Road under storms of shell-fire which took daily toll of them. No French statesman by optimistic words could resurrect in a little while the beauty that had been in Artois and Picardy and the fields of Champagne.
On days of national thanksgiving the spirit of France was exalted by the joy of victory. In Paris it was a feverish joy, wild-eyed, with laughing ecstasy, with troops of dancing girls, and a carnival that broke all bounds between Montmartre and Montparnasse. France had saved herself from death. She had revenged herself for 1870 and the years just passed. She had crushed the Enemy that had always been a brutal menace across the frontier. She had her sword deep in the heart of Germany, which lay bleeding at her feet. I who love France with a kind of passion, and had seen during the years of war the agony and the heroism of her people, did not begrudge them their ecstasy, and it touched my spirit with its fire so that in France I could see and understand the French point of view, of ruthlessness towards the beaten foe. But I saw also what many people of France saw slowly but with a sense of fear, that the Treaty made by Clemenceau did not make them safe, except for a little while. This had not been, after all, "the war to end war." There was no guarantee of world-peace. Their frontiers were not made impregnable against the time when the Germans might grow strong again and come back for vengeance. They could not stand alone, but must make new alliances, new secret treaties, new armies, new armaments, because Hate survived, and the League of Nations was a farce, as it had come from the table at Versailles.
They looked round and counted their cost—a million and a half dead. A multitude of maimed, and blind, and nerve-shocked men. A birth-rate that had sunk to zero. A staggering debt which they could not pay. A
