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:—