if it were true, what creature endowed with reason would find life worth struggling for?  Certainly not the writer of these letters.  He fought, not only for his country, but to maintain a contrary doctrine; and we see him and a thousand others passing through the fiercest trial of faith at the moment when the mind of man has been by its own perverse activity stripped most bare of faith.  So he cannot even express the faith for which he is ready to die; but he is ready to die for it.  A few years ago he would have been sneered at for the vagueness of his language, but no one can sneer now.  The dead will not spoil the spring, he says No, indeed:  for by their death they have brought a new spring of faith into the world.

A. Clutton-Brock.

LETTERS OF A SOLDIER

AUGUST 1914-APRIL 1915

PREFACE BY ANDRE CHEVRILLON

PREFACE BY ANDRE CHEVRILLON

The letters that follow are those of a young painter who was at the front from September [1914] till the beginning of April [1915]; at the latter date he was missing in one of the battles of the Argonne.  Are we to speak of him in the present tense or in the past?  We know not:  since the day when the last mud-stained paper reached them, announcing the attack in which he was to vanish, what a close weight of silence for those who during eight months lived upon these almost daily letters!  But for how many women, how many mothers, is a grief like this to-day a common lot!

In the studio and amid the canvases upon which the young man had traced the forms of his dreams, I have seen, piously placed in order on a table, all the little papers written by his hand.  A silent presence—­I was not then aware what manner of mind had there expressed itself—­revisiting this hearth:  a mind surely made to travel far abroad and cast its lights upon multitudes of men.

It was the mind of a complete artist, but of a poet as well, that had lurked under the timid reserves of a youth who at thirteen years of age had left school for the studio, and who had taught himself, without help from any other, to translate the thoughts that moved him into such words as the reader will judge of.  Here are tenderness of heart, a fervent love of Nature, a mystical sense of her changing moods and of her eternal language:  all those things of which the Germans, professing themselves heirs of Goethe and of Beethoven, imagine they have the monopoly, but of which we Frenchmen have the true perception, and which move us in the words written by our young countryman for his most dearly beloved and for himself.

It is singularly touching to find in the spiritual, grave, and religious temper of these letters an affinity to the spirit of many others written from the front.  During those weeks, those endless months of winter in the mud or the frost of the trenches, in the daily sight of death, in the thought of that death coming upon them also, closing upon them to seal their eyes for ever, these boys seem to have faced the things of eternity with a deeper insight and a keener feeling, as each one, in the full strength of life and youth, dwelt upon the thought of beholding the world for the last time: