The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORTED THE EGMONT SETTLER FRIDAY, JUNE 23,1916. THE HEART OF FRANCE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXX, Issue 67, 23 June 1916, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORTED THE EGMONT SETTLER FRIDAY, JUNE 23, 1916. THE HEART OF FRANCE.

This great war, amongst the many other things it has clone, has at least given Englishmen a better conception of the great qualities possessed by our nobio Allies of Russia and France. The revelation of the soul of a triumphant Russia, is something too wonderful almost to believe, and to that we have already referred. France, the new France of to-day, chastened and grown greater in adversity, is well worthy of her high place among the nations and the love the world will bear her when degenerate and brutalised Germany is undone. The military correspondent of the London Times tells us that of all the truly wonderful things in this wonderful war most assuredly the moral cf the French Army is the most wonderful of all. “After twenty months of devastating war,” he writes, “one French woman in every three in mourning; many lair departments and the best of tiie French black country in the hands of the enemy; no to the war discoverable by the wit oJ man; regiments renewed from top to bottom, not once, but many times, the national life suspended ; the savings of half a century thrown into the melting-pot; and yet here, in close and deadly conflict with a numerous and still formidable enemy, rhut inestimable and most precious treasure, the moral of the Army, wholly untarnished and unsubdued. Rather, with each call upon a generous race the moial rises. To ever-rising demands France replies with ever-rising spirit. >She has been great before. Rut never, surely, so great as now. ‘Rather than accept slavery at German hands,’ said General do Castelnan, ‘the trench race will die upon the battlefield.’ And so it will. In very truth it will. In the mighty fires of war this grand old race has become puntied. It has lost, if it were possessed, all sense of self and sellishness. It is one. it is absolutely united. It is determined, if lightness was ever its bane, there is something to lie said for lightness which causes spirits to rise superior to all misfortunes, and to look fate squarely and gaily in the lace, in the warmest corner of the premiere ligne his—the line of resistance-and in”the first lino of till where the watchers wait calmly lor the death that is swift and always close at hand, theie is a smile of confidence lor the stianger who passes by, a cheery word, a quick repartee, and an unmistakable but indefinable seu.se of superiority to file enemy. The peiln knew helore anyone else—before his chiefs, before fi ll of us—that the Roehe was a beaten man. He knew it by instinct, by atavism, by the practice of war for two thousand years. No one told him. lie knew. And the pmmissionii.dres weed off on furlough and told the old folk at

homo to oheor up, for the tide hud turned. The front brought the message of confidence to the rear, and nor the other way about. The chiefs, and the old folk, and the rest of us, learnt it from the poilu, because the poilu came of a martial race to the manner born. He had taken the bully’s mea-, sure. He was sure.” The great and splendid sacrifices which war has called! forth have revealed in France a nobler' spirit. And so it is in Russia and in .Britain and so it must be in our own land. The spirit of true patriotism and real sacrifice must prevail amongst.