nt of his death, on August 22, 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 March 26, 1917, the Societe 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 Leo 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 Leo 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 postma