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 "commenced 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 August 1 and September 22, 1914. This wonderful book, "Ma
Piece," was written by the young gunner, night after night, on his
knee, during seven weeks of inconceivable intensity of emotion, and it
is by this revelation of his genius that his memory will be preserved.

The style of Paul Lintier is one of the miracles of art. There is no
evidence that this youth had studied much or had devoted himself to
any of the training which adequate expression commonly demands. We
know nothing about him until he suddenly bursts upon us, in the
turmoil of mobilization, as a finished author. What strikes a critical
reader of "Ma Piece," as distinguishing it from other works of its
class, is a certain intellectual firmness most remarkable in a lad of
Lintier's age, suddenly confronted by such a frenzy of public action.
There is no pessimism, and no rhetoric, and no touch of humour, but an
obsession for the truth. This is displayed by another and an extremely
popular recent publication, "En Campagne," by M. Marcel Dupont, which
exhibi