And now (after a passing glance at an unchanged, inconspicuous André Gide) we approach the name of Péguy. Péguy was killed in September, 1914, as he was leading his men into action at the Battle of the Marne. And as the flash of a fusee lights up the nocturnal battlefield, so that tragic illumination of his death reveals the true meaning of much that was obscure and easy to misunderstand in his gift. I own that I have almost entirely rewritten the chapter I had given to Péguy. I did not--do not--fully like or appreciate a genius now generally accepted as such in France, but I had composed my first sketch in a mood of freakish pleasantry, which might be permitted towards a man much younger than myself, with a great future before him, but which is not possible in speaking of a poet, dead, who died a martyr and a hero. It is perhaps the fault of a classical education which, if it was not very extensive at least sank deep, (inclining me especially to grace and measure, to something exquisitely right, exactly true)--it is perhaps the fault of a taste nourished on Sophocles and Plato that these ultra-lyrical modern geniuses, with their wild reiterations, their violence, their volume, their hoarse abundance, more often shock or dazzle me than please.... Péguy, Claudel, carry me off my feet, drown me, drench me in their billows full of sand and pebbles, and leave me gasping: ‘Oh, for the well beneath the poplar in the field!’ Yet Péguy and Claudel are the names which must be most profoundly considered in this little book, for they represent a generation. I have placed in Péguy’s train, as witnesses and mourners, his friend Ernest Psichari, his fellow-officer, Émile Nolly, and the two really considerable writers who have risen into eminence during the war: Henri Barbusse and Georges Duhamel. Three of our four ladies have passed through the time of stress unscathed nor greatly left their impress on the angry world--not that they have not published in due course their poems or their novels. But these novels and poems are chiefly reflections from a mirror fully occupied by their own image. Madame Colette publishes to-day _Mitsou_; the tender irony and charming grace of her style are the same as of old--Mitsou is an enchanting little savage of the music-hall stage--Madame Tinayre has given us a novel which is an agreeable fresco of the day of mobilisation in Paris. Madame de Noailles has scattered a score of lyrics, like a handful of rose leaves and cypress-buds, over the pages of half a dozen reviews, but the terrible enigma--‘Must I grow old like the others? And, if not, must I die?’ is her most intimate preoccupation, and blurs in her eyes the great spectacle of the war.