heard in my boyhood a good deal of the great Napoleonic legend. I had a genuine feeling that I would find myself at home in it, and The Duel is the result of that feeling, or, if the reader prefers, of that presumption. Personally I have no qualms of conscience about this piece of work. The story might have been better told of course. All one&rsquo;s work might have been better done; but this is the sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn&rsquo;t mean every one of his conceptions to remain for ever a private vision, an evanescent reverie. How many of those visions have I seen vanish in my time! This one, however, has remained, a testimony, if you like, to my courage or a proof of my rashness. What I care to remember best is the testimony of some French readers who volunteered the opinion that in those hundred pages or so I had managed to render &ldquo;wonderfully&rdquo; the spirit of the whole epoch. Exaggeration of kindness no doubt; but even so I hug it still to my breast, because in truth that is exactly what I was trying to capture in my small net: the Spirit of the Epoch&mdash;never purely militarist in the long clash of arms, youthful, almost childlike in its exaltation of sentiment&mdash;naively heroic in its faith. </p> <p> 1920. J. C. <br /> <br /> </p> <hr /> <p> <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> </p> <h1> A SET OF SIX </h1> <p> <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> <!-- H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br /> </p> <h2> GASPAR RUIZ </h2> <p> I </p> <p> A revolutionary war raises many strange characters out of the obscurity which is the common lot of humble lives in an undisturbed state of society. </p> <p> Certain individualities grow into fame through their vices and their virtues, or simply by their actions, which may have a temporary importance; and then they become forgotten. The names of a few leaders alone survive the end of armed strife and are further preserved in history; so that, vanishing from men&rsquo;s active memories, they still exist in books. </p> <p> The name of General Santierra attained that cold paper-and-ink immortality. He was a South American of good family, and the books published in his lifetime numbered him amongst the liberators of that continent from the oppressive rule of Spain. </p> <p> That long contest, waged for independence on one side and for dominion on the other, developed in the course of years and the vicissitudes of changing fortune the fierceness and inhumanity of a struggle for life. All feelings of pity and compassion disappeared in the growth of political hatred.