His account of the defeat at Virton, on August 22, is grave and calm
in its sad stoicism, it is even harsh in its refusal to overlook any
of the distressing features of the affair. But hope rises in his heart
like clear water in a troubled well, and it is just after this
melancholy set-back that the noble French spirit most vividly asserts
itself. In the very forefront of physical and moral misery, "quelle
émouvante compréhension de la Patrie s'est révélée à nous!" An army
which is instantly and completely victorious can never experience the
depth of this sentiment. It is necessary to have fought, to have
suffered, to have feared (if only for a moment) that all was lost, in
order to comprehend with passion what the mother-country means to a
man. Lying in the fog, soaked with rain, at the edge of the copses
from which the German guns had ejected them, it was at that wretched
moment that the full apprehension came to Paul Lintier that France
comprised for him all the charm of life, all the affections, all the
joys of the eyes and the heart and the brain. "Alors, on préfère
tomber, mourir là, parce qu'on sent que la France perdue, ce serait
pire que la mort." This is a feeling which animates the darkest pages
of his book--and many of them perforce are gloomy; through all the
confusion and doubt, the disquietude, the physical dejection, the
sense of a kind of blind-man's buff intolerably wearisome and
fatiguing--through all this, which the young author does not seek to
conceal, there runs the ceaseless bright thread of hope sustained by
love.
For us English the book has a curious interest in its unlikeness to
anything which an English lad of twenty would have dreamed of writing.
It strikes an English reader, in comparison with the equally gallant
and hardly less picturesque records which some of our own young
officers have produced, as extraordinarily "grown up." The new
generation which France sent into the war of defence was more simple
and more ardent at the outset than our own analogous generation was.
It was less dilettante and more intellectual. The evidences of
thought, of reasoned reflection carried out to its full extent, of an
adequate realization of the problems presented by life, are manifest,
though in various degree, in all these records of French officers
killed in the months which preceded Christmas 1914. These Frenchmen
did not go out light-heartedly, nor with a pathetic inability to
fathom the purpose for which they so generously went, but they had
given the matter a study which seemed beyond their years. They marched
to the blood-baths of Belgium and Lorraine with solemnity, as though
to a sacrament.
It must be remarked as an interesting point that this generation had
recovered a sense of the spirituality of a war of national defence. In
simpler words, it had recovered that honest pride which France, in
certain of its manifestations since the war of 1870, seemed to have
lamentably lost. Posterity will compare the serene simplicity of Péguy
and Lintier with the restlessness and bitter disenchantment of the
1880 generation, which arrived at manhood just when France was most
deeply conscious of her humiliation. If we seek for the sources of
this recovery of self-respect, which so beautifully characterized
French character at the immediate crisis of 1914, we have to find it,
of course, in the essential elasticity of the trained French mind. The
Frenchman likes the heroic attitude, which is unwelcome to us, and he
adopts it instinctively, with none of our national shyness and false
modesty. But, if we seek for a starting-point of influence, we may
probably find it in the writings of a soldier whose name is scarcely
known in England, but whose "Études sur le Combat," first published in
1880, have been the text-book of the young French officer, and were
never being so much read as just before the outbreak of the war.
The author of these "Études sur le Combat" was Colonel Ardent du Picq,
who fell at the battle of Longeville-les-Metz, on August 15, 1870. He
had predicted the calamity of that war, which he attributed to the
mental decadence of the French army, and to the absence of any
adequate General Staff organization. Ardent du Picq had received no
encouragement from within or from without, and the reforms which he
never ceased to advocate were treated as the dreams of an eccentric
idealist. He died, unrecognized, without having lived to see carried
out one of the reforms which he had so persistently advocated. His
tongue was rough and his pen was dipped in acid; the military critic
who ridiculed the "buffooneries" of his generals and charged his
fellow-officers with trying to get through their day's work with as
little trouble to themselves as possible, was not likely to carry much
weight at the close of the Second Empire. But the scattered papers of
the forgotten Colonel Ardent du Picq were preserved, and ten years
after his death a portion of them was published. Every scrap which
could be found of the work of so fruitful a military thinker was
presently called for, and at the moment of the outbreak of the present
war the "Études sur le Combat" had become the text-book of every
punctilious young officer. It is still unknown how much of the
magnificent effort of 1914 was not due to the shade of Ardent du Picq.
Although the name of that author does not occur in the pages of "Ma
Pièce," we are constrained to believe that Lintier had been, like so
many young men of his class, an infatuated student of the "Études." He
had comprehended the essence of military vitality and the secret of
military grandeur. He had perceived the paramount importance of moral
force in contending with formidable hostile organizations. Ardent du
Picq, who possessed the skill of his nation in the manufacture of
maxims, laid it down that "Vaincre, c'est d'être sûr de la victoire."
He assented to the statement that it was a spiritual and not a
mechanical ascendancy which had gained battles in the past and must
gain them in the future. Very interesting it is to note, in the
delicately scrupulous record of the mind and conscience of Paul
Lintier, how, side by side with this uplifted patriotic confidence,
the weakness of the flesh makes itself felt. At Tailly, full of the
hope of coming battle, waiting in the moonlit forest for the sound of
approaching German guns, suddenly the heroism drops from him, and he
murmurs the plaintive verses of the old poet Joachim du Bellay to the
echo of "Et je mourrai peut-être demain!" The delicate sureness with
which he notes these changes of mood is admirable; and quickly the
depression passes: "vite notre extraordinaire insouciance l'emporte,
et puis, jamais heure a-t-elle été plus favorable à la revanche?"
In defining the particular principles which have actuated the
magnificent French General Staff in the present crisis, Lord Haldane
has dwelt on the fact that the French have displayed throughout "that
moral effect which comes from certainty of purpose and which only
concentrated thought can give." The value which the higher authority
sets on the cultivation of moral enthusiasm is exemplified by the fact
that the French Ministry of War has encouraged the publication of
those personal records, from which we have here made a selection, on
the ground that they carry throughout the army a contagion of energy
and courage. We are far here from the obscure jealousy of thought
which made a military representative of the British War Office the
other day lay down the brilliant axiom "A hairdresser is of more value
to the country at war than a librarian!" Such a man could not exist in
a French community, where, at the very height of hostilities, so
prominent a military authority as Colonel Émile Manceau could pause to
say, "Let us read, let us give much time to reading!" It is a curious
reflection that the present struggle has been, for the French, the
most literary of all wars, the one in which the ordered expression of
clear thought in language has been most carefully and consciously
cultivated.
This was very far from being the case with the war of 1870, when the
absence of literature was strongly felt during and after the crisis.
The old satirist of the "Iambes," Auguste Barbier, wrote, immediately
after the declaration of peace, a poem in which he rehearsed the
incidents of the war, and commented on the absence from the list of
its victims of a single distinguished writer. He said--
_"La Muse n'a pas vu tomber un seul poète_,"
and it was out of any one's power to refute the sinister and prosaic
verse. The contrast with 1914 is painful and striking. In the existing
war the holocaust of victims, poets and historians, painters and
sculptors, musicians and architects, has been heartrending, and it can
never in future years be pretended that the Muses have this time
spared us their most poignant sacrifices. A year ago the _Revue
Critique_, one of the most serious and original of the learned
journals of Paris, announced the losses it had endured. It was
conducted by a staff of forty scholars; by the summer of 1916 this
number was reduced by twenty-seven; thirteen had been killed, eleven
severely wounded, three had disappeared.
Many writers have asked, and M. Maurice Barrès prominently among them,
what is the reason of the fact that intelligence has taken a front
place in this war? What has been the source of the spirit of
self-immolation which has driven the intellectual and imaginative section
of French youth to hold out both hands to catch the full downpour of
the rain of death? There is no precedent for it in French history, and
we may observe for ourselves how new a thing it was, and how
unexpected, by comparing with the ardent and radiant letters and poems
of the youngest generation the most patriotic expressions of their
elders. A single example may suffice. No man of letters has given a
nobler witness to the truth of his patriotism than Colonel Patrice
Mahon, known in letters as Art Roë. His novels, which dealt largely
with modern Russian life, in relation with the French army, were
virile and elevated productions, but he was a man of fifty at the time
of his heroic death at the head of his troops, in the battle of
Wisembach (August 22, 1914), and his tone was not that of such young
men as Camille Violand and Marcel Drouet. To read again the "Pingot et
moi" of Art Roë is to return to a book of the utmost sincerity and
valour, but it was published in 1893, and there is no touch of the
splendour of 1914 about it.
A figure which stands midway between the generation of Art Roë and
that of the adolescent comrades of a new Sophocles of whom we shall
presently speak, is Captain E.J. Détanger, who seems to be
transitional, and to share the qualities of both. This name has, even
now, scarcely grown familiar to the eye and ear, but it proves to have
been the real name of Émile Nolly, whose romances of modern life in
the Extreme East had been widely read just before the war. Nolly's
earliest books, "Hien le Maboul" and "La Barque Annamite" (but
particularly the latter), gave promise of a new Pierre Loti or a new
Rudyard Kipling, but totally distinct in manner from both. Détanger
was just thirty-four when the war broke out, and he was one of its
early victims, dying at Blainville-sur-l'Eau on September 5. He
greatly distinguished himself by his personal bravery, and the cross
of the Legion of Honour was pinned to his blood-stained uniform on his
last battle-field. The tribute of a fellow-officer to this devoted man
of letters may be quoted here. It is an example of the sudden and
complete transformation which turned artists into soldiers at the
first sound of the bugle:--
"Émile Nolly proved a magnificent soldier. He had a youthful, blithe,
fervent and resolute soul; he had the soul of a hero completely
prepared to sacrifice himself with joy for his country. After having
served valiantly and brilliantly in Indo-China, and then in Morocco,
it was with a radiant hope that he set out for the frontier of
Lorraine. 'What does the life of any one of us matter?' he said to me
just before he left. 'All that is essential is that France should
live, that she should be victorious.'"
Marcel Drouet, who has just been mentioned, was much younger. He was a
native of the invaded department of the Ardennes, and had not
completed his twenty-sixth year when he was killed in the trenches of
Consenvoye, in the Woëvre, when he was taking part in the outer
defence of Verdun. He seems to have been distinguished by a refinement
of spirit, which is referred to, in different terms, by every one who
has described him. He leaves behind him a volume of poems, "L'Ombre
qui tourne," and various essays and fragments. The journal of the last
days of his life has been edited by M. Maurice Barrès, and is a record
of singular delicacy and courage. We see him facing the dreadful
circumstances of the war, made the more dreadful to him because the
horrors are committed in the midst of the familiar scenes of his own
home, and we find him patiently waiting for the signal to lead his men
into action while he holds a volume of Chateaubriand open upon his
knee. The reflections of Marcel Drouët differ in some respects from
those of his most enthusiastic companions. There is a note of
tenderness in them which is unusual, and which is very pathetic. At
the very close of his brief and heroic life, the thoughts of Drouët
reverted to the historic town in which he was born, to Sedan which
still shuddered in his infancy at the recollection of the horrors of
1870. He thought of the dead who fell on that melancholy field; and
then his thoughts turned to those dear faces which he had so recently
left behind. The following passage, in its simplicity, in its
sweetness, deserves to live in the memorial literature of the war:--
"Je pense à vous, mes chers vivants, aux mains des barbares en ce
moment sans doute, mais en le coeur de qui j'ai foi, tant je connais
votre dévouement aux choses sublimes.
"Mais aussi je pense à vous, mon Dieu, qui avez voulu toutes ces
choses pour votre plus grand gloire et pour l'établissement de votre
justice. Tous ces malheurs, ces tristesses, tout ce sang répandu sont
imposés par vous, mon Dieu, en manière de rédemption. Mais votre
soleil glorieux éclairera bientôt, j'en suis absolument certain, la
victoire du bon droit qui attend depuis près d'un demi-siècle. J'y
coopère de toutes mes forces, de toute mon âme. Et si vous me retirez
de ce monde, ô Dieu de bonté, permettez que ce soit pour me joindre à
ceux qui m'out précédé dans votre séjour, et dont l'affection
terrestre me fut précieuse. C'est toute la prière ardente que je fais
devant le soleil levant, ce jour de Toussaint que sillonnent déjà les
obus semeurs de mort, en cette année 1914 qui verra rétablir la paix
du monde, par l'anéantissement du peuple barbare, et la régénérescence
de la nation française."
In most cases there rests an obscurity over the brief lives of these
gallant young officer-authors, whose nature was little observed until
the flash of battle illuminated them for one last brilliant moment. We
feel a strong desire, which cannot be gratified, to follow them from
their childhood to their adolescence, and to see for ourselves what
impulses directed them into the path of heroism. It is rarely that we
can do this, but one of these poets has left behind him two friends
who have recaptured the faint and shrouded impressions of his early
life. The piety of M. Henri Albert Besnard, who was his intimate
companion, and of that practised narrator M. Henri Bordeaux, who is
his biographer, enable us to form a clearer and fuller conception of
Camille Violand than of any of his compeers. Born in 1891, he was
typical of that latest generation of which we have spoken, in whom all
seemed to be unconsciously preparing for the great and critical
sacrifice. He was born at Lyons, but was brought up in the Quercy,
that wild and tortured district just north of the Pyrenees, where
nature seems to gather together all that she possesses of the
grotesque and violent in landscape; but he was educated at Alençon,
and trained at Vouziers, in the midst of the orchards of Normandy.
Thus both sides of France, the Midi and the Manche, were equally known
to him, but the ceaseless peregrinations which he underwent, so far
from enlarging his horizon, seem to have plunged his soul in
melancholy. At the age of twenty he struck M. Bordeaux as being the
typical _déraciné._
The letters of Camille Violand and the memories of his friends present
to us the record of a vague and uneasy boyhood. He began quite early
to exercise his mind in prose and verse, but without energy or aim. He
was not fixed in any plan of life. His letters--for he wrote with
abundance, and something undefined seems to have induced his family to
keep his letters--are steeped in sombre and objectless melancholy. He
was tormented by presentiments of misfortune; he indulged a kind of
romantic valetudinarianism. In the confusion of his spirit as he
passed uneasily from boyhood into manhood, the principal moral quality
we perceive is a peevish irritation at the slow development of life.
He was just twenty-one when the death of his mother, to whom he was
passionately attached, woke him out of this paralyzed condition, and
it is remarkable that, in breaking, like a moth from a chrysalis, out
of his network of futile and sterile sophisms, it was immediately on
the contingency of war that he fixed his thoughts. The news of his
mother's death, by a strange and rapid connexion of ideas, reminded
him of his future responsibility as an officer in the coming struggle.
He wrote, in 1913, "Je m'effraie en pensant à cette responsabilité qui
pèsera certainement un jour sur moi, car je considère la guerre comme
à peu près certaine à bref délai."
Having once formed this conviction, a complete revolution affected the
character of the young Violand. His melancholy ceased; his uncertainty
fell from him; it seemed as though his soul threw off her fetters.
From the close of 1913, when the chancelleries of Europe were still
profoundly unconscious of the tremendous upheaval which was in store
for them, this young man, hitherto so timorous and irresolute, is seen
to be filled with a species of prophetic ecstasy:--
_"The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness!
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!
.........the animation of delight
Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind"_
This remarkable change of character was encouraged by the military
discipline which now regulated his life, and which he accepted with
rapture and devotion. His mother's one aim had been to make of Camille
a soldier and a Christian, and he became the very type of that
combination.
To use a striking phrase of M. Henri Bordeaux, the war found Camille
Violand in a state of preparedness. He saw it arrive, not with anxiety
or trepidation, but with solemn joy. His father was placed in command
of a brigade of dragoons, and he himself, at another part of the
frontier line, was given the rank of second lieutenant and a command
which filled him with the pride of responsibility. Three weeks later
he was wounded in the head at the battle of Virton, but not until he
had seen the Germans, after a hard fight, retire before the attack of
his men. "Il a connu l'ivresse de la victoire: il a vu fuir
l'ennemi"--so a friend announced it. He was taken back to the hospital
at Limoges, but the victory of the Marne intoxicated him, and it was
found impossible to hold him back. With a head still bandaged, he made
his appearance once more in his beloved regiment, which was now
fighting in the forest of the Argonne, but on the first occasion on
which he led his men, Violand was wounded again, now in the shoulder.
He was sent far back, into Brittany, to Quimper, where, a second time,
by a subterfuge he contrived to escape from the hospital before his
wound was properly healed. He was absolutely intractable in his
determination to get back promptly to the fighting line: "il était
comme ça, avec son air délicat et tranquille!" Again brought back, he
was set to training men at Quimper. But he could not endure the
restraint, and his nerves broke down.
It was found impossible to hold him back, and on October 8 the
military authorities consented to his return to his regiment, and with
the permission was combined the news that he had been nominated for
the cross of the Legion of Honour. The letter in which he announces
that fact to the ladies at home--"mes chères Grand'mère et Tante"--is
charming in its simplicity. "La croix gagnée sur un champ de bataille,
c'est à mes yeux le plus beau rêve qu'un jeune Français pût faire; je
regrette seulement de ne pas l'avoir méritée davantage; mais l'avenir
me permettra, j'espère, de justifier cette récompense, que je
considère comme anticipée." The official notification specifies the
wounds which he had received and the fact that, by the testimony of
all who saw him under fire, the young lieutenant gave evidence of very
great courage and of indomitable energy. That he was, by what he calls
a queer coincidence, the youngest officer of his regiment and its only
member of the Legion of Honour, afforded him an unaffected
satisfaction.
From this time--the end of October 1914--the letters of Camile Violand
testify to the rapid development of his mind and character. He loses a
certain childishness which had hitherto clung to him, and he expresses
himself with a more virile sobriety. Nothing could exceed the pathos
of his pictures of the terrible life in the Argonne, and we are made
to feel how rapidly the suffering and the responsibility of his
military life were bringing out all the deepest and most serious
elements in his character. There is a remarkable letter of January 7,
1915, describing an engagement in which he lost several of his best
men, and in particular an experienced corporal in whose skill he much
confided. The briefest fragment broken from this pathetic description,
addressed to his father, will give a notion of the tone of it:--
"J'étais absorbé par les blessés dans mon poste de commandement et
quand je pus me rendre dans la tranchée où il était, il tombait dans
le coma. Ses derniers mots avaient été: 'Adieu, ma Patrie!' Pourtant,
il me reconnut à la voix, me répondit faiblement. Je l'assistai dans
ses derniers moments. Ce fut bien rapide, bien simple et bien beau.
_J'étais pour lui le chef, ce qui est plus que le Père et le Prêtre
réunis_. Je l'ai bien senti là; quand ce fut presque fini, je
l'embrassai et le quittai pour retourner aux soucis que nous donne
l'ennemi."
Thus was this lad of three-and-twenty fortified and ripened by the
arduous warfare in the Argonne. He was now spending what leisure the
fighting gave him in a careful study of Homer. We gather that he had
just finished re-reading the "Iliad" when the end came. On March 4,
1915, at Mesnil-les-Hurlus, a ball pierced his heart, splintering in
its passage the cross of the Legion of Honour of which he was so
proud. In his pocket was found his last letter, still unposted, in
which he told his father of a fresh distinction for valour which he
had just received, and in the course of which, with a manifest
presentiment of his approaching end, he wrote, "Je mourrai, si Dieu
veut, en bon chrétien et en bon Français."
It is not to be denied that ordinary observers were not in any degree
prepared for the heroic devotion displayed by such young officers as
these at the beginning of the war. The general opinion in peace time
was expressed by M. Maurice Maeterlinck when he laid it down that
"courage, moral and physical endurance (if not abnegation,
forgetfulness of self, renunciation of all comfort, the faculty of
sacrifice, the power to face death) belong exclusively to the most
primitive, the least happy, the least intelligent of peoples, those
which are least capable of reasoning, of taking danger into account."
It was the common hypothesis among moralists that, as men's nerves
grew more sensitive and the means of destruction more cruel and
irresistible, no human being would be able to support the strain of
actual fighting. It seemed inevitable that soldiers would rapidly
become demoralized, when exposed to the multifarious horrors of modern
mechanical battle. Nothing, therefore, could have been more surprising
than the temper shown by thousands of young men, suddenly called up
from sedentary and safe pursuits, and confronted by the terrors of
shrapnel and liquid fire and mines and gas, and all the other horrible
ingenuities of an unseen enemy for killing and mutilating. Their
imaginations were unaccustomed to these terrors, it is true, but the
higher faculties of the human mind asserted themselves, and in the
vague collective battle of the trenches these young French officers;
despite the refinement and the security in which they had always been
acustomed to exist, instantly reverted to the chivalrous attitude
which their remote ancestors had adopted in a warfare that was
romantic and personal in its individualism.