Excerpt from Three French Moralists: And the Gallantry of France All that has long been wearied out, 'and might even be forgotten, if the letters and journals of a great cloud of witnesses Were not fortunately extant. The record kept by the friends of Paul Lintier and those others whom I em presently to mention, and by innumerable persons to whose memory justice cannot here be done, will keep fresh in the history of France the idealism of a splendid generation. Now we see, and for a long time past have seen, a different attitude on the fields of Champagne and Picardy. There is no feather worn now in the cap, no white gloves grasp the sword the Saint Cyrien elegance is over and done with. There is no longer any declamation, any emphasis, any attaching of importance to form or rhetoric. The fervour and the emotion are there still, but they are kept in reserve, they are below the surface, at the bottom of the heart, as La Rochefoucauld puts it. Heroism is now restrained by a sense of the pro digious length and breadth of the contest, by the fact, at last patent to the most unthinking, that the war is an octopus which has wound its tentacles about every limb and every organ of the Vitality of France. A revelation of the overwhelming Violence of enormous masses of men has broken down the tradition of chivalry. War is now accepted with a sort of indifference, as a part of the day's work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.