Many of the sectors of the front are held by this guard of older men. When the German reserves were hurled in pursuit of the Belgian Army in 1914, threatening the shores of Pas de Calais, a territorial division checked the onslaught of the best troops of the German Empire. Of their work in the trenches, Mr. Bazin writes: But do not let anyone think theirs is a life of inaction; work is not lacking; even night is a time of reports, of revictualing, of reconnoitering, or repairing barbed-wire entanglements. When the sector is quiet, however, the territorial enjoys some free hours. He writes a great deal; makes up for all the time past when he wrote almost no letters at all and for all the time to come when he promises himself to leave the pen hidden on the groove of the ink-well, idle on the mantel. One of them said to me: “They have put up a letter-box in my village. What will it be good for after the war—a swallow’s nest?” Many of these letters contain only a recital of uneventful days and the prescribed formalities of friendship or love, banal to the general public but dear enough to those who are waiting and who will sit around the lamp of an evening and comment on every word. I know young women throughout the country who receive a letter from their husbands every day. The war has served as a school for adults. Sometimes expediency entirely disappears and it is the race which speaks, and the hidden faith, and the soul which perhaps has never thus been laid bare. Here is a letter which has been brought to my notice. For a year it had been carried in the pocket of a territorial who wrote it as his last will and testament, and when he was killed it was sent to his widow. Read it and see if you would not like to have had him who wrote it as a friend and neighbor: “My dear, today, as I am writing these lines, my heart feels very big, and if you ever read them it will be because I died doing my duty. I ask you, before I go, to bring up our children in honor and in memory of me, for I have loved them very dearly, and I shall have died thinking of them and of you. Tell them I died on the field of honor, and that I ask them to offer the same sacrifice the day France shall need their arms and hearts. Preserve my certificate of good conduct, and later make them know that their father would like to have lived for them and for you, whom I have always held so dear. Now, I do not want you to pass the rest of your life worshiping one dead. On the contrary, if during your life you meet some good, industrious young fellow capable of giving you loyal aid in rearing our children, join your life with his and never speak to him of me, for if he loves you it would only cast the shadow of a dead man upon him—it is over, my dear. I love you now and forever, even through eternity. Good-bye! I shall await you over there. Your adoring JEAN.” As showing the dogged, determined character of these men, Mr. Bazin relates the following incident: