Not their own soil only, they enriched with their blood, but the universal mind. In saving the best in dream and reality that France means to the world, they saved the whole future, as short reflection upon the alternative will show. The victory of the Marne sealed the brotherhood of France and England, and did much toward bringing America and the Dominions into the comity of nations. It was the basis of the completer victory to follow, and of the only possibilities of future peace and liberal progress. For ever, this example will call to youth everywhere——“that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have lived in vain.” May there not again be need to pass through such a Gehenna; but it is surer that the world will only be made “safe for democracy,” or even for elementary order, by the vigilance and chivalry of each oncoming generation. For these, for ever, ghostly bugles will blow through the woods and hamlets of the Marne. “_Ames des chevaliers, revenez-vous encor? Est-ce vous qui parlez avec la voix du cor? Roncevaux! Roncevaux! dans ta sombre vallée L’ombre du grand Roland, n’est-elle pas consolée?_” NOTES AND REFERENCES [1] Many volumes of soldiers’ notes and recollections have been published, and some of them have high literary merit. One of these is _Ma Pièce, Souvenirs d’un Canonnier_ (Paris: Plon-Nourrit), by Sergeant Paul Lintier, of the 44th Artillery, who shared in the defeat of Ruffey’s Army near Virton, in the south-eastern corner of Belgium, 35 miles north of Verdun. It was almost his first sight of bloodshed, and with an artist’s truthfulness he records all the confusion of his mind. “The battle is lost,” he writes on August 23, “I know not how or why. I have seen nothing. It is a sheer nightmare. We shall be massacred.... Anguish chokes me.... This boiling mass of animality and thought that is my life is about to cease. My bleeding body will be stretched upon the field. I see it. Across the sunny perspective of the future a great curtain falls. I am only twenty-one years old.... What are we waiting for? Why do not our guns fire? I perspire, I am afraid ... afraid.” This mood gradually passes away. A few days later he is trying to explain the change: “One accustoms oneself to danger as to the cruellest privations, or the uncertainty of the morrow. I used to wonder, before the war, how the aged could live in quietude before the immanence of death. Now I understand. For ourselves, the risk of death has become an element of daily existence. One counts with it; it no longer astonishes, and frightens us less. And, besides, every day trains us to courage. The conscious and continuous effort to master oneself succeeds at length. This is the whole of military bravery. One is not born brave; one becomes so.” And this stoicism is softened and spiritualised by a new sense of what the loss of France would mean.