Publisher's Synopsis
From the Preface.
It was nearly two years before the beginning of the war that a disquieting symbol of change first appeared to me in the French sky. I was sitting in a friendly garden, basking in the warm autumnal sunshine, savoring, as a New Englander can, the charm of being again in France. Above me, a red-roofed cottage; below, a steep, terraced hillside; beyond, closing the ripe green valley, a darkly wooded horizon. No sign of life but a solitary pony-cart climbing the one white road that cut the opposite hill. No sound in the golden air but the scratch of a pen at an upper window, the click of garden shears among the rose-bushes. Then suddenly, brusquely, an ominous whirr, a mysterious pulsing throb directly overhead. Staring up, I saw the long brown shadow of an army biplane sharp against the opalescent sky. Almost grazing the cottage roof, it wheeled, swooped across the valley, and disappeared. But the spell was broken. Those mechanical wings had left a sinister echo in the quiet garden; and when my radical friend came down from his study to talk of aviation fields beyond the hill, of a journey he had just taken to the battlefields of 1870, I became aware of a new tension, a half-concealed anxiety, a subtle change in the French temper.
This change, as I saw it further reflected in a certain distinguished French household the following winter, I have tried to suggest in one of the last sketches in the present volume, "Signs of the Times." The Epilogue, "The Merciers at Topsbridge," will indicate that of the war itself I have had only a transatlantic impression. Most of the papers were written in days that now seem unbelievably felicitous, the occasional record of a series of peaceful French visits which date back to 1904.
My excuse for collecting them in war-time is precisely that the cross-sections of French life and character they seek to portray, the sober perspectives they would open, belong to the old France, not to the new. For I cannot see France as reborn, by a sort of miraculous conversion, from the ruins of the Varietes and the Latin Quarter. I see her rather as living through these bitter years on the strength of her ancient everyday virtues. Most of all, by force of what has been called her "professional conscience," that love of work for work's sake, that passion for technical perfection, that scrupulous patience in carrying things through which, whether it takes the form of good housekeeping, tilling a field, writing a verse, making an artificial flower, or firing a big gun, is, I long ago came to believe, the deepest source of the French national energy.
"He who goes hungry without complaining, who walks with bloody feet, only fires after taking aim, and only dies if necessary, is the soldier who has only done his job perfectly," writes M. Pierre Hamp in his admirable "brochure," "Le Travail Invincible." "You can't die but once," says the peasant woman, bringing in the harvest while shells shriek overhead; ""s'il n'y a que ca, c'est peu de misere."" ""C'est la guerre, "" says the old miller of the north, sheltering the flame of his little stove behind his shattered wall, "but I must do my job - "ilfautfaire son metier."" With the intellectual the expression is different, the spirit the same. ""Ilfaut tenir, tenir et lutter, n'est-ce pas?"" Hold on, struggle, those are the words the letters bring. "One can but turn back on one's self, try to draw from some inner reservoir all possible energy and force." It is only the young soldiers who speak of heroism, and how temperate even their speech! ""L'heroisme, "" wrote one of them to his mother the night before he died, ""ce n'est pas autre chose que ce qu'on est au fond, mats qui s'eclaire dans la clarte d'une incendie."" ..."
