Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/207

 is at an end. Despite M. Briand's famous apaisement speech, despite the success of M. Poincaré's "national" programme, the State has not yet returned even to a position of neutrality. But the vivid colour of hope dominates the horizon. Combes-ism is no longer opposed as unjust, it is dismissed as vulgar. The boulevards may not have shed their scepticism, but at all events they recognise religion as one of the ideal forces that make men good citizens and gallant soldiers. As the army recovers its prestige there is a return to the spirit of that strange and burning remonstrance of Alexandre Dumas, the younger—

"Had I been Bazaine" (he wrote), "I would have set up a statue of the Virgin in the midst of my army on the Fifteenth of August—not because it was Saint Napoleon but because it was Sainte Marie—and I would have delivered battle against the God whom King William carries about in his pocket, behind whom he speaks like a ventriloquist, and who is not the God of battles, for the very simple reason that there is no God of battles. I would have said to my soldiers: 'My children, I place the Virgin in your midst. See in her your daughter, your betrothed, your wife, your sister, your mother. Over there is a masked "God" who menaces her with insult. Defend her! Honour her feast with a victory!' And the Germans would have been defeated. There is, there will always be, in the French soldier something of the Frank