No, it is their lack of faith in the altar on which this suffering was laid—­(does a man regret if he sacrifices himself for the woman he loves, or for his child?)—­This doubt poisons them, takes away the courage to pursue their way, because they fear to find only despair at the end.  This is why people say to you:  “Never shake the ideal of Country, it ought rather to be built up.”  What a derision!  As if it were possible to restore a lost faith by force of will!  We deceive ourselves; we know it in the bottom of our hearts, and this consciousness kills courage and joy.

Let us be brave enough to reject that in which we no longer believe.  The trees drop their leaves in the autumn in order that they may put forth new leaves in the spring.  Out of your past illusions, make fires as the peasants do with the fallen leaves; the fresh grass, the new faith, will grow all the more thickly, for it is there waiting.  Nature does not die, it changes shape continually; like her, let us cast off the garment of the past.

Look carefully, and reckon up these hard years.  You have fought and suffered for your country, and what have you gained by it?  You have discovered the brotherhood of the men who fight and suffer.  Is the price too high?  No, if you will listen to your heart, if you will dare to open it to the new faith which has come to you when you least expected it.

The thing that disappoints and drives us to despair is that we cling to what we had at the beginning; and when we no longer trust that, we feel that all is lost.  A great nation has never reached the object sought; and so much the better, for almost always what is reached is superior to what was sought, though different.  It is not wise to start out with our wisdom ready made, but to gather it sincerely as we go along.

You are not the same men that you were in 1914.  If you dare admit it, then dare to act it also!  That will be the chief gain—­perhaps the only one—­of the war.  But do you really care?  So many things conspire to intimidate you; the weariness of these years, old habits, dread of the effort needed to examine yourself, to throw away what is dead, and stand for what is living.  We have, we do not know what respect for the old, a lazy preference for what we are accustomed to, even if it is bad, fatal.  Then there is the indolent need for what is easy which makes us take a trodden path rather than hew out a new one for ourselves.  Is it not the ideal of most Frenchmen to accept their plan of life ready-made in childhood and never change it?  If only this war, which has destroyed so many of your hearths, could force you to come out from your ashes, to found other healths, to seek other truths!

The wish to break with the past, and adventure themselves in unknown regions was not lacking to these young men.  They would rather have preferred to go ahead without stopping, and they had scarcely left the Old World when they expected to take possession of the New.—­No hesitation, no middle course; they wanted absolute solutions, either the docile servitude of the past, or revolution.