Neither affected to be cast in the mould of one of Corneille’s heroes, and the thought of immolating their child on the altar of a barbaric idea would have filled them with horror; but the transfiguration of their petted boy suddenly become a hero, touched them with a tenderness never before felt.  In spite of their anxiety, Maxime’s enthusiasm intoxicated them, and it made them ungrateful toward their former life, that peaceful affectionate existence, with its long monotonous days.  Maxime was amusingly contemptuous of it, calling it absurd after one had seen what was going on “out there.”

“Out there” one was glad to sleep three hours on the hard ground, or once in a month of Sundays on a wisp of straw, glad to turn out at three o’clock in the morning and warm up by marching thirty kilometres with a knapsack on one’s back, sweating freely for eight or ten hours at a time....  Glad above all to get in touch with the enemy, and rest a little lying down under a bank, while one peppered the boches....  This young Cyrano declared that fighting rested you after a march, and when he described an engagement you would have said that he was at a concert or a “movie.”

The rhythm of the shells, the noise when they left the gun and when they burst, reminded him of the passage with cymbals in the divine scherzo of the Ninth Symphony.  When he heard overhead as from an airy music-box the buzzing of these steel mosquitoes, mischievous, imperious, angry, treacherous, or simply full of amiable carelessness, he felt like a street boy rushing out to see a fire.  No more fatigue; mind and body on the alert; and when came the long-awaited order “Forward!” one jumped to one’s feet, light as a feather, and ran to the nearest shelter under the hail of bullets, glad to be in the open, like a hound on the scent.  You crawled on your hands and knees, or on your stomach, you ran all bent doubled-up, or did Swedish gymnastics through the underbrush ... that made up for not being able to walk straight; and when it grew dark you said:  “What, night already?—­What have we been doing with ourselves, today?” ...  “In conclusion,” said this little French cockerel, “the only tiresome thing in war is what you do in peace-time,—­you walk along the high road.”

This was the way these young men talked in the first month of the campaign, all soldiers of the Marne, of war in the open.  If this had gone on, we should have seen once more the race of barefooted Revolutionaries, who set out to conquer the world and could not stop themselves.

They were at last forced to stop, and from the moment that they were put to soak in the trenches, the tone changed.  Maxime lost his spirit, his boyish carelessness.  From day to day he grew virile, stoical, obstinate and nervous.  He still vouched for the final victory, but ceased after a while to talk of it, and wrote only of duty to be done, then even that stopped, and his letters became dull, grey, tired-out.