n, who had a letter in his hands. He took it from them,
and put on his spectacles, and read that his two sons had been killed
in an engagement in the Vosges. He said quietly, "God has found them
ready," and then, slowly, "My poor wife!" and he returned to his yoke
of oxen. It would seem that the French accepted, without reserve and
without difficulty, an inward discipline for which the world had
formed little conception of their readiness. There is no question now,
since all the private letters and diaries prove it, that the
generation which had just left college, and had hardly yet gone out
into the world, had formed, unsuspected by their elders, a conception
of life which might have been called fatalistic if it had not been so
rigorously regulated by a sense of duty. They were singularly calm
under a constant presentiment of death. When the war came, they
accepted the fiery trial not merely with resignation, but even with
relief. Their athletic stoicism took what fortune offered them,
instead of attempting to rebel against it. Their sentiment was that a
difficulty had been settled. Life had been producing upon their
consciences a sense of complication, a tangle of too many problems.
Now they might, and did, cheerfully relinquish the effort to solve
them. One of the most extraordinary features of the moral history of
the young French officers in this war has been the abandonment of
their will to the grace of God and the orders of the chief. In the
letters of the three noble brothers Belmont, who fell in rapid
succession, this apprenticeship to sacrifice is remarkable, but it
recurs in all the records. "God found them ready!"

When all is of so inspired an order of feeling, it is difficult, it is
even invidious, to select. But the figure of Paul Lintier, whose
journals have been piously collected by M. Edmond Haraucourt, stands
out before us with at least as much saliency as any other. We may take
him as a peculiarly lucent example of his illuminated class.
Quartermaster Lintier died on March 15, 1916, struck by a shell, on
the Lorraine frontier, at a place called Jeandelincourt. He had not
yet completed his twenty-third year, for he was born at Mayenne on May
13, 1893. In considering the cases of many of these brilliant and
sympathetic young French officers, who had already published or have
left behind them works in verse and prose, there may be a disposition,
in the wonderful light of their experience, to exaggerate