In colorless and shapeless uniforms, indescribably rigged out, and in poses of the most pleasurable leisure, the soldiers of France picturesquely slip from glory to glory, less aware, it seems, of historic grandeur than of serene gladness in implacable duty. They are picturesque because nature will have it so, but without any romanticism or sense of posing—officers hardly to be distinguished from privates by vague, soiled stripes—all the men enveloped in a halo of splendor above anything known to ordinary humanity. The pugnacious pipe or the sportive cigarette hinders their expression of any personal reflection. Only their eyes are animate, and these express things which cannot be told in words lest they be profaned. The line of their lip is youthful under a silky moustache or firm with age under gray brush. But the fire of their look, framed in their dark helmets, leaps out with quiet intensity to meet the tragic unknown that no longer can bring surprise. They are our soldiers of the year II who are following the Biblical column of fire. They see something. They go to it. Ashamed of my humility, I should like to find words to say to them. But, were I a poet, they would have no need of hearkening to me, since the greatest beauty of man lies in them, and since, unwitting of utterance, which at best seems inept, these men live on the summits of life. And the “old classes” who prosaically break stone at the side of the road or work with the shovel, the pickaxe, the broom, making the toilette of the road of triumph, what an injustice if I did not mention them! How does it happen that the noblest soldier is always the one I chance upon? That is the miracle of these men; and when I tell you that on the battlefield of the Aisne the “old classes,” not granting that it was necessary to wait to the end of the battle before beginning to clear and rebuild, went off into the hottest of the action to fill up craters, to break stones, to place tree-trunks and beams during heavy fire, without vouchsafing the Boche a single hasty gesture, so that they might the more quickly open the way for revictualling and for the bringing up of artillery—when I tell you this, you will admit that they do not deserve a lesser greeting than their “young ones.” And the infantryman—could I commit the supreme injustice of forgetting him? That is impossible when one has gone over the battleground where he has taken possession of the burrows of the Boches, among heaps of munition material, cases of supplies, an indescribable débris, abandoned with their dead and wounded in the haste of a desperate fight. What we cannot understand is that our little poilu can pass so quickly from the apathy of the trench to the extreme fury of the attack, and then from the violence of the offensive to the calm smile of a victory of which his modesty seems to say: “It was as easy as all that.”