ophy, what a delicate study of nature, were
revealed at once in the writings of these heroic boys of twenty.
Lieutenant Belmont, who fought in Alsace, had spent his infancy and
adolescence in the neighbourhood of Grenoble, and his memory was full
of the rich Dauphine valley, with its great river and its eastern
horizon of the Alps. In the misery of the September nights of 1914, in
the harshness of misty mornings among the Alsatian pines, his thoughts
return to the luminous twilights of his old home under the great oaks
of the Isere, and he expresses his nostalgia in terms of the most
exquisite and the most unstudied grace. Here is a fragment of one of
his letters home (October 1914):--

"Les journees sont exquises, tristes et pales, egalement differentes
des crudites de nos idees et des tenebres de l'hiver. L'imagination a
vite fait de s'envoler, a travers cette lumiere adoucie, vers tous les
horizons familiers de la petite patrie, vers la vallee de Grenoble,
paresseusement allongee dans ce bain de leger soleil, au pied des
Alpes deja engourdies, vers les terres rousses de Lonnes longees par
les futaies jaunissantes ou s'abritent les gibiers, tranquilles cette
annee."

No doubt, the reason why this war has been, for France, so peculiarly
a literary war, is that the mechanical life in the trenches,
alternately so violent and so sedentary, has greatly enforced the
habit of sustained contemplation based on a vivid and tragic
experience. This has encouraged, and in many instances positively
created, a craving for literary expression, which has found abundant
opportunity for its exercise in letters, journals, and poems; and what
it has particularly developed is a form of literary art in which
Frenchmen above all other races have always excelled, that analysis of
feeling which has been defined as "le travail de ciselure morale."
This moral carved-work, or chasing, as of a precious metal, revealing
the rarity and value of spiritual surfaces, is characteristic of the
journals of Paul Lintier, of the beauty of which we have already
spoken. His art expends itself in the effect of outward things on the
soul. He speaks of mysterious sights, half-witnessed in the gloaming,
of sinister noises which have to be left unexplained. He does not
shrink from a record of unlovely things, of those evil thoughts which
attend upon the rancour of defeat, of the suspicion of treason which
comes to dejected armies like a breath of poison-gas. Tha