We have seen that Vauvenargues--to whose memory the mind incessantly reverts in contemplation of the heroes of this war--says in one of his "Maximes"--written nearly two centuries ago--"The earliest days of spring have less charm than the budding virtue of a young man." No figure of 1914 exemplifies this quality of grace more surprisingly than Jean Allard (who called himself in literature Meeus). He was only twenty-one and a half when he was killed at Pierrepont, at the very beginning of the war, but he was already one of the promising figures of his generation. Allard was looked upon as an incipient Admirable Crichton; he was a brilliant scholar, an adroit and multiform athlete, the soul of wit and laughter, the centre of a group of adoring admirers. This sparkling poet was suddenly transformed by the declaration of war into the sternest of soldiers. His poem, called "Demain," created, or rather expressed, the patriotic passion which was simultaneously evoked all over France; it is really a lesser "Marseillaise." Not less popular, but more elaborate and academic, is Allard's aviation poem, "Plus haut toujours!"--an extraordinary vision of the flight and ecstasy and tragic death of a solitary airman. We may notice that in this, and many other verses describing recent inventions of science, the young French poets contrive to be very lucid and simple in their language, and to avoid that display of technical verbiage which deforms too many English experiments in the same class. It is not, however, so much by his writings, which are now collected in two, or perhaps three, little volumes, that Allard-Meeus strikes the imagination of a foreign spectator, as by his remarkable attitude. From the first, this lad of twenty-one exemplified and taught the value of a chivalrous behaviour. In the face of events, in that corruption of all which could make the martial spirit seem noble, that Germany has forced upon the world, this attitude of young French officers at the very opening of the war is pathetic, and might even lend itself, if we were disposed for mirth, to an ironic smile. But it should be recorded and not forgotten. It was Allard who revived the etiquette of going to battle dressed as sprucely as for a wedding. We shall do well to recollect the symbolic value which the glove holds in legends of medieval prowess. When the dying Roland, under the pine-trees, turns to the frontier of Spain, he offers, as a dying soldier, his glove to God-- "_Pur ses pecchiez deu puroftrid son guant_."