the poilus to the quick. "But what justice,"
these asked, "can the living hope for, when the glorious dead are so
soon forgotten?" For one ghastly detail remains to complete a picture to
which Boccaccio could hardly have done justice. "While all this wild
dissipation was going on among the moneyed class in the capital the
corpses of many gallant soldiers lay unburied and uncovered on the
shell-plowed fields of battle near Rheims, on the road to
Neuville-sur-Margival and other places--sights pointed out to visitors
to tickle their interest in the grim spectacle of war. In vain
individuals expostulated and the press protested. As recently as May
persons known to me--my English secretary was one--looked with the
fascination of horror on the bodies of men who, when they breathed, were
heroes. They lay there where they had fallen and agonized, and now, in
the heat of the May sun, were moldering in dust away--a couple of hours'
motor drive from Paris...."[17]

The soldiers mused and brooded. Since the war began they had undergone a
great psychic transformation. Stationed at the very center of a
sustained fiery crisis, they lost their feeling of acquiescence in the
established order and in the place of their own class therein. In the
sight of death they had been stirred to their depths and volcanic fires
were found burning there. Resignation had thereupon made way for a
rebellious mood and rebellion found sustenance everywhere. The poilu
demobilized retained his military spirit, nay, he carried about with him
the very atmosphere of the trenches. He had rid himself of the sentiment
of fear and the faculty of reverence went with it. His outlook on the
world had changed completely and his inner sense reversed the social
order which he beheld, as the eye reverses the object it apprehends.
Respect for persons and institutions survived in relatively few
instances the sacredness of life and the fear of death. He was
impressed, too, with the all-importance of his class, which he had
learned during the war to look upon as the Atlas on whose shoulders rest
the Republic and its empire overseas. He had saved the state in war and
he remained in peace-time its principal mainstay. With his value as
measured by these priceless services he compared the low estimate put
upon him by those who continued to identify themselves with the
state--the over-fed, lazy, self-seeking money-getters who reserved to
themselves the fruits of his toil.

One