[Sidenote:  Patience and tenacity are necessary.]

But to support, while we waited, the monotonous trench-life to accomplish the rapid nocturnal raids or the formidable exploits of the great days and weeks of offensive, required more than that brilliant quality of our fathers, the furia francese that was the synonym of overwhelming courage and the ardor which commands victory.  Patience to wait, resignation to accept, tenacity to prolong efforts, deliberate and indomitable will to overcome trials, within and without and to press on to the distant goal of final victory were above all things necessary.

[Sidenote:  “To the end!”]

These qualities, summed up in one expression:  “To the end!” so profoundly different from those which hitherto have passed as characteristic of our race, were the ones most noticeable in our combatant of the fourth year of the War.  Youthful enthusiasm was no more; each man numbered the dangers run, each man took clear account of those to come.

[Sidenote:  Patriotism becomes a passion.]

Only austere love of duty can sustain a man at such a height.  A schoolmaster-sergeant of Lyon, Philippe Gonnard, voices it to a friend inclined to pity him:  he was ill enough to get his freedom, but wished, nevertheless, to keep at his post until he was killed:  “I intend to stay at the front....  Patriotism for me is a passion.  Does that mean that I am happy here far from all I love?  You do not think that and I have often said I am not, in prose and verse.  But from now until peace, no man of heart can be happy.  If I came back, I should be still less happy, because instead of being dissatisfied with my lot, I should be dissatisfied with myself.”

[Sidenote:  Strong will and nobility of soul.]

More or less consciously, this was the rock bottom of the character of the soldier of France after three and a half years of war:  “Will always on the stretch, anguish conquered, melancholy transformed into nobility of soul—­as long as literature does not portray these essential traits of the soldier,” says one of our best author-combatants, “all it creates will only be artificial and bear no relation to reality.”

[Sidenote:  “No matter, it is for France.”]

“No matter, it is for France!” says the wounded soldier to the comrades bending over him, and if it is during an attack he tells them not to stop, not to carry him away “because it is no longer worth while,” but to continue without him the noble work for which he is offering his life.  Let a chaplain bring him divine help in time and he will die more than resigned, joyous and radiant in the faith of his childhood, bewailing his sins and kissing the crucifix like the French of the Middle Ages.  How many times, in the horrible frame of modern war, have words been uttered, scenes enacted, agonies suffered which echoed the most sublime passages of the Chanson de Roland!