Excerpt from Tales of Wartime France To us Americans France has become almost a mystic word, carrying with it a picture of suffering and heroism. The Marne and Verdun stand out as the great check battles of the modern world, where the oldest and most sympathetic of European peoples again, after an interval of centuries, stopped the inroad of a new and more terri ble barbarism; that in which brutish appetite is served by all the devices of modern science. The great lines of the conflict we all know. They are revealed to us by the daily press and contemporary his tory. These are the broad outlines of the story, but there is much more to the picture that we do not see and that the imagination can scarce conjure the simple devotion of obscure persons, the silent suffering of little children, the long agony of the women in the invaded districts, the quiet heroism of the humble folk whose names will never adorn the pages of history. It is the recital of incidents sudh as are contained in these little stories that reveals to us the very soul of France itself, as it can be revealed in no formal oration or state document. 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.