From this time--the end of October 1914--the letters of Camile Violand testify to the rapid development of his mind and character. He loses a certain childishness which had hitherto clung to him, and he expresses himself with a more virile sobriety. Nothing could exceed the pathos of his pictures of the terrible life in the Argonne, and we are made to feel how rapidly the suffering and the responsibility of his military life were bringing out all the deepest and most serious elements in his character. There is a remarkable letter of January 7, 1915, describing an engagement in which he lost several of his best men, and in particular an experienced corporal in whose skill he much confided. The briefest fragment broken from this pathetic description, addressed to his father, will give a notion of the tone of it:-- "J'etais absorbe par les blesses dans mon poste de commandement et quand je pus me rendre dans la tranchee ou il etait, il tombait dans le coma. Ses derniers mots avaient ete: 'Adieu, ma Patrie!' Pourtant, il me reconnut a la voix, me repondit faiblement. Je l'assistai dans ses derniers moments. Ce fut bien rapide, bien simple et bien beau. _J'etais pour lui le chef, ce qui est plus que le Pere et le Pretre reunis_. Je l'ai bien senti la; quand ce fut presque fini, je l'embrassai et le quittai pour retourner aux soucis que nous donne l'ennemi." Thus was this lad of three-and-twenty fortified and ripened by the arduous warfare in the Argonne. He was now spending what leisure the fighting gave him in a careful study of Homer. We gather that he had just finished re-reading the "Iliad" when the end came. On March 4, 1915, at Mesnil-les-Hurlus, a ball pierced his heart, splintering in its passage the cross of the Legion of Honour of which he was so proud. In his pocket was found his last letter, still unposted, in which he told his father of a fresh distinction for valour which he had just received, and in the course of which, with a manifest presentiment of his approaching end, he wrote, "Je mourrai, si Dieu veut, en bon chretien et en bon Francais."