it is altogether bad; and he will have no dealings with it.  He may have to endure it; but he endures gravely and tensely with a sad Latin dignity, and so it is that this Frenchman endures the war from first to last.  For that reason the Germans, after their failure on the Marne, counted on the nervous exhaustion of the French.  It was a favourite phrase with them—­one of those formulae founded on knowledge without understanding which so often mislead them.—­Their formula for us was that we cared for nothing but football and marmalade.—­But reading these letters one can understand how they were deceived.  The writer of them seems to be always enduring tensely.  It is part of his French sincerity never to accept any false consolation.  He will not try to believe what he knows to be false, even so that he may endure for the sake of France.  Yet he does endure, and all France endures, in a state of mind that would mean weakness in us and utter collapse in the Germans.  The war is to him like an incessant noise that he tries to forget while he is writing.  He does not write as a matter of duty, and so that his mother may know that he is still living; rather he writes to her so that he may ease a little his desire to talk to her.  We are used to French sentiment about the mother; it is a commonplace of French eloquence, and we have often smiled at it as mere sentimental platitude; but in these letters we see a son’s love for his mother no longer insisted upon or dressed up in rhetoric, but naked and unconscious, a habit of the mind, a need of the soul, a support even to the weakness of the flesh.  Such affection with us is apt to be, if not shamefaced, at least a little off-hand.  Often it exists, and is strong; but it is seldom so constant an element in all joy and sorrow.  The most loving of English sons would not often rather talk to his mother than to any one else; but one knows that this Frenchman would rather talk to his mother than to any one else, and that he can talk to her more intimately than to any woman or man.  One can see that he has had the long habit of talking to her thus, so that now he does it easily and without restraint.  He tells her the deepest thoughts of his mind, knowing that she will understand them better than any one else.  That foreboding which the mother felt about her baby in Morris’s poem has never come true about him: 

      ’Lo, here thy body beginning, O son, and thy soul and thy life,
       But how will it be if thou livest and enterest into the strife,
       And in love we dwell together when the man is grown in thee,
       When thy sweet speech I shall hearken, and yet ’twixt thee and me
       Shall rise that wall of distance that round each one doth grow,
       And maketh it hard and bitter each other’s thought to know?’