t portion of
his "Souvenirs" which deals with the days of the retreat on Paris is
written in a spasm of savage anger; a whole new temper is instantly
revealed when once the tide turns at Nanteuil. Nature herself thus
endorses his new mood, as he writes "There are still clouds heaped up
to the west, but the blue, that cheers us, is chasing them all away."

Among the noble young poets whose pathetic and admirable fragments the
piety of surviving friends has preserved, it is difficult to select
one name rather than another. But in the rank of these Rupert Brookes
and Julian Grenfells and Charles Listers of France, we may perhaps
pause before the ardent figure of Jacques de Choudens. He was a
Breton, and was trained for the law on the other side of France, at
Lille. He found that the call of the sea was irresistible, and after
two years at a desk in that dreary and dusty city, he suddenly flung
up his cap and would have no more of such drudgery. To the despair of
his family, he started on the high seas, and explored the wonderland
of Haiti. After various adventures, he was about to return to France,
when the sea again took him by the throat, and he vanished, like
Robert Louis Stevenson, in the Pacific. Having sailed twice round the
world, "beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars," a
tired Ulysses under thirty, Jacques de Choudens had just come back to
France when the war seized him with a fresh and deep enchantment. He
entered into it with a profound ardour, and proved himself to possess
exceptional military qualities. He was severely wounded on the second
day of the battle of Charleroi, but slowly recovered, only to be
killed in an engagement on June 13, 1915. His poems, written since war
broke out, have been carefully collected and published by his friend,
M. Charles Torquet. They are few, and they suffer from a certain
hardness of touch; Jacques de Choudens had, as yet, a deeper
acquaintance with life than with literature; but they breathe a spirit
of high and romantic heroism. Let the sonnet called "Autre Priere" be
offered as an example:--

"_Terres, fleuves, forets, o puissances occultes,
C'est votre ame qui bat au bleu de nos poignets;
Notre orgueil s'est enfin cabre sous les insultes
Dont, depuis quarante ans, o France, tu saignais.

Dans le livre ou s'apprend le plus hautain des cultes,
Marque la page avec nos sabres pour signets;
Ceins la couronne d'or qu'en