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Show I ARE YOU WORTHY TO RECEIVE H BETTERS LIKE THESE. Better editorials than I or any other editor can write are being written by the young men who, for an ideal, are giving their lives in France. ,....- I want to quote to you one or two letters from an article published in the Atlantic Monthly. The writers k-were all of them boys under twenty-one; all of them are K Just care-free, more or less thoughtless boys before .the war ; but transformed by the war into men of soul and -vision. Men who could write letters like these: From Alfred Eugene Cazalis, who gave up his life at H nineteen: H More and more, in the face of all those who 1 have struggled and fallen, in the presence of the t mighty effort which has been made, my thoughts H turn to the France of tomorrow to the divine H France which is bound to be. I could not fight on f if I did not hope for the birth of that France, so richly deserving that men would kill one another H to die for her sake. I j It is not for death I would prepare myself, but H j for life. For life eternal, no doubt, but for the more f immediate matter of earthly life as well. When H . war is over and I go home, I must be a .changed H being. I shall have no right to be as I formerly Was or the lesson will all have been in vain. H Through the war mankind must be reborn, and is . m it not our duty to be reborn first of all? H A grave moment is at hand. There is to be a H F bayonet charge. If I do not come back, one thing H only I ask: may the tiny flame of consecrated H forces which was in me descend upon those whom H I loved and who loved me upon all my comrades ' f' in faith and in toil. H A few days later, side by side with his lieutenant in m J bayonet charge, he died. H Jean Rival, nineteen years old, wrote this letter to a M lyoung kinswoman: H I feel within me such an intensity of life, such M a need of loving and of being loved, of unfolding, B of admiring, of drawing joyous breaths, that I can H not believe that death will lay hands on me. And M yet, I know well that commanding a section is dead- H ly perilous. If death should be my lot, B 1 count on you, dear J, to console my parents. B You must tell them that I died facing the enemy, B protecting France with my body, and that they did M not bring their son to his twentieth year in vain, M since they have given our country one more de- M fender. Tell them that my blood has not flowed m Xbr nothing, and that the countless tragic sacrifices M of individual lives will save the life of France. B And this, the day before he died: m Dear J : Tomorrow at dawn we shall charge m the German lines. The attack will probably finish K me. On the evening before this great day, which B may be my last, I remind you of your promise. M Keep up my mother's courage. For a week or fl more she will receive no news. Tell her that when M an advance is at hand no soldier can write to his K loved ones; he must content himself with thinking m about them. And if time goes by and she hears 111 nnthinir nf mo. let her live in hone: keen un her B ' courage. Then, if you learn at last that I have B fallen on the field of honor, let your heart speak H those words that will bring her solace. H This morning I attended mass and took com- H munion some metres back from the trenches. If B I die, I shall die as a Christian and a French- H man. H ; God guard be to tho very end. But if my blood H j God guard me to the very end. But if my blood B 0 Lord. H I pity the man or woman who can read a letter like H tthat without a tightening of the throat, a stirring deep H anside his or her spiritual self. H Our own boys will be writing letters six months from H mow. We will find it difficult to recognize the writers H sis tho same happy-go-lucky youngsters whom we knew H at home. War will have lifted them out of themselves, Bi'ii !have created in them a sdnse of the great realities of life that will astonish us. Are we, who stay behind, to be swept also by this purifying fire ? Will the war which transforms the hearts-of hearts-of the men who fight it, cleanse also the hearts of those who stay behind? . Will this nation, which has so completely given itself to materialism in the past few years, now make itself worthy of the devotion of those who are about to lay down their lives for it? This is a question for every individual man and woman to answer for himself. What can I do to lift my own life to a higher level than it has ever reached before? What can I do to make the real America correspond to the ideal of America which her sons will carry with them when they follow their captains "over the top"? Bruce Barton, Editor of Every Week. |