A young lieutenant, fresh from the Polytechnique, the son of one of my friends, fell in with Alain-Fournier during those months of victory and retreat on the frontier of Lorraine. The two young men, no less ardent in their intellectual energy than in their military theories, recognised each other as kindred spirits; with a third (a young pastor, I think, or the son of a Protestant pastor) they used to meet o’ nights, their day’s work done, in a broken-down military motor car, wrecked by the side of the road. I like to think of the three young officers, on those August nights--the immense French camp asleep all round them--as they sat till the dawn broke, like gipsies in their van, eagerly talking _de omni re scibili_. In the daytime they generally saw little of each other; but, on August 22, one of the two others, marching to the front, met Alain-Fournier and his men going in a contrary direction. ‘Ordered to the rear! (he called out); no luck! Au revoir!‘; and he passed on. It chanced that that day’s engagement was a particularly murderous one, but the two friends when they met at night felt no anxiety about the third of their accustomed party, deeming him safe. And yet, when the dead were counted and buried, there was one figure, the head bashed in, whose limbs and hands bore so great a resemblance to their friend that the young men felt a chill presentiment. They looked for the badge of identity; a wicked bayonet-thrust had driven it into the breast. So haunting was their surmise that they cut it out; but they could not decipher the number on the battered, bloodstained plaque. Since then, unbroken silence: Alain-Fournier is among the ‘missing.’