The Daily News. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1915. THE BURDEN ON FRANCE.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 September 1915, Page 4

The Daily News. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1915. THE BURDEN ON FRANCE.

There was a time—and not so very long ago—when the French were accustomed to shrug their shoulders and say that •the English took their pleasures sadly. To-day, in this dreadful time of war, it is the French who are intensely serious, and the British who are light of heart) yet both nations are confident of the ultimate issue. This remarkable contrast has furnished a theme for many pens, and many high-sounding and cutting phrases have been used to press home the fact that France is right and Britain wrong in their respective attitudes. The subject has even induced Rudyard Kipling to champion the attitude of France, and to charge his countrymen with failure to recognise how France is living this war; and the pity of it is that his contention is true. When he says that "France has no time for anything else but war," he sums up the situation in a few words that may well be taken to heart throughout the British Empire. The old spirit of British insularity is still strongly in evidence, and that accounts for the fact that we are not so greatly concerned with what France and the French have at stake, or with the nature and extent of the burden France is bearing, as we are with the question of what help can France give in the struggle for victory. A writer in the Dunedin Star says there is reason to believe that there are those among us who regard the appalling conflict that now curses the earth almost solely from the British standpoint. There may be such people, but they must be those who fail to recognise what France has done, is doing, and will continue to do—work that makes the efforts of the British pale into insignificance, for out of a battle line of over 600 miles Fiance for more than a. year lias been continuously defending over 510 miles, Britain and Belgium being responsible for the balance. France has good cause to take the war more seriously than Britain, for she has seen her fields devastated, her towns and villages destroyed, her churches and cathedrals desecrated, her people scattered and subjected to nameless horrors. She lias within the same period lost hundreds of thousands of the flowe:- of her population, and she is still undaunte'd and still confronting the crisis with the same resolute tenacity. ''France," says Mr. Henry James, "is bleeding at every pore, while at no time in her history so completely erect . . . incalculable, immortal France." Similar testimony is given by Lord Esher, who in a ■prefatory note to a recent publication, writes: "During the war I have lived much with J the l'Vonvh armies and among the French pcop'e. There is no soldier of France and very few of her men and women to whom the issues at stake are not pellucidly clear. Their agony and sacrifice of wealth, of blood, and of life are not laid upon the altar of ambition." ''The French people," says the Times, "realise very keenly that, when all has been said of our assistance, the main burden of the war, even in the west, lias fallen not upon England, but upon France." And yet these allies of ours arc put to additional worry and strain in consequence of the strike of 10,000 British coal miners, whereby France is blocked from obtaining those coal supplies that are almost as vital to her success at this critical time as is an abundant supply of bread. There we teas of thousands of

men in England, including the miners, who not only do not realise that their country i s engaged in a war in,which its continued existence as a free, independent, and great Power is the issue, but who write, talk, and act as though the devastated lands of Belgium and I'rance were not nearer to the heart of the Empire than is the capital of Scotland. And Prance knows this only too well, It is not mo,re than bare justice to ask that the responsibilities now pressing so heavily on France shall be fully recognised, and that her great example shall be estimated at its high value. She lias felt the talons of the German eagle and the scars are still visible.