Art. 4.-A CHAPLET OF HEROES.

Ernest Psichari, Charles Péguy, Emile Nolly (Captain Détanger), Henri Alain-Fournier, André Lafon.

THE resident in a Catholic country envies sometimes the placid old women sitting in the twilight, telling their beads; their dim sight and thickened tympanums do not disturb this tranquil occupation; they seem secure against the demon of Ennui. Why should not we Anglicans institute, in the interests of the idle, the elderly, the meditative or the sentimental, an unconsecrated rosary of recollection, adapted to the events of our existence? As we fingered the chaplet-every bead of it representing a year of our past-when we came to the big bead we should linger and reflect, and try to draw a lesson from the evocation of that term of years. Or we might string a thread to commemorate the lovely places we have seen, recalling them on different days at different seasons, summoning thus from the dimmest haunts of our memories beauties too good to lose. Or we might count a chaplet of the Dead.

To-day I would tell my beads very briefly in memory of five French soldiers, men of letters by profession, who died for their country in the first months of the war. It was on them I chiefly counted to renew the spirit of literature in France. Yet (with the exception of Péguy, who was an eccentric genius) they were perhaps not more gifted than several others-than Paul Acker, for instance, or Léo Byram, among the hundred and fifty young writers who have fallen for France. They had not yet gathered in the finest fruit of their vintage, for (save Péguy, who was over forty) they were young. They belonged one and all-Péguy first and young Lafon last -to a generation in full reaction against the excessive intellectualism of their fathers and their elder brothers. Two of them were soldiers and explorers by profession, men who had seen life arduously enough, and death face to face, in African deserts and in colonial battles; these were Captain Détanger (Emile Nolly) and Lieutenant Ernest Psichari; Alain-Fournier stood on the threshold of politics as secretary to Claude Casimir-Périer (also fallen); Charles Péguy was a publisher, a printer, a

polemist, as well as a prose-writer and a poet; while André Lafon was a budding schoolmaster. Not one of them was an out-and-out man of letters of that thoroughgoing and professional sort whose horizon is bounded by the twy-peaked summit of Parnassus and the roofs of Grub Street. They were men of action, doers, not

dreamers.

Of course, all of them had served their term of military service in the regiment, and had thus, beside their official calling, another-the career of arms. All felt, with a precision and an acuity that their forefathers could not guess, the importance of the regiment-of the army-and the corresponding humiliation of belonging to a country that has been vanquished in arms, but has not yet avenged and redeemed that disgrace. It is, in fact, the army of a nation which determines the language it shall speak, the laws it shall obey, the trade it shall make, and even the Church it shall worship in, since all these follow the conqueror. These young men considered themselves to belong to a generation-to a series of generations-sacrificed in 1870, deprived by that defeat of their place in History. The little things they did they could not love; the great things they fain would do they were not allowed to undertake; so that they felt like the sons of a bankrupt emperor, unable to forget their Empire or their bankruptcy. For compare the France of fifty years ago with the France of Caillaux! No amount of literary glory, or scientific invention, or artistic refinement, or material prosperity, could console this ardent generation. They murmured with their spokesman, Péguy :

'Où sont nos mourants et nos morts? Nous n'avons même pas renversé un gouvernement! Nous mourrons tous dans notre lit! Et je ne m'intéresse pas aux personnes qui mettent cinquante ans à mourir dans leur lit.'

So deep in them did the taste for action and activity descend that Péguy declared in one of his most characteristic pages:

'Ne peuvent pas mener une vie chrétienne, c'est-à-dire ne peuvent pas être chrétiens, ceux qui sont assurés du pain quotidien Et ce sont les rentiers, les fonctionnaires, les moines. Peuvent seuls mener une vie chrétienne, c'est-à-dire

peuvent seuls être chrétiens, ceux qui ne sont pas assurés du pain quotidien. Et ce sont les joueurs (petits et gros), les aventuriers; les pauvres et les misérables; les industriels, les commerçants (petits et gros); les hommes mariés, les pères de famille, ces grands aventuriers du monde moderne' (VictorMarie, Comte Hugo,' ch. 84).

Well, if thus they still felt in the spring of 1914, before that blazing summer should run out they were to have their fill of life and death! Three of them at least must have quaffed their heart's desire. I know little of the dreamy, delicate Lafon; his slight young soul seems to have slipped away out of all that clamour and clatter of battle like a frail white wisp of skyascending vapour, or the clear note of a clarion. But I know that the romantic Alain-Fournier was happy in his great adventure an hour or two before his mysterious end. As for Péguy, Psichari, and Nolly, their death was a dream come true-almost the answer to a prayer.

'Faites que je sois fort, et que je tue beaucoup d'ennemis. . . . Si vous le voulez, Seigneur Dieu, donnez-moi la grâce de mourir dans une grande victoire.'

Such is the soldier's petition in Psichari's 'Appel des Armes.' And their prayers are answered; they are dead in their promise, but at least they have lived! The longed-for hour arrived, and they left the daily round, the dull routine, and set forth to conquer a new world -to frame it nearer to the heart's desire! What a task was theirs-to save, defend, avenge! Around them mustered hundreds and thousands and millions of soldiers, one at heart with them, following the same flag, marching in step; the same mighty passion, like a rhythm, beating in all alike. See them, swinging forward, with that quick yet patient stride, mile after mile, league after league. Hear them, humming rather than singing, crooning rather than humming, no poem of their own (poets though they be) but the same wild song for all-La Marseillaise. Mark them, marching through the sunstroke and stifling dust of August 1914 to the scorched, cannon-blasted stubble-fields of the Marne; breasting the whistling winds of Lorraine ; scaling the forest-hung precipices of the Vosges; sunk

knee-deep in the black mud of Flanders; slipping in the white treacherous slime of Champagne. All are equal, all are one-glorious incorporate atoms of the Eternal France, even as, in the communion of saints, living and dead are blent in the substance of God. No voice, no soul of their own, but henceforth an inseparable immortality, the army of 1914.

The first of them to fall was Ernest Psichari. I knew him root and branch-his grandparents before him, and his mother in her charming girlhood; and, when I think of Ernest, the first image to rise on my mind's eye is that of a dear boy of eleven years old whom I found one day half-stupefied with grief, passionately sobbing, beside an open wardrobe, in which he had discovered the dressing-gown worn by his grandmother the year before, when she had nursed him through some childish illness -and she had died in the spring. The child's heart, perceiving in one moment the irrevocable, and the impoverishment of life when some great tenderness goes out of it, nearly burst with the force of that enlarging pang. And then I see another Ernest, still younger, perhaps nine, unaware of my presence in his grandmother's drawing-room, as he talks to his little brother in the twilight: 'When I am grown up (says Ernest) I shall be a great man! Et j'aurai ma statue sur tous les marchés de France!' And the little one of seven ripples with laughter at Ernest's having so satisfactorily 'gone one better': 'Il y a du chemin à faire, mon frère! (says he). Il y a bien du chemin à faire!' Whereat I too laughed and broke the spell, the two little boys informing me that, while waiting for their violin-lesson, 'on s'amusait à raconter des blagues.'

Even in Ernest's fun there was a desire of greatness; that, and an intense sensibility, a rare faculty of moral imagination, were what I chiefly noticed in the child, of whom I saw less and less as his studies absorbed him more and more; youths between twelve and twenty have little time for their mother's friends. A quiet young man, with charming, living eyes, and in his whole aspect something ardent, firm and grave-that is all that Ernest Psichari was to me.

And then came a bolt from the blue. It was on the

morrow of the Dreyfus case, when France was divided into two camps, and each faction feverishly counted its men and the great families which centralised these men on either side. As Daniel Halévy wrote, in a passage already celebrated: 'Paris a ses familles comme Florence eut les siennes; et ses maisons, non couronnées de tours, n'en abritent pas moins des factions guerrières.' Ernest was born into one of these houses-one of the most important to the Liberals-for those grandparents of his (both dead before that shock of schism shook France to her foundations), those grandparents of whom I have written, were Ernest Renan and his wife. And his father was Jean Psichari, a philologist of most 'advanced' opinions. It came, therefore, almost as a defection, an apostasy, when the rumour spread in the ruffled circles of the Dreyfusards that Renan's grandson, at nineteen, had enlisted as a volunteer in the Colonial Artillery.

'Le fils a pris le parti de ses pères contre son père'so Ernest himself defined the situation in his 'Appel des Armes.' Just as his Breton ancestors, curious of the vast world on the other side the seas, most incurious of worldly advancement, would sail the world over in the service of the State, before the mast, seamen content with the salt air and their duty, so this grandson of theirs spent five years with his cannon in the Congo, a non-commissioned officer. When at twenty-four years of age he returned to Paris, he could scarcely understand why his friends pressed him to enter a school for officers. 'One can serve the country as well in the ranks; one is perhaps more useful!' But he yielded to his mother-to her, indeed, he always yielded.

Péguy has left an eloquent description of his friend, telling how he lived like a king in the palace of the École Militaire, but a step from the dome of the Invalides, where in the summer mornings, in the freshness of the dawn, he used to escort his slender little threeinch cannon-'ses 75, ces petits jeunes gens de canons modernes, ces gringalets de canons modernes, au corps d'insecte, aux roues comme des pattes d'araignées '-filing them off under the shadow of the monstrous historic artillery of the great Pensioners' Hospital, the cannon of Fontenoy and Malplaquet, bronze mastodonts and