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10 erthygl ar y dudalen hon

THE POILU. )

Newyddion
Dyfynnu
Rhannu

THE POILU. ) t The French Soldier at Home By J.D. W. I Upon an evening in late May, the French interpreter held forth at the door of the guard- room to a little group of Welshmen who had been re- membering old times through the old hymns of Wales. When we had finished with our minor tunes, and pipes and cig- arettes were glow- ing, the interpreter —in peace times a professor of more than Parisian repu- tation—had the ear of the company without restraint. It is." he caid, a thing incomprehensible to me that you the Welsh should have a repute for lack of staying power. You, with these sad, sweet hymns I have had the gratification to hear you Bing just now! Your fondness for these, to a philosopher, abolishes such a charge. It is what you, call [he paused for the appropriate word] yes, it is absurd. Show me the people who sing like that, and I tell you that to imagination they add strength, to courage stedfastness, to liveliness endurance. It has been like that with us too. The Eng- lish, what did they think of us? Were they not doubtful? Yes, they were—you need not shake your heads eo. Were they I not fear fill ? Yes. Did not I see it in the eyes of some of your people ? And we have answered at Verdun." I quote the interpreter, I believe, with fair exactness, for what he said during that evening around the guard-room fire, when, after the soldiers had returned to their billets, we talked into morning, made an indelible impression upon my mind. It was another France this scholar- soldier revealed to me, a Fi4tnce whose resolution had hardened into steel, a France who would endure as long as the need existed. Perhaps there has been a France frivolous, unstable, fickle. Per- haps there has been a France whose bril- lianoe was only equalled by its weakness. But reading again the great books of France with a new mental vision, I see that the qualities showing in the new France—tenacity, fixity of purpose, grim- ness of purpose—were in the old. I read I the Dumas Musketeer serial, and I see it there. And in Hugo also, in the rugged. herculean characters who are in hit; books, the Valjeans, the Gilliatts. But I saw it best in the poilus who marched through our village, in the regi- ments Mat passed us entrained, in. the soldiers who came home to L on leave. i I have as one precious gift to recall my days in France, a little rough-cast Crucifix, the work of a moulder who went from our village to the war, a Crucifix made of shell-metal in the trenches during the awful days when the Boche tried to beat open the gate of Verdun. I can never look at it without recalling the giver, his silences, his deep wells of eyes, the set of his mouth, the one or two out- bursts when we sat around his mother's table, and they tried to get him to talk. They were terrible days we were passing through then, days when it seemed as though the eastern postern into France was being gradually sapped. Louis listened to the family clatter, silent amid the babble. The news is bad, to-day," said the soldier billeted there. And then his eyes flashed, his hand came to the table with a fierooness that set the cups ringing. They will not pass! he stormed. They are held Their shells are like the rain! Their men come on like the flood. But we hold! They will not pass! Never." I saw him at the station when his leave had expired, awaiting the commission train. The family were around him in the station yard. It was a sacramental scene. First the embrace be- tween father and son, then the long, long fondling of the mother, and the kiss for little Marie. And then a last look, and the station door closed. Louis, certain as all the French soldiers are that they will never return, was en route to the glorious trenches of Verdun. They went past us, these grim quiet sol- diers—altogether unlike our old concep- tions of the French—in their stained, looped-up overcoats, and wearing their helmets, like all things French, beautiful M ours are ugly, waving courteous greet- ings to the women in the station yard- they passed us like men who knew that them would be no joy in the world, no light-heartedness, until the enemy had been cleared off the soil of their country. Their humour, when they showed it, had a touch of ferocity in it. The gentle graces of France have gone. And they will not return in our time, for the soul of France has been stricken, and they are a people of long memories. When I hear the sentimentalists of Britain talking their inconsequential nonsense about the international reilaticnships of Europe after the- war, I think of the soldiers who passed through our village on the Somme, I see again their strong but wearied faces and the turn of their mouths, and I ask myself what the French poilu will say when he comes back from the fight- hig. and enters a?ain into political and civil life! I wonder what Louis, the mitrailleur of Verdun-if he lives—will say to the people who will want him to forg-ot-Louis who saw that the Boche did not pass through the eastern postern. « I had set out to write lightly, even with a touch of frivolity; about nog poilus." I had meant to write of the multiplicity of fashions in whiskers that prevails in the French armies, of the wonderful beards, the magnificent mou-stachios, that make a French regiment a sight never to forget. But one cannot get his pen to flow freely in such a strain. There is fun and jollity enough in France, but I did not see it awong the French. There is light-heartedness in Picardv, but it is not among the poilus. France can still smile ,-it rarely laughs. For it knows the evil in the Boche, and there will be no gaiety or laughter, neither frivolity nor merry- making, and there will be no gentle graces or lightness, until the Boche has been broken on the wheel he set rolling. And France will be inflexible, rock-like, until the end. The French rarely sing in chorus as do the British soldiers. Someftmes they get one of their number to sing La Mar- seillaise," and once at I- a poilu stood in the station yard and orated rather than sung Roland a Rencevaux." The Cure wrote me the refrain: Mourons pour la patrie C'est le sort le plus beau, le plus digne d'envie. For my country I shall die! The grandest fate for man beneath the sky." This is the France of to-day, as it was also the France of yesterday. And with that song I couple another, sung one day by a wounded soldier passing down in an ambulance train, and flourishing a German helmet as he sang—the great Ca Ira," of which I have since seen a rough translation: All will go right-will go right-will go right, All will succeed, tho' malignants are strong; All will go right-will go right-will go right, ThUg aY6 the people by day and by night." This, also, i-s-the France of to-day. But if they sing the Ca Ira they sing it with a hammer-stroke in every note. It is the chant of You shall not pass."

MUNITIONS TRIBUNAL.

MORRISTON SPORT. I

LATE QUEEN'S PEARLS. f

[No title]

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THE MARRIAGE OF MARI.

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IYSTALYFERA BATTLE.

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