THE GALLANTRY OF FRANCE

I. Ma Pièce. Souvenir d'un canonnier, 1914. Par PAUL LINTIER. 35m éd. Paris: Librairie Plon. 1916.

2. En Campagne (1914-1915). Impression d'un officier de légère. Par MARCEL DUPONT. 53 éd. Paris: Librairie Plon. 1916.

3. L'Appel du sol. Roman par ADRIEN BERTRAND. 12m éd. Paris Calmann-Lévy. 1916.

4. Ma Campagne au jour le jour. Préface de MAURICE BARRÈS.

5. La Jeunesse Nouvelle. Librairie Plon. 1917.

Par

Par LE CAPITAINE HASSLER. Paris: Perrin et Cie. 1917. HENRI BORDEAUX. Paris:

6. Autour de la Guerre Actuelle. Par EMILE MAYER. Paris: Chapelot. 1917.

7. Anthologie des Écrivains français morts pour la Patrie. Par CARLOS LARRONDE. Préface de MAURICE BARRÈS. I.-IV. Paris Larousse. 1916-1917.

8. Sous Verdun. Par MAURICE GENEVOIX. Préface d'ERNEST LAVISSE. Paris: Hachette. 1916.

THE

HE spirit displayed by the young French officers in this war deserves to be compared in many essential respects with that which is blazoned in the glorious 'Chanson 'de Roland.' It is interesting to remember that during the long years in which the direct influence of that greatest of medieval epics was obscured, it was chiefly known through the paraphrase of it executed in German by the monk Konrad in the twelfth century. Many years ago, Gaston Paris pointed out the curious fact that Konrad completely modified the character of the Chanson de Roland' by omitting all expressions of warlike devotion to 'la douce France,' and by concentrating the emotion of the poem on its religious sentiment. But the real theme of the Chanson de Roland,' as we know now, was the passionate attachment of the heroes to the soil of France; 'ils étaient poussés par l'amour de la patrie, de 'l'empereur français leur seigneur, de leur famille, et surtout 'de la gloire.' It is a remarkable instance of German 'penetra'tion' that in the paraphrase of the 'Chanson de Roland'

which Germany so long foisted upon Europe, these elements were successfully effaced. There is a sort of poetical revenge, therefore, in the attitude of those who answered the challenge of Germany in the true spirit of Roland and Oliver.

Vauvenargues-to whose memory the mind incessantly reverts in contemplation of the heroes of this war-says in one of his 'Maximes '-written nearly two centuries ago— 'The earliest days of spring are less graceful than the budding 'virtue of a brave young man.' No figure of 1914 exemplifies this quality of grace more surprisingly than Jean Allard (who called himself in literature Méeus). He was only twenty-one and a half when he was killed at Pierrepont, at the very beginning of the war, but he was already one of the promising figures of his generation. Allard was known as an incipient Admirable Crichton; he was a brilliant scholar, an adroit and multiform athlete, the soul of wit and laughter, the centre of a group of adoring admirers. This sparkling poet was suddenly transformed by the declaration of war into the sternest of soldiers. His poem, called 'Demain,' created, or rather expressed, the patriotic passion which was simultaneously evoked all over France; it is really a lesser ' Marseillaise.' Not less popular, but more elaborate and academic, is Allard's aviation poem, 'Plus haut toujours! '—an extraordinary vision of the flight and ecstasy and tragic death of a solitary airman. We may notice that in this, and many other verses describing recent inventions of science, the young French poets contrive to be very lucid and simple in their language, and to avoid that display of technical verbiage which deforms too many English experiments in the same class.

It is not, however, so much by his writings, which are now collected in two, or perhaps three, little volumes, that AllardMéeus strikes the imagination of a foreign spectator, as by his remarkable attitude. From the first, this lad of twenty-one exemplified and taught the value of a chivalrous behaviour. In the face of events, in that corruption of all which could make the martial spirit seem noble, that Germany has forced upon the world, this attitude of young French officers at the very opening of the war is pathetic, and might even lend itself, if we were disposed for mirth, to an ironic smile. But it should be recorded and not forgotten. It was Allard who revived the etiquette of going to battle dressed as sprucely as

for a wedding. We shall do well to recollect the symbolic value which the glove holds in legends of medieval prowess. When the dying Roland, under the pine-tree, turns to the frontier of Spain, he offers, as a dying soldier, his glove to God

'Pur ses pecchiez deu puroffrid son guant.'

Allard-Méeus at St. Cyr made all the young officers swear that they would not go into battle except in white gloves and with their képi adorned with the casoar, the red and white dress-plume. Ce serment, bien français, est aussi élégant que téméraire,' he said, and the rest followed him with acclamation. He was one of the first French officers to fall in battle, at the head of his infantry, and his mother was presented by the regiment with his casoar and his gloves, worn at the moment of his death, on the 22nd of August 1914, and stained with his blood. Allard offers a fugitive but typical specimen of the splendour of French sentiment in the first flush of its enthusiasm.

On the 26th of March 1917, the Société des Gens de Lettres in Paris held a solemn assembly under the presidency of M. Pierre Decourcelle to commemorate those authors who, during the present war, have fallen in the service of France. Touching and grave in the extreme was the scene, when, before a crowded and throbbing audience, the secretary read the name of one young writer after another, pausing for the president to respond by the words' Mort au champ d'honneur !' In each case there followed a brief silence more agitating in its emotion than any eloquence could be.

The great number of young men of high intellectual promise who were killed early in this war is a matter for grave and painful reflection. Especially in the first months of the autumn of 1914 the holocaust was terrible. There was no restraining the ardour of the young, who sought their death in a spirit of delirious chivalry, each proud to be the Iphigenia or the Jephtha's Daughter of a France set free. It has been noted since that the young generation, born about 1890, had been prepared for the crisis in a very significant way. The spiritual condition of these grave and magnificent lads resembled nothing that had been seen before, since the sorrows of 1870. They gave the impression of being dedicated. As we now read their letters, their journals, their poems, we are

astonished at the high level of moral sentiment which actuated them all. There is often even a species of rapturous detachment which seems to lift them into a higher sphere than that of vain mortality. Examples might be given by the sheaf, but it suffices here to quote a letter from the youthful Léo Lantil, who was killed early in 1915, in one of the obscure battles of Champagne. He says, in writing to his parents, shortly before his death, All our sacrifice will be of sweet savour if it leads to a really glorious victory and brings 'more light to human souls.' It was this Léo Lantil, dying in his twenty-fifth year, whose last words were 'Priez pour 'la France, travaillez pour la France, haussez-la! '

A story is told by M. Henri Bordeaux which illustrates the impression made by these young soldiers. A peasant of Savoy, while ploughing his fields in the autumn of 1914, saw his wife crossing to him with the local postman, who had a letter in his hands. He took it from them, and put on his spectacles, and read that his two sons had been killed in an engagement in the Vosges. He said quietly' God has found 'them ready,' and then, slowly, 'My poor wife!' and he returned to his yoke of oxen. It would seem that the French accepted, without reserve and without difficulty, an inward discipline for which the world had formed little conception of their readiness. There is no question now, since all the private letters and diaries prove it, that the generation which had just left college, and had hardly yet gone out into the world, had formed, unsuspected by their elders, a conception of life which might have been called fatalistic if it had not been so rigorously regulated by a sense of duty. They were singularly calm under a constant presentiment of death. When the war came, they accepted the fiery trial not merely with resignation but even with relief. Their athletic stoicism took what fortune offered them, instead of attempting to rebel against it. Their sentiment was that a difficulty had been settled. Life had been producing upon their consciences a sense of complication, a tangle of too many problems. Now they might, and did, cheerfully relinquish the effort to solve them. One of the most extraordinary features of the moral history of the young French officers in this war has been the abandonment of their will to the grace of God and the orders of the chief. In the letters of the three noble brothers Belmont,

who fell in rapid succession, this apprenticeship to sacrifice is remarkable, but it recurs in all the records. God found ' them ready!'

When all is of so inspired an order of feeling, it is difficult, it is even invidious, to select. But the figure of Paul Lintier, whose journals have been piously collected by M. Edmond Harancourt, stands out before us with at least as much saliency as any other. We may take him as a peculiarly lucent example of his illuminated class. Quartermaster Lintier died on the 15th of March 1916, struck by a shell, on the Lorraine frontier, at a place called Jeandelincourt. He had not yet completed his twenty-third year, for he was born at Mayenne on the 13th of May 1893. In considering the cases of many of these brilliant and sympathetic young French officers, who had already published or have left behind them works in verse and prose, there may be a disposition, in the wonderful light of their experience, to exaggerate the positive value of their productions. Not all of them, of course, have contributed, or would have contributed, durable additions to the store of the literature of France. We see them, excusably, in the rose-light of their sunset. But, for this very reason, we are inclined to give the closer attention to Paul Lintier, who not only promised well but adequately fulfilled that promise. It seems hardly too much to say that the revelation of a prose-writer of the first class was brought to the world by the news of his death.

His early training predicted nothing of romance. He was intended for a career in commerce, but, showing no aptitude for trade, he dallied with legal studies at Lyons, and 'com'menced author' by publishing some essays in that city. At the age of twenty he joined a regiment of artillery, and seems to have perceived, a year before the war, that the only profession he was fitted for was soldiering. Towards the close of September 1914, in circumstances which he recounts in his book, he was severely wounded; he went back to the front in July 1915, and, as we have said, fell fighting eight months later. This is the history of a young man who will doubtless live in the annals of French literature; and brief as it seems, it is really briefer still, since all we know of Paul Lintier, or are likely ever to know, is what he tells us himself in describing what he saw and practised and endured between the 1st of August and 22nd of September of the year 1914. This wonderful book,