orts that we read the
eulogies of our army for its endurance and tenacity.

We have always known how to pluck the laurels of the brave on fields of
battle and to water them with our blood. We Frenchmen, all of us, are
lovers of glory. The stories of war which we read in our childhood
days--captures of redoubts, fiery charges, furious fights around the
flag--made us thrill. And, like the Athenians who left the performance
of a tragedy by Aeschylus thirsting to close their books and march on
the enemy, we dreamed of combats in which we were to win fame.

But since those days military literature has undergone somewhat of a
change, and the communiques which we devour twice a day, hungry for
news, give us no such tales of prowess.

"On the left wing we have progressed. On the right wing we have repulsed
violent counter-attacks. On the front the situation remains without
change." Where are our men? What troops are meant? What Generals?
Nothing is told of such things. The veil of anonymity shrouds great
actions, a barrier of impenetrable mystery protects the secret of the
operations.

*Great Things Done Simply.*

Our soldiers have endured every hardship, braved every danger, never
knowing whether each dawning day was their last, yet the cleverest
manoeuvring, the most gallant feats, are obliterated, effaced, lost, in
the calculated colorlessness of an enigmatic report. But that sacrifice
also have they made. To be at the post assigned to them, to play a great
or infinitesimal role in the common work, is the only reward they
desire. Can it be that the disease of individualism is a thing of
yesterday? The soldier of 1914 has cured us of it. Never have
disinterestedness and modesty been pushed so far.

Let us say it in a word: Never have great things been done so simply.

But he knows why he is fighting. It is not for the ambition of a
sovereign or the impatience of his heir, for the arrogance of a caste of
country squires or the profit of a firm of merchants. No; he fights for
the land where he was born and where his dead sleep; he fights to free
his invaded country and give her back her lost provinces, for her past,
struck to the heart by the shells that bombarded the Cathedral of
Rheims; he fights so that his children may have the right to think,
speak, and feel in French, so that there may still be in the world a
French race, which the world needs. For this war of destruction is aimed
at the destruction of our race,