This son has lived and entered into the strife indeed; but the wall of distance has not grown round him; and, as we read these letters, we think that no French mother would fear the natural estrangement which that English mother in the poem fears.  The foreboding itself seems to belong to a barbaric society in which there is a more animal division of the sexes, in which the male fears to become effeminate if he does not insist upon his masculinity even to his mother.  But this Frenchman has left barbarism so far behind that he is not afraid of effeminacy; nor does he need to remind himself that he is a male.  There is a philosophy to which this forgetfulness of masculinity is decadence.  According to that philosophy, man must remember always that he is an animal, a proud fighting animal like a bull or a cock; and the proudest of all fighting animals, to be admired at a distance by all women unless he condescends to desire them, is the officer.  No one could be further from such a philosophy than this Frenchman; he is so far from it that he does not seem even to be aware of its existence.  He hardly mentions the Germans and never expresses anger against them.  The worst he says of them almost makes one smile at its naive gentleness.  ’Unfortunately, contact with the German race has for ever spoilt my opinion of those people.’  They are to him merely a nation that does not know how to behave.  He reminds one of Talleyrand, who said of Napoleon after one of his rages:  ’What a pity that so great a man should have been so badly brought up.’  But there was malice in that understatement of Talleyrand’s; and there is none in the understatement of this Frenchman.  He has no desire for revenge; his only wish is that his duty were done and that he could return home to his art and his mother.  To the philosophy I have spoken of that would seem a pitiable state of mind.  No one could be less like a Germanic hero than this French artist; and yet the Germans were in error when they counted on an easy victory over him and his like, when they made sure that a conscious barbarism must prevail over an unconscious civilisation.

These letters reveal to us a new type of soldier, a new type of hero, almost a new type of man; one who can be brave without any animal consolations, who can endure without any romantic illusions, and, what is more, one who can have faith without any formal revelation.  For there is nothing in the letters more interesting than the religion constantly expressed or implied in them.  The writer is not a Catholic.  Catholic fervour on its figurative side, he says, will always leave him cold.  He finds the fervour of Verlaine almost gross.  He seems afraid to give any artistic expression to his own faith, lest he should falsify it by over-expression, lest it should seem to be more accomplished than it is.  He will not even try to take delight in it; he is almost fanatically an intellectual ascetic; and yet again and again he affirms a faith which he will hardly consent to specify