Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France

by Edmund Gosse

THE GALLANTRY OF FRANCE

The spirit displayed by the young French officers in this war deserves to be compared in many essential respects with that which is blazoned in the glorious "Chanson de Roland." It is interesting to remember that during the long years in which the direct influence of that greatest of medieval epics was obscured, it was chiefly known through the paraphrase of it executed in German by the monk Konrad in the twelfth century. Many years ago, Gaston Paris pointed out the curious fact that Konrad completely modified the character of the "Chanson de Roland" by omitting all expressions of warlike devotion to "la douce France," and by concentrating the emotion of the poem on its religious sentiment. But the real theme of the "Chanson de Roland," as we know now, was the passionate attachment of the heroes to the soil of France; "ils étaient poussés par l'amour de la patrie, de l'empereur français leur seigneur, de leur famille, et surtout de la gloire."

It is a remarkable instance of German "penetration" that in the paraphrase of the "Chanson de Roland" which Germany so long foisted upon Europe, these elements were successfully effaced. There was a sort of poetical revenge, therefore, in the attitude of those who answered the challenge of Germany in the true spirit of Roland and Oliver.

We have seen that Vauvenargues—to whose memory the mind incessantly reverts in contemplation of the heroes of this war—says in one of his "Maximes"—written nearly two centuries ago—"The earliest days of spring have less charm than the budding virtue of a young man." No figure of 1914 exemplifies this quality of grace more surprisingly than Jean Allard (who called himself in literature Méeus). He was only twenty-one and a half when he was killed at Pierrepont, at the very beginning of the war, but he was already one of the promising figures of his generation. Allard was looked upon as an incipient Admirable Crichton; he was a brilliant scholar, an adroit and multiform athlete, the soul of wit and laughter, the centre of a group of adoring admirers. This sparkling poet was suddenly transformed by the declaration of war into the sternest of soldiers. His poem, called "Demain," created, or rather expressed, the patriotic passion which was simultaneously evoked all over France; it is really a lesser "Marseillaise." Not less popular, but more elaborate and academic, is Allard's aviation poem, "Plus haut toujours!"—an extraordinary vision of the flight and ecstasy and tragic death of a solitary airman. We may notice that in this, and many other verses describing recent inventions of science, the young French poets contrive to be very lucid and simple in their language, and to avoid that display of technical verbiage which deforms too many English experiments in the same class.

It is not, however, so much by his writings, which are now collected in two, or perhaps three, little volumes, that Allard-Méeus strikes the imagination of a foreign spectator, as by his remarkable attitude. From the first, this lad of twenty-one exemplified and taught the value of a chivalrous behaviour. In the face of events, in that corruption of all which could make the martial spirit seem noble, that Germany has forced upon the world, this attitude of young French officers at the very opening of the war is pathetic, and might even lend itself, if we were disposed for mirth, to an ironic smile. But it should be recorded and not forgotten. It was Allard who revived the etiquette of going to battle dressed as sprucely as for a wedding. We shall do well to recollect the symbolic value which the glove holds in legends of medieval prowess. When the dying Roland, under the pine-trees, turns to the frontier of Spain, he offers, as a dying soldier, his glove to God—

"Pur ses pecchiez deu puroftrid son guant."

Allard-Méeus at St. Cyr made all the young officers swear that they would not go into battle except in white gloves and with their képi adorned with the casoar, the red and white dress-plume. "Ce serment, bien français, est aussi élégant que téméraire," he said, and the rest followed him with acclamation. He was one of the first French officers to fall in battle, at the head of his infantry, and his mother was presented by the regiment with his casoar and his gloves, worn at the moment of his death, on August 22, 1914, and stained with his blood. Allard offers a fugitive but typical specimen of the splendour of French sentiment in the first flush of its enthusiasm.

On March 26, 1917, the Société des Gens de Lettres in Paris held a solemn assembly under the presidency of M. Pierre Decourcelle to commemorate those authors who, during the present war, have fallen in the service of France. Touching and grave in the extreme was the scene, when, before a crowded and throbbing audience, the secretary read the name of one young writer after another, pausing for the president to respond by the words "Mort au champ d'honneur!" In each case there followed a brief silence more agitating in its emotion than any eloquence could be.

The great number of young men of high intellectual promise who were killed early in this war is a matter for grave and painful reflection. Especially in the first months of the autumn of 1914 the holocaust was terrible. There was no restraining the ardour of the young, who sought their death in a spirit of delirious chivalry, each proud to be the Iphigenia or the Jephtha's Daughter of a France set free. It has been noted since that the young generation, born about 1890, had been prepared for the crisis in a very significant way. The spiritual condition of these grave and magnificent lads resembled nothing that had been seen before, since the sorrows of 1870. They gave the impression of being dedicated. As we now read their letters, their journals, their poems, we are astonished at the high level of moral sentiment which actuated them all. There is often even a species of rapturous detachment which seems to lift them into a higher sphere than that of vain mortality. Examples might be given by the sheaf, but it suffices here to quote a letter from the youthful Léo Lantil, who was killed early in 1915, in one of the obscure battles of Champagne. He says, in writing to his parents, shortly before his death, "All our sacrifice will be of sweet savour if it leads to a really glorious victory and brings more light to human souls." It was this Léo Lantil, dying in his twenty-fifth year, whose last words were "Priez pour la France, travaillez pour la France, haussez-la!"

A story is told by M. Henri Bordeaux which illustrates the impression made by these young soldiers. A peasant of Savoy, while ploughing his fields in the autumn of 1914, saw his wife crossing to him with the local postman, who had a letter in his hands. He took it from them, and put on his spectacles, and read that his two sons had been killed in an engagement in the Vosges. He said quietly, "God has found them ready," and then, slowly, "My poor wife!" and he returned to his yoke of oxen. It would seem that the French accepted, without reserve and without difficulty, an inward discipline for which the world had formed little conception of their readiness. There is no question now, since all the private letters and diaries prove it, that the generation which had just left college, and had hardly yet gone out into the world, had formed, unsuspected by their elders, a conception of life which might have been called fatalistic if it had not been so rigorously regulated by a sense of duty. They were singularly calm under a constant presentiment of death. When the war came, they accepted the fiery trial not merely with resignation, but even with relief. Their athletic stoicism took what fortune offered them, instead of attempting to rebel against it. Their sentiment was that a difficulty had been settled. Life had been producing upon their consciences a sense of complication, a tangle of too many problems. Now they might, and did, cheerfully relinquish the effort to solve them. One of the most extraordinary features of the moral history of the young French officers in this war has been the abandonment of their will to the grace of God and the orders of the chief. In the letters of the three noble brothers Belmont, who fell in rapid succession, this apprenticeship to sacrifice is remarkable, but it recurs in all the records. "God found them ready!"

When all is of so inspired an order of feeling, it is difficult, it is even invidious, to select. But the figure of Paul Lintier, whose journals have been piously collected by M. Edmond Haraucourt, stands out before us with at least as much saliency as any other. We may take him as a peculiarly lucent example of his illuminated class. Quartermaster Lintier died on March 15, 1916, struck by a shell, on the Lorraine frontier, at a place called Jeandelincourt. He had not yet completed his twenty-third year, for he was born at Mayenne on May 13, 1893. In considering the cases of many of these brilliant and sympathetic young French officers, who had already published or have left behind them works in verse and prose, there may be a disposition, in the wonderful light of their experience, to exaggerate the positive value of their productions. Not all of them, of course, have contributed, or would have contributed, durable additions to the store of the literature of France. We see them, excusably, in the rose-light of their sunset. But, for this very reason, we are inclined to give the closer attention to Paul Lintier, who not only promised well but adequately fulfilled that promise. It seems hardly too much to say that the revelation of a prose-writer of the first class was brought to the world by the news of his death.

His early training predicted nothing of romance. He was intended for a career in commerce, but, showing no aptitude for trade, he dallied with legal studies at Lyons, and "commenced author" by publishing some essays in that city. At the age of twenty he joined a regiment of artillery, and seems to have perceived, a year before the war, that the only profession he was fitted for was soldiering. Towards the close of September 1914, in circumstances which he recounts in his book, he was severely wounded; he went back to the front in July 1915, and, as we have said, fell fighting eight months later. This is the history of a young man who will doubtless live in the annals of French literature; and brief as it seems, it is really briefer still, since all we know of Paul Lintier, or are likely ever to know, is what he tells us himself in describing what he saw and practised and endured between August 1 and September 22, 1914. This wonderful book, "Ma Pièce," was written by the young gunner, night after night, on his knee, during seven weeks of inconceivable intensity of emotion, and it is by this revelation of his genius that his memory will be preserved.

The style of Paul Lintier is one of the miracles of art. There is no evidence that this youth had studied much or had devoted himself to any of the training which adequate expression commonly demands. We know nothing about him until he suddenly bursts upon us, in the turmoil of mobilization, as a finished author. What strikes a critical reader of "Ma Pièce," as distinguishing it from other works of its class, is a certain intellectual firmness most remarkable in a lad of Lintier's age, suddenly confronted by such a frenzy of public action. There is no pessimism, and no rhetoric, and no touch of humour, but an obsession for the truth. This is displayed by another and an extremely popular recent publication, "En Campagne," by M. Marcel Dupont, which exhibits exactly the same determination to exaggerate nothing and to reduce nothing, but to report exactly what the author saw with his own eyes, in that little corner of the prodigious battle-field in which his own regiment was fighting. Truth, the simple unvarnished truth, has been the object of these various writers in setting down their impressions, but the result exemplifies the difference between what is, and what is not, durable as literature. For this purpose, it is well to turn from Lintier's pages to those of the honest writers of whom Dupont is the type, and then back again to Lintier. All evoke, through intense emotion, most moving and most tragic sensations, but Lintier, gifted with some inscrutable magic, evokes them in the atmosphere of beauty.

A quality of the mind of Paul Lintier which marked him out for a place above his fellows was the prodigious exactitude of his memory. This was not merely visual, but emotional as well. Not only did it retain, with the precision of a photograph, all the little fleeting details of the confused and hurried hours in which the war began, but it kept a minute record of the oscillation of feeling. Those readers who take a pleasure in the technical parts of writing may enjoy an analysis of certain pages in "Ma Pièce," for instance, the wonderful description of an alerte at 2 A.M. above the village of Tailly-sur-Meuse (pp. 131, 132). With the vigorous picturesqueness of these sentences we may compare the pensive quality and the solidity of touch which combine to form such a passage as the following account of a watch at Azannes (August 14, 1914):—"La nuit est claire, rayée par les feux des projecteurs de Verdun qui font des barres d'or dans le ciel; merveilleuse nuit de mi-août, infiniment constellée, égayée d'étoiles filantes qui laissent après elles de longues phosphorescences.

"La lune s'est levée. Elle perce mal les feuillages denses des pruniers et le cantonnement immobile reste sombre. Çà et là, seulement, elle fait des taches jaunes sur l'herbe et sur les croupes des chevaux qui dorment debout. Le camarade avec qui je partage cette nuit de garde est étendu dans son manteau au pied d'un grand poirier. Devant moi, la lune illumine la plaine. Les prairies sont voilées de gaze blanche. Les deux armées, tous feux éteints, dorment ou se guettent."

Lintier has no disposition to make things out better than they were. His account of the defeat at Virton, on August 22, is grave and calm in its sad stoicism, it is even harsh in its refusal to overlook any of the distressing features of the affair. But hope rises in his heart like clear water in a troubled well, and it is just after this melancholy set-back that the noble French spirit most vividly asserts itself. In the very forefront of physical and moral misery, "quelle émouvante compréhension de la Patrie s'est révélée à nous!" An army which is instantly and completely victorious can never experience the depth of this sentiment. It is necessary to have fought, to have suffered, to have feared (if only for a moment) that all was lost, in order to comprehend with passion what the mother-country means to a man. Lying in the fog, soaked with rain, at the edge of the copses from which the German guns had ejected them, it was at that wretched moment that the full apprehension came to Paul Lintier that France comprised for him all the charm of life, all the affections, all the joys of the eyes and the heart and the brain. "Alors, on préfère tomber, mourir là, parce qu'on sent que la France perdue, ce serait pire que la mort." This is a feeling which animates the darkest pages of his book—and many of them perforce are gloomy; through all the confusion and doubt, the disquietude, the physical dejection, the sense of a kind of blind-man's buff intolerably wearisome and fatiguing—through all this, which the young author does not seek to conceal, there runs the ceaseless bright thread of hope sustained by love.

For us English the book has a curious interest in its unlikeness to anything which an English lad of twenty would have dreamed of writing. It strikes an English reader, in comparison with the equally gallant and hardly less picturesque records which some of our own young officers have produced, as extraordinarily "grown up." The new generation which France sent into the war of defence was more simple and more ardent at the outset than our own analogous generation was. It was less dilettante and more intellectual. The evidences of thought, of reasoned reflection carried out to its full extent, of an adequate realization of the problems presented by life, are manifest, though in various degree, in all these records of French officers killed in the months which preceded Christmas 1914. These Frenchmen did not go out light-heartedly, nor with a pathetic inability to fathom the purpose for which they so generously went, but they had given the matter a study which seemed beyond their years. They marched to the blood-baths of Belgium and Lorraine with solemnity, as though to a sacrament.

It must be remarked as an interesting point that this generation had recovered a sense of the spirituality of a war of national defence. In simpler words, it had recovered that honest pride which France, in certain of its manifestations since the war of 1870, seemed to have lamentably lost. Posterity will compare the serene simplicity of Péguy and Lintier with the restlessness and bitter disenchantment of the 1880 generation, which arrived at manhood just when France was most deeply conscious of her humiliation. If we seek for the sources of this recovery of self-respect, which so beautifully characterized French character at the immediate crisis of 1914, we have to find it, of course, in the essential elasticity of the trained French mind. The Frenchman likes the heroic attitude, which is unwelcome to us, and he adopts it instinctively, with none of our national shyness and false modesty. But, if we seek for a starting-point of influence, we may probably find it in the writings of a soldier whose name is scarcely known in England, but whose "Études sur le Combat," first published in 1880, have been the text-book of the young French officer, and were never being so much read as just before the outbreak of the war.

The author of these "Études sur le Combat" was Colonel Ardent du Picq, who fell at the battle of Longeville-les-Metz, on August 15, 1870. He had predicted the calamity of that war, which he attributed to the mental decadence of the French army, and to the absence of any adequate General Staff organization. Ardent du Picq had received no encouragement from within or from without, and the reforms which he never ceased to advocate were treated as the dreams of an eccentric idealist. He died, unrecognized, without having lived to see carried out one of the reforms which he had so persistently advocated. His tongue was rough and his pen was dipped in acid; the military critic who ridiculed the "buffooneries" of his generals and charged his fellow-officers with trying to get through their day's work with as little trouble to themselves as possible, was not likely to carry much weight at the close of the Second Empire. But the scattered papers of the forgotten Colonel Ardent du Picq were preserved, and ten years after his death a portion of them was published. Every scrap which could be found of the work of so fruitful a military thinker was presently called for, and at the moment of the outbreak of the present war the "Études sur le Combat" had become the text-book of every punctilious young officer. It is still unknown how much of the magnificent effort of 1914 was not due to the shade of Ardent du Picq. Although the name of that author does not occur in the pages of "Ma Pièce," we are constrained to believe that Lintier had been, like so many young men of his class, an infatuated student of the "Études." He had comprehended the essence of military vitality and the secret of military grandeur. He had perceived the paramount importance of moral force in contending with formidable hostile organizations. Ardent du Picq, who possessed the skill of his nation in the manufacture of maxims, laid it down that "Vaincre, c'est d'être sûr de la victoire." He assented to the statement that it was a spiritual and not a mechanical ascendancy which had gained battles in the past and must gain them in the future. Very interesting it is to note, in the delicately scrupulous record of the mind and conscience of Paul Lintier, how, side by side with this uplifted patriotic confidence, the weakness of the flesh makes itself felt. At Tailly, full of the hope of coming battle, waiting in the moonlit forest for the sound of approaching German guns, suddenly the heroism drops from him, and he murmurs the plaintive verses of the old poet Joachim du Bellay to the echo of "Et je mourrai peut-être demain!" The delicate sureness with which he notes these changes of mood is admirable; and quickly the depression passes: "vite notre extraordinaire insouciance l'emporte, et puis, jamais heure a-t-elle été plus favorable à la revanche?"

In defining the particular principles which have actuated the magnificent French General Staff in the present crisis, Lord Haldane has dwelt on the fact that the French have displayed throughout "that moral effect which comes from certainty of purpose and which only concentrated thought can give." The value which the higher authority sets on the cultivation of moral enthusiasm is exemplified by the fact that the French Ministry of War has encouraged the publication of those personal records, from which we have here made a selection, on the ground that they carry throughout the army a contagion of energy and courage. We are far here from the obscure jealousy of thought which made a military representative of the British War Office the other day lay down the brilliant axiom "A hairdresser is of more value to the country at war than a librarian!" Such a man could not exist in a French community, where, at the very height of hostilities, so prominent a military authority as Colonel Émile Manceau could pause to say, "Let us read, let us give much time to reading!" It is a curious reflection that the present struggle has been, for the French, the most literary of all wars, the one in which the ordered expression of clear thought in language has been most carefully and consciously cultivated.

This was very far from being the case with the war of 1870, when the absence of literature was strongly felt during and after the crisis. The old satirist of the "Iambes," Auguste Barbier, wrote, immediately after the declaration of peace, a poem in which he rehearsed the incidents of the war, and commented on the absence from the list of its victims of a single distinguished writer. He said—

"La Muse n'a pas vu tomber un seul poète,"

and it was out of any one's power to refute the sinister and prosaic verse. The contrast with 1914 is painful and striking. In the existing war the holocaust of victims, poets and historians, painters and sculptors, musicians and architects, has been heartrending, and it can never in future years be pretended that the Muses have this time spared us their most poignant sacrifices. A year ago the Revue Critique, one of the most serious and original of the learned journals of Paris, announced the losses it had endured. It was conducted by a staff of forty scholars; by the summer of 1916 this number was reduced by twenty-seven; thirteen had been killed, eleven severely wounded, three had disappeared.

Many writers have asked, and M. Maurice Barrès prominently among them, what is the reason of the fact that intelligence has taken a front place in this war? What has been the source of the spirit of self-immolation which has driven the intellectual and imaginative section of French youth to hold out both hands to catch the full downpour of the rain of death? There is no precedent for it in French history, and we may observe for ourselves how new a thing it was, and how unexpected, by comparing with the ardent and radiant letters and poems of the youngest generation the most patriotic expressions of their elders. A single example may suffice. No man of letters has given a nobler witness to the truth of his patriotism than Colonel Patrice Mahon, known in letters as Art Roë. His novels, which dealt largely with modern Russian life, in relation with the French army, were virile and elevated productions, but he was a man of fifty at the time of his heroic death at the head of his troops, in the battle of Wisembach (August 22, 1914), and his tone was not that of such young men as Camille Violand and Marcel Drouet. To read again the "Pingot et moi" of Art Roë is to return to a book of the utmost sincerity and valour, but it was published in 1893, and there is no touch of the splendour of 1914 about it.

A figure which stands midway between the generation of Art Roë and that of the adolescent comrades of a new Sophocles of whom we shall presently speak, is Captain E.J. Détanger, who seems to be transitional, and to share the qualities of both. This name has, even now, scarcely grown familiar to the eye and ear, but it proves to have been the real name of Émile Nolly, whose romances of modern life in the Extreme East had been widely read just before the war. Nolly's earliest books, "Hien le Maboul" and "La Barque Annamite" (but particularly the latter), gave promise of a new Pierre Loti or a new Rudyard Kipling, but totally distinct in manner from both. Détanger was just thirty-four when the war broke out, and he was one of its early victims, dying at Blainville-sur-l'Eau on September 5. He greatly distinguished himself by his personal bravery, and the cross of the Legion of Honour was pinned to his blood-stained uniform on his last battle-field. The tribute of a fellow-officer to this devoted man of letters may be quoted here. It is an example of the sudden and complete transformation which turned artists into soldiers at the first sound of the bugle:—

"Émile Nolly proved a magnificent soldier. He had a youthful, blithe, fervent and resolute soul; he had the soul of a hero completely prepared to sacrifice himself with joy for his country. After having served valiantly and brilliantly in Indo-China, and then in Morocco, it was with a radiant hope that he set out for the frontier of Lorraine. 'What does the life of any one of us matter?' he said to me just before he left. 'All that is essential is that France should live, that she should be victorious.'"

Marcel Drouet, who has just been mentioned, was much younger. He was a native of the invaded department of the Ardennes, and had not completed his twenty-sixth year when he was killed in the trenches of Consenvoye, in the Woëvre, when he was taking part in the outer defence of Verdun. He seems to have been distinguished by a refinement of spirit, which is referred to, in different terms, by every one who has described him. He leaves behind him a volume of poems, "L'Ombre qui tourne," and various essays and fragments. The journal of the last days of his life has been edited by M. Maurice Barrès, and is a record of singular delicacy and courage. We see him facing the dreadful circumstances of the war, made the more dreadful to him because the horrors are committed in the midst of the familiar scenes of his own home, and we find him patiently waiting for the signal to lead his men into action while he holds a volume of Chateaubriand open upon his knee. The reflections of Marcel Drouët differ in some respects from those of his most enthusiastic companions. There is a note of tenderness in them which is unusual, and which is very pathetic. At the very close of his brief and heroic life, the thoughts of Drouët reverted to the historic town in which he was born, to Sedan which still shuddered in his infancy at the recollection of the horrors of 1870. He thought of the dead who fell on that melancholy field; and then his thoughts turned to those dear faces which he had so recently left behind. The following passage, in its simplicity, in its sweetness, deserves to live in the memorial literature of the war:—

"Je pense à vous, mes chers vivants, aux mains des barbares en ce moment sans doute, mais en le coeur de qui j'ai foi, tant je connais votre dévouement aux choses sublimes.

"Mais aussi je pense à vous, mon Dieu, qui avez voulu toutes ces choses pour votre plus grand gloire et pour l'établissement de votre justice. Tous ces malheurs, ces tristesses, tout ce sang répandu sont imposés par vous, mon Dieu, en manière de rédemption. Mais votre soleil glorieux éclairera bientôt, j'en suis absolument certain, la victoire du bon droit qui attend depuis près d'un demi-siècle. J'y coopère de toutes mes forces, de toute mon âme. Et si vous me retirez de ce monde, ô Dieu de bonté, permettez que ce soit pour me joindre à ceux qui m'out précédé dans votre séjour, et dont l'affection terrestre me fut précieuse. C'est toute la prière ardente que je fais devant le soleil levant, ce jour de Toussaint que sillonnent déjà les obus semeurs de mort, en cette année 1914 qui verra rétablir la paix du monde, par l'anéantissement du peuple barbare, et la régénérescence de la nation française."

In most cases there rests an obscurity over the brief lives of these gallant young officer-authors, whose nature was little observed until the flash of battle illuminated them for one last brilliant moment. We feel a strong desire, which cannot be gratified, to follow them from their childhood to their adolescence, and to see for ourselves what impulses directed them into the path of heroism. It is rarely that we can do this, but one of these poets has left behind him two friends who have recaptured the faint and shrouded impressions of his early life. The piety of M. Henri Albert Besnard, who was his intimate companion, and of that practised narrator M. Henri Bordeaux, who is his biographer, enable us to form a clearer and fuller conception of Camille Violand than of any of his compeers. Born in 1891, he was typical of that latest generation of which we have spoken, in whom all seemed to be unconsciously preparing for the great and critical sacrifice. He was born at Lyons, but was brought up in the Quercy, that wild and tortured district just north of the Pyrenees, where nature seems to gather together all that she possesses of the grotesque and violent in landscape; but he was educated at Alençon, and trained at Vouziers, in the midst of the orchards of Normandy. Thus both sides of France, the Midi and the Manche, were equally known to him, but the ceaseless peregrinations which he underwent, so far from enlarging his horizon, seem to have plunged his soul in melancholy. At the age of twenty he struck M. Bordeaux as being the typical déraciné.

The letters of Camille Violand and the memories of his friends present to us the record of a vague and uneasy boyhood. He began quite early to exercise his mind in prose and verse, but without energy or aim. He was not fixed in any plan of life. His letters—for he wrote with abundance, and something undefined seems to have induced his family to keep his letters—are steeped in sombre and objectless melancholy. He was tormented by presentiments of misfortune; he indulged a kind of romantic valetudinarianism. In the confusion of his spirit as he passed uneasily from boyhood into manhood, the principal moral quality we perceive is a peevish irritation at the slow development of life. He was just twenty-one when the death of his mother, to whom he was passionately attached, woke him out of this paralyzed condition, and it is remarkable that, in breaking, like a moth from a chrysalis, out of his network of futile and sterile sophisms, it was immediately on the contingency of war that he fixed his thoughts. The news of his mother's death, by a strange and rapid connexion of ideas, reminded him of his future responsibility as an officer in the coming struggle. He wrote, in 1913, "Je m'effraie en pensant à cette responsabilité qui pèsera certainement un jour sur moi, car je considère la guerre comme à peu près certaine à bref délai."

Having once formed this conviction, a complete revolution affected the character of the young Violand. His melancholy ceased; his uncertainty fell from him; it seemed as though his soul threw off her fetters. From the close of 1913, when the chancelleries of Europe were still profoundly unconscious of the tremendous upheaval which was in store for them, this young man, hitherto so timorous and irresolute, is seen to be filled with a species of prophetic ecstasy:—

"The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness! The vaporous exultation not to be confined! ………the animation of delight Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light, And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind"

This remarkable change of character was encouraged by the military discipline which now regulated his life, and which he accepted with rapture and devotion. His mother's one aim had been to make of Camille a soldier and a Christian, and he became the very type of that combination.

To use a striking phrase of M. Henri Bordeaux, the war found Camille Violand in a state of preparedness. He saw it arrive, not with anxiety or trepidation, but with solemn joy. His father was placed in command of a brigade of dragoons, and he himself, at another part of the frontier line, was given the rank of second lieutenant and a command which filled him with the pride of responsibility. Three weeks later he was wounded in the head at the battle of Virton, but not until he had seen the Germans, after a hard fight, retire before the attack of his men. "Il a connu l'ivresse de la victoire: il a vu fuir l'ennemi"—so a friend announced it. He was taken back to the hospital at Limoges, but the victory of the Marne intoxicated him, and it was found impossible to hold him back. With a head still bandaged, he made his appearance once more in his beloved regiment, which was now fighting in the forest of the Argonne, but on the first occasion on which he led his men, Violand was wounded again, now in the shoulder. He was sent far back, into Brittany, to Quimper, where, a second time, by a subterfuge he contrived to escape from the hospital before his wound was properly healed. He was absolutely intractable in his determination to get back promptly to the fighting line: "il était comme ça, avec son air délicat et tranquille!" Again brought back, he was set to training men at Quimper. But he could not endure the restraint, and his nerves broke down.

It was found impossible to hold him back, and on October 8 the military authorities consented to his return to his regiment, and with the permission was combined the news that he had been nominated for the cross of the Legion of Honour. The letter in which he announces that fact to the ladies at home—"mes chères Grand'mère et Tante"—is charming in its simplicity. "La croix gagnée sur un champ de bataille, c'est à mes yeux le plus beau rêve qu'un jeune Français pût faire; je regrette seulement de ne pas l'avoir méritée davantage; mais l'avenir me permettra, j'espère, de justifier cette récompense, que je considère comme anticipée." The official notification specifies the wounds which he had received and the fact that, by the testimony of all who saw him under fire, the young lieutenant gave evidence of very great courage and of indomitable energy. That he was, by what he calls a queer coincidence, the youngest officer of his regiment and its only member of the Legion of Honour, afforded him an unaffected satisfaction.

From this time—the end of October 1914—the letters of Camile Violand testify to the rapid development of his mind and character. He loses a certain childishness which had hitherto clung to him, and he expresses himself with a more virile sobriety. Nothing could exceed the pathos of his pictures of the terrible life in the Argonne, and we are made to feel how rapidly the suffering and the responsibility of his military life were bringing out all the deepest and most serious elements in his character. There is a remarkable letter of January 7, 1915, describing an engagement in which he lost several of his best men, and in particular an experienced corporal in whose skill he much confided. The briefest fragment broken from this pathetic description, addressed to his father, will give a notion of the tone of it:—

"J'étais absorbé par les blessés dans mon poste de commandement et quand je pus me rendre dans la tranchée où il était, il tombait dans le coma. Ses derniers mots avaient été: 'Adieu, ma Patrie!' Pourtant, il me reconnut à la voix, me répondit faiblement. Je l'assistai dans ses derniers moments. Ce fut bien rapide, bien simple et bien beau. J'étais pour lui le chef, ce qui est plus que le Père et le Prêtre réunis. Je l'ai bien senti là; quand ce fut presque fini, je l'embrassai et le quittai pour retourner aux soucis que nous donne l'ennemi."

Thus was this lad of three-and-twenty fortified and ripened by the arduous warfare in the Argonne. He was now spending what leisure the fighting gave him in a careful study of Homer. We gather that he had just finished re-reading the "Iliad" when the end came. On March 4, 1915, at Mesnil-les-Hurlus, a ball pierced his heart, splintering in its passage the cross of the Legion of Honour of which he was so proud. In his pocket was found his last letter, still unposted, in which he told his father of a fresh distinction for valour which he had just received, and in the course of which, with a manifest presentiment of his approaching end, he wrote, "Je mourrai, si Dieu veut, en bon chrétien et en bon Français."

It is not to be denied that ordinary observers were not in any degree prepared for the heroic devotion displayed by such young officers as these at the beginning of the war. The general opinion in peace time was expressed by M. Maurice Maeterlinck when he laid it down that "courage, moral and physical endurance (if not abnegation, forgetfulness of self, renunciation of all comfort, the faculty of sacrifice, the power to face death) belong exclusively to the most primitive, the least happy, the least intelligent of peoples, those which are least capable of reasoning, of taking danger into account." It was the common hypothesis among moralists that, as men's nerves grew more sensitive and the means of destruction more cruel and irresistible, no human being would be able to support the strain of actual fighting. It seemed inevitable that soldiers would rapidly become demoralized, when exposed to the multifarious horrors of modern mechanical battle. Nothing, therefore, could have been more surprising than the temper shown by thousands of young men, suddenly called up from sedentary and safe pursuits, and confronted by the terrors of shrapnel and liquid fire and mines and gas, and all the other horrible ingenuities of an unseen enemy for killing and mutilating. Their imaginations were unaccustomed to these terrors, it is true, but the higher faculties of the human mind asserted themselves, and in the vague collective battle of the trenches these young French officers; despite the refinement and the security in which they had always been acustomed to exist, instantly reverted to the chivalrous attitude which their remote ancestors had adopted in a warfare that was romantic and personal in its individualism.

No doubt a not inconsiderable part of the serenity, which is so remarkably evident in the letters and journals of these young men, was due to the fact that they had arrived, for the first time, at a comprehension of the unity of life. There is no tedious alternative of choice in the active military career. All is regulated, all is arranged in accordance with a hierarchical discipline, and war becomes what dogmatic religion is to a weak soul that has been tossed about by the waves of doubt. It must be also borne in mind that the incessant dread of invasion, especially in the neighbourhood of the eastern frontier, had kept the spirits of those who knew that responsibility would fall upon them, in a state of unceasing agitation. It is a paralyzing thing to exist under a perpetual menace which nothing can precipitate and yet nothing can avert. Captain Belmont, in his admirable letters, speaks much of the "romanticism" which attracted many of his companions, and of the natural satisfaction which the declaration of war gave to their restless faculties. The two sentiments were probably one and the same, and to a poetical temperament that might well seem "romantic" which filled a less vivid mind with restlessness and languor.

It is noticeable, too, that when once the sickening suspense was removed, and the path of pain and glory lay clear before these youthful spirits, they grew very rapidly in intellectual stature. They had found their equilibrium, and no more time and force were wasted in useless oscillations. Each of them had, at last, the occasion, and therefore the power, to fill out the lines of his proper individuality. As M. Henri Bordeaux excellently says, "L'esprit inquiet ne se contente de rien, le coeur inapaisé se croit incompris." But now these men knew their vocation, and a precocious experience of life developed in them a temper of meditation. It is extraordinary what an intelligent philosophy, what a delicate study of nature, were revealed at once in the writings of these heroic boys of twenty. Lieutenant Belmont, who fought in Alsace, had spent his infancy and adolescence in the neighbourhood of Grenoble, and his memory was full of the rich Dauphiné valley, with its great river and its eastern horizon of the Alps. In the misery of the September nights of 1914, in the harshness of misty mornings among the Alsatian pines, his thoughts return to the luminous twilights of his old home under the great oaks of the Isère, and he expresses his nostalgia in terms of the most exquisite and the most unstudied grace. Here is a fragment of one of his letters home (October 1914):—

"Les journées sont exquises, tristes et pâles, également différentes des crudités de nos idées et des ténèbres de l'hiver. L'imagination a vite fait de s'envoler, à travers cette lumière adoucie, vers tous les horizons familiers de la petite patrie, vers la vallée de Grenoble, paresseusement allongée dans ce bain de léger soleil, au pied des Alpes déjà engourdies, vers les terres rousses de Lonnes longées par les futaies jaunissantes où s'abritent les gibiers, tranquilles cette année."

No doubt, the reason why this war has been, for France, so peculiarly a literary war, is that the mechanical life in the trenches, alternately so violent and so sedentary, has greatly enforced the habit of sustained contemplation based on a vivid and tragic experience. This has encouraged, and in many instances positively created, a craving for literary expression, which has found abundant opportunity for its exercise in letters, journals, and poems; and what it has particularly developed is a form of literary art in which Frenchmen above all other races have always excelled, that analysis of feeling which has been defined as "le travail de ciselure morale." This moral carved-work, or chasing, as of a precious metal, revealing the rarity and value of spiritual surfaces, is characteristic of the journals of Paul Lintier, of the beauty of which we have already spoken. His art expends itself in the effect of outward things on the soul. He speaks of mysterious sights, half-witnessed in the gloaming, of sinister noises which have to be left unexplained. He does not shrink from a record of unlovely things, of those evil thoughts which attend upon the rancour of defeat, of the suspicion of treason which comes to dejected armies like a breath of poison-gas. That portion of his "Souvenirs" which deals with the days of the retreat on Paris is written in a spasm of savage anger; a whole new temper is instantly revealed when once the tide turns at Nanteuil. Nature herself thus endorses his new mood, as he writes "There are still clouds heaped up to the west, but the blue, that cheers us, is chasing them all away."

Among the noble young poets whose pathetic and admirable fragments the piety of surviving friends has preserved, it is difficult to select one name rather than another. But in the rank of these Rupert Brookes and Julian Grenfells and Charles Listers of France, we may perhaps pause before the ardent figure of Jacques de Choudens. He was a Breton, and was trained for the law on the other side of France, at Lille. He found that the call of the sea was irresistible, and after two years at a desk in that dreary and dusty city, he suddenly flung up his cap and would have no more of such drudgery. To the despair of his family, he started on the high seas, and explored the wonderland of Haiti. After various adventures, he was about to return to France, when the sea again took him by the throat, and he vanished, like Robert Louis Stevenson, in the Pacific. Having sailed twice round the world, "beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars," a tired Ulysses under thirty, Jacques de Choudens had just come back to France when the war seized him with a fresh and deep enchantment. He entered into it with a profound ardour, and proved himself to possess exceptional military qualities. He was severely wounded on the second day of the battle of Charleroi, but slowly recovered, only to be killed in an engagement on June 13, 1915. His poems, written since war broke out, have been carefully collected and published by his friend, M. Charles Torquet. They are few, and they suffer from a certain hardness of touch; Jacques de Choudens had, as yet, a deeper acquaintance with life than with literature; but they breathe a spirit of high and romantic heroism. Let the sonnet called "Autre Prière" be offered as an example:—

"_Terres, fleuves, forêts, ô puissances occultes,
C'est votre âme qui bat au bleu de nos poignets;
Notre orgueil s'est enfin cabré sous les insultes
Dont, depuis quarante ans, ô France, tu saignais.

Dans le livre où s'apprend le plus hautain des cultes,
Marque la page avec nos sabres pour signets;
Ceins la couronne d'or qu'en l'An deux tu ceignais,
Car c'est dans notre chair à nous que tu la sculptes.

France! France! Bénis chaque arme et chaque front;
C'est d'ardeur, non de peur, que tremble l'éperon.
Nous sommes tes martyrs volontaires, superbes,

Sous l'auréole d'or des galons du képi….
Nous allons préparer aux faucilles des gerbes,
Puisqu'où tombe un soldat pousse un nouvel épi._"

The poet, shortly before he fell, wrote to a friend "Nous travaillerons mieux après la victoire, ce que nous ferons ayant été mûri par la fatigue et les angoisses. La vie est bonne et belle et la guerre est une chose bien amusante." This is the type of Frenchman who fights for the love of fighting, who puts above all other happiness the prize of military honour and glory won in a good cause. We meet with it in the lyrical effusion of an adventurous poet like Jacques de Choudens and in the straightforward evidence of a practised soldier like Captain Hassler, whose "Ma Campagne" is a record extraordinary alike for its courage, for its vivacity, and for its modesty.

The peculiar spirit of ardent gallantry to which we have dedicated these few pages is illustrated, as will be observed, by examples taken without exception from the first months of the war. It would be rash to say, without a careful sifting of evidence, how much of this sentiment survived the days which preceded the battle of the Marne. France has, in the succession of her attacks up to the present hour, continued and confirmed the magnificent tradition of her courage. But it is impossible to overlook the elements which have taken the romantic colour out of the struggle. No chivalry could survive close experience of the vile and bestial cruelty of German methods. The sad and squalid aspects of a war of resistance, fought in the very bleeding flesh of the beloved mother-country, were bound to be fatal to "cette bonne humeur bienfaisante" which so marvellously characterized the young French officers of August 1914. Moreover, the mere physical element of fatigue has been enough to quench that first radiant flame. We find it deadening, at last, even the high spirit of Paul Lintier, and we listen to his confession: "To sleep! to sleep! O to live without a thought, in absolute silence. To live, after having so often nearly died. I could sleep for days, and days, and days!"

These are considerations which belong to a heavier and a wearier time. As a matter of history—so that in our hurrying times a gesture of so much beauty may not, because it was so ephemeral, be forgotten—I have endeavoured to catch a reflection of the glow which blazed in the hearts of young intellectual officers at the very beginning of the war. If in the inevitable wear and tear of the interminable struggle, this beauty fades into the light of common day, so much the more is there need that we should fix it in memory, since in a world which savagery and treason have made so hideous, we cannot afford to let this jewel of pure moral beauty be trampled into oblivion.

breve et irreparabile tempus Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere facti Hoc virtutis opus.