"Mais aussi je pense a vous, mon Dieu, qui avez voulu toutes ces choses pour votre plus grand gloire et pour l'etablissement de votre justice. Tous ces malheurs, ces tristesses, tout ce sang repandu sont imposes par vous, mon Dieu, en maniere de redemption. Mais votre soleil glorieux eclairera bientot, j'en suis absolument certain, la victoire du bon droit qui attend depuis pres d'un demi-siecle. J'y coopere de toutes mes forces, de toute mon ame. Et si vous me retirez de ce monde, o Dieu de bonte, permettez que ce soit pour me joindre a ceux qui m'out precede dans votre sejour, et dont l'affection terrestre me fut precieuse. C'est toute la priere ardente que je fais devant le soleil levant, ce jour de Toussaint que sillonnent deja les obus semeurs de mort, en cette annee 1914 qui verra retablir la paix du monde, par l'aneantissement du peuple barbare, et la regenerescence de la nation francaise." In most cases there rests an obscurity over the brief lives of these gallant young officer-authors, whose nature was little observed until the flash of battle illuminated them for one last brilliant moment. We feel a strong desire, which cannot be gratified, to follow them from their childhood to their adolescence, and to see for ourselves what impulses directed them into the path of heroism. It is rarely that we can do this, but one of these poets has left behind him two friends who have recaptured the faint and shrouded impressions of his early life. The piety of M. Henri Albert Besnard, who was his intimate companion, and of that practised narrator M. Henri Bordeaux, who is his biographer, enable us to form a clearer and fuller conception of Camille Violand than of any of his compeers. Born in 1891, he was typical of that latest generation of which we have spoken, in whom all seemed to be unconsciously preparing for the great and critical sacrifice. He was born at Lyons, but was brought up in the Quercy, that wild and tortured district just north of the Pyrenees, where nature seems to gather together all that she possesses of the grotesque and violent in landscape; but he was educated at Alencon, and trained at Vouziers, in the midst of the orchards of Normandy. Thus both sides of France, the Midi and the Manche, were equally known to him, but the ceaseless peregrinations which he underwent, so far from enlarging his horizon, seem to have plunged his soul in melancholy. At the age of twenty he struck M. Bordeaux as being the typical _deracine._