military representative of the British War Office the
other day lay down the brilliant axiom "A hairdresser is of more value
to the country at war than a librarian!" Such a man could not exist in
a French community, where, at the very height of hostilities, so
prominent a military authority as Colonel Emile Manceau could pause to
say, "Let us read, let us give much time to reading!" It is a curious
reflection that the present struggle has been, for the French, the
most literary of all wars, the one in which the ordered expression of
clear thought in language has been most carefully and consciously
cultivated.

This was very far from being the case with the war of 1870, when the
absence of literature was strongly felt during and after the crisis.
The old satirist of the "Iambes," Auguste Barbier, wrote, immediately
after the declaration of peace, a poem in which he rehearsed the
incidents of the war, and commented on the absence from the list of
its victims of a single distinguished writer. He said--

_"La Muse n'a pas vu tomber un seul poete_,"

and it was out of any one's power to refute the sinister and prosaic
verse. The contrast with 1914 is painful and striking. In the existing
war the holocaust of victims, poets and historians, painters and
sculptors, musicians and architects, has been heartrending, and it can
never in future years be pretended that the Muses have this time
spared us their most poignant sacrifices. A year ago the _Revue
Critique_, one of the most serious and original of the learned
journals of Paris, announced the losses it had endured. It was
conducted by a staff of forty scholars; by the summer of 1916 this
number was reduced by twenty-seven; thirteen had been killed, eleven
severely wounded, three had disappeared.

Many writers have asked, and M. Maurice Barres prominently among them,
what is the reason of the fact that intelligence has taken a front
place in this war? What has been the source of the spirit of
self-immolation which has driven the intellectual and imaginative section
of French youth to hold out both hands to catch the full downpour of
the rain of death? There is no precedent for it in French history, and
we may observe for ourselves how new a thing it was, and how
unexpected, by comparing with the ardent and radiant letters and poems
of the youngest generation the most patriotic expressions of their
elders. A single example may suffice. No man of letters has given a
nobler