se who would go into the
wilderness and lose themselves in the depths of abstract thought; he is
a European, an artist, a lover, one for whom the visible world exists,
and to whom the Christian doctrine of love is but the expression of his
own experience. For a century or more our world, confident in its
strength, its reason, its knowledge, has been undermining that doctrine
with every possible heresy. In sheer wilfulness it has tried to empty
life of all its values. It has made us ashamed of loving anything; for
all love, it has told us, is illusion produced by the will to live, or
the will to power, or some other figment of its own perverse thought.
And now, as a result of that perversity, the storm breaks upon us when
we seem to have stripped ourselves of all shelter against it. The
doctrine of the struggle for life becomes a fact in this war; but, if it
were true, what creature endowed with reason would find life worth
struggling for? Certainly not the writer of these letters. He fought,
not only for his country, but to maintain a contrary doctrine; and we
see him and a thousand others passing through the fiercest trial of
faith at the moment when the mind of man has been by its own perverse
activity stripped most bare of faith. So he cannot even express the
faith for which he is ready to die; but he is ready to die for it. A
few years ago he would have been sneered at for the vagueness of his
language, but no one can sneer now. The dead will not spoil the spring,
he says No, indeed: for by their death they have brought a new spring of
faith into the world.

A. CLUTTON-BROCK.

LETTERS OF A SOLDIER

AUGUST 1914-APRIL 1915

PREFACE BY ANDRE CHEVRILLON

PREFACE BY ANDRE CHEVRILLON

The letters that follow are those of a young painter who was at the
front from September [1914] till the beginning of April [1915]; at the
latter date he was missing in one of the battles of the Argonne. Are we
to speak of him in the present tense or in the past? We know not: since
the day when the last mud-stained paper reached them, announcing the
attack in which he was to vanish, what a close weight of silence for
those who during eight months lived upon these almost daily letters! But
for how many women, how many mothers, is a grief like this to-day a
common lot!

In the studio and amid the canvases upon which the young man had traced
the forms of his dreams, I have seen, piously placed in order on a
table, all the