rave and calm
in its sad stoicism, it is even harsh in its refusal to overlook any
of the distressing features of the affair. But hope rises in his heart
like clear water in a troubled well, and it is just after this
melancholy set-back that the noble French spirit most vividly asserts
itself. In the very forefront of physical and moral misery, "quelle
emouvante comprehension de la Patrie s'est revelee a nous!" An army
which is instantly and completely victorious can never experience the
depth of this sentiment. It is necessary to have fought, to have
suffered, to have feared (if only for a moment) that all was lost, in
order to comprehend with passion what the mother-country means to a
man. Lying in the fog, soaked with rain, at the edge of the copses
from which the German guns had ejected them, it was at that wretched
moment that the full apprehension came to Paul Lintier that France
comprised for him all the charm of life, all the affections, all the
joys of the eyes and the heart and the brain. "Alors, on prefere
tomber, mourir la, parce qu'on sent que la France perdue, ce serait
pire que la mort." This is a feeling which animates the darkest pages
of his book--and many of them perforce are gloomy; through all the
confusion and doubt, the disquietude, the physical dejection, the
sense of a kind of blind-man's buff intolerably wearisome and
fatiguing--through all this, which the young author does not seek to
conceal, there runs the ceaseless bright thread of hope sustained by
love.

For us English the book has a curious interest in its unlikeness to
anything which an English lad of twenty would have dreamed of writing.
It strikes an English reader, in comparison with the equally gallant
and hardly less picturesque records which some of our own young
officers have produced, as extraordinarily "grown up." The new
generation which France sent into the war of defence was more simple
and more ardent at the outset than our own analogous generation was.
It was less dilettante and more intellectual. The evidences of
thought, of reasoned reflection carried out to its full extent, of an
adequate realization of the problems presented by life, are manifest,
though in various degree, in all these records of French officers
killed in the months which preceded Christmas 1914. These Frenchmen
did not go out light-heartedly, nor with a pathetic inability to
fathom the purpose for which they so generously went, but they had
given th