It was thus in a mood of deep despondency that
M. Duhamel crossed in the spring to England :
" What of it? A Frenchman, finding himself in the midst of this spring idyll, suffers more atrociously than ever from his own cares and anxieties. He feels himself to be a wet blanket. He is conscious of this and it makes him blush. Those boys at Eton, with their short coats and long hats, those indolent Oxonians who stroll about with a book in their hand, those young people on the Serpentine, rejoicing in the hour of spring—what are they think- ing? It is clear what they are thinking.
They are thinking: ' Why should you people come over here to disturb us? Of course we know that the world is not going in the way that one could wish; but the danger is still distant; we have still time to think it over. Please allow us to enjoy our happy days in peace. We have conquered the world. Please let us enjoy in peace our glory and our possessions. Yes, we know that Empires are fragile things; but one should never exaggerate. Consider how easy everything is here, how pacific,. how agreeable. We may have conquered the world, but we have installed therein a civilisation which is both charming and respectable. . . . Yes we know about the danger of war; it is always a possibility. Don't imagine that we do not worry about it. We do. Why, during the last year there has been an increase in our territorial army, at least that is what I hear from a man I know. So please don't look so glum at us; please smile and pass onwards.'
" The Frenchman, hearing this, bows his head. He thinks but does not say, that the gift of imagination is not one which Nature has distributed very widely, and that a great people, and one which has given so many poets to the world, is sometimes capable of rejecting the bitter benefits of imagination in order that it may continue, in blind obstinacy, to enjoy its own achievements and its own virtues."
That is what Georges Duhamel, a sympathetic observer, thinks about the effect upon England of the Great White War of 1938. "Now that things in Europe are settling down. . . ."
* * *
Previous page
