the military ideals of honor, duty, and sacrifice of one's all for the
common good are the fundamentals of. character. Psichari turned this
generation from a generation of dreamers to a generation of soldiers,
knowing why they were soldiers, glad to be soldiers. The army saved the
morale of France when the Church had lost its hold, and the public
schools had been delivered to the creatures of sentimental doctrinaire
government. Was it not a pity that Psichari should have died so young?"

"Did you know him?" I asked.

"Yes; I saw something of him in Africa. The mystery of the East had
profoundly stirred him. He was a dark, serious fellow with something of
the profile of his grandfather, Ernest Renan. At Charleroi, after an
heroic stand, he and every man of his squad died beside the guns they
served."

Long after, at the Bois-le-Prêtre, I went to the trenches to get a young
sergeant. His friends had with clumsy kindness gathered together his
little belongings and put them in the ambulance. "As tu trouvé mon
livre?" (Have you found my book?) he asked anxiously, and they tossed
beside the stretcher a trench-mired copy of Psichari's "L'Appel des
Armes."

One morning, just at dawn, we drew near a low, sandy coast, and anchored
at the mouth of the great estuary of the Gironde. A spindly lighthouse
was flashing, seeming more to reflect the sunlight from outside than to
be burning within, and a current the color of coffee and cream with a
dash of vermilion in it, went by us mottled with patches of floating
mud. From the deck one had an extraordinary view, a ten-mile sweep of
the strangely colored water, the hemisphere of the heavens all of one