This was Péguy’s firm conviction: no duty so important as the military duty! When the war broke out, man of forty as he was and father of a struggling family--man, too, much engrossed and overworked by his triple occupation as poet, prose-writer, and publisher--he changed from the Territorials into a regiment sent on active service to the front. ‘No man hath greater love than this....’ Thanks to the recital of one of his soldiers, Victor Bondon, we can witness the fall--or rather I would say the assumption--of the poet and brother of Joan of Arc. For he too fell in driving the invader out of France! There is an extraordinary breath of heroism in this page of an unknown private soldier relating the end of a great man. I cannot do better than translate it here, with some abridgments and suppressions:-- ‘On the 5th September in the morning, the 55th division of the army of Paris was ranged on the left of the forces which had received the general order, “Die where you stand, rather than retreat.” In front of us, on the wooded hills that reach from Dammartin to Meaux, von Klück and his Boches, who had followed us step by step from Roye during our terrible retreat, lay in wait for us, hidden in their trenches, like beasts of prey. ‘The heat was tropical; the battalion halted a moment at the pretty village of Nantouillet. I see again, with the mind’s eye, our dear Lieutenant Péguy, seated on a stone, white with dust (as indeed we all were), covered with sweat, his beard rough and shaggy, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez. Such he was, as we had seen him in Lorraine during the retreat, impervious to fatigue, brave under a storm of shells, going from one to another of his men with a cheering word for each throughout the whole length of our company (the 19th), sharing our rations (and we eat as a rule one day in three), never complaining despite his forty years, as young as the youngest, knowing just the right way to take the Parisians that we were, heartening the discouraged with a word, satirical enough sometimes, but more often a friendly quizzical quip, always brave, always an example; ah, yes! I see again our dear lieutenant, bidding us fight in hope, raising our flagging spirits in an hour when many were near despairing, with the assurance of his own absolute confidence in our final victory.’