A single example may suffice. No man of letters has given a
nobler witness to the truth of his patriotism than Colonel Patrice
Mahon, known in letters as Art Roe. His novels, which dealt largely
with modern Russian life, in relation with the French army, were
virile and elevated productions, but he was a man of fifty at the time
of his heroic death at the head of his troops, in the battle of
Wisembach (August 22, 1914), and his tone was not that of such young
men as Camille Violand and Marcel Drouet. To read again the "Pingot et
moi" of Art Roe is to return to a book of the utmost sincerity and
valour, but it was published in 1893, and there is no touch of the
splendour of 1914 about it.
A figure which stands midway between the generation of Art Roe and
that of the adolescent comrades of a new Sophocles of whom we shall
presently speak, is Captain E.J. Detanger, who seems to be
transitional, and to share the qualities of both. This name has, even
now, scarcely grown familiar to the eye and ear, but it proves to have
been the real name of Emile Nolly, whose romances of modern life in
the Extreme East had been widely read just before the war.
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