It is noticeable, too, that when once the sickening suspense was removed, and the path of pain and glory lay clear before these youthful spirits, they grew very rapidly in intellectual stature. They had found their equilibrium, and no more time and force were wasted in useless oscillations. Each of them had, at last, the occasion, and therefore the power, to fill out the lines of his proper individuality. As M. Henri Bordeaux excellently says, "L'esprit inquiet ne se contente de rien, le coeur inapaise se croit incompris." But now these men knew their vocation, and a precocious experience of life developed in them a temper of meditation. It is extraordinary what an intelligent philosophy, what a delicate study of nature, were revealed at once in the writings of these heroic boys of twenty. Lieutenant Belmont, who fought in Alsace, had spent his infancy and adolescence in the neighbourhood of Grenoble, and his memory was full of the rich Dauphine valley, with its great river and its eastern horizon of the Alps. In the misery of the September nights of 1914, in the harshness of misty mornings among the Alsatian pines, his thoughts return to the luminous twilights of his old home under the great oaks of the Isere, and he expresses his nostalgia in terms of the most exquisite and the most unstudied grace. Here is a fragment of one of his letters home (October 1914):-- "Les journees sont exquises, tristes et pales, egalement differentes des crudites de nos idees et des tenebres de l'hiver. L'imagination a vite fait de s'envoler, a travers cette lumiere adoucie, vers tous les horizons familiers de la petite patrie, vers la vallee de Grenoble, paresseusement allongee dans ce bain de leger soleil, au pied des Alpes deja engourdies, vers les terres rousses de Lonnes longees par les futaies jaunissantes ou s'abritent les gibiers, tranquilles cette annee."