Thus wrote Maurice Rostand in his memoirs published in 1948. Fifty years earlier, Edmond Rostand had exhorted young schoolboys at his alma mater to imitate the panache of Cyrano. There is certainly evidence to indicate that many young French men entering into battle during the First World War had taken this lesson to heart. Notwithstanding the hyperbolic nature of Rostand fils's comment and the hindsight involved, it is true that French soldiers took copies of Cyrano de Bergerac to the front with them and that they also performed the play in the trenches. Rostand himself regularly received letters from poilus (soldiers), who saw the great author as a national icon, indeed, an honorary uncle.

If Rostand was France's cherished elder statesman, his friend and fellow icon Sarah Bernhardt was her grande dame, a personification of France itself. Bernhardt, who by this time was in her seventies, lost a leg to amputation in 1915.