No doubt, the reason why this war has been, for France, so peculiarly a literary war, is that the mechanical life in the trenches, alternately so violent and so sedentary, has greatly enforced the habit of sustained contemplation based on a vivid and tragic experience. This has encouraged, and in many instances positively created, a craving for literary expression, which has found abundant opportunity for its exercise in letters, journals, and poems; and what it has particularly developed is a form of literary art in which Frenchmen above all other races have always excelled, that analysis of feeling which has been defined as "le travail de ciselure morale." This moral carved-work, or chasing, as of a precious metal, revealing the rarity and value of spiritual surfaces, is characteristic of the journals of Paul Lintier, of the beauty of which we have already spoken. His art expends itself in the effect of outward things on the soul. He speaks of mysterious sights, half-witnessed in the gloaming, of sinister noises which have to be left unexplained. He does not shrink from a record of unlovely things, of those evil thoughts which attend upon the rancour of defeat, of the suspicion of treason which comes to dejected armies like a breath of poison-gas. That portion of his "Souvenirs" which deals with the days of the retreat on Paris is written in a spasm of savage anger; a whole new temper is instantly revealed when once the tide turns at Nanteuil. Nature herself thus endorses his new mood, as he writes "There are still clouds heaped up to the west, but the blue, that cheers us, is chasing them all away."