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.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25