It is necessary to have fought, to have
suffered, to have feared (if only for a moment) that all was lost, in
order to comprehend with passion what the mother-country means to a
man. Lying in the fog, soaked with rain, at the edge of the copses
from which the German guns had ejected them, it was at that wretched
moment that the full apprehension came to Paul Lintier that France
comprised for him all the charm of life, all the affections, all the
joys of the eyes and the heart and the brain. "Alors, on prefere
tomber, mourir la, parce qu'on sent que la France perdue, ce serait
pire que la mort." This is a feeling which animates the darkest pages
of his book--and many of them perforce are gloomy; through all the
confusion and doubt, the disquietude, the physical dejection, the
sense of a kind of blind-man's buff intolerably wearisome and
fatiguing--through all this, which the young author does not seek to
conceal, there runs the ceaseless bright thread of hope sustained by
love.
For us English the book has a curious interest in its unlikeness to
anything which an English lad of twenty would have dreamed of writing.
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