days have come upon me, and nothingness seems the end of all, whereas
all that is in my being had assured me of the plenitude of the
universe.' And he asks himself the anxious question, 'Is it even sure
that moral effort bears any fruit?' It is something like abandonment by
God. But that darkening of his lights passes quickly away. He comes
again to the regions of tranquil thought, and leaves them thenceforward
only for the work in hand. 'I hope,' he writes, 'that when you think of
me you will have in mind all those who have left everything behind, and
how their nearest and dearest think of them only in the past, and say
of them, "We had once a brother, who, many years ago, withdrew from this
world."' How strange is the serenity of these lofty thoughts, how
entirely detached from self and from all human things is this spirit of
contemplation. Two slight traits give us signs: One night, on a
battlefield 'scattered with fragments of men' and with burning
dwellings, under a starry sky, he makes his bed in an excavation, and
lies there watching the crescent moon, and waits for dawn; now and again
a shell bursts, earth falls about him, and then silence returns to the
frozen soil: 'I have paid the price, but I have had moments of solitude
full of God.' Again, one evening, after five days of horror ('we have no
officers left--they all died as brave men'), he suddenly comes upon the
body of a friend; 'a white body, splendid under the moon. I lay down
near him.' In the quietness, by the side of the dead man, nothing
remains but beauty and peace.

* * * * *

These letters are to be anonymous, at least so long as any hope remains
that he who was lost may return. It is enough to know that they were
written by a Frenchman who, in love and faith, bore his part in the
general effort, the common peril, glad to renounce himself in the pain