Arrears and Aristocrats.
Indeed, as to the general outlook of things, Bouillé himself
augurs not well of it. The French Army, ever since those old
Bastille days, and earlier, has been universally in the
questionablest state, and growing daily worse. Discipline, which
is at all times a kind of miracle, and works by faith, broke down
then; one sees not with that near prospect of recovering itself.
The Gardes Françaises played a deadly game; but how they won it,
and wear the prizes of it, all men know. In that general
overturn, we saw the Hired Fighters refuse to fight. The very
Swiss of Château-Vieux, which indeed is a kind of French Swiss,
from Geneva and the Pays de Vaud, are understood to have
declined. Deserters glided over; Royal-Allemand itself looked
disconsolate, though stanch of purpose. In a word, we there saw
_Military Rule_, in the shape of poor Besenval with that
convulsive unmanageable Camp of his, pass two martyr days on the
Champ-de-Mars; and then, veiling itself, so to speak, “under the
cloud of night,” depart “down the left bank of the Seine,” to
seek refuge elsewhere; _this_ ground having clearly become too
hot for it.
But what new ground to seek, what remedy to try? Quarters that
were “uninfected:” this doubtless, with judicious strictness of
drilling, were the plan. Alas, in all quarters and places, from
Paris onward to the remotest hamlet, is infection, is seditious
contagion: inhaled, propagated by contact and converse, till the
dullest soldier catch it! There is speech of men in uniform with
men not in uniform; men in uniform read journals, and even write
in them.[306] There are public petitions or remonstrances,
private emissaries and associations; there is discontent,
jealousy, uncertainty, sullen suspicious humour. The whole French
Army, fermenting in dark heat, glooms ominous, boding good to no
one.
So that, in the general social dissolution and revolt, we are to
have this deepest and dismallest kind of it, a revolting
soldiery? Barren, desolate to look upon is this same business of
revolt under all its aspects; but how infinitely more so, when it
takes the aspect of military mutiny! The very implement of rule
and restraint, whereby all the rest was managed and held in
order, has become precisely the frightfullest immeasurable
implement of misrule; like the element of Fire, our indispensable
all-ministering servant, when it gets the _mastery_, and becomes
conflagration. Discipline we called a kind of miracle: in fact,
is it not miraculous how one man moves hundreds of thousands;
each unit of whom it may be loves him not, and singly fears him
not, yet has to obey him, to go hither or go thither, to march
and halt, to give death, and even to receive it, as if a Fate had
spoken; and the word-of-command becomes, almost in the literal
sense, a magic-word?
Which magic-word, again, if it be once _forgotten;_ the spell of
it once broken! The legions of assiduous ministering spirits rise
on you now as menacing fiends; your free orderly arena becomes a
tumult-place of the Nether Pit, and the hapless magician is rent
limb from limb. Military mobs are mobs with muskets in their
hands; and also with death hanging over their heads, for death is
the penalty of disobedience and they have disobeyed. And now if
all mobs are properly frenzies, and work frenetically with mad
fits of hot and of cold, fierce rage alternating so incoherently
with panic terror, consider what your military mob will be, with
such a conflict of duties and penalties, whirled between remorse
and fury, and, for the hot fit, loaded fire-arms in its hand! To
the soldier himself, revolt is frightful, and oftenest perhaps
pitiable; and yet so dangerous, it can only be hated, cannot be
pitied. An anomalous class of mortals these poor Hired Killers!
With a frankness, which to the Moralist in these times seems
surprising, they have sworn to become machines; and nevertheless
they are still partly men. Let no prudent person in authority
remind them of this latter fact; but always let force, let
injustice above all, stop short clearly on _this_ side of the
rebounding-point! Soldiers, as we often say, do revolt: were it
not so, several things which are transient in this world might be
perennial.
Over and above the general quarrel which all sons of Adam
maintain with their lot here below, the grievances of the French
soldiery reduce themselves to two, First that their Officers are
Aristocrats; secondly that they cheat them of their Pay. Two
grievances; or rather we might say one, capable of becoming a
hundred; for in that single first proposition, that the Officers
are Aristocrats, what a multitude of corollaries lie ready! It is
a bottomless ever-flowing fountain of grievances this; what you
may call a general raw-material of grievance, wherefrom
individual grievance after grievance will daily body itself
forth. Nay there will even be a kind of comfort in getting it,
from time to time, so embodied. Peculation of one’s Pay! It is
embodied; made tangible, made denounceable; exhalable, if only in
angry words.
For unluckily that grand fountain of grievances does exist:
Aristocrats almost all our Officers necessarily are; they have it
in the blood and bone. By the law of the case, no man can pretend
to be the pitifullest lieutenant of militia, till he have first
verified, to the satisfaction of the Lion-King, a Nobility of
four generations. Not Nobility only, but four generations of it:
this latter is the improvement hit upon, in comparatively late
years, by a certain War-minister much pressed for
commissions.[307] An improvement which did relieve the
over-pressed War-minister, but which split France still further
into yawning contrasts of Commonalty and Nobility, nay of new
Nobility and old; as if already with your new and old, and then
with your old, older and oldest, there were not contrasts and
discrepancies enough;—the general clash whereof men now see and
hear, and in the singular whirlpool, all contrasts gone together
to the bottom! Gone to the bottom or going; with uproar, without
return; going every where save in the Military section of things;
and there, it may be asked, can they hope to continue always at
the top? Apparently, not.
It is true, in a time of external Peace, when there is no
fighting but only drilling, this question, How you rise from the
ranks, may seem theoretical rather. But in reference to the
Rights of Man it is continually practical. The soldier has sworn
to be faithful not to the King only, but to the Law and the
Nation. Do our commanders love the Revolution? ask all soldiers.
Unhappily no, they hate it, and love the Counter-Revolution.
Young epauletted men, with quality-blood in them, poisoned with
quality-pride, do sniff openly, with indignation struggling to
become contempt, at our Rights of Man, as at some newfangled
cobweb, which shall be brushed down again. Old officers, more
cautious, keep silent, with closed uncurled lips; but one guesses
what is passing within. Nay who knows, how, under the plausiblest
word of command, might lie Counter-Revolution itself, sale to
Exiled Princes and the Austrian Kaiser: treacherous Aristocrats
hoodwinking the small insight of us common men?—In such manner
works that general raw-material of grievance; disastrous; instead
of trust and reverence, breeding hate, endless suspicion, the
impossibility of commanding and obeying. And now when this second
more tangible grievance has articulated itself universally in the
mind of the common man: Peculation of his Pay! Peculation of the
despicablest sort does exist, and has long existed; but, unless
the new-declared Rights of Man, and all rights whatsoever, be a
cobweb, it shall no longer exist.
The French Military System seems dying a sorrowful suicidal
death. Nay more, citizen, as is natural, ranks himself against
citizen in this cause. The soldier finds audience, of numbers and
sympathy unlimited, among the Patriot lower-classes. Nor are the
higher wanting to the officer. The officer still dresses and
perfumes himself for such sad unemigrated _soirée_ as there may
still be; and speaks his woes,—which woes, are they not Majesty’s
and Nature’s? Speaks, at the same time, his gay defiance, his
firm-set resolution. Citizens, still more Citizenesses, see the
right and the wrong; not the Military System alone will die by
suicide, but much along with it. As was said, there is yet
possible a deepest overturn than any yet witnessed: that deepest
_up_turn of the black-burning sulphurous stratum whereon all
rests and grows!
But how these things may act on the rude soldier-mind, with its
military pedantries, its inexperience of all that lies off the
parade-ground; inexperience as of a child, yet fierceness of a
man and vehemence of a Frenchman! It is long that secret
communings in mess-room and guard-room, sour looks, thousandfold
petty vexations between commander and commanded, measure every
where the weary military day. Ask Captain Dampmartin; an
authentic, ingenious literary officer of horse; who loves the
Reign of Liberty, after a sort; yet has had his heart grieved to
the quick many times, in the hot South-Western region and
elsewhere; and has seen riot, civil battle by daylight and by
torchlight, and anarchy hatefuller than death. How insubordinate
Troopers, with drink in their heads, meet Captain Dampmartin and
another on the ramparts, where there is no escape or side-path;
and make military salute punctually, for we look calm on them;
yet make it in a snappish, almost insulting manner: how one
morning they “leave all their chamois shirts” and superfluous
buffs, which they are tired of, laid in piles at the Captain’s
doors; whereat “we laugh,” as the ass does, eating thistles: nay
how they “knot two forage-cords together,” with universal noisy
cursing, with evident intent to hang the Quarter-master:—all this
the worthy Captain, looking on it through the ruddy-and-sable of
fond regretful memory, has flowingly written down.[308] Men growl
in vague discontent; officers fling up their commissions, and
emigrate in disgust.
Or let us ask another literary Officer; not yet Captain;
Sublieutenant only, in the Artillery Regiment La Fère: a young
man of twenty-one; not unentitled to speak; the name of him is
_Napoleon Buonaparte._ To such height of Sublieutenancy has he
now got promoted, from Brienne School, five years ago; “being
found qualified in mathematics by La Place.” He is lying at
Auxonne, in the West, in these months; not sumptuously lodged—“in
the house of a Barber, to whose wife he did not pay the customary
degree of respect;” or even over at the Pavilion, in a chamber
with bare walls; the only furniture an indifferent “bed without
curtains, two chairs, and in the recess of a window a table
covered with books and papers: his Brother Louis sleeps on a
coarse mattrass in an adjoining room.” However, he is doing
something great: writing his first Book or Pamphlet,—eloquent
vehement _Letter to M. Matteo Buttafuoco_, our Corsican Deputy,
who is not a Patriot but an Aristocrat, unworthy of Deputyship.
Joly of Dôle is Publisher. The literary Sublieutenant corrects
the proofs; “sets out on foot from Auxonne, every morning at four
o’clock, for Dôle: after looking over the proofs, he partakes of
an extremely frugal breakfast with Joly, and immediately prepares
for returning to his Garrison; where he arrives before noon,
having thus walked above twenty miles in the course of the
morning.”
This Sublieutenant can remark that, in drawing-rooms, on streets,
on highways, at inns, every where men’s minds are ready to kindle
into a flame. That a Patriot, if he appear in the drawing-room,
or amid a group of officers, is liable enough to be discouraged,
so great is the majority against him: but no sooner does he get
into the street, or among the soldiers, than he feels again as if
the whole Nation were with him. That after the famous Oath, _To
the King, to the Nation and Law_, there was a great change; that
before this, if ordered to fire on the people, he for one would
have done it in the King’s name; but that after this, in the
Nation’s name, he would not have done it. Likewise that the
Patriot officers, more numerous too in the Artillery and
Engineers than elsewhere, were few in number; yet that having the
soldiers on their side, they ruled the regiment; and did often
deliver the Aristocrat brother officer out of peril and strait.
One day, for example, “a member of our own mess roused the mob,
by singing, from the windows of our dining-room, _O Richard, O my
King;_ and I had to snatch him from their fury.”[309]
All which let the reader multiply by ten thousand; and spread it
with slight variations over all the camps and garrisons of
France. The French Army seems on the verge of universal mutiny.
Universal mutiny! There is in that what may well make Patriot
Constitutionalism and an august Assembly shudder. Something
behoves to be done; yet what to do no man can tell. Mirabeau
proposes even that the Soldiery, having come to such a pass, be
forthwith disbanded, the whole Two Hundred and Eighty Thousands
of them; and organised anew.[310] Impossible this, in so sudden a
manner! cry all men. And yet literally, answer we, it is
inevitable, in one manner or another. Such an Army, with its
four-generation Nobles, its Peculated Pay, and men knotting
forage cords to hang their quartermaster, cannot subsist beside
such a Revolution. Your alternative is a slow-pining chronic
dissolution and new organization; or a swift decisive one; the
agonies spread over years, or concentrated into an hour. With a
Mirabeau for Minister or Governor the latter had been the choice;
with no Mirabeau for Governor it will naturally be the former.