Tales from the trenches by the hundreds prove that the French have not lost the sparkle of wit even under the dreary conditions of trench-fighting. When Italy joined the Allies, some soldiers of a front-line trench hoisted the placard,--"Macaroni mit uns!" Again, when boasting placards of German successes in Galicia were displayed, the French _poilus_ retorted,--"You lie. You have taken ten thousand officers and ten millions of troops." When in a German military prison the keepers boasted of their recent successes on the western front, the French prisoners began to sing the _Marseillaise_ to the astonishment of their German guards, "because," as they explained, "we know if you have killed all those French soldiers, you must have lost at least four times as many!"
The barbarian misread the Gallic love of wit and laughter. To joke and quip seemed to him beneath the dignity of men. It is, rather, the safety-valve of a highly intelligent people--the outlet for their ironic perceptions of life. The most amusing songs of the war that I have heard were given by the _poilus_ on a little stage near Commercy while the cannon thundered a few miles away. This ability to turn upon himself and see his life in a humorous light is an invaluable quality of the French soldier. So, too, is his love of handicraft which finds many ingenious expressions even in the trenches. The French soldier is always a civilian, with a love of neatly arranged gardens and terraces, and he lays out a _potager_ in the curve of a shell-swept hillside, or a neat flower garden in the crumbled walls of a village house. He makes rings from the aluminum found in German shell-caps, carves the doorposts of his stone dugout, or likenesses of his officers on beam-ends, as I saw in a colonel's quarters in the Bois-le-Prêtre.
The French soldier remains, even in this bloodiest of wars, always a civilian, a man, capable of laughter and tears, of heroic heights, of chivalrous sacrifices,--with the soul's image of what manhood requires, with the vision of a state of free individual men like himself.
The New France is inspired with qualities of Old France, qualities which I call Latin, which have emerged into high relief under grief and suffering and effort. It is above all gallant and high-minded. The wounded Frenchman never complains or whimpers. "_C'est la guerre--que voulez-vous!_" To the surgeon who has operated on him,--"_Merci, mon major_." And they lie legless or armless, perhaps with running sores, a smile on the face in answer to the sympathetic word, in long hospital rows....