ation. 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-Meeus 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-Meeus at St. Cyr made all the young officers swear that they
would not go into battle except in white gloves and with their _kepi_
adorned with the _casoar_, the red and white dress-plume. "Ce serment,
bien francais, est aussi elegant que temeraire," 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 mome