seeking to maintain control of his own private self amid all the
excitement of numbers. And he succeeds. He guards himself, he separates
himself, 'as much as possible,' in the midst of his comrades, he keeps
his intellectual life intact. Meanwhile he is within barrack walls, or
else he is jotting down his letters at a railway station, or else he is
in the stages of an interminable journey, 'forty men to a truck.' But to
know him completely, wait until you see him within the zone of war, in
billets, in the front line, on guard, when he has returned to contact
with the very earth. As soon as he breathes open air, his instincts are
awake again, the instinct 'to draw all the beauty out,' and--in the
shadow where the future hides--'to draw out the utmost beauty as quickly
as may be.' 'I picked flowers in the mud; keep them in remembrance of
me,' he will write in a day of foreboding. A most significant trait is
this--in the tedium of trench days, or when imminent peril silences the
idle tongues, he gathers the greatest number of these magical flowers.
In those moments when speech fails, his soul is serene, it has free
play, and we hear its own fine sounds. Hitherto we had heard the
repetition of the word of courage and of brotherhood uttered by all our
gathering armies. But here, in battle, face to face with the eternities,
that spirit of his sounds like the chord of an instrument heard for the
first time in its originality and its infinite sensibility. Nor are
these random notes; they soon make one harmonious sound and acquire a
most touching significance, until by daily practice he learns how to
abstract himself altogether from the most wretched surroundings. A quite
impersonal _ego_ seems then to detach itself from the particular _ego_
that suffers and is in peril; it looks impartially upon all things, and
sees its other self as a passing wave in the tide that a mysterious
Intelligence controls. Strange faculty of double existence and of
vision! He possesses it in the midst of the very battle in which his
active valour gained him the congratulations of his commanding officer.