Does not every Englishman feel this to be true of his own countrymen?
It is consequently not absurd that Frenchmen should think the same of themselves.

The French are intensely patriotic--country with them is no abstraction.

They moan over its ruin as though it were a human being, and far then be it from me to laugh at them for doing so.

When, however, I find persons dressing themselves up in all the paraphernalia of war, visiting tombs and statues in order to register with due solemnity that they intend to die rather than yield, and when, after all this nonsense, these same persons decline to take their share in the common danger on the score that they have a mother, or a sister, or a wife, or a child, dependent upon them, and when month after month they drum and strut up and down the Boulevards, I consider that they are ridiculous, and I say so.

When a man does a silly thing it is his own fault--not that of the person who chronicles it.