Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/212



I makes me a little proud to remember that I was one of the few writers in these countries to announce and celebrate the birth of la nouvelle France long before the coming of the war. For many years the Republic has been in ill repute in the Catholic world. Men thought of her as the home of Renan and scepticism, of Gambetta and anti-clericalism, of Combes—the unspeakable Combes—and persecution, of Anatole France and refined sensualism, of a score of lesser writers and plain pornography. That interpretation of her life was never true although it had elements of truth in it. Even in the old France there were two strains: there was Rabelais as well as Pascal, Montaigne as well as Bossuet, Voltaire as well as St. Francis de Sales. There is, indeed, lodged in the very mind and temper of France a seed of perilous adventure. Her courage is a constant temptation to dally with the blasphemous and the foul: her lucidity—for vague and furtive innuendoes are like a toothache to French style—doubles the offence when she lapses.

But on the other hand there was something peculiarly obnoxious in the circumstance that these attacks on France proceeded in great part from