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 Camille 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 the 7th of January 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 the 4th of March 1915, at Mesnil-lèsHurlus, 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 before the war 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 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 their 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 men would rapidly become demoralised, 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, 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 accustomed 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 definite 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 para

lysing 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 ' cœur 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 on 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 the 13th of June 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.

E

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 Cam