the programs in the Universities, which was more of a political dispute for the men who fixed them, was, for us, a question of choosing the knowledge that would help us to the kind of life we wanted to live. And what was that life?

This was being decided, little by little, as the result of many influences. (Certainly more varied influences than any other generation had received before.) They came through new channels. We practised more physical life than our fathers, and that influenced our ways of living. (I shall dwell again on this aspect of our formation.) We travelled more. If I take my six best friends as examples, I find that one has been in Germany and Tunisia, another in Russia and in Greece; the third through Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil; the fourth in California and Russia; the fifth in England, Italy, Russia and North America; the sixth in Algeria, Spain and Asia Minor; and I had, myself, at 27, visited thirteen nations in Europe. Three other friends of mine, being about 25, have founded a vast and prosperous French enterprise in British Columbia, after having been first around the world.

This was together the consequence and cause of our learning foreign languages much more than it had been done before. The time we spent in that

work, however imperfect the knowledge that we might reach, is a time we never regret. It opened not only more possibilities for travelling, for easier business, direct meeting of the people, but it gave us the key to whole literatures, which, in their turn, played a decisive part in our intellectual formation. At least foreign language brought understanding of the foreign spirit, a sense of what is relative and what absolute in expression, and new reasons to love our own language.

Some foreign works impressed us greatly. Dostoievsky after Tolstoi, Kipling after Dickens, Whitman after E. A. Poe, meant a great deal, not only to writers, but to readers of any class or purpose. (How many young men did I find in the French Ambulance Service, during this war, in Belgium or in Macedonia, who were reading Walt Whitman's "Wound Dresser," from the "Drum Taps"!)

All this was preparing the notion of universal concern, which is so strong now in all of us. We got trained to think beyond the frontiers. What I called the disciples of Anatole France, looked there mostly for foreign culture. The disciples of Barrè's looked there for danger. Elder people, apart from few exceptions, spoke of danger and of culture, but did not look there at all. They were negative; they were just critical; they always knew

the reasons against doing things; they were immensely far from America, whom they ignored and feared. They might have prevented this war, which from any standpoint is a failure, for all policies which led to it. They called it, afterwards, inevitable. But it was not. And as our generation is dying in it, it has a certain right to state how things did happen.

It was in 1905 that our hard training to civic and national life began, with our awakening to danger, and to the great fact that, now, everybody is concerned with everything that happens in the world. I insist upon this, because this explains all: our attitude before the war, our stand in the war, and our will after the war.

In 1904-5, came the Russo-Japanese conflict. Most of us did not feel that we were very strongly affected by it. Still we were. As soon as our Russian ally had proved to be weaker, Germany started her aggressive policy in the Moroccan question. That year Charles Péguy published his "cahier," Notre Patrie, about that precise week, that very day when we realized the presence of danger: "As every one, I had come back to Paris at 9 in the morning; as every one, that is to say, as about eight or nine hundred persons, I knew at half past eleven

that a new period had just begun in the history of my own life, in the history of this country, and certainly in the history of the world." "Every one, at

the same time, knew that the menace of a German invasion was present, that it was there, that it was really imminent."

"It was not a news like ordinary news—it went from one man to another like a knowledge from anterior life, a recognition of anterior certitude. Indeed, each of us did find in himself the recognition total, immediate, ready, immobile-of this menace which was present. . . . Each man recognized in himself, as if it were familiar and wellknown, this deep voice, this voice from inside, this voice of long-buried memory."

Later, Germany provoked brutal incidents in Alsace, which gave opportunity to notice that the Reichstag, representing the German people, had no authority whatever to disapprove a government which had the support of the Emperor. In 1908 came the annexation of Bosnia by Austria, against the will of the Serbian population, and this was the direct source of the Balkan trouble and of the European war. Now is it not the very image of our subject and a symbol of our times: that in order to write, in America, about France, I am obliged to mention the annexation of Bosnia and to insist upon

it? I was a soldier at that time, and I had been in Bosnia before. I remember my comrades asking me to explain what was the connection between that Turkish province and their possible going to battle against the Prussians? Many of them did not believe that such a connection existed.

In 1911 Germany sent a warship to the Moroccan coast. I remember the feeling we had, of air being made irrespirable by that nation. We had to come, little by little, in spite of ourselves, to adopt the feelings and opinions of our fathers towards the Prussians. We discovered our fathers to be right, by ourselves. We did not inherit the idea of revenge, as the Germans always pretended. We thought it, for a time, to be the remotest possible illusion. (In 1899, at the time of the Boer war and after the Fashoda incidents, England was a hundred times more unpopular than Germany in France, among the young.) Germany having chosen the "big stick" policy, we rediscovered, one by one, the elements of old hostilities. The man from the people who had been anti-militaristic for a time and who loved his work and peace, got more and more impatient, and realized that in Europe a group of powers was acting systematically against us when nothing was to fear from us. For the people of France were still ready to do many new foolish things, but could