informing them that the sheep with the red tag on its tail was the personal property of the Canadian, and was on no account to be killed. It lived for several weeks, and eventually fell a victim to a combined attack by the whole of the Canadian's trawler crew, armed with every sort of weapon from a .303 rifle to a .380 revolver.

On board the cruiser it had been considered bad taste even to mention the word sheep for a long time, and the whole subject of the farm was taboo. It was felt by most of the people concerned that they had been made victims, owing to the stupidity of their messmates. On the few occasions when the subject was discussed, the Chief was always saying that if we had had cattle it would have been all right. The land agent harped on the sheepdog with irritating frequency. The Commander made bitter remarks on the inadequacy of his expert advisers, and on the Clerk's wording as to the climbing capabilities of the sheep.

The Canadian had been sarcastically amused at the way the whole thing had been mismanaged, and made nasty comparison with the way things were done in the Colonies. The Paymaster, who by this time was gaunt and careworn, could not eat mutton at all on the rare occasions it appeared in the wardroom, and his feelings toward all who had been in any way mixed up in the farm were too bitter to permit of expression.

On the occasion of the death of the red-tailed sheep, which occurred late in the autumn, the last of the Admiralty sheep had also fallen a victim to a well-armed landing force; and, though riddled with bullets, the Paymaster had been relieved to find that a small Blackwood's Magazine

portion was still fit for human consumption. The general relief which was felt by all interested parties in the wardroom was so great that, after a glass or two of port, the subject was once more reopened.

The Commander gravely congratulated the Canadian on his success as a stalker, and inquired whether his ancestors had been Border folk or not.

'I did n't steal it,' said the Canadian. 'I saved the poor brute from a terrible death in a burning ship, and we got it second shot. I turned the skin over to the butcher, Pay.,' he added, turning to the Paymaster; 'it may help to fill up some of the nasty hiatuses there must be in your farm accounts.'

"Thanks,' said the Paymaster, 'it will certainly help me a little; but really I'm in despair as to how to account for these brutes. They weigh about twenty pounds by the time they are killed or murdered, and half of it is not fit to eat.'

"The only possible thing for you to do, Pay.,' said the land agent, 'is to expend them, skins and all. I kept stores years ago when I was a navigator, and there were lots of ways of putting your accounts right. The Admiralty are very good about it as a rule-why, one fellow expended a gun eaten by rats, and nothing was said."

'Well, how do you suggest I should expend sheep?' said the Paymaster. 'It sounds all right, but I've got to deal with a different department from the one you used to.'

'I should put them down eaten by wolves,' said the land agent.

'Good idea,' said the Chief. 'Russia is full of wolves, you know, even in these days.'

So wolves were decided upon.

DURING the first months of the war, almost the only books which were published in Paris were collections of articles which appeared in the daily press. The best of these formed a chronicle of events and emotions which people were glad to possess. It is curious to turn over the pages of these earliest volumes. They are full of the shock and turmoil of a time when no one knew what was going to happen, or, indeed, what had happened already. The writers were hampered by the censorship, and by their own ignorance of the exact course which military operations were taking. The articles by M. Maurice Barrès, whose genius is wonderfully ductile and adaptable, were perhaps those which approached most nearly to what we mean when we speak of literature. As early as November, 1914, M. Barrès collected, in a volume called L'Union Sacrée, his daily articles contributed to the Echo de Paris, and this has some claim to be considered the first book published in France during the war.

These collected newspaper chronicles, and especially those by M. Barrès, were popular almost to excess. People relieved their nervous strain by reviewing what events they had already survived. But until after the Battle of the Marne it cannot be said that there was any sustained literary work done in France. Men were too acutely conscious of the contingencies of the struggle to settle down to brain-work unconnected with the war. The emotion was too direct to be expressed in

prose or verse. We should make a great mistake, however, if we took for granted that this emotion had, on really vitalized spirits, a paralyzing effect. Quite the contrary. Among a large class of men who were pursuing, or were just about to enter, professional life, the crisis seems to have been unexpectedly stimulating. Many such persons felt themselves to be freed from the servitude of intellectual routine. They had a sense of taking in large draughts of open air after having been shut up too long in the lectureroom or the laboratory. Many early letters from the front breathe that spirit of release; the writers of them seem to have embraced the perils and discomforts of life in the field with a curious sense of relief. It had become in the end tiresome to be obliged to keep abreast of all that was going on in art and in letters and in research. And, in particular, there was a phase not easily to be realized in England, where purely mental activity takes so small a place, there was the comfort, to an over-fastidious mind, of being released from the wear and tear of subtle little problems.

The writers of France had never taken so much practical part in fighting as devolved upon them in the autumn of 1914. If we look at the records of French authorship, we shall be amused to see how small a share people of letters had ever enjoyed of the heroic crash of armies. Napoleon had no opinion of writers as fighting men, and he subdued their warlike instincts with

severity. As a rule they gave him no trouble by showing any military ambition; they kept out of the way of his armies. Chateaubriand spent the day of the battle of Jena in gathering oleanders in the ruins of Sparta; he preferred that his lauriers should be lauriers roses. The authors who have had a distinct call to arms have had no opportunity for fighting. Alfred de Vigny, who was at heart a soldier through and through, never saw a war. In 1914 the memory of Stendhal was very popular in France, mainly because he had some actual experience, both as a soldier and as a military administrator, but that experience did not amount to very much. Vauvenargues alone, in the eighteenth century, had full experience of the bitterness of military misfortune. In the war of 1914, on the contrary, the usefulness of literary talent to the State was early recognized, and men of letters took a prominent part in the defense of the invaded territory.

But the campaign of 1914 produced one soldier-writer whose brief career in the field struck a chord in the whole French nation which has vibrated ever since. There can be no doubt that the name and fame of Charles Péguy will be legendary so long as French history endures. His character and his behavior in life and death impressed the national imagination to an extraordinary degree, and started a type of intellectual heroism which was new and has fructified in all manner of directions. His story offers a very curious instance of the part which accident seems to take in the affairs of men. Charles Péguy, when the war broke out, was quite unknown outside France, and he was known to but a small circle at home. He was in his forty-second year, and there seemed little prospect of his achieving any measure of what is called success. He was a dreamer, and,

strangely enough in the history of a man who, at the clear call of duty, was to show such magnificent decision, he left on the minds of his associates a superficial impression of wavering purpose. He was long in finding his road. He came from the people, and he was a Socialist, as it were, by tradition. He finished his studies at the Ecole Normale, with the idea of becoming a professor, and then he gave that up. He preferred to be an artisan and he engaged himself to a working printer; at the age of twenty-five he obscurely published a little book, on Joan of Arc, in which his views were already dimly shadowed.

His biographers described him to us as a slender man of inconspicuous presence, who stooped as he walked, absorbed by his dreams, feeble in appearance but in reality stronger than he looked. He had gone through long years of poverty and care, and at the age of forty his constitution seemed to be giving way; he had no physical characteristic of the conventional national hero. But those who knew him best were aware of the purity of his conscience and the vehemence of his will. His Socialism, which was intense, was of a character wholly unlike what we have since seen developed by the delirium of Eastern Europe. It was idealistic, humane, and Christian, although Péguy did not observe the rites of any church or subscribe to any set creed. He was a very honest workman of the old school. There was a rural savor about him, the gravity of a selfrespecting republican peasant. He wrote of himself, 'I have always taken everything au sérieux,' and this was the secret of some of his difficulties, for he was not supple and his mind moved slowly into its true path. He had a deep indignation for the kind of proletarian idleness to which we have since learned to give the name of Bolshevism.

Péguy wrote in praise of the incredible honor of work, the most lovely of all the forms of honor.' He hated strikes and every kind of sabotage; he said, "The workman who throws down his tools is a maniac who mutilates himself.' He liked to see work well done, and no ca' canny found the slightest favor with Péguy. 'I have seen,' he said, 'my mother mend the straw bottoms of chairs in the same spirit in which our forefathers carved their cathedrals.'

Such was Charles Péguy before the war. In 1900, he had started, as printer, author, and publisher in one, the issue of a strange magazine, which he called Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, and in this he produced his various poems and prose essays. He also published in it those of a group of disciples, who embraced his mystical ideal of republican liberty. He employed a curious style, full of repetitions and enlargements, which had nothing classical about it, but which reproduced the slow movement of his own meditation. He wished to conciliate Rome with the Revolution, and mockers told him that he would merely be crushed between the upper and the lower mill-stone; indeed, it seems to me true that he was imprisoned between the two great forces in French social and religious sentiment, until the war came and set him free. None of his early writings attracted wide attention, but when he was thirty-seven he published Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc, which marked a great advance in unity of thought and continuity of purpose. It was less diffuse than his earlier pamphlets had been, and more logical. He had written over and over again about Joan of Arc, but never so well as here. He was interpenetrated with worship of Joan of Arc; she was the theme to which he incessantly returned. He said once that, if he lived a hundred years, he should never cease writing about

her. She became at last a perfect vision of France to him, and he fought for her tradition and for her ideals like a crusader.

And when the war came, it was like a crusader that Péguy flung himself into it. He had been a pacifist in his youth, but he gradually became convinced of the inevitability of the struggle. The declaration of war found Charles Péguy absolutely ready for sacrifice, inspired by the years of meditation on his virgin model. He did not hesitate, as she had not hesitated, but he hastened, with ecstasy, to die for the liberties of France. Lieutenant of reserve in a regiment of infantry, he showed, from the first moment, a genius for exhilarating his men and for leading them into action. He died, on the eve of the victory of the Marne, attacking the Germans at the head of his troops, on the 5th of September, 1914, in the cornfields of the shattered village of Villeroy; and from one end of France to the other there arose a great cry in which his name was mingled in glory with joy over the almost unhoped-for victory.

The grandson of Renan, Ernest Psichari, who was killed early in the war, said, 'Whatever we do we shall always put intelligence above everything.' That was the French attitude, and as we look back over those four glorious years of torrent and strain, we shall see that it was really the sleepless intelligence, alertness, suppleness of the French mind which carried France through to victory. But there was little place for the external manifestation of intelligence in individuals under the whirlwind of sensations with which the war opened. The remarkable feature of those first months was the extraordinary alacrity with which the young men who were already distinguished by promising gifts and had started along civil paths which assured them an early success, gave up, not merely the

worldly advantages of their position, but the liberty of thought and action that was dearer to their hearts than success itself. It was in souls thus disciplined to resignation and obedience, for the sake of the requirements of the State lucidly exposed and intelligently grasped, that the renaissance of the religious instinct also started.

What the religious instinct develpoed into among the young writers who were soldiers can be observed most clearly by yet a further reference to Péguy. In the mystical conscience of Péguy, trained by the incessant contemplation of Joan of Arc as saint and as patriot, as becoming a saint in the act and by the fortitude of her patriotism, in this condition of his conscience the act of doing noble things took a higher value than the things themselves. And that has been an element in the literary expression of France during the war, which has to be emphatically stated. Not all, indeed, but a large proportion of the authors who have expressed in their writings the emotions, the passionate sentiments, evoked by the war, have done so under the call of something almost supernatural. They have seen the world made perfect by the virtue of France, and they have turned away from the accidents of experience as unimportant. This appears to me to distinguish them sharply from their English brothers-in-arms. The English writers have almost confined themselves to a record of their day's adventure, usually without any overt reference to the scheme of events of which that adventure was a little fragment. The French have noted the detail, too, but against a wider background. They have given the impression that to be carrying out God's work was the essential thing, and that all the doing and all the moving would

be but a hurrying of ants over a broken clod if the general purpose and object of the struggle were not borne in mind. Perhaps some of them- perhaps Péguy himself - went too far in this idealism. To have carried out his dream would have been to sacrifice efficiency and organization to sentiment; and it is very fortunate that authority over the councils of the army was not in the hands of the admirable young writers who collaborated on the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. It was necessary that these devotees of Joan of Arc should learn that the age of miracle only partially comes back in modern times. And we turn with satisfaction to the great part which a more logical and a more adult intelligence took in the preparations. The published statements of the generals were admirable for their lucidity in the midst of rigorous tension. Even the civilian can appreciate the purely literary excellence of the treatises of Marshal Foch on The Principles of Warfare and On the Conduct of War, respectively. It could only be a great French general who wrote, "To conquer our enemy will be nothing unless we begin by conquering ourselves.'

So far as I can trace, the very earliest revival of poetry after the invasion was due to a poet who is much less known in England than he deserves to be, M. Paul Fort. He is a citizen of no mean city, namely, of the tortured and mutilated Reims, where he was born half a century ago, in a house close to the Lion d'Or, and fully in face of that enchanting cathedral which the Germans have wantonly destroyed. The bombardment and arson of the noblest church of France reawakened M. Paul Fort to melody, and he began an ode to the outraged cathedral in these words, 'Monstrous General Baron von Plattenberg, it is you who have inspired this love chant to my church.'