It strikes an English reader, in comparison with the equally gallant
and hardly less picturesque records which some of our own young
officers have produced, as extraordinarily "grown up." The new
generation which France sent into the war of defence was more simple
and more ardent at the outset than our own analogous generation was.
It was less dilettante and more intellectual. The evidences of
thought, of reasoned reflection carried out to its full extent, of an
adequate realization of the problems presented by life, are manifest,
though in various degree, in all these records of French officers
killed in the months which preceded Christmas 1914. These Frenchmen
did not go out light-heartedly, nor with a pathetic inability to
fathom the purpose for which they so generously went, but they had
given the matter a study which seemed beyond their years. They marched
to the blood-baths of Belgium and Lorraine with solemnity, as though
to a sacrament.
It must be remarked as an interesting point that this generation had
recovered a sense of the spirituality of a war of national defence. In
simpler words, it had recovered that honest pride which France, in
certain of its manifestations since the war of 1870, seemed to have
lamentably lost.
Pages:
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194