e matter a study which seemed beyond their years. They marched
to the blood-baths of Belgium and Lorraine with solemnity, as though
to a sacrament.

It must be remarked as an interesting point that this generation had
recovered a sense of the spirituality of a war of national defence. In
simpler words, it had recovered that honest pride which France, in
certain of its manifestations since the war of 1870, seemed to have
lamentably lost. Posterity will compare the serene simplicity of Peguy
and Lintier with the restlessness and bitter disenchantment of the
1880 generation, which arrived at manhood just when France was most
deeply conscious of her humiliation. If we seek for the sources of
this recovery of self-respect, which so beautifully characterized
French character at the immediate crisis of 1914, we have to find it,
of course, in the essential elasticity of the trained French mind. The
Frenchman likes the heroic attitude, which is unwelcome to us, and he
adopts it instinctively, with none of our national shyness and false
modesty. But, if we seek for a starting-point of influence, we may
probably find it in the writings of a soldier whose name is scarcely
known in England, but whose "Etudes sur le Combat," first published in
1880, have been the text-book of the young French officer, and were
never being so much read as just before the outbreak of the war.

The author of these "Etudes sur le Combat" was Colonel Ardent du Picq,
who fell at the battle of Longeville-les-Metz, on August 15, 1870. He
had predicted the calamity of that war, which he attributed to the
mental decadence of the French army, and to the absence of any
adequate General Staff organization. Ardent du Picq had received no
encouragement from within or from without, and the reforms which he
never ceased to advocate were treated as the dreams of an eccentric
idealist. He died, unrecognized, without having lived to see carried
out one of the reforms which he had so persistently advocated. His
tongue was rough and his pen was dipped in acid; the military critic
who ridiculed the "buffooneries" of his generals and charged his
fellow-officers with trying to get through their day's work with as
little trouble to themselves as possible, was not likely to carry much
weight at the close of the Second Empire. But the scattered papers of
the forgotten Colonel Ardent du Picq were preserved, and ten years
after his death a portion of them was published. Every sc