At the beginning of September, 1914, I was commissioned by The Times to go to France as its representative on the eastern frontier, and it so happens that, during the war, no other English newspaper correspondent has been stationed for any length of time on the long section of the front between Verdun and Belfort. One or two paid flying visits to Lorraine after I was settled there, but they were birds of passage, and were off again almost as soon as they arrived. In collecting the material for my despatches and letters I was helped more than I can say by my colleague, Monsieur Fleury Lamure, a French journalist who had already worked for The Times in Belgium, where he spent some exciting days in August dodging about in front of the armies of von Kluck, von Bulow, and von Hausen as they advanced on Charleroi and Namur. Before the war he had served two years as an engineer officer in the French and Russian navies, and had also worked in Manchuria and the Near East, first as interpreter to General Silvestre, the French military attachÉ at Kuropatkin’s headquarters, and then as correspondent of the Novoe Vremya, with the Servians, in the second Balkan war. In the course of our wanderings together we found that the French military and civil authorities highly appreciated the fact that the newspaper which most of them consider the greatest of English journals had associated a Frenchman with me in the work of writing about the operations of their frontier force. From the first our path was smoothed by what they looked upon as a graceful and sensible act on the part of the Editor. At a later stage in the war my French colleague, who has been twice rÉformÉ as unfit for the active exercise of his profession, offered himself at the Admiralty in Paris for one of the auxiliary forces, but was told that the best thing he could do for his country was to go on working for The Times.

From September, 1914, to January, 1915, after which no correspondents were allowed in the zone of the armies, we made our headquarters at Nancy. Between us, at various times, we visited a large part of the front from Verdun to Ferette, close to the Swiss frontier, and only fifteen or twenty miles from the Rhine. Sometimes we were in the trenches, Â bout portant of the enemy’s rifles, and for four months hardly a day or a night passed when we did not hear the sound of the guns. From what we saw and from what we heard from those who took an active part in it, we were able to get what is, I believe, a fairly correct idea of the general run of the fighting on both sides of the frontier. We were well placed, not only for judging the temper of the civil population of the invaded provinces, but also the spirit and fighting qualities of their defenders.

Before we came to Lorraine we had both seen a little of the early fighting in Belgium—at Namur and Mons, and Charleroi and Dinant. But it was at Nancy that I really got to know something of French soldiers and learnt to admire the wonderful cheerfulness and courage of the XXth Army Corps and the other splendid troops who talked with the enemy in the gate of France, and blocked the passage with their dead bodies.

All that is long ago, though not so long as it seems after the weary waiting of more than a year’s work in the trenches. But the end is not yet. Those army corps, or their successors—for nearly all of the original officers and men are dead or wounded—are still steadily pressing the enemy back, almost on the same ground as when we were there, and, though the full story cannot be told even now, it is neither too late nor too soon for an Englishman to try and give some idea of the debt which England owes to the French armies of the east.

But I should like to say a word about England too. It is always difficult to see ourselves as others see us. Till long after I had gone abroad for this war—to be quite frank, till the end of 1915—I had no real idea of the view which other nations held at the beginning of the chances of our taking a hand in it. I knew, of course, that many Germans had declared since it began that they for their part had never believed that we would draw the sword. I knew from Englishmen who were in Berlin two days, and even I believe one day, before we did declare war, that Englishmen at that time were received in the streets with cries of “Vive l’Angleterre,” or rather “Hoch! England!” and that the bitter revulsion of feeling against us only began when we had thrown down the glove. But that—as I then thought—extraordinary miscalculation and misunderstanding of our national temper, the infuriated reaction from which found vent in the “Gott strafe England” campaign and the “Song of Hate,” I put down to an inexplicable blindness peculiar to the German nation, and to the sort of fury to which we are all liable when other people on important occasions do not act as we wish and expect that they will. Since then—but only lately—I have learnt better, from the vantage ground of a neutral nation.

It is a fact that not only the Germanophil but the Francophil Swiss were genuinely and deeply astonished when they learnt—from the official communiquÉs—that we intended to intervene in the war because the soil of Belgium had been invaded. When the thing was done they accepted it as a fact. They were bound to. But they did not anticipate it. They found it hard to believe that with an army, as they thought—and they were not so far wrong—of only 150,000 men, with nothing to gain and everything to lose, we would be so quixotic as to throw ourselves into a contest in which we were not directly concerned, and to send our “contemptible little army” (even smaller than their own) to fight in a foreign country the battles of another state against the overpowering military might of Germany.

It is also a fact—and to me a still more astounding revelation—that a month after the war had begun there were people in France, and among them soldiers of high standing, who were honestly surprised at what we had already done in the war, as well as profoundly grateful, and who even then honestly doubted whether we really meant to put our backs into it to any purpose.

One can understand their astonishment at what we have done since. Even an Englishman may say, without excessive national conceit, that the work of our Navy, the huge volunteer armies raised in a year from the Mother-country and our Dominions and Colonies and India, and our subsequent if only partial acceptance of the principle of National Service, are not everyday affairs. But the initial Swiss doubt or scepticism as to our possible action, once the neutrality of Belgium had been violated, and the fears of our friends in France at the beginning, that having set our hand to the plough we might turn back before the furrow was finished, are not so easy for us Englishmen to comprehend. We had thought that they knew us better. No matter what Government had been in power, once the Germans had declared their intention of passing through the country of the Belgians, we must inevitably have drawn the sword to defend or avenge them; more than that, even if Belgium had not been invaded, we must no less have put our sword at the disposal of invaded France, for the one wrong was in reality as great as the other. And, no matter what Government may be in power to-morrow or the day after, the spirit of England will not change. We stand by the side of France and our other Allies to the end. And by now, I fancy, the French have found that out.

But do we, even now, realize fully what the war means, and what, as a nation, we have got to do before we can expect to win it? I have just come back to England after an absence of a year and a half. I find that though Parliament and the great mass of the people in all ranks have accepted the principle of National Service, there are still in some quarters powerful organizations which are vehemently opposed to it. I find that in spite of all the warnings that have been issued in the Press and by other means as to the imperative necessity of thrift, and in spite of all the efforts made by countless individuals and large sections of the community to model their lives in accordance with those warnings, other individuals and other sections of the community pay no attention to them at all. Money is being earned in unexampled and hitherto undreamt-of profusion, and is being spent with reckless prodigality. Thrift there is on all sides, but cheek by jowl and hand-in-hand with it there is appalling waste.

We have got to get rid of that word thrift altogether. At the best it is an affair of calculation, and can never inspire us to great deeds or counteract the personal and ignoble motives by which human nature, even in the greatest crises, is too often swayed. There is nothing lofty or idealistic or spiritual about it. We must get into an altogether higher region than that of economics. We must learn the lesson not of thrift but of self-sacrifice. Only that can save us. Without it, even though we have the dreaded ships and the splendid men and the all-necessary money too, we shall be in this war as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. With it, bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things, we shall move mountains and overcome the world—the world of the powers of darkness. It is the lack of it, and nothing but the lack of it, which is at present preventing us from winning the war and putting an end to its intolerable misery and evil.