doubtedly helps many a soldier to bear the grime and the discomfort of the war. It may sometimes lead to an unnecessary exaggeration of them. A clean, new uniform, for instance, is an object of suspicion. The wearer is likely to be taken for that most odious of all creatures, an embusqué.

A French soldier is also spoken of as a "blue," (bleu,) appropriate in view of the color of the new army uniform. The young soldier, who has been called up since the war began, is a "bluet," (bleuet,) and the familiar blue corn flower has become his emblem. Another and older term for one of these youngsters is a Marie-Louise. Strictly speaking, he is a recruit called up ahead of the usual time, but, of course, this is the case in respect to all the new classes mobilized during the present war. The word goes back to the marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise of Austria in 1810, when France had exhausted her men and was calling up boys for the army.

When a "bluet," or Marie-Louise, first takes the field, he is naturally the object of much good-natured chaff from the veterans. Pierre Falké, a French illustrator, has made a drawing of a smooth-faced youngster arriving at the front, where he is greeted by an underofficer, with a beard like a hedgehog's back, who says, sternly, "It's understood now that if by tomorrow you haven't a mustache, I'll give you four days' imprisonment."

The war seems to have made of the average soldier a philosopher and a fatalist, who jests at danger and radiates cheerfulness, but there are occasions when he does not live up to this part. One of them is when, on leave from the

So

trenches, he reaches the last day of his holiday and must return to the front. Then he loses his smile and his banter, and in soldier slang has the cafard. Literally, the word means cockroach.

The source of that word boche, an abbreviation of alboche or alleboche, has been a subject of discussion in France since the war brought the term into prominence. The most plausible explanation seems to be that, in French slang, it is not an infrequent device to substitute boche or oche for the final syllable of a word, with a view to treating it in a trivial or disdainful way, and that alleboche has been thus made from allemand, the recognized word for German.

The spirit of jest and raillery which animates the soldier at the front is expressed in the prevailing description of a shell as a marmite, which in normal life is a pot for cooking stew, and, by extension, the stew itself. Bullets are "prunes," (pruneaux.) A soldier refers to his bayonet affectionately as his "Rosalie," or, more slightingly, as a "fork" or toothpick." A machine gun is sometimes a moulin à café, or coffee grinder, and on other occasions a machine à découdre, that is, a machine to unsew, or an "unsewing machine."

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Of course, the French soldier is continually christening by new names the familiar objects of his daily life. The beef with which he is served is known as monkey," (singe,) while wine passes under a number of names, the commonest of which is pinard. The poets of the trenches know how to praise their pinard with all the enthusiasm, if not with the genius, of Omar Khayyám.

ing to leave for the front. For your dear sake I am writing this farewell, which you will read only if I die. Let it also be my adieu to papa, to my brothers, to all those who loved me in this world. Because in life my heart, in its love and gratitude to you, has always given you

its best thoughts, it is to you also that I desire to make known my last wishes.

* *

*

"You know the joys of my life have been poetry, art, and science. Many persons have loved me. To each of them you will give in remembrance of me some trifle that was mine and that you will yourself choose from the things that you care for least. I wish that they, too, should possess something of the friend who has vanished, to rise like the flame above the clouds, above the flesh, et ultra, (you remember my motto?) into the sun, into the soul of the universe. * * * You will therefore find herewith a list of names.

“Try, if you can, not to weep for me too much. Think that, even though I do not return, I am not dead. My body, the less important part of me, suffers, wears out, and dies; but not myself-I the soul, cannot die, because I come from God and must return to God. I was created for happiness and through the joy that underlies all suffering I must return to the happiness eternal. If I have been a little time the prisoner of my body, I am none the less eternal. My death is a liberation, the beginning of the true life, the return to the Infinite.

"So do not weep for me. If you think of the immortal beauty of the ideas to which my soul has willingly sacrificed my body, you will not weep. But if your mother heart weeps, let the tears flow: a mother's tears will always be sacred. May God keep account of them: they will be the stars of his crown. * **

"Be strong, little mother. From the beyond your son says good-bye to you, to papa, to the brothers, to all those who loved him-your son who has given his body to fight those who wished to extinguish the light of the world."

The story of the rare spirit that penned the foregoing lines has been told by the young man's lyceum teacher, Francesco Picco, in a brochure ("Breviario di guerra di uno studente," Turin, Paravia, 1917) containing long extracts from the young soldier's notes and letters. "Brilliantly cultivated," says the teacher, "young Valentini also possessed, along with a clear call for the natural sciences, certain wonderful artistic gifts. He had

made a collection of insects, and won public approval by an exhibit of his pastels and aquarelles. His style, flexible and expressive, was already formed. But he instantly abandoned his pen, his pencils, and his brushes and left for the war, filled with a sincere and joyous enthusi

asm.

He volunteered as a common soldier and was soon away in the Alps.

"The longer I stay here," he wrote, "the more I love the mountains. Their spell is slower than that of the sea, but it is deeper and more lasting. Every hour that passes, every cloud, every morning mist clothes the Alps in new beauty so great that even the rudest of our brave soldiers, peasants though they be, pause to look; it may be only an instant, but it is enough to prove that the soul never forgets its celestial origin, even if it be imprisoned in the roughest shell. The days follow each other calmly, uniformly serene. It seems as if the Autumn ought never to end. The divine solemnity of the nights is inexpressible, especially now that the moon fills them with soft enchantment. There are hours in the day when everything is so saturated with light, and when the silence is so profound that the light seems to cease, letting the silence blaze forth into the immense harmony." (Sept. 20.) "At nightfall," he wrote later, “when the fires redden the vast blue in the direction of the barracks, we get under way. At 10 o'clock I reach my tent, dead with fatigue, and happy, convinced that the world is beautiful."

Such was the life of Enzo Valentini at the front from the middle of July to the latter half of October, 1915. "I have not yet been in battle," he wrote to his teacher, but by the time the letter had been read he had fallen mortally wounded. His company, entering the trenches Oct. 17, had taken part in the ceaseless combats that raged about the Col di Lana. In the afternoon of the 22d came the assault upon the Sano di Mezzodi. When the turn of his platoon came, "beautiful and full of audacity, he was the first to dash from the trench, drawing after him all who hesitated," and making the mountains ring with the old Italian war cry of liberty, "Savoia! Italia!

He ran far forward without being touched by the infernal hail from the Austrian guns, paused to embrace his friend, Lieutenant Mayo, and then, still leading the charge, fell pierced by five shrapnel bullets. His comrades carried him back, dying, to a grotto, where surgeons dressed his wounds. The Lieutenant who helped to carry him, concludes his narrative thus:

"We laid him down on a litter before the grotto, amid the great rocks, under

the sombre vault of the sky, his face upturned to the stars. He was a little depressed, asked for a drink, and fainted; they carried him to the operating room and I never saw him again. I have been told that they carried him down the side of Mount Mesola to "his" little lake, and that he sleeps there in death. But for us he is still living in the glory of his youth, there on the Alps, waving his cap with an edelweiss flower in it, and crying, 'Savoia!'”

to Soldiers

war.

* * *

Women of France, I see you as if I were sitting by your side. The old whitehaired mother, the young wife whose swift, healthy blood colors her cheeks, the young girl obstinately secret over the anguish of her heart, the schoolgirl whose childhood has been ripened too soon by And I see, too, the table, a thing of art or a piece of kitchen furniture; the ink bottle, an antique gem or a humble bit of spattered glass; the paper from a peddler's cart, ruled off in naïve squares, or the beautiful sheets of tinted vellum, marked with a monogram; the rude pencil or the elegant pen. * * * I see these accessories of the letter to be written, and I see her who is about to write it. Will she kindly listen to me before tracing a line?

Frenchwoman, what are you going to write to the soldier who is bound to you

by ties of blood, by ties of love, and for whom your letter will be both something of yourself and something of the home? Oh! I know what comes first by instinct, before everything else I know the words that are inclosed in the first drop of ink or in the extreme point of your lead pencil: "How long the time is, and how I yearn to see you again!" That is what is burning in your thoughts and in your fingers. When you shall have written that, it seems to you that you will be a little comforted. Then your instinct will prompt you to depict the cruel void in the home left by the absent one, all that is going not so well, or not going at all, since he departed, all that weighs heavily upon the lives of women when the men are far away. To tell of these tears and troubles, is this not to remind him how indispensable he is, how much reason you have to miss him and to love him?

Finally, having described with all the troubled warmth of your heart what a desert you are living in, your instinct will impel you to conclude with a new and more ardent lament over this calamity of war, which leaves you so lonely-a long, heartrending, desolating wail, like that of a faithful dog that has been abandoned.

That is what you wish to write, is it

not? Well, that is just what should not be written if you do not wish to harm him who is to receive the letter and who loves you.

It is for him, not for you, that the letter ought to be written. It is not to solace you, but to help him to live his hard life. His life is dangerous almost without cessation, and when it does cease to be dangerous it often becomes more dreary. Almost everything around him conspires to use up his spirit and ruin his resistance. The thing to do is to send him strength, if you can; in any case, it is a sin to breathe weakness into him.

What then? Should one lie to him? No, women of France, the poilu wants no lies. Tell him the truth, but truth that is comforting; the little, happy things of the day and place, the winning of a school medal by the child, the fine health of the old folks, the solution of a problem that had worried you, the thriving appearance of a certain crop. A letter that begins with good news is like a visitor who smiles from the moment of entering the door. Afterward there will be time to tell the less comforting truths, but only the necessary ones, those which must be known without delay, which cannot wait for the home furlough. The rule is this: Never to tell the soldier at the front anything that will sadden him and that he does not need to know. To take away, without absolute necessity, a little of his courage is as bad as if you took away some of his blood.

Above all, avoid vague rumors, good or bad, which are based on nothing, and which are almost always harmful. At the time of the German attack on Verdun there were women who wrote from the distant Dordogne or from Brittany: They say Verdun is going to be taken.” What madness! They were writing that to the men who, in the ravines of Le Mort Homme, were driving back the barbarians with hand grenades! It was criminal, but it was also great foolishness. In like manner when the Paris factory girls, under the paternal eye of agents, sang gayly through the streets, "We want our twenty cents and the English vacation week," there were women in the provinces who wrote to the poilus on

the strength of burlesque tittle-tattle, "They say there is revolution in Paris." What a sinister fantasy! I may add that false" good news," such as "They say that the war is soon going to end," is scarcely less silly or injurious. What sadness, what deceptions have been promoted in this way, with the best of intentions, from behind the lines to the front, between two beings who love each other!

Women, tell the soldier only things that are certain.

The letter is finished, the information about events, people, the home, family affairs is given with sincerity, yet with the wish to omit nothing that is comforting, to defer as much as possible all disquieting news that can wait, and to abstain from all vague predictions, good or bad. With what shall you close?

Above all, I insist, not with this evident and sterile prayer:

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Ah, that this may end soon, and that you may return! Your soldier knows very well that you long for that, but if you must say it to him again, that is not the best way to do it. You should put it in some such form as this:

"The home and household are waiting for you, and are thinking only of you; but we, who are suffering less than you, wish to equal your patience and courage, for we know that peace can come only through patience and courage. All the rest is empty words. The home and the household are waiting for you; you continue to be everything here, the same as before, more than before. We are trying to keep it prosperous and inviting for the day of your return. Our hearts are more loving and tender than ever for you, and every hour of separation makes you more precious to us."

Say that you will say it much better than I and then drop the letter in the post box. You will thus have the joy of thinking that, thanks to it, the man who receives it will have a little comfort. He will read and reread its pages, each time feeling himself more secure, and when evening comes he will sleep more calmly. Think how, if your letter robbed him of rest or even spoiled one hour of sleep—