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.
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