The scene in the restaurant is inexhaustibly interesting.  The mere attempt to puzzle out the different uniforms is absorbing.  A week’s experience near the front convinces me that no two uniforms in the French army are alike either in colour or in cut.  Within the last two years the question of colour has greatly preoccupied the French military authorities, who have been seeking an invisible blue; and the range of their experiments is proved by the extraordinary variety of shades of blue, ranging from a sort of greyish robin’s-egg to the darkest navy, in which the army is clothed.  The result attained is the conviction that no blue is really inconspicuous, and that some of the harsh new slaty tints are no less striking than the deeper shades they have superseded.  But to this scale of experimental blues, other colours must be added:  the poppy-red of the Spahis’ tunics, and various other less familiar colours—­grey, and a certain greenish khaki—­the use of which is due to the fact that the cloth supply has given out and that all available materials are employed.  As for the differences in cut, the uniforms vary from the old tight tunic to the loose belted jacket copied from the English, and the emblems of the various arms and ranks embroidered on these diversified habits add a new element of perplexity.  The aviator’s wings, the motorist’s wheel, and many of the newer symbols, are easily recognizable—­but there are all the other arms, and the doctors and the stretcher-bearers, the sappers and miners, and heaven knows how many more ramifications of this great host which is really all the nation.

The main interest of the scene, however, is that it shows almost as many types as uniforms, and that almost all the types are so good.  One begins to understand (if one has failed to before) why the French say of themselves:  “La France est une nation guerriere.” War is the greatest of paradoxes:  the most senseless and disheartening of human retrogressions, and yet the stimulant of qualities of soul which, in every race, can seemingly find no other means of renewal.  Everything depends, therefore, on the category of impulses that war excites in a people.  Looking at the faces at Chalons, one sees at once in which [Page 54] sense the French are “une nation guerriere.”  It is not too much to say that war has given beauty to faces that were interesting, humorous, acute, malicious, a hundred vivid and expressive things, but last and least of all beautiful.  Almost all the faces about these crowded tables—­young or old, plain or handsome, distinguished or average—­have the same look of quiet authority:  it is as though all “nervosity,” fussiness, little personal oddities, meannesses and vulgarities, had been burnt away in a great flame of self-dedication.  It is a wonderful example of the rapidity with which purpose models the human countenance.  More than half of these men were probably doing dull or useless or unimportant things till the first of last August; now each one of them, however small his job, is sharing in a great task, and knows it, and has been made over by knowing it.