PARLEZ VOUS?

It is instructive to note the air with which the lecture room greets the remarks of the French officers. If the orals are a test of the average college man's ability as a linguist, French should be as intelligible to him as Hottentot to an Eskimo. Yet we hear the voluminous applause of six hundred men at the proper dramatic pause, and the right ripple or broad guffaw of as many at the humorous interlude. It may be that a few, habituated to the Gallic tongue, lead the applause, and the rest follow to show that they also are of the appreciative and selected cultured.

More probably the explanation of this ready appreciation of an unfamiliar tongue is in the nature of the subject and the lecturer. Bravery speaks in every language with but one speech. French of Paris may be to us unknown, but the French of the battlefield, of Verdun and Vimy Ridge, is a tongue we may all talk, and understand.