Death may be regarded as a funeral or as a Columbus expedition to worlds unknown—­it may be seized upon as an opportunity for weeping or for a display of courage.  From the first day in her choice England never hesitated; like a boy set free from school, she dashed out to meet her danger with laughter.  Her high spirits have never failed her.  Her cavalry charge with hunting-calls upon their lips.  Her Tommies go over the top humming music-hall ditties.  The Hun is still “jolly old Fritz.”  The slaughter is still “a nice little war.”  Death is still “the early door.”  The mud-soaked “old Bills” of the trenches, cheerfully ignoring vermin, rain and shell fire, continue to wind up their epistles with, “Hoping this finds you in the pink, as it leaves me at present.”  They are always in the pink for epistolary purposes, whatever the strafing or the weather.  That’s England; at all costs, she has to be a sportsman.  I wonder she doesn’t write on the crosses above her dead, “Yours in the pink: a British soldier, killed in action.”  England is in the pink for the duration of the war.

The Frenchman cannot understand us, and I don’t blame him.  Our high spirits impress him as untimely and indecent.  War for him is not a sport.  How could it be, with his homesteads ravaged, his cities flattened, his women violated, his populations prisoners in occupied territories?  For him war is a martyrdom which he embraces with a fierce gladness.  His spirit is well illustrated by an incident that happened the other day in Paris.  A descendant of Racine, a well-known figure at the opera, was travelling in the Metro when he spotted a poilu with a string of ten medals on his breast.  The old aristocrat went over to the soldier and apologised for speaking to him.  “But,” he said, “I have never seen any poilu with so many decorations.  You must be of the very bravest.”

“That is nothing,” the man replied sombrely; “before they kill me I shall have won many more.  This I earned in revenge for my wife, who was brutally murdered.  And this and this and this for my daughters who were ravished.  And these others—­they are for my sons who are now no more.”

“My friend, if you will let me, I should like to embrace you.”  And there, in the sight of all the passengers, the old habitue of the opera and the common soldier kissed each other.  The one satisfaction that the French blind have is in counting the number of Boche they have slaughtered.  “In that raid ten of us killed fifty,” one will say; “the memory makes me very happy.”

Curiously enough the outrage that makes the Frenchman most revengeful is not the murder of his family or the defilement of his women, but the wilful killing of his land and orchards.  The land gave birth to all his flesh and blood; when his farm is laid waste wilfully, it is as though the mother of all his generations was violated.  This accounts for the indomitable way in which the peasants insist on staying on in their houses under shell-fire, refusing to depart till they are forcibly turned out.