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