There have been many more who found the sacrifice of personal happiness—­of all that made life livable, or one’s country worth fighting for—­infinitely harder than the most apprehensive imagination could have pictured.  There have been mothers and widows for whom a single grave, or the appearance of one name on the missing list, has turned the whole conflict into an idiot’s tale.  There have been many such; but there have apparently not been enough to deflect by a hair’s breadth the subtle current of public sentiment; unless it is truer, as it is infinitely more inspiring, to suppose that, of this company of blinded baffled sufferers, almost all have had the strength to hide their despair and to say of the great national effort which has lost most of its meaning to them:  “Though it slay me, yet will I trust in it.”  That is probably the finest triumph of the tone of France:  that its myriad fiery currents flow from so many hearts made insensible by suffering, that so many dead hands feed its undying lamp.

This does not in the least imply that resignation is the prevailing note in the tone of France.  The attitude of the French people, after fourteen months of trial, is not one of submission to unparalleled calamity.  It is one of exaltation, energy, the hot resolve to dominate the disaster.  In all classes the feeling is the same:  every word and every act is based on the resolute ignoring of any alternative to victory.  The French people no more think of a compromise than people would think of facing a flood or an earthquake with a white flag.

Two questions are likely to be put to any observer of the struggle who risks such assertions.  What, one may be asked, are the proofs of this national tone?  And what conditions and qualities seem to minister to it?

The proofs, now that “the tumult and the shouting dies,” and civilian life has dropped back into something like its usual routine, are naturally less definable than at the outset.  One of the most evident is the spirit in which all kinds of privations are accepted.  No one who has come in contact with the work-people and small shop-keepers of Paris in the last year can fail to be struck by the extreme dignity and grace with which doing without things is practised.  The Frenchwoman leaning in the door of her empty boutique still wears the smile with which she used to calm the impatience of crowding shoppers.  The seam-stress living on the meagre pay of a charity work-room gives her day’s sewing as faithfully as if she were working for full wages in a fashionable atelier, and never tries, by the least hint of private difficulties, to extract additional help.  The habitual cheerfulness of the Parisian workwoman rises, in moments of sorrow, to the finest fortitude.  In a work-room where many women have been employed since the beginning of the war, a young girl of sixteen heard late one afternoon that her only brother had been killed.  She had a moment of desperate distress; but there