the cause of life, in the thought of a sacrifice not useless.  ’Tell ——­ that if fate strikes down the best, there is no injustice; those who survive will be the better men.  You do not know the things that are taught by him who falls.  I do know.’  And even more complete is the sacrifice when the relinquishment of life, when the renunciation of self, means the sacrifice of what was dearer than self, and would have been a life’s joy to serve.  There was the ’flag of art, the flag of science,’ that the boy loved and had begun to carry—­with what a thrill of pride and faith!  Let him learn to fall without regrets.  ’It is enough for him to know that the flag will yet be carried.’

A simple, a common obedience to the duty at hand is the practical conclusion of that high Indian wisdom when illusions are past.  Not to retreat into the solitude, not to retire into the inaction, that he has known and prized; to fight at the side of his brothers, in his own rank, in his own place, with open eyes, without hope of glory or of gain, and because such is the law:  this is the commandment of the god to the warrior Arjuna, who had doubted whether he were right in turning away from the Absolute to take part in the evil dream of war.  ’The law for each is that he should fulfil the functions determined by his own state and being.  Let every man accept action, since he shares in that nature the methods of which make action necessary.’  Plainly, it is for Arjuna to bend his bow among the other Kshettryas.  The young Frenchman had not doubted.  But it will be seen by his letters how, in the horror of carnage, as in the tedious and patient duties of the mine and the trench, he too had kept his eyes upon eternal things.

I would not insist unduly upon this union of thought.  He had hardly gained, through a few extracts from the Ramayana, a glimpse of the august thought of ancient Asia.  Yet, with all the modern shades of ideas, with all the very French precision of form, the soul that is revealed in these letters, like that of Amiel, of Michelet, of Tolstoi, of Shelley, shows certain profound analogies with the tender and mystical genius of the Indies.  Strange is that affinity, bearing witness as it does not only to his profound need of the Universal and the Absolute, but to his intuitive sympathy with the whole of life, to his impulses of love for the general soul of fruitfulness and for all its single and multitudinous forms.  ’Love’—­this is one of the words most often recurring in these letters.  Love of the country of battle; love of the plain over which the mornings and the evenings come and go as the emotions come and go over a sensitive face; love of the trees with their almost human gesture—­of one tree, steadfast and patient in its wounds, ‘like a soldier’; love of the beautiful little living creatures of the fields which, in the silence of earliest morning, play on the edges of the trench; love of all things in heaven and earth—­of that tender