The German lesson is not the whole truth: it is the poorer half of the truth. An undisciplined world is more in God's image than a world from which beauty, humanity, and chivalry have been exterminated. But discipline is the primal condition of survival. Between these two poles, between its body and its soul, mankind must struggle as it has always struggled from the beginning of time....
When I looked on the sensitive, suffering faces of Frenchwomen in their mourning, the wistful eyes of crippled youths, the limp forms of wounded men, the tense, bent figures of dirty _poilus_ in their muddy trenches, I knew that through their souls and bodies was passing the full agony of this struggle.
I do not mean religious faith, although that too has been evoked, reaffirmed by the trials and griefs of the war, but I mean faith in themselves, in their cause, in life. The unshakable faith of the French is the one most exhilarating, abiding impression that the visitor takes from France these days. It is so universal, so pervasive, so contagious that he too becomes irresistibly convinced, no matter how dark the present may be, how many victories German arms may win, that the ultimate triumph of the cause is merely deferred.
There has never been the slightest panic in France, not during the mobilization when white-faced men and women realized that the dreaded hour had struck, not even in those days of suspense when the public began to realize that the first reports of French victories in Alsace were deceptive and that the enemy was almost at the gates of Paris. A million or so people left the city with the Government in order to escape the expected siege, but there was no panic, not even among the wretched creatures driven from their homes in the provinces before the blast of the German cyclone.
Ever since the battle of the Marne the tide of confidence has been steadily rising, in spite of the tedious disappointments of trench warfare, the small gains of ground, the steady toll of lives, in spite of reverses in Galicia and Poland and the mistakes in the Dardanelles, in spite of English sluggishness and Russian weakness. Each reverse has been courageously accepted, analyzed, and found not decisive, merely temporary. Victory must come to the ones who can endure to the end, and the French know now that they can endure. "We can do it all alone, if we have to!" Again, "The Germans know that they are beaten already: they know it in Berlin as well as we do." This confidence is based on realities--first on the success with which France has learned the German lesson and completely reorganized her life for the business of war. "We were not ready last August--but we are now." Her machine is growing stronger in spite of the daily waste of life, while the German machine is weakening steadily.