of the men who have passed through the hospital could by any stretch of imagination have been taken for English. The southerners are the most easily identified, especially the men from the Vaucluse and the Mediterranean sea-board. The former are generally handsome, with finely chiseled features, and show their discipleship of Mistral by their pointed beards. Two men from Marseilles are of a very pronounced Mediterranean type; they probably have the blood of Barbary corsairs in their veins; one of them is the champion dancer of his town, and, alas! it seems likely that the poor man will lose his leg. The man with the long raven locks, melting eyes, and delicate features, for all the world like a troubadour, comes from the Aveyron; the boy with the liquid Languedocian patois works on the canal des deux mers at Béziers, the man in the brown dressinggown and hood, who looks like a friar, is a Breton: his Celtic speech falls familiarly on the ears of a West-Highlander. Here is a peasant who tills the very soil that Englishmen enriched with their blood at Crecy. The men with the blue bonnets and quick movements are Chasseurs Alpins.

They are of all ages, too, from the volunteers of eighteen (of whom we have had quite a number, and amongst them some of the finest men who have passed through our hands) to grave non-commissioned officers of forty and upwards. Of every class, too, and profession. We have had many schoolmasters, one of whom wrote agreeable verse, while another composed music. Some men are from quite the upper middle class, sons, for example, of prosperous business men in Lille; one grizzled adjudant holds a high position in the Credit Lyonnais at Montpellier; here is a watch-maker, there a porter, there an expéditeur de truffes noires, there a member of the anciens pompiers de Paris (he served during the first

months of the war beside the English and found them "bons camarades"). But the majority are peasants, who will talk with delight of their crops and live-stock and with regret of the horses commandeered by the government. There is, of course, a strong leaven of Jews and cosmopolitans from Paris.

But it is the mental and spiritual attitude of these men that is the real interest. Here there have been many surprises for us who have been accustomed to regard the French as a highstrung emotional race altogether lacking in the qualities of phlegm and stoicism on which we pride ourselves. There is, of course, an element of truth in this as there is in most generalities. The typical Frenchman is more excitable than the typical Englishman, his feelings lie nearer the surface, he is more prone to dissolve into tears when subjected to great strain, his courage does not take the form of stoicism, but it is real and admirable for all that. The fortitude and fundamental composure of the French under their present trial has been matter for astonishment to all those who have had close relations with them. In hospital it has been remarkably displayed. Not only is suffering and the prospect of disablement confronted with equanimity, but the added agony of ignorance as to the fate of home, wife, and family is borne with beautiful philosophy. One of the sweetest-tempered and most cheerful of our patients is a schoolmaster from the Lille district who has been on his back for five months, during which time he has heard nothing of his wife and home. He is cheerful with a constancy that is a perpetual source of wonder. I think this philosophical composure may be partly accounted for by the fact that for forty years France has been confronted with the more or less immediate prospect of the ordeal which she is now undergoing. Dwellers in Northeastern France have been in the position of

dwellers on the slopes of a volcano. When the eruption comes they suffer, but they suffer what they have long faced as inevitable.

At the beginning of the war it was often said that the French were frightened, on what authority I know not. If so, they are frightened no longer, and I cannot credit the statement that they ever were. I have seen nothing but the finest courage and determination. Curiously enough, too, there has been little or no hysteria or nervous breakdown. From what I hear you would probably find more in a hospital for English wounded.

Another surprise has been the wonderful solidarity of the nation as evidenced in the bearing of the common soldiers. We had become accustomed to believe that France was irretrievably honeycombed with divisions. That, too, has disappeared. The divisions were purely political, and politics have been relegated to the background: of social or class distinctions there is no trace; men of all classes mix in the army with an ease and completeness which is evidently not artificial; officers are treated with military respect, but fraternize with the soldiers with a total absence of condescension and a genuineness that, I fancy, would be impossible in our own army. I have seen no antagonism to the Jews who have been through the hospital, and yet we had been taught to believe that the Jew led a life of ostracism in France. The solidarity of religious feeling has also been a surprise. Hardly a man has entered the hospital without a religious medal round his neck. Most of them wear a whole bundle. Every dying man has asked for, and received, the last rites of the Church: the curé, so far from being looked askance at, is a constant and evidently welcome visitor: the parish church is full of convalescents: of the anti-clericalism of which we used to hear so much not a trace. Whether there

has been a great revival of genuine religious feeling in France (as some assert) I am unable to say; I can only speak for what I have seen: and I am bound to add that there is another side to this religious energy. The same men who have attended mass with such devotion will perform of an evening, with elaborate detail, a mock funeral, in which one of their number plays the part of the corpse, while another, disguised as a priest, buries him with much irreverent detail. And amidst all the apparently genuine religious feeling which I have seen displayed, I have seen repeated evidence of this strange irreverence and of a spirit of mockery, as if Voltaire's spirit had gone into the body of Fénélon. It is not easy to account for this apparent contradiction; it might be suggested that the whole thing is a mere superstition long engrained in the blood and revived in the present trial, and that such a religion has no foundation of reverence. On the other hand, it is possible to suggest that their very familiarity with religion encourages irreverence: "a man needs to be on pretty close terms with religion to make a joke of his divinity." At any rate, even when familiarity verges on profanity, it is no proof of insincerity, and my observation tells me that religion amongst the classes from which the French army is recruited is general and sincere.

From what has been said, it is clear that we shall have to revise our estimate of the French national temperament. Perhaps we have been too quick to attribute to nations temperamental qualities and weaknesses based on our reading of history and our necessarily superficial study of current events. History is, after all, to a great extent a series of accidents; it is not the best or even the most widespread, but the noisiest and most self-assertive, elements in a nation that prevail in public life. A nation has two characters, its public and its

private character: it is only on rare occasions that the private character makes itself felt in public life. In France one of these rare occasions has occurred. Conscription has produced in the army a true representation of the entire ablebodied manhood of France, and in the army the true voice of France is heard. And so we have seen the France which, in 1870, committed military suicide rather than leave Paris exposed to attack, contemplate the imminent siege of the capital with perfect calm. We see her patient under the trial of occupied departments, patient to an extent which admits of her making allowances for the difficulties of her Ally: we see her entirely homogeneous with but one object and one thought, bearing her burden with a superb fortitude, respected by all the world.

All this is seen in miniature in such a hospital as that of Arc-en-Barrois: our work has brought us into daily contact with this new France, and has enabled us to see her as she really is. It is daily also bringing to the knowledge of a large number of Frenchmen (not the patients alone, but their relations, our neighbors and the French officials) some of the better qualities of the English, chief of which is our whole-hearted sympathy with our Allies and our desire to serve them. The time may come when the The Cornhill Magazine.

demand in England for doctors and nurses becomes so insistent that a great strain will be put on the loyalty of our staff. The time may come, too, when lack of funds will bring our work to an untimely conclusion. The hospital works directly under the French military authorities and receives a grant of 2 francs a head per diem for each patient. As, however, we have set ourselves to provide such food, nursing, and surgical aid as will make the hospital a worthy gift to our Allies, and as prices in France are rising, the grant does not by any means cover our working expenses, and we need considerable and constant support from home. Hitherto this has been forthcoming in such a measure as to satisfy our requirements; but the financial future is full of anxiety. It is greatly to be hoped that neither lack of funds nor the call for doctors and nurses at home will be allowed to interrupt the work that is being done by English hospitals for French wounded. We have built up an organization and attained a corporate efficiency which would be largely destroyed if we were dissolved: above all, by the breaking down of barriers, we are doing a work for the Entente which it would be impossible to perform in any other way.

J. E. M. Macdonald.

CHAPTER V.

Following Mr. Beamish's example, Miss Crawley determined to give a dinner party, this time in honor of Mr. Macpherson's appearance at the Royal Institution, and she was only restrained therefrom by discovering what untold anguish it would give the person for whom it was intended.

"I'll dine with you if I may," said Willie Macpherson; "it will keep me calm, and Tom will let me off coming

to him. But, please, no party! I may be able to go through with the thing if you will allow me to come in to dinner quietly with you, also it will prevent a bolt perhaps."

"I suppose you have no idea how proud we all are of you and how much we look forward to the lecture," she said in her kind flattering way.

"It's a lesson to me to remain silent always," he remarked miserably. "In the old days, when one discovered a

fact in science, one was burned alive for it, but nowadays everyone is so horribly eager with their laurel wreaths." "But this honor is a great one surely," she urged.

"Honors should be kept till one is dead," wailed Willie Macpherson. "No living man can stand them or can want them."

"It is better than being burned at the stake," she said playfully.

"Not much!" groaned the unhappy

man.

She fell into his view of the subject in a modified form, and without expressing her own views, asked for his. "Do tell me," she said, "what is the connection in the human mind between the discovery of a scientific fact and burning the discoverer at the stake."

"The normal man doesn't think," said Mr. Macpherson, who when he was alone with Miss Crawley, was an eager talker. "Thought is a disease dependent upon cerebral excitation."

"I wish you'd tell me more about it," she said, preparing herself to receive information by putting aside some embroidery she was doing and folding her hands with an air of attention.

"I know nothing about it," he said, in the urgent way he always denied an accusation of this sort. "Psychology isn't my line, you know. My class calls me 'Atstinkson' because my laboratory smells so bad sometimes. Sometimes I am 'Stinks' for short." He put his head on his hands.

"The choice of words and names is very curious nowadays," Miss Crawley commented. "Is there a psychological reason for that too?"

"I know nothing about it," the professor said, "but I do know that all thought is resented by that large class of person whom we call nowadays the 'man in the street.' He is the man of the hour undoubtedly, and as he is proverbially sane we must look upon ourselves as insane."

"You cannot look upon all thought as madness."

He

"I am talking about what the man in the street thinks about thought. sees a pond in his garden or on Clapham Common, and is content with it. If you tell him what water is composed of, or even that it is sticky or has a skin to it, his natural impulse is to smash your head. In more primitive days it took the form of burning you alive."

Miss Crawley was interested in the discussion, and always enjoyed a chat with the professor. Also she had an idea that Willie's nerves had been sadly upset of late. She had met him taking solitary walks in the Park and had heard him mutter to himself, and fancied he was getting his speech off by heart, and she had frequently seen him making notes on the backs of old envelopes. He had not always heard when he was spoken to, and his appetite, always a poor one, had been unusually bad of late. She had decoyed him in to lunch, two or three times, and once he had stayed on afterwards until six o'clock in the evening, and she had been obliged to give up all her engagements rather than tell him to go. All that was nothing, however, compared with his uneasiness today, and she felt she might be of use to him by keeping him engaged in conversation and leading his mind away from the thought of the dreaded evening before him. Talking was always good for him because he indulged in it so seldom, and she rejoiced that she had been able to waken his interest in the problem of torture as the reward of science.

"It is always truth that they object to," she ventured, "and that is what puzzles me so much."

"They call truth facts, and facts are the things they themselves know." "Is anything beyond that, presumption?" she asked.

He laughed and went on: "The less they know, the more they object to

other people knowing, and that is why men and women have suffered for religious beliefs more than for any other which they hold. Science comes next; perhaps because it is nearly always associated in men's minds with religion, and interferes with vested interests. But even medical facts have claimed their quota of sufferers, and psychic persons are still hounded out of our midst."

"Give me a lesson as if you were giving it to a child," said Miss Crawley. "You know how stupid we women are about these things."

"My belief is," he went on, thinking the matter out as he proceeded, and forgetting everything except the conversation that he was holding. "My belief is, as I have said, that the generality of people in this world believe thought to be abnormal. They say facts are unalterable, whereas of course a fact is exactly what we bring to it."

"When we try to get beyond facts to reality it is very difficult," she said. He looked at her keenly for a moment and said, "You know, you know just as much about this matter as I do."

But she threw up her hands protesting. "I love to have you tell me about it," she said.

"But that doesn't mean you don't know just as much as I do," he persisted. "I go to lectures and I have read a little," she faltered.

He took up one of her disengaged hands in his, and in an unexpected way raised it to his lips.

“You are very wonderful," he said.

It is needless to say that such a thing as this had never before happened in Miss Crawley's drawing-room. She found it impossible to meet the situation with composure, and could think of nothing but hastily to summon Bodnim to bring tea. She rang the bell nervously and immediately afterwards hoped with all her heart that this did

LIVING AGE, VOL. III, No. 106.

not look either as if she were summoning the faithful retainer to defend her, or as if she wanted Mr. Macpherson shown to the door. It was manifestly impossible to continue the conversation about reality which had been so abruptly terminated, and she wondered if she would ever be able to meet Willie Macpherson in the same old way again. She resumed her work which she had laid aside and bent a crimson face over it, and then, feeling that Mr. Macpherson was watching her, she saw her hands flutter, while inwardly her desire to find something to say almost resolved itself into an unspoken prayer. Willie was proverbially silent and hardly ever started a conversation, and the encouragement that she had been wont to give him had always been bestowed with a kindly recognition of his shyness. On the present occasion it was she whose discomposure was apparent, while without glancing up from her work she was positively aware that her very disturbing companion was himself sitting perfectly still, with his chin in his hand, looking at her.

Bodnim appeared as a tower of strength with the tea tray, and placed it on a table in front of her. Across its defenses she looked at her visitor curiously once or twice, wondering if he had waked up from his dreams to kiss her hand or had done it while dreaming. She never quite knew whether Willie Macpherson was asleep or awake, but if he had transgressed he seemed unconscious of it, and this fact steadied her fluttering hands and helped her in her efforts to make light of the salutation which she had received. She poured out tea in a certain pretty way which was characteristic of her, moving the delicate china cups with a light touch and pouring into them a particular brew of tea which her guest preferred. As she did so she turned her little silver sugar basin deliberately round with the date towards