Excerpt from France at Bay This is not a war book in the ordinary sense. It does not contain pictures of moonlit battles, or pages saturated with blood. It seeks only to give some account of France at work as Well as at war, of efforts to organize herself in the hour of agony. The first exhaustion had passed, the first staggering shock of battle, joined with a foe, relentless and prepared for years. France, on the other hand, had other thoughts than war; she had indulged a little her love of reverie, her dreams of art and intellectual conquest. The war had become an intellectual habit against a background Of terrific fact. The only casualty list allowed - the black of widows and bereaved mothers - told of the death-roll: how voluminous and crushing it was. Yet, on the faces Of these women, as on the faces of the brave mutiles hobbling down the street, we read courage and resolution. In answer to the talk of peace, a stricken mother said: Let there be no peace till the victory is won. My son, killed in the trenches, would have willed it so; my son who survives has no other thought. It is the common feeling of the country. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.