sorbe par les blesses dans mon poste de commandement et
quand je pus me rendre dans la tranchee ou il etait, il tombait dans
le coma. Ses derniers mots avaient ete: 'Adieu, ma Patrie!' Pourtant,
il me reconnut a la voix, me repondit faiblement. Je l'assistai dans
ses derniers moments. Ce fut bien rapide, bien simple et bien beau.
_J'etais pour lui le chef, ce qui est plus que le Pere et le Pretre
reunis_. Je l'ai bien senti la; quand ce fut presque fini, je
l'embrassai et le quittai pour retourner aux soucis que nous donne
l'ennemi."

Thus was this lad of three-and-twenty fortified and ripened by the
arduous warfare in the Argonne. He was now spending what leisure the
fighting gave him in a careful study of Homer. We gather that he had
just finished re-reading the "Iliad" when the end came. On March 4,
1915, at Mesnil-les-Hurlus, a ball pierced his heart, splintering in
its passage the cross of the Legion of Honour of which he was so
proud. In his pocket was found his last letter, still unposted, in
which he told his father of a fresh distinction for valour which he
had just received, and in the course of which, with a manifest
presentiment of his approaching end, he wrote, "Je mourrai, si Dieu
veut, en bon chretien et en bon Francais."

It is not to be denied that ordinary observers were not in any degree
prepared for the heroic devotion displayed by such young officers as
these at the beginning of the war. The general opinion in peace time
was expressed by M. Maurice Maeterlinck when he laid it down that
"courage, moral and physical endurance (if not abnegation,
forgetfulness of self, renunciation of all comfort, the faculty of
sacrifice, the power to face death) belong exclusively to the most
primitive, the least happy, the least intelligent of peoples, those
which are least capable of reasoning, of taking danger into account."
It was the common hypothesis among moralists that, as men's nerves
grew more sensitive and the means of destruction more cruel and
irresistible, no human being would be able to support the strain of
actual fighting. It seemed inevitable that soldiers would rapidly
become demoralized, when exposed to the multifarious horrors of modern
mechanical battle. Nothing, therefore, could have been more surprising
than the temper shown by thousands of young men, suddenly called up
from sedentary and safe pursuits, and confronted by the terrors of
shrapnel and liquid fire and mines and gas, and all the