14 
LAND & WATER 
November i6, 191^ 
in the nature of things, couldn't apologise, ju-t :l3 I 
lieard an American friend here say of the attitudt^ of the 
Washington Government in so many questions connocted 
with the war. And the worst of it was having mn ever 
considerate French friends try to save our feilini,'s by 
changing the subject whenever a conversation tin tatened 
to turn to 'England's part.' Of course, thv Sonune 
offensive has changed all that now, and the I'vench 
people, high and low, fully realise that we're with them 
\p the end." 
The growing strength of the French confidence in, 
and the increasing warmth of the French admiration for 
the British is evident on every hand in France to-day, 
and, as indicative of the growing soUdarity of the Allies 
as the grim ordeal of the third winter of the war is at 
hand, its continued development is of the highest ;~ignific- 
ance. One sees evidence of it in the kinemas when 
British pictures are shown (I saw a crowd watching a 
Pathe " Journal " come to its feet as one man in the 
enthusiasm of its applause for Lieutenant Robinson 
standing among the wreckage of the Zeppelin he had 
brought down), at the music halls when British airs 
are played, and on tiie streets in the friendly glances 
which greet and follow the British soldier on lea\e. 
Popularity of Canadians 
The Canadians — irrespective of whether or not they 
arc of French ancestry — appear to be especially popular 
in France, and an ofiiicial in the Ministry of Foreign 
Affairs recently told me that one of the most enthusiastic 
and spontaneous demonstrations he had ever seen in 
Paris was occasioned by the appearance of a lorry load 
of Canadian Ser\ice Corps men in the midst of a great 
crowd that had assembled to greet a visiting Serbian band. 
" The Canadians had nothing whatever to do with the 
affair," he said, " they were only so many men going about 
their duty, and they chanced along just after the Serbians, 
who had been giving a concert, had been hurried away 
in their motors. No sooner did the crowd sight the 
khaki uniforms of the Canadians th^n a rush was made 
for the lorry, and for fully twenty minutes it was the 
centre of cheering thousands. And hardly were they 
free of this section of the crowd than those in the next 
block closed in around them." 
There is no doubt that that brave fighter and genial 
diplomat " Thomas Atkins," has played a great part in ce- 
menting the Entente, not only by the blood he has shed on 
I'Yench soil but also by the frank ingenuousness that is so 
direct an antitliesis of the rather standoffish tourist 
that the Frenchman has been wont in the past to con- 
sider as the typical Briton. He visits Paris just in- 
frequently enough to make one remark his presence 
when he does come, and I have been much interested 
to note that he is nearly always seen either in the company 
of a Poilu or two, or else in that of a bevy of French 
giris who are taking the occasion to act as " Thos. 
Cooks "to " Thos. Atkins." Yesterday, seated under 
a tree in the Champs Elysees, I came upon a group 
consisting of an outer periphery of French nurse girls 
and children clustered around "a nodal centre of two 
bronzed warriors from the Somme in trench-stained 
khaki. At the moment mv companion and I pushed 
unobtrusively in to learn what was afoot, one of the 
'■ Tommies " was running his finger down the laundry 
list of his dog-eared phrase-book in order to explain 
just which one of his garments— and, incidentally, 
by inference, just what sector of cuticle— had recently 
been punctured by the spent shrapnel bullet that his com- 
rade was holding up for the inspection of all interested. 
His enthralled auditors laughed till they cried when he 
finally closed his book to tell them that it was " a bas 
of mon chemise Boche bullet come ping ! " 
" Those two diplomats," said the English journalist 
with whom I was walking, " are probably doing more 
to rivet down the loose corners of the Entente Cordiale 
than are the Cabinet Ministers of France and England 
who are meeting in Boulogne this afternoon." 
If there has been one place more than another where 
a nft might have started in the Entente lute, it is in that 
portion of France which constitutes the area under 
British military control, and that serious trouble has 
not arisen here is due to two things— the innate docility 
and coramonsense of the French peasant and the con- 
siderate manliness of the British soldier. But even 
allowing for these things the lack of serious friction 
between the soldiers and the civil population is astonish- 
ing. Nothing (not even tlie artillery bombardment on 
the Somme) interested me more on a recent visit to this 
area than the kindly attitude of the jx^ople toward the 
army wliich the Germans ha\ c tried so hard to make 
them believe had come to stay for good. 
" An army of angels couldn't occupy England as we 
have France," said an officer on tiie British Headquarters 
Staff, " without rubbing the wrong way the fur of our 
highly independent British farmer. Only the fine be- 
haviour of the ' Tommies ' and the firm conviction of 
the people that we are in France to help them makes the 
situation possible here." 
Just as generous is the view of peasants on the other 
side. " How do you get on with the British soldiers ? " 
I .asked an old dame with a parchment-brown face iX^ho 
was hoeing sugar beets well within range of the German 
guns in the Arras sector. " Tyes bien, in'sicu," was the 
reply, and she went on to tell me how one " Tomce " 
billeted in her house chopped her wood, and another 
brought water, and another was making a scare-crow 
dressed in a Bociie uniform for her garden, and finally, 
how all three of them brought bon-bons for her daughter 
Just how well " Tommy " has behaved may be judged 
from the observation of a well-known Russian corre- 
spondent in whose company I motored several hundred 
miles behind the British fines. Every time that he saw a 
large flock of ducks, geese or chickens, a look of in- 
credulity would spread over his broad Slavic countenance, 
the while he pursed his lips in a whistle of astonishment. 
" What's so remarkable about the poultry, X ? " 
I asked. " They look to me like a very ordinary lot of 
barnyard fowl." 
" So they arc," he rephed. " It is not their points as 
show-birds that interest me, but the fact that, with 
so many able-bodied soldiers about, there are any birds 
at all. Now, if it was the Don Cossacks that were here 
instead of these orderly ' Tommies ' " — and he indicated 
a chicken-less northern France with a sweeping gesture of 
extended hands. " No wonder the French peasants 
love the British soldier. He does not even steal their 
poultry." 
The feehng of the French people toward the rest of 
their country's Allies may be quickly indicated, for 
France's relations with these have been marked by few 
such complicating circumstances as have those with 
Great Britain. Of all the gallant Republic's Allies 
Russia, as the oldest and best pioved of them, un- 
doubtedly stands first in the affections of the French 
people. The sort of " big brother " feeling which France 
has had for years for the great northern Empire has been 
intensified since the outbreak of the war by the self- 
sacrificing gallantry with which, time and time again, 
often at great cost to herself, Russia has struck to create 
a diversion and relieve the pressure on a hard beset Ally, 
In the great parade in Paris on July 14th the Russian 
soldiers are generally credited with having been more 
enthusiastically cheered than any others, and the same 
feeling is evident whenever the tall warriors of the Tsar 
flicker past on the sheet of a kinema. 
" We always knew we could count on Russia for all 
the help she was able to give, and we feel that we always 
shall be able so to count on her." 
These, the words of a French journalist with whom I 
chsciissed the subject seem to epitomize the.feehngs of 
the I'rench people toward their oldest Ally. 
Already bound to Italy by ties of blood, the French 
awaited only the declaration of war by that country 
upon Germany to welcome her into the inner circle of 
the Entente, the " brotherhood " in which Russia was 
already included at the outbreak of hostilities, and to 
wiiich England fought her way on the Somme. The 
co-operation of the Itahans in the Balkans and their 
clean-cut successes in the advance on Gorizia and beyond 
have brought home to the French people, just as they did 
to the English, a realisation of the weight that Italy is 
throwing into the scale of the Allies. With th*" arrival " 
of Italy as a full-fledged Ally, indeed, the Quadruple 
Entente entered into an existence in fact as well as in 
name, and there is nothing I have seen in either France 
or England that would indicate that its bonds will not 
become more firmly knit with everv month of the war. ■ 
