he looked with pious eyes, as Nature took them back
into her maternal care and mingled them with her earth.
Day by day he lived in the thought of eternity.
True, he kept a feeling heart for all the horror, and
compassion for all the pain; as to his duty, the reader
will know how he did that. But, suffering ‘all
the same,’ he took refuge in ’the higher
consolations.’ ‘We must,’ he
writes to those who love him and whom he labours—with
what constant solicitude!—to prepare for
the worst, ’we must attain to this—that
no catastrophe whatsoever shall have power to cripple
our lives, to interrupt them, to set them out of tune.
. . . Be happy in this great assurance that I
give you—that up till now I have raised
my soul to a height where events have had no empire
over it.’ These are heights upon which,
beyond the differences of their teachings and their
creeds, all great religious intuitions meet together;
upon which illusions are no more, and the soul rejects
the pretensions of self, in order to accept what is.
’Our sufferings come from our small human patience
taking the same direction as our desires, noble though
they may be. . . . Do not dwell upon the personality
of those who pass away and of those who are left;
such things are weighed only in the scales of men.
We should gauge in ourselves the enormous value of
what is better and greater than humanity.’
In truth, death is impotent because it too is illusory,
and ‘nothing is ever lost.’ So this
young Frenchman, who has yet never forgone the language
of his Christianity, rediscovers amid the terrors
of war the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius—that
virtue which is ’neither patience nor too great
confidence, but a certain faith in the order of all
things, a certain power of saying of each trial, “It
is well."’ And, even beyond stoicism, it is
the sublime and antique thought of India that he makes
his own, the thought that denies appearances and differences,
that reveals to man his separate self and the universe,
and teaches him to say of the one, ‘I am not
this,’ and of the other, ‘that,
I am.’ Wonderful encounter of thoughts
across the distance of ages and the distance of races!
The meditation of this young French soldier, in face
of the enemy who is to attack on the morrow, resumes
the strange ecstasy in which was rapt the warrior
of the Bhagavad Gita between two armies coming
to the grapple. He, too, sees the turbulence
of mankind as a dream that seems to veil the higher
order and the Divine unity. He, too, puts his
faith in that ‘which knows neither birth nor
death,’ which is ’not born, is indestructible,
is not slain when this body is slain.’ This
is the perpetual life that moves across all the shapes
it calls up, striving in each one to rise nearer to
light, to knowledge, and to peace. And that aim
is a law and a command to every thinking being that
he should give himself wholly for the general and
final good. Thence comes the grave satisfaction
of those who devote themselves, of those who die, in