The style of Paul Lintier is one of the miracles of art. There is no
evidence that this youth had studied much or had devoted himself to
any of the training which adequate expression commonly demands. We
know nothing about him until he suddenly bursts upon us, in the
turmoil of mobilization, as a finished author. What strikes a critical
reader of "Ma Piece," as distinguishing it from other works of its
class, is a certain intellectual firmness most remarkable in a lad of
Lintier's age, suddenly confronted by such a frenzy of public action.
There is no pessimism, and no rhetoric, and no touch of humour, but an
obsession for the truth. This is displayed by another and an extremely
popular recent publication, "En Campagne," by M. Marcel Dupont, which
exhibits exactly the same determination to exaggerate nothing and to
reduce nothing, but to report exactly what the author saw with his own
eyes, in that little corner of the prodigious battle-field in which
his own regiment was fighting. Truth, the simple unvarnished truth,
has been the object of these various writers in setting down their
impressions, but the result exemplifies the difference between what
is, and what is not, durable as literature.
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