It is noticeable, too, that when once the sickening suspense was
removed, and the path of pain and glory lay clear before these
youthful spirits, they grew very rapidly in intellectual stature. They
had found their equilibrium, and no more time and force were wasted in
useless oscillations. Each of them had, at last, the occasion, and
therefore the power, to fill out the lines of his proper
individuality. As M. Henri Bordeaux excellently says, "L'esprit
inquiet ne se contente de rien, le coeur inapaise se croit incompris."
But now these men knew their vocation, and a precocious experience of
life developed in them a temper of meditation. It is extraordinary
what an intelligent philosophy, what a delicate study of nature, were
revealed at once in the writings of these heroic boys of twenty.
Lieutenant Belmont, who fought in Alsace, had spent his infancy and
adolescence in the neighbourhood of Grenoble, and his memory was full
of the rich Dauphine valley, with its great river and its eastern
horizon of the Alps. In the misery of the September nights of 1914, in
the harshness of misty mornings among the Alsatian pines, his thoughts
return to the luminous twilights of his old home under the great oaks
of the Isere, and he expresses his nostalgia in terms of the most
exquisite and the most unstudied grace.
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