Fields of Victory | Page 4

not always that. We have the right to claim that our safety
and restoration, the safety of the country which has suffered most,
should at this moment be the first thought of Europe. You speak to us
of the League of Nations?--By all means. Readjustments in the Balkans
and the East?--As much as you please. But here stands the Chief
Victim of the war--and to the Chief Victim belongs of right the chief
and first place in men's thoughts, and in the settlement. Do not allow us
even to begin to ask ourselves whether, after all, we have not paid too
much for the alliance we gloried in?"
Some such temper as this has been showing itself since the New Year,
in the discontent of the French Press, in the irritation of French talk and
correspondence. And, of course, behind the bewildered and almost
helpless consciousness of such a loss in accumulated wealth as no other

European country has ever known before, there is the ever-burning
sense of the human loss which so heavily deepens and complicates the
material loss. One of the French Ministers has lately said that France
has lost three millions of population, men, women, and children,
through the war. The fighting operations alone have cost her over a
million and a half, at least, of the best manhood of France and her
Colonies. One million and a half! That figure had become a familiar bit
of statistics to me; but it was not till I stood the other day in that vast
military cemetery of Châlons, to which General Gouraud had sent me,
that, to use a phrase of Keats, it was "proved" upon "one's own pulses."
Seven thousand men lie buried there, their wreathed crosses standing
shoulder to shoulder, all fronting one way, like a division on parade,
while the simple monument that faces them utters its perpetual order of
the day: "Death is nothing, so long as the Country lives. En Avant!"
And with that recollection goes also another, which I owe to the same
General--one of the idols of the French Army!--of a little graveyard far
up in the wilds of the Champagne battle-field--the "Cimetière de Mont
Muret," whence the eye takes in for miles and miles nothing but the
trench-seamed hillsides and the bristling fields of wire. Here on every
grave, most of them of nameless dead, collected after many months
from the vast battle-field, lie heaped the last possessions of the soldier
who sleeps beneath--his helmet, his haversack, his water-bottle, his
spade. These rusty spades were to me a tragic symbol, not only of the
endless, heart-wearing labour which had produced those trenched
hillsides, but also of that irony of things, by which that very labour
which protected the mysterious and spiritual thing which the
Frenchman calls patrie, was at the same time ruining and sterilising the
material base from which it springs--the soil, which the Frenchman
loves with an understanding tenacity, such as perhaps inspires no other
countryman in the world. In Artois and Picardy our own British graves
lie thickly scattered over the murdered earth; and those of America's
young and heroic dead, in the battle-fields of Soissons, the Marne, and
the Argonne, have given it, this last year, a new consecration. But here
in England our land is fruitful and productive, owing to the pressure of
the submarine campaign, as it never was before; British farming and
the American fields have cause to bless rather than to curse the war.

Only in France has the tormented and poisoned earth itself been blasted
by the war, and only in France, even where there are no trenches, have
whole countrysides gone out of cultivation, so that in the course of a
long motor drive, the sight of a solitary plough at work, or merely a
strip of newly ploughed land amid the rank and endless waste, makes
one's heart leap.
No!--France is quite right. Her suffering, her restoration, her future
safety, as against Germany, these should be, must be, the first thought
of the Allies in making peace. And it is difficult for those of us who
have not seen, to feel, as it is politically necessary, it seems to me, we
should feel.
Since I was in France, however, a fortnight ago, the proceedings in
connection with the extension of the Armistice, and the new restrictions
and obligations laid on Germany, have profoundly affected the
situation in the direction that France desires. And when the President
returns from the United States, whither he is now bound, he will surely
go--and not for a mere day or two!--to see for himself on the spot what
France has suffered. If so, some deep, popular instincts in France will
be at once appeased and softened, and Franco-American relations, I
believe, greatly improved.
No doubt,