them throughout the world's history. The spirituality, the moral
quality of war, has not changed since those times. Mechanics, modern
arms, all the artillery invented by man and his science, will not make
an end to this thing, so lightly considered at the moment and called
the human soul. Books like that of Ardant du Picq prevent it from
being disdained. If no other effect should be produced by this sublime
book, this one thing would justify it. But there will be others--do
not doubt it--I wish merely to point out the sublimity of this
didactic book which, for me, has wings like celestial poetry and which
has carried me above and far away from the materialistic abjectness of
my time. The technique of tactics and the science of war are beyond my
province. I am not, like the author, erudite on maneuvers and the
battle field. But despite my ignorance of things exclusively military,
I have felt the truth of the imperious demonstrations with which it is
replete, as one feels the presence of the sun behind a cloud. His book
has over the reader that moral ascendancy which is everything in war
and which determines success, according to the author. This
ascendancy, like truth itself, is the sort which cannot be questioned.
Coming from the superior mind of a leader who inspires faith it
imposes obedience by its very strength. Colonel Ardant du Picq was a
military writer only, with a style of his own. He has the Latin
brevity and concentration. He retains his thought, assembles it and
always puts it out in a compact phrase like a cartridge. His style has
the rapidity and precision of the long-range arms which have dethroned
the bayonet. He would have been a writer anywhere. He was a writer by
nature. He was of that sacred phalanx of those who have a style all to
themselves."

Barbey d'Aurevilly rebels against tedious technicalities. Carried away
by the author's historical and philosophical faculties, he soars