This consciousness that he can no longer dispose of himself, at least for the finer spirit, must act as a great release. Having accepted his fate, and therefore willed it as the only possible choice for him, he becomes another person, a largely selfless person, a strangely older, calmer being capable of thinking and acting clearly, nobly. Once the great personal decision made, the resolve to forego life and happiness and personal achievement, a clogging burden of selfish considerations drop from within. So one can read the experience of those two young officers preserved in Henry Bordeaux's "Two Heroes." They were free as never before to do what lay before them,--their officers' duty,--simply, directly. Many things that they had previously valued seemed to have lost color, to have become trivial. They thought solely of acquitting themselves with, honor in what it was their fate to do. They were ready to obey because before death they were humble. They had begun to glimpse the blind mystery that is life, in which every one must needs act his part without questioning, with faith in its ultimate meaning, with the will to trust its end. They were brave because they were simple and single-hearted, selfless. They were strong because they disdained to be weak, having renounced all. If it were to be their fate to die unnoted, they were content with the satisfaction of having done what was expected of them. And if they died in glory, they were unaware of their honor, believing that they had done no more than any of their fellows would have done in the same opportunity.
Thus, having laid down their lives for the cause that commanded their faith and loyalty, they found their real lives--larger, more beautiful, stronger.... Not once, but many thousands of times, has this miracle happened! Their graves are strewn, singly and in groups, over every field of eastern France. They paid the debt, did their part little or great, unknown or glorified by men. Literally they have given their blood for the soil of their fathers' land.
We know that they have given much more than their blood to that soil. Just as at the call to arms, the selfish, the mean, the vicious qualities of these lives dropped from them in the freedom of sacrifice accepted, and in place of egotistic preoccupations rose once more to the surface of their natures the ancient virtues of their race, so in their going they left for the others who lived, who were to be born, a tremendous legacy of honor and noble responsibility. By watering the soil with their blood they have made it infinitely more precious for every human being that treads upon it. They have helped to make mere life more significant for those who remain to mourn them. It can never again be quite the same commonplace affair, so lightly, cheaply spent, as it had been before. They have not left behind them joy, but faith. And that is why the faces of the earnest living who are able to realize this sacrifice of youth have a grave sternness in them which touches even the most careless stranger. Something of the glory created by the dead and the wounded radiates out even to us in a distant, peaceful land....