Excerpt from My French Year

In bygone days I have known and loved my French friends in the happy times of Peace - times which now seem to belong to a past as remote as the days of Greece, when the Gods dwelt on Olympus and nymphs and shepherds danced to the pipes of Pan. But the love and sympathy which had grown up with me from childhood, and which I felt, as one united by far-back ties of race and kindred, has deepened immeasurably with every year of the War.

For in the supreme ordeal my French friends have shown themselves at their finest, their noblest, their sublimest. To those of us who had the happiness of knowing France and the French this has been no surprise. We always knew that the roots went down very deep of that fair flower of French character which showed so gay, so fine a wit, so happy a facing of life, so brave and buoyant a spirit in adversity. But there were those, and they were the British nation as a whole, who judged the French with as little true psychology as they judged the Germans, whose war-books planned so neatly the occupation and subjugation of France in less than tree months, keeping Christmas in Paris - such a happy German Christmas!

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