Since then Nolly had learned the words that save. He was, I think, no ardent Catholic, like Psichari or Péguy; but his faith in the destinies of human society, his conviction that the army of France is indeed a Salvation Army, not only for Frenchmen, but for his dear Senegalese, for black, red, and yellow--every shade of skin or soul--gave him the persuasiveness of the men of Napoleon’s army. And he went out into the highways and the by-ways and compelled them to come in. And now these young men--so much younger than I, who sit by my lonely fire and remember them--these young men with a future, as it seemed, are all dead for their country and for the faith that was in them. Their bodies lie in wayside tombs, or in the middle of the fields, with a rough cross over them, and a name traced in ink that the autumn rains efface. And that name, which was beginning to shine in the literary record of their nation, that name which they looked to burnish in the course of the next thirty years, can now receive no further lustre. From the personal, individualist point of view, their fame is sacrificed, even as their lives are sacrificed. They are mulcted in their works, as in their race, for, among them all, only Péguy was a father. And, so far as they knew, their immense suffering and sacrifice was in vain. They lie, perhaps, among those dreadful heaps which the shell at once agglomerates and scatters, and from which all individual difference is wiped out. So many of them! The saddest fate of all, I think, was Émile Nolly’s--to die so slowly and so painfully of his wounds, in hospital, while the fight in which he longed to join was raging, still undecided. HENRI BARBUSSE Before the war, the name of Henri Barbusse was practically unknown. And now he is, of all French writers, the most widely read: he is the Prince of Best-sellers. Bourget has his tens of thousands, his scores of thousands; but _Le Feu_ is in its 250th thousand, _L’Enfer_ in its 200th thousand, and _Clarté_ (published in January, 1919) had reached its fortieth thousand by the beginning of March. And all these novels have appeared in war time, despite the endless difficulties of book-production. What is the reason of this prodigious success? How is it that Barbusse, who was an unknown young poet in 1913, should satisfy to-day the souls of so vast a public. One may say that he has inherited the immense unsatisfied public left desolate since the death of Zola. He has most of Zola’s qualities, imagination; a tragic realism that impresses an image lastingly on the reader’s brain; and a sort of public passion, rather than public spirit, that makes him feel other men’s grievances and wrongs more keenly than his own. Moreover, he has all Zola’s faults--and they are of a kind that do not prejudice the sale of a book--he has Zola’s filth, his sexual obsession; Zola’s anarchism, and his Utopias; Zola’s abuse of horror in the evocation of physical torture.