For the young men who consciously adopted the maxims of the Prince de Ligne as their guide at the opening of this war, M. Maurice Barres has found the name of "Traditionalists." They are those who followed the tradition of the soldierly spirit of France in its three main lines, in its individualism, in its intelligence, in its enthusiasm. They endeavoured, in those first months of agony and hope, to model their conduct on the formulas which their ancestors, the great moralists of the past, had laid down for them. Henri Lagrange, who fell at Montereau in October 1915, at the age of twenty, was a type of hundreds of others. This is how his temper of mind, as a soldier, is described by his friend Maxime Brienne:-- "The confidence of Lagrange was no less extraordinary than was his spirit of sacrifice. He possessed the superhuman severity which comes from being wholly consecrated to duty.... With a magnificent combination of logic and of violence, with a resolution to which his unusually lucid intelligence added a sort of methodical vehemence, he expressed his conviction that resolute sacrifice was necessary if the result was to be a definite success.... He declared that a soldier who, by force of mind and a sentiment of honour and patriotism, was able to conquer the instinct of fear, should not merely "fulfil" his military duty with firmness, but should hurl himself on death, because it was only at that price that success could be obtained over a numerical majority." This is a revelation of that individualism which is characteristic of the trained French character, a quality which, though partly obscured by the turn the great struggle has taken, will undoubtedly survive and ultimately reappear. It is derived from the admonitions of a series of moral teachers, and in the wonderful letters which M. Maurice Barres has brought together with no less tact than passion in his series of volumes issued under the general title of "L'Ame Francaise et la Guerre," we have an opportunity of studying it in a great variety of situations. This is but a portion, and it may be but a small portion, of the multiform energy of France, and it is capable, of course, of being subjected to criticism. That, in fact, it has had to endure, but it is no part of my business here, nor, if I may venture to say so, is it the business of any Englishman to criticise at any time, except in pathetic admiration, an attitude so beautiful, and marked in its self-sacrifice by so delicate an effusion of scrupulous good taste. We are in presence of a field of those fluttering tricolor flags which fill the eyes of a wanderer over the battle-centres of the Marne with a passion of tears. We are in presence of the memorials of a chivalry that did not count the price, but died "joyfully" for France.[1]