He
was not fixed in any plan of life. His letters--for he wrote with
abundance, and something undefined seems to have induced his family to
keep his letters--are steeped in sombre and objectless melancholy. He
was tormented by presentiments of misfortune; he indulged a kind of
romantic valetudinarianism. In the confusion of his spirit as he
passed uneasily from boyhood into manhood, the principal moral quality
we perceive is a peevish irritation at the slow development of life.
He was just twenty-one when the death of his mother, to whom he was
passionately attached, woke him out of this paralyzed condition, and
it is remarkable that, in breaking, like a moth from a chrysalis, out
of his network of futile and sterile sophisms, it was immediately on
the contingency of war that he fixed his thoughts. The news of his
mother's death, by a strange and rapid connexion of ideas, reminded
him of his future responsibility as an officer in the coming struggle.
He wrote, in 1913, "Je m'effraie en pensant a cette responsabilite qui
pesera certainement un jour sur moi, car je considere la guerre comme
a peu pres certaine a bref delai.
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