of the lowland inundated by the rain, a picture of the crumbling
trenches. The spectacle resembles a scene from the book of Genesis.
Germans and French are fleeing together from the scourge of the
elements, or are sinking pell-mell into a common grave. Some of these
castaways, taking refuge on ridges of mud that stand up amid the waters,
begin to awaken from their passivity, and a striking dialogue ensues
between the sufferers, like the strophe and antistrophe in a Greek
chorus. They are overwhelmed by excess of suffering. Even more are they
overwhelmed, "as if by a yet greater disaster," by the thought that in
days to come the survivors will be able to forget these ills.
"If only people would remember! If they would only remember, there would
be no more wars."
Suddenly, from all sides, rises the cry: "There must never be another
war."
Each in turn heaps insults upon war.
"Two armies fighting each other--that's like one great army committing
suicide."
One suggests, "It's all right if you win." But the others make answer:
"That's no good.--To win settles nothing.--What we need is to kill war."
"Then we shall have to go on fighting after the war?"--"Praps we
shall."--"But praps it won't be foreigners we shall be fighting?"--"May
be so. The peoples are fighting to-day to get rid of their
masters."--"Then one works for the Prussians too?"--"Oh well, we may
hope...."--"But we oughtn't to interfere with other folks'
business."--"Yes, yes, we ought to, for what you call other folks'
business is our own."
"What do people fight for?"--"No one knows what they fight for, but we
know whom they fight for. They fight for the pleasure of the few."
The soldiers reckon up these few: "the fighters, those born to power";
those who say, "the races hate one another"; those who say, "I grow fat
on the war"; those who say, "there always has been war and there always
will be"; those who say, "bow your head, and trust in God"; the
sabre-rattlers, the profiteers, the ghouls who batten on the spoils;
"the slaves of the past, the traditionalists, for whom an abuse has the
force of law because it is of old date."
"Such as these are your enemies quite as much as any of the German
soldiers who now share your wretchedness. The German soldiers are no
more than poor dupes odiously betrayed and brutalised, domesticated
beasts.... But the others are your enemies wherever they were born,
whatever the fashion in which they utter their names, and whatever the
language in which they lie. Look at them in the heavens above and on the
earth beneath! Look at them everywhere! Look well, till you know them,
that you may never forget their faces!"
Such is the wail of these armies. But the book closes with a note of
hope, with the unspoken oath of international brotherhood, what time a
rift forms in the black skies and a calm ray of light falls upon the
flooded plain.
* * * * *
One ray of sunlight does not make the sky clear, nor is the voice of one
soldier the voice of an army. The armies of to-day are nations; and in
such armies, as in every nation, there must doubtless conflict and
mingle many different currents. Barbusse's story is that of a single
squad, almost entirely composed of workers and peasants. But the fact
that among these humble folk, among those who, like the third estate in
'89, are nothing and shall be all,--that in this proletariat of the
armies there is obscurely forming an awareness of universal
humanity,--that so bold a voice can be raised from France,--that those
who are actually fighting can make a heroic effort to ignore environing
wretchedness and imminent death, to dream of the fraternal union of the
warring peoples,--I find in this a greatness which surpasses that of all
the victories, I find something whose poignant splendour will survive
the splendour of battle. I find something which will, I hope, put an end
to war.
_February, 1917._
"Journal de Genève," March 19, 1917.
XVI
AVE, CÆSAR, MORITURI TE SALUTANT
_Dedicated to the Heroic Onlookers in Safe Places._
In one of the scenes of his terrible and admirable book, _Under Fire_, a
record of experiences in the trenches of Picardy, dedicated "To the
memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119,"
Henri Barbusse depicts two privates going on leave to the neighbouring
town. They quit the hell of mud and blood; for months they have been
suffering unnamable tortures of body and mind; they now find themselves
among comfortable bourgeois who, being at a safe distance from the
front, are, of course, bursting with warlike enthusiasm. These
carpet-heroes welcome the two men as if they had just returned from a
wedding feast. No questions are asked concerning what goes on at the
front. The soldiers are told all about it. "It must be splendid, an
attack! These masses of men marching forward as to a revel; there's no
holding them; they die laughing!" All that our poilus can do is to hold
their tongues. One of them says resignedly to his companion: "_They_
know more than you do about war and all that goes on at the front. When
you get back, if you ever do, with your little bit of truth you will be
quite out of it amid that crowd of chatterers."
I do not believe that when the war is over, when all the soldiers have
returned home, they will so readily submit to being put in their places
by these braggarts of the rear. Already the real fighters are beginning
to speak in a singularly bitter and vengeful tone. Barbusse's book bears
powerful witness to the fact.
We have other testimonies from the front, less known but no less moving.
All of those to which I shall refer have been published. It is my rule,
as long as the war lasts, to make no use of personal confidences, oral
or written. Things I have been told by friends, known or unknown, are a
sacred trust. I shall not use them without special permission, nor until
the conditions make it safe. The testimonies I reproduce here have been
published in Paris, under a censorship which is extremely strict in the
case of the few newspapers that have remained independent. This proves
that they describe things that are widely known, things which it is
useless or impossible to conceal.
I leave the authors to speak for themselves. Comment is superfluous. The
tones are sufficiently clear.
* * * * *
Paul Husson, _L'Holocauste_ (a collection entitled _Vers et Prose_,
published by F. Lacroix, 19 rue de Tournon, Paris, January 10,
1917).--This is the note book of a soldier from the Ile de France. The
author "went to the front without enthusiasm, detesting war and devoid
of martial ardour. As a soldier he did what all the others did."
p. 19. "In the name of what superior moral principle are these struggles
imposed on us? Is it for the triumph of a race? What remains of the
glory of Alexander's soldiers or of Cæsar's? To fight, one must have
faith. A man must have faith that he is fighting in God's cause, in the
cause of some great justice; or else he must love war for its own sake.
But we have no faith; we do not love war and we know nothing about it.
Yet men fight and die believing neither in the cause of God nor in the
great justice; men who do not love war, and who die none the less with
their faces to the enemy.... Many, unawakened, go to their deaths
without thinking; but others die with anguish in their hearts, anguish
at the futile sacrifice and at their realisation of the madness of
men."
p. 20. In the trenches. "Everyone was cursing the war, everyone hated
it. Some were saying: 'Frenchmen or Germans, they are men like
ourselves, they suffer as we do in body and in mind. Do not they, too,
dream of the home-coming?' Passing through a village and seeing a man
unfit for service because he had lost two fingers, the soldiers had said
to him: 'You lucky devil; you needn't go to the war!'"
p. 21. "I am not one of those who believe in the coming of Beauty,
Goodness, and Justice.... Nor am I one of those who regild the idols of
the past, symbols of obscure forces which it behoves us to worship in
silence. I am neither submissive nor a believer.--I love Pity, for we
are unfortunates, and it does us good to be solaced, even if we be
executioners and butchers. If we do not need consolation for the ills we
are suffering, we need consolation for the ills we have done or shall
do. We need solace because we have to make others suffer, to kill and be
killed."
p. 22. "Lying prone, while the shells whistle overhead, I think. Die!
Why should we die on this battlefield?... Die for civilisation, for the
freedom of the nations? Words, words, words. We are dying because men
are wild beasts killing one another. We are dying for bales of
merchandise; we are dying for squabbles about money.--Art, civilisation,
and culture are equally beautiful, be they Romance, Teutonic, or Slav.
We should love them all!"
p. 59. "With Baudelaire, we detest the weapons of warriors.... The great
epoch was the one in which we were living before the war. The flapping
of the banners, the long files of soldiers, the roaring of the guns, and
the blare of the bugles--these things cannot inspire us with admiration
for collective murder and for the monstrous enslavement of the
peoples.... Young men lying to-day in your graves, they strew flowers on
your tombs and proclaim you immortal. What to you are empty words? They
will pass even more quickly than you have passed! It is true that, in
any case, within a few years you would have ceased to be. But these few
years of life would have been your universe and your strength."
* * * * *
André Delemer, _Waiting_ (leading article in the fourth issue, dated
March, 1917, of the review "Vivre," edited by André Delemer and Marcel
Millet, 68 boulevard Rochechouart, Paris).
"If the patriarch of Yasnaya Polyana had been granted a few additional
years, superadded to a life already long and full of grief, he would
have shuddered before the tragedy of the younger generations. Tolstoi
was a man of infinite compassion, and his heart would have been torn
with suffering as he contemplated our fate, the fate of those who were
suddenly thrust into this colossal war, those who had proclaimed their
love for life, those whose faith in the future had seemed an infallible
talisman, those who had fervently uttered this great cry of vital
affirmation:
"'To live out our youth'--how poignant is the irony of these words; what
vistas do they suddenly evoke! All the happiness we have failed to
secure, the joys of which we have been deprived, because one evening the
order came to us to shoulder our rifles! In twenty years' time people
will write about what we have suffered, a suffering which may be
compared with the Passion; but we die daily. One galling privilege is
ours, that we have lived through a convulsion, that we have been the
ransom of past errors and a pledge for the tranquillity of the future.
This mission is at once splendid and cruel; simultaneously it exalts and
revolts; for the spasm through which we are passing wounds us and
immolates us!... To-day the poor quivering refuse raked from the furnace
knows all the bitterness of the laurels. Such pride as we retain makes
it impossible for us to accept an illusory and transient glory. We know
the falsity of attitudinising, and we have probed the emptiness of
certain dreams. The fire has licked up the scenery, has reduced the
tinsel to ashes. We are now face to face with ourselves, perhaps more
fully awakened, certainly more sincere and more disillusioned, for we
have secret wounds to heal and great sufferings to lull in the shade!
The passing of the days is like wormwood in the mouth.... How painful
will be the transition, and how numerous will be the waifs! Already a
fresh anguish oppresses our minds; it is this that will afflict when the
day comes for the return of those who are still fighting. Terrible will
be the anguish as we gaze upon the ruins and the dead encumbering the
battlefields! How it will cramp the young wills and annihilate the fine
courage of their souls! Troubled and confused epoch, wherein men will be
doggedly seeking safer roads and less cruel idols!...
"Young man of my generation, it is you of whom I think as I write these
lines, you whom I do not know, though I know that you are still fighting
or that you have returned broken from the trenches. I have met you in
the street, wearing an almost shamefaced air, doing your best to conceal
some infirmity; but in your eyes I have read the intensity of your
inward agony. I know the terrible hours through which you have lived,
and I know that those who have endured like trials end by having like
souls.... I know your doubts; I share your uneasiness. I know how you
are obsessed with the question, 'What next?' You, too, are asking what
can be seen from the heights, and what is going to happen. I understand
your 'What next?'--'To live!' You sing this straight to the hearts of
all of us. 'To live!' You embody the cry of our cruel epoch. I have
heard this cry, simple yet tremendous, from the lips of the wounded who
were aware of the oncoming footsteps of victorious death. I have heard
it in the trenches, murmured low like a prayer.--Young man, this is a
grievous hour. You are a survivor from the ghastly war; your vitality
must affirm itself; you must live. Stripped of all falsehoods, freed
from every mirage, you find yourself alone in your nakedness; before you
stretches the great white road. Onward, the distance beckons. Leave
behind you the old world, and the idols of yesterday. March forward
without turning to listen to the outworn voices of the past!"
* * * * *
In the name of these young men and their brothers who have been
sacrificed in all the lands of the world engaged in mutual slaughter, I
throw these cries of pain in the faces of the sacrificers. May the blood
sting their faces!
"Revue mensuelle," Geneva, May, 1917.
XVII
AVE, CÆSAR ...
THOSE WHO WISH TO LIVE SALUTE THEE
In an earlier article I referred to the writings of certain French
soldiers. After _Under Fire_, by Henri Barbusse, _L'Holocauste_ by Paul
Husson and the poignant meditations of André Delemer gave expression to
their touching and profoundly human cry. In place of the scandalous
idealisations of the war, manufactured far from the front--crude Epinal
images, grotesque and false--they give us the stern face of truth, they
show us the martyrdom of young men slaughtering one another to gratify
the frenzy of criminal elders.
I wish to-day to make known another of these voices, more acerb, more
virile, more vengeful, than the stoical bitterness of Husson and the
despairing tenderness of Delemer. It is that of our friend Maurice
Wullens, editor of "Les Humbles, the literary review of the primary
school teachers."
He was severely wounded, and has just been given the war cross with the
following honourable mention:
"Wullens (Maurice), soldier of the second class in the eighth company of
the seventy-third infantry regiment, a good soldier to whom fear was
unknown, dangerously wounded during the defence, against a superior
force, of a post which had been entrusted to him."
In "demain," for August, 1917, we find the wonderful story of the fight
in which this man was wounded and was then given brotherly help by the
German soldiers. As he lay gasping, in expectation of the death-blow, a
lad leaned over him smiling, holding out a hand, and saying in German,
"Comrade, how do you feel?" And when the wounded man doubted his enemy's
sincerity, the latter went on: "Oh, it's all right, comrade! We'll be
good comrades! Yes, yes, good comrades." The tale is dedicated:
"To my brother, the anonymous Würtemberg soldier who, in Grurie Wood, on
December 30, 1914, withheld his hand when about to slay me, generously
saved my life;
"To the (enemy) friend who, in Darmstadt hospital, cared for me like a
father;
"And to the comrades E., K., and B., who spoke to me as man to man."
* * * * *
This soldier without fear and without reproach, returning to France,
discovered there the braggart army of the scribblers at the rear. Their
venom and their stupidity infuriated him. But instead of taking refuge,
like many of his comrades, in disdainful silence, he did what he had
always done, and turned bravely to the attack upon "a superior force."
In May, 1916, he became editor of a small magazine, entitled "Les
Humbles," but which somewhat belies its name by the ruggedness of its
accents and by its refusal to allow its voice to be stifled. He boldly
declares:
"Emerged from the whirlwind of the war, but still struggling in its
eddies, we do not propose to resign ourselves to the environing
mediocrity, to content ourselves with the servile utterance of official
platitudes.... We are weary of the daily and systematic stuffing of
people's heads with official pabulum.... We have not abdicated any of
our rights, not even our hopes."[37]
Each issue of the magazine was a fresh proof of his independence. At
this juncture, reviews edited by young thinkers were springing up
everywhere from among the ruins. That of Wullens took the leading place,
owing to his force of character and his indomitable frankness.
He found a great friend in Han Ryner, who amid the European barbarians,
amid the prevailing chaos, exhibits the calm of an exiled Socrates.
Gabriel Belot, the engraver, another sage, who, knowing nothing of
mental discord or ill-will, dwells on the Ile St. Louis as if the two
beautiful arms of the Seine sheltered him from the troubles of the
world, lights up the most sombre of articles with the peace of his
radiant designs.[38] Other friends, younger men, soldiers like Wullens,
rallied to support him in the struggle for the truth. For instance,
Marcel Lebarbier, poet and critic.
The most recent issue of "Les Humbles" contains excellent work. Wullens
begins with a tribute to the rare French writers who have shown
themselves during the last three years to be free-spirited humanists: to
Henri Guilbeaux and his periodical "demain";[39] to P. J. Jouve, author
of _Vous êtes des hommes_ and of _Poème contre le grand crime_, whose
sympathetic spirit vibrates and trembles like a tree to the wind of all
the pains and all the angers of mankind; to Marcel Martinet, one of the
greatest lyricists whom the war (the horror of the war) has brought
forth, the writer of _Temps maudits_, a poem which will for ever bear
witness to the suffering and the revolt of a free spirit; to Delemer,
that moving writer; and to a few recently founded magazines. The editor
of "Les Humbles" goes on to clear the ground of what he terms "the false
literary vanguard," telling the chauvinist writers what he thinks of
them. This lettered poilu, a blunt fellow, does not mince matters:
"I have come from this war whose praises you are singing--I who
write.... I have my honourable mention, my war cross: I never wear it. I
spent seven months as a war prisoner, before being sent home
incapacitated by my wound. I could flood you with war anecdotes. I have
no desire to do anything of the kind. Nevertheless I am writing a book
on the war. I compress into it all that my heart has felt, all that one
man has suffered during these months of unspeakable horror, and likewise
all the joy he experienced when he came to perceive, by rare flashes of
light, that humanity still lives, that kindliness still exists, on both
sides of the Rhine, the world over. You, M. B., sing 'The war in which
it is beautiful and sweet to die for our country!' All those who have
faced this death will tell you that while it may have been necessary, it
was neither beautiful nor sweet.--You glorify the sublime and tattered
tricolour: blue is the blouse of our workmen; white is the cornette of
our splendid sisters of charity.... You will excuse me for cutting you
short before coming to the red, for my unaided memory here suffices me:
the red blood of my wounds flowing and clotting on the frozen mud of
Argonne that terrible morning in December, 1914; the red mud of
pestilential slaughter-houses; the shattered heads of dead comrades;
mangled stumps irrigated with peroxide solution so that the living
corruption was half hidden by bloodstained foam; red visions glimpsed
everywhere in these ghastly and tragical days, you chase one another
through the mind tumultuous and hateful. Like the poet, I would fain
say, 'A very little more and my heart would break!'"
To bring his philippic to a close he quotes another soldier-author, G.
Thuriot-Franchi, who, in the same fighting style, with no pretty phrases
and with no concealments, compels these Hectors of the study to swallow
their boasts:[40]
"Men who are too young or too old, poets in pyjamas, jealous doubtless
of the strategists in slippers, regard it as their duty to be lavish in
patriotic song. The trumpets of rhetoric blare; invective has become the
chosen method of argument; a thousand blue-stockings, under cover of the
Red Cross, when one chats with them out strolling, make a parade of
spartan sentiments, amazonian impulses. Whence the plethora of sonnets,
odes, stanzas, etc., in which, to speak the jargon of the ordinary
critic 'the most exquisite sensibility is happily wedded to the purest
patriotism.'--For God's sake leave us alone; you know nothing about it;
shut up!"
Thus does a soldier from the front imperiously impose silence upon the
false warriors of the rear. If they are fond of the "poilu" style, they
will find plenty of it here. Those who have just been looking death in
the face have certainly earned the right to speak the plain truth to
these "amateurs" of death--the death of others.
"Revue mensuelle," Geneva, October, 1917.
XVIII
MEN IN BATTLE[41]
[_THE MAN OF SORROWS_]
Art is stained with blood. French blood, German blood, it is always the
Man of Sorrows. Yesterday we were listening to the sublime and gloomy
plaint which breathes from Barbusse's _Under Fire_. To-day come the yet
more heartrending accents of _Menschen im Krieg_ (Men in Battle).
Although they hail from the other camp, I will wager that most of our
bellicose readers in France and Navarre will flee from them with stopped
ears. For these tones would be a shock to their sensibilities.
_Under Fire_ is more tolerable to these carpet-warriors. There reigns
over Barbusse's book a specious impersonality. Despite the multitude and
the sharp outline of the figures on his stage, not one of them has a
commanding role. We see no hero of romance. Consequently, the reader
feels less intimately associated with the hardships recounted on every
page; and these hardships, like their causes, have an elemental
character. The immensity of the fate which crushes, lessens the agony of
those who are crushed. This war fresco resembles the vision of a
universal deluge. The human masses execrate the scourge, but accept it
passively. _Under Fire_ growls forth a threat for the future, but has no
menace for the present. Settling-day is postponed until after peace has
been signed.
In _Men in Battle_, the court is sitting; mankind is in the witness-box,
giving testimony against the butchers. Mankind? Not so. A few men, a few
chance victims, whose sufferings, since they are individual, appeal to
us more strongly than those of the crowd. We follow the ravages these
sufferings make in tortured body and lacerated heart; we wed these
sufferings; they become our own. Nor does the witness strain after
objectivity. He is the impassioned pleader who, just delivered panting
from the rack, cries for vengeance. The writer of the book now under
review is newly come from hell; he gasps for breath; his visions chase
him; pain's claws have left their mark upon him. Andreas Latzko[42]
will, in future days, keep his place in the first rank among the
witnesses who have left a truthful record of Man's Passion during 1914,
the year of shame.
* * * * *
The work is written in the form of six separate stories, united only by
a common sentiment of suffering and revolt. There is no logical plan in
the arrangement of the six war episodes. The first is entitled "Off to
War"; the last, "Home Again." Between, we have "Baptism of Fire," a
picture of wounded men; and "A Hero's Death." The centre piece is
devoted to "The Victor," the great general, the master of the feast, the
responsible and beflattered chief. In the last three stories, physical
pain exposes its hideous countenance like that of Medusa mutilated. The
two opening stories deal with mental pain. The hero of the centre piece
sees neither the one nor the other; his glory is throned on both; he
finds life good, and war even better. From the first page to the last,
revolt mutters. But on the last page revolt culminates in a murder; a
soldier, back from the front, kills a war profiteer.
I give an analysis of the six stories.