Meanwhile we stay.
You can't conceive of the intense interest which is reigning here, you can't realise it, scarcely.

In Paris there is vivid interest, of course, but that is from less immediate motives, except with persons who have relations in the army.

Here it is as if each one had a personal enemy in the street below struggling to get up to him.

When we are anxious we are pale; when we are glad we have tears in our eyes.

This 'unnecessary' and 'inexcusable' war (as it has been called in England) represents the only hope of a nation agonising between death and life.