individual gesture. He
concentrates his energy in another kind of action.

But the French race is by nature bellicose and amorous of adventure,
and more than all other nations has a tendency to clothe its
patrimonial ardour of defence in beautiful terms and gallant
attitudes. This is one of the points on which the British race, with
its scrupulous reserve, often almost its affectation of
self-depreciating shyness, differs most widely from the French, and is
most in need of sympathetic imagination in dealing with a noble ally
whose methods are not necessarily the same as ours. It is difficult to
fancy a young English lieutenant quoting with rapturous approval, as
Pierre de Rozieres and Henri Lagrange did in August 1914, the counsels
which were given more than a hundred years ago by the Prince de Ligne:
"Let your brain swim with enthusiasm! Let honour electrify your heart!
Let the holy flame of victory shine in your eyes! as you hoist the
glorious ensigns of renown let your souls be in like measure
uplifted!" A perpetual delirium or intoxication is the state of mind
which is recommended by this "heart of fire," as the only one becoming
in a French officer who has taken up arms to defend his country.

For the young men who consciously adopted the maxims of the Prince de
Ligne as their guide at the opening of this war, M. Maurice Barres has
found the name of "Traditionalists." They are those who followed the
tradition of the soldierly spirit of France in its three main lines,
in its individualism, in its intelligence, in its enthusiasm. They
endeavoured, in those first months of agony and hope, to model their
conduct on the formulas which their ancestors, the great moralists of
the past, had laid down for them. Henri Lagrange, who fell at
Montereau in October 1915, at the age of twenty, was a type of
hundreds of others. This is how his temper of mind, as a soldier, is
described by his friend Maxime Brienne:--

"The confidence of Lagrange was no less extraordinary than was his
spirit of sacrifice. He possessed the superhuman severity which comes
from being wholly consecrated to duty.... With a magnificent
combination of logic and of violence, with a resolution to which his
unusually lucid intelligence added a sort of methodical vehemence, he
expressed his conviction that resolute sacrifice was necessary if the
result was to be a definite success.... He declared that a soldier
who, by force of mind and a sentiment of honou