Ch. 6: The Tone of France

Nobody now asks the question that so often, at the beginning of the
war, came to me from the other side of the world: "_What is France
like?"_ Every one knows what France has proved to be like: from
being a difficult problem she has long since become a luminous
instance.

Nevertheless, to those on whom that illumination has shone only from
far off, there may still be something to learn about its component
elements; for it has come to consist of many separate rays, and the
weary strain of the last year has been the spectroscope to decompose
them. From the very beginning, when one felt the effulgence as the
mere pale brightness before dawn, the attempt to define it was
irresistible. "There _is_ a tone--" the tingling sense of it was in
the air from the first days, the first hours--"but what does it
consist in? And just how is one aware of it?" In those days the
answer was comparatively easy. The tone of France after the
declaration of war was the white glow of dedication: a great
nation's collective impulse (since there is no English equivalent
for that winged word, _elan_ ) to resist destruction. But at that
time no one knew what the resistance was to cost, how long it would
have to last, what sacrifices, material and moral, it would
necessitate. And for the moment baser sentiments were silenced:
greed, self-interest, pusillanimity seemed to have been purged from
the race. The great sitting of the Chamber, that almost religious
celebration of defensive union, really expressed the opinion of the
whole people. It is fairly easy to soar to the empyrean when one is
carried on the wings of such an impulse, and when one does not know
how long one is to be kept suspended at the breathing-limit.

But there is a term to the flight of the most soaring _elan_. It is
likely, after a while, to come back broken-winged and resign itself
to barn-yard bounds. National judgments cannot remain for long above
individual feelings; and you cannot get a national "tone" out of
anything less than a whole nation. The really interesting thing,
therefore, was to see, as the war went on, and grew into a calamity
unheard of in human annals, how the French spirit would meet it, and
what virtues extract from it.

The war has been a calamity unheard of; but France has never been
afraid of the unheard of. No race has ever yet so audaciously
dispensed with old precedents; as none has ever so revered their
relics. It is a great strength to be able to walk without the
support of analogies; and France has always shown that strength in
times of crisis. The absorbing question, as the war went on, was to
discover how far down into the people this intellectual audacity
penetrated, how