the
young French officers at the beginning of the war. We cannot examine
too minutely, or with too reverent an enthusiasm, the effort of our
great ally, and in this theme for our admiration there are many
strains, some of which present themselves in apparent opposition to
one another. The war has now lasted so long, and has so completely
altered its character, that what was true of the temper of the
soldiers of France in November 1914 is no longer true in April 1918.
Confidence and determination are still there, there is no diminution
in domestic intensity or in patriotic fervour, but the long
continuance of the struggle has modified the temper of the French
officer, and it will probably never be again what it was in the stress
and tempest of sacrifice three years and a half ago, when the young
French soldiers, flushed with the idealisms which they had imbibed at
St. Cyr, rushed to battle like paladins, "with a pure heart," in the
rapture of chivalry and duty.

All that has long been wearied out, and might even be forgotten, if
the letters and journals of a great cloud of witnesses were not
fortunately extant. The record kept by the friends of Paul Lintier and
those others whom I am presently to mention, and by innumerable
persons to whose memory justice cannot here be done, will keep fresh
in the history of France the idealism of a splendid generation. Now we
see, and for a long time past have seen, a different attitude on the
fields of Champagne and Picardy. There is no feather worn now in the
cap, no white gloves grasp the sword; the Saint Cyrian elegance is
over and done with. There is no longer any declamation, any emphasis,
any attaching of importance to "form" or rhetoric. The fervour and the
emotion are there still, but they are kept in reserve, they are below
the surface, "at the bottom of the heart," as La Rochefoucauld puts
it.

Heroism is now restrained by a sense of the prodigious length and
breadth of the contest, by the fact, at last patent to the most
unthinking, that the war is an octopus which has wound its tentacles
about every limb and every organ of the vitality of France. A
revelation of the overwhelming violence of enormous masses of men has
broken down the tradition of chivalry. War is now accepted with a sort
of indifference, as a part of the day's work; "pas de grands mots, pas
de grands gestes, pas de drame!" The imperturbable French officer of
1918 attaches no particular importance to his