Those who die for their country should not be numbered with the dead.
We must call them by another name. They have nothing in common with
those who end in their beds a life that is worn out, a life almost
always too long and often useless. Death, which every elsewhere is but
the object of fear and horror, bringing naught but nothingness and
despair, this death, on the field of battle, in the clash of glory,
becomes more gracious than birth and exhales a beauty greater than
that of love. No life will ever give what their youth is offering us,
that youth which gives in one moment the days and the years that lay
before it. There is no sacrifice to be compared with that which they
have made; for which reason there is no glory that can soar so high
as theirs, no gratitude that can surpass the gratitude which we owe
them. They have not only a right to the foremost place in our
memories: they have a right to all our memories and to everything that
we are, since we exist only through them.


2

And now it is in us that their life, so suddenly cut short, must
resume its course. Whatever be our faith and whatever the God whom it
adores, one thing is almost certain and, in spite of all appearances,
is daily becoming more certain: it is that death and life are
commingled; the dead and the living alike are but moments, hardly
dissimilar, of a single and infinite existence and members of one
immortal family. They are not beneath the earth, in the depths of
their tombs; they lie deep in our hearts, where all that they once
were will continue to live to to act; and they live in us even as we
die in them. They see us, they understand us more nearly than when