The Ironmonger by Hilaire Belloc — Read

When I was in the French army we came one day with the guns in July along / a straight and dusty road and clattered into the village called Bar-le-Duc. / Of the details of such marches I have often written. I wish now to speak of / another thing, which, in long accounts of mere rumbling of guns, one might / never have time to tell, but which is really the most important of all / experiences under arms in France -- I mean the older civilians, the fathers.

Who made the French army? Who determined to recover from the defeats and / to play once more that determined game which makes up half French history, / the "Thesaurization," the gradual reaccumulation of power? The general / answer to such questions is to say: "The nation being beaten had to set / to and recover its old position. " That answer is insufficient. It deals / in abstractions and it tells you nothing. Plenty of political societies / throughout history have sat down under disaster and consented to sink / slowly. Many have done worse -- they have maintained after sharp warnings / the pride of their blind years; they have maintained that pride on into / the great disasters, and when these came they have sullenly died. France / neither consented to sink nor died by being overweening. Some men must / have been at work to force their sons into the conscription, to consent / to heavy taxation, to be vigilant, accumulative, tenacious, and, as it / were, constantly eager. There must have been classes in which, unknown to / themselves, the stirp of the nation survived; individuals who, aiming at / twenty different things, managed, as a resultant, to carry up the army / to the pitch in which I had known it and to lay a slow foundation for / recovered vigour. Who were these men?