THE ARMY AND THE NATION
The question of the hour in France is militarism and anti-militarism.
The emotions roused by this fierce duel between these two parties of
the nation are poignant and absorbing, and threaten us ever with civil
war. It is impossible to blink away all the perils and grievances and
wrong-doing in which the final triumph of militarism could involve
France; and still less possible to deny the sad fact that a large
proportion of the country are in favour of military triumph. This fact
is mainly due to the infamous campaign of a Press with little instinct
of honour or truth, which persuades the unthinking multitude that the
salvation of France lies in the hands of a group of unscrupulous and
incompetent generals who, since Sedan, have not done anything to justify
the extraordinary confidence reposed in them by their credulous and
easily fooled countrymen.
[Illustration: A REVIEW AT LONGCHAMP]
Thanks to Napoleon, the French are unable to bear defeat. The race is a
nervous, excitable one, susceptible to great moments of dejection, and
easily plunged into terror under the influence of anxiety. They have not
recovered from the effects of ’70, and their souls are still stamped with
the horrors of that terrible year. They wince at the memory of Sedan,
and have only been able to check the depressing work of remembrance by
a buoyant conviction in the near hour of vengeance. For years they have
fed upon the hope of the _revanche_. Only a general can give them this
desired satisfaction, they believe, and hence their absurd worship of
their army, and their still more absurd readiness to fling themselves
under the feet of any soldier who will fool them with tall talk, and
intimidate them with the discovery of traitors. Their apprehension of
treason in their own midst is one of the most significant symptoms of
demoralisation. According to the modern French, every man seems to have
his price, and every Frenchman is only longing for an opportunity to
sell his country. Not even the Chinese have an intenser distrust of the
foreigner. In the lamentable _Affaire Dreyfus_, the immense majority
were honestly convinced that the nations of the world (Spain excepted)
were banded together to work the ruin of France, and cast shame upon
her army. They knew the figures paid to the Czar, their ally, to the
Emperor of Germany, and to the King of Italy by the Jews. England as
a rich country was supposed to be one of the paymasters of Europe in
its unequal struggle against the honour of France. It was the _Affaire
Dreyfus_ that revealed to the amazed world the sudden passion of the
French people for its army. The army saw its opportunity, seized it, and
may now be said to be in revolt against the nation. Let us be in no doubt
of the fact that France does not desire a military dictator, and that
such a dictatorship would be the very worst calamity that could happen
to her. It is easy enough to detect the wire-pullers behind a parcel
of mischievous journalists; discontented shopkeepers, whose suffrages
are obtained by the promise of brisker commerce under a new condition
of things; the large middle class always in terror of socialism, which
might rob them of their cherished luxuries. There are two great powers
diminished under republican government—the aristocracy and the Church.
These are working together to overthrow what they regard as a common
enemy, and any means are welcome to them, whether foul or fair. Hence we
see a marquis who has denied his order, an atheist and blasphemer who has
shocked every religious and aristocratic conviction, and wounded every
decent French susceptibility by pen and speech, M. Henri Rochefort, the
leading light of the present agitation, a man who has heaped obloquy and
contempt on French generals in days gone by, now the honoured mouthpiece
of the army, fighting, with his usual weapons, the battle of the Church
and the aristocracy. Devout Catholics will say to-day of the man whose
name some years ago they could not bring themselves to mention: _C’est
un bien brave homme_ (“Such an honest fellow!”) and well-born ladies of
unimpeachable morals and manners will spend their halfpennies on the
_Intransigeant_, in which this amiable gentleman exhales his patriotic
wrath. A more singular union has never been celebrated even in France,
land of incongruous contracts and odd proximities, than that between M.
Henri Rochefort and the army of France, the Church, and the aristocracy.
The attitude of the army to-day may be traced to the two parties in
the land already mentioned, through its commanders and officers, who
naturally belong to either or both. The officers who are not well
born—and they are many—would fain conceal the circumstance in a snobbish
democracy, and, as a consequence, adopt with exaggerated fervour the
prejudices of the class to which they desire to be admitted. For
there are no partisans of aristocratic privilege so impassioned and
so silly, as the middle class, who ape their ways and espouse their
cause through snobbishness. It is upon the weakness of this class that
the nobles of France are playing so recklessly. Every second officer
calls himself a count, or viscount, and is accepted as such with joy in
provincial circles and by wealthy parvenus. I should be sorry to deny the
respectability of honest religious convictions, but Catholicism at the
present hour in France is too much a question of fashion and politics
to inspire respect. Men who, to my knowledge, believe in nothing, make
a point of ostentatiously attending religious services and simulating
attitudes of advanced piety, because they think it “good form,” and that
it will give them tone in the eyes of their neighbours. They are well
aware that they cannot hope to place Philip of Orleans on an unstable
throne, being too cognisant of the fact that that singular pretender is
held in light esteem even by his followers and would be far from welcome
to the large majority of his intelligent compatriots, still less to the
working classes, and so they pin their faith to the military dictator.
The popularity of the French army to-day, the outcome, be it said, of a
well-worked political campaign, in which credulous French officers have
been shamelessly used as mere tools, is hard for us to understand, if it
were for nothing else but the heavy mortgage on man’s freshest and most
ardent years which it implies. How, one asks one’s self, can independent
citizens accept such a tax when combined resistance to it ought to be
so easy? For, after all, in a democracy it should be the voice of the
people that rules, and not the law of a dead tyrant. Militarism to the
outsider appears to be not only a demoralising force, but a monstrous
expense; and it passes imagination how so thrifty a race as the French
can go on complacently squandering millions on the support of an army
that has stood still for thirty years and may not move for thirty more.
It would be compensation enough if one could only believe what, in the
face of facts, experience teaches us to be false, that military life
hardens and solidifies a man and gives him an ideal of honour higher
than any he would learn in any trade or profession that might assist
him to a fortune. The proof that it does not solidify the citizen may
be accepted when we remember the coarsening influences of the barracks.
How general is the complaint that the three years spent in the army have
unfitted a country lad for farm service, a town youth for the shop; and
when you dwell on the rapid downward careers of retired officers, of men
dismissed from service, of their inability, once out of regiment lines,
to stand alone and cope with the difficulties of individual strife, it
is impossible to agree to the theory that intelligence and force of
character are acquired in the army. I once heard that _bête comme un
militaire_ is an accepted conclusion in diplomatic circles; and I think
the conclusion a just one. An intelligent soldier over thirty is very
rare to find, however bright and pleasant young officers may sometimes
be. As for the military ideal of honour, that is hardly a thing to speak
of with patience.
Recent events in France have proved how fatal it is to allow the army
of a country to dabble in politics. The military code of honour is good
enough for the battle-field, where all we need of men is the courage
to fight well and the capacity to provoke and profit by the enemy’s
blunders. When the battle is won, it would be a churlish people who
would ask to peer too closely into the method of winning it. For this
reason a licence is permitted to soldiers that could never be tolerated
in civilians. But bring those same morals into civil existence, and
you may judge of the results by an impartial study of the _Affaire
Dreyfus_. Where the civilian, bred to allow the individual some rights,
would hesitate, the spurred and sabred hero knows no fear. He is
accustomed to the effacement of the individual, to the suppression of all
personal rights, to an unmitigated harshness of rule, to the dictator’s
unquestioned authority. The law has no terrors for him, for he possesses
his own law, which is summary and implacable. All means which lead to the
end he has in view are alike serviceable and honest, since he is bound
to win, and, as a soldier, must make short work of all obstacles in
his path. And so, when he drifts into politics, liberty, life, honour,
justice are words he recognises not. He is apt to treat his opponents as
the enemy, to be circumvented at all costs, and into politics he carries
the nefarious theory that all is fair in war. Unhappily, France for the
tristful hour shares his belief. If militarism were not the execrable
plague it is, such a lamentable state of things could never have been
brought about amongst a fairly sane and intelligent people. Nowhere will
you find a higher ideal of justice, of honour, of delicate and noble
sentiment, than in France among the elect. This fact alone proves the
French capable of every generous feeling, which we may be sure militarism
will tend to destroy.
One of the worst things about the French army is, undoubtedly,
conscription. Who is to measure the amount of evil done to the country
by taking young men of twenty-one away from the work which is to make
them independent citizens—to the commerce, the tillage, the liberal
professions of a land where everything must stand still while its youth
learns enough of soldiering to detest it, as a rule, without any serious
profit to the army? I have gathered many impressions of barrack-life from
Frenchmen and have never found that they were imbued with an excessive
admiration of it. The good-humoured and indifferent make a joke of their
trials; but it is plain to the simplest intelligence that their time, for
themselves and their country, would have been better employed at home
than dodging and ducking from the furies of corporals or captains. Here
are some impressions culled from a young soldier’s notes, sent to me by a
scientific student, whose time was lamentably squandered in his year of
futile service.
“Monotony is not the only thing a soldier complains of. I remember
suffering many fits of indignation and of fury, principally in the
beginning. A most remarkable thing about the army is that you are
punished, not only for your own faults, which is quite right, but also
for those of each of your comrades; and so you are responsible for the
behaviour of the whole army—six hundred thousand men. Suppose you are
at Brest. You will not, of course, be hanged if a soldier at Marseilles
misbehaves, but if a soldier on leave a hundred leagues off comes back
tipsy and obstreperous, the leave you hoped to have will perhaps not be
given, and the time you might have employed in a pleasanter manner will
be spent in cleaning the floor with the bottom of a bottle, without wax.
These vicarious punishments occur much oftener in your own regiment,
above all, in your own company; so that the nearer the sinner is to you
the more threatening is he; and if you have the ill-luck to have for
comrade a stupid or awkward fellow, you will be insulted and punished
until that poor devil converts himself. I well remember such an idiot I
suffered constantly for. The sergeant would tread on his feet when he
was cold, and, consequently, more sensitive, and I have seen tears in
his eyes more than once. Nobody, however, pitied him; everyone laughed
at him; and such was his misery, his loneliness, his deep distress,
that I have seen him weeping in bed like a child. He entered the army a
good, poor creature, and will probably leave it a hardened blackguard.
From military life, the school of patriotism, honour, and abnegation,
he will only learn evil.... Sometimes it was so evident that our
sufferings diverted our chiefs, and had no other object, that I fell into
indescribable anger; though I am not bloodthirsty, I would gladly have
killed some of my superior officers—this is no exaggeration; and I well
remember one day weeping from impotent rage.”
Elsewhere he remarks that the only feeling a soldier comes to cherish is
resignation. “He knows very well that none of his superiors will ever say
a kind word to him, and that his destiny is to pay for every annoyance
they undergo. If he behaves himself he will be compelled to toil all day
without evening recreation, and his only reward will be to be called
an idiot by his comrades, to be punished for them, and not be allowed
out oftener than they, and, in the case of a clever comrade, have his
work forced upon him—for in the regiment the clever fellows do nothing,
the fools do everything. Oh, the things I have seen! A black-hearted
sergeant, who always chose for attack weak and sickly men; a Parisian
workman, one of my comrades, on the brink of manslaughter or self-murder
from persecution, not ill-natured, but destined to be sent to Africa for
indiscipline or rebellion. Those who can’t hold their tongues or their
tempers are greatly to be pitied. I saw one strike a chief, and he was
right. I sometimes scorn myself for not having done so too. It makes
a great difference, of course, when you have a good captain or a good
lieutenant. The beginning is the hardest time in barracks. The cavalry
and artillery regiments are the worst of all. You would not believe half
the dreadful things I could tell you of them. The great evil of the army
comes from this. The corporal can injure you; that is all he can do. He
may punish, but he cannot reward. He can prevent you from going out,
but he cannot give you leave of absence before the regulated hour. But
if his power to do good is small, his power to do evil is immense. The
general cannot give a leave if the corporal opposes it. In the army the
punishment always suppresses the reward, but the reward never suppresses
the punishment; and as the number of those who can punish is at least
twenty times greater than that of those who can reward, nearly everything
that happens is disagreeable. In fact, rewards are unknown. To show a
curious example: leave of absence is not a reward; the privation of it
is a punishment. A soldier’s paradise is outside the barracks. Offer him
fifteen days of prison and after that fifteen days’ furlough, and he
will not hesitate. What the corporal and sergeant wish to avoid is being
bored, and so, to get out of work, they punish and govern by the terror
they inspire. The men do not wash their clothes because they should be
washed, but from fear the sergeant should find them dirty. The idea of
duty does not exist in the army; it is the kingdom of fear, into which no
ray of hope or justice penetrates.”
I have left these notes of a young French soldier in their original
English, with hardly an alteration. This is one of the anecdotes
concerning military denseness he sends me: “In the town where my
regiment was quartered there was an exhibition, and the directors of the
exhibition, knowing how light a soldier’s purse is (a soldier’s purse is
one of the most remarkable things I ever saw. It contains everything:
thread, needles, pins, nails, white and black wax, buttons of six or
seven sorts; but if you wish to dig so far as to find money, you are as
likely as not to reach the ground), wrote to the colonel to say that a
certain number of soldiers—sixty, I believe—could visit the exhibition
free every day. In the beginning it was all right. The soldiers had as
lief go to the exhibition as do exercise. They understood nothing; they
were watched by a corporal, and could not go away before the regulated
hour. After two weeks there were not sixty volunteers to be found, and
after a month not twenty; after six weeks not even five. The colonel’s
order was that each day sixty soldiers _could_ go to the exhibition, but
the corporal understood _must_ go, and so every day sixty unfortunates
were bidden to dress themselves in their best and go and be bored for two
mortal hours between pictures and ploughshares, so that in the end the
visit to the exhibition was used as a punishment. This surely was not the
intention of the kind-hearted director.”
Something must be said of how conscription is worked in France. Military
life begins at twenty-one and ends at forty-five, which means that every
Frenchman is subject to the military authorities during twenty-five
years, three in the _Armée Active_, ten in the _Réserve_, six in the
_Territoriale_, and six in the _Réserve de la Territoriale_. A youth,
when he reaches twenty-one, draws a lot in February; he enters the
barracks in November and remains there until September three years later,
and is then guaranteed as a proper defender of his country. After that,
for ten years, he forms part of the _Réserve_, and twice he must return
to the regiment for twenty-eight days. In the _Territoriale_ he must
serve once for fourteen days, and after that he is let alone unless war
should break out, when he must shoulder his gun and knapsack, and go to
the front with the rest. The drawing of lots takes place in the town
hall, where the mayor sits with a big box filled with numbers written
on bits of wood. Each youth draws out a number. Formerly this ceremony
had a meaning, for the owner of a lucky number was exempt from military
service, or only served a year. Now all must serve for three years, and
the numbers count as nothing. Then comes the Revision Council, a most
important thing. If a man passes he enters the barracks six months later;
if not, he waits a year and begins again. If he is refused once, he
serves only two years; if twice, one year; if three times, none at all.
But it is exceedingly rare that a candidate is refused three times, as it
is considered disgraceful not to serve as a soldier, though you should
die in barracks or always be ailing. Men are passed even in advanced
stages of heart disease or consumption, too weak almost to hold a gun.
The chiefs argue that military service will strengthen the weak, and
be very good for the strong. My scientific correspondent ironically
adds: “It is, above all, very good for those who die in the middle of
their three years, for, indeed, they were not hardened enough for such
a difficult thing as life.” But there are so many ways of escaping
from the three years’ servitude, the wonder is all do not profit by
the opportunities offered. These are the lucky ones: the eldest son of
seven brothers, the eldest son of a widow, of an invalid father, or of
one blind or over seventy; those who have a brother “under the flag,”
or students of all sorts. To quote my correspondent again: “There are,
I believe, at least a hundred kinds of students, coming from you could
never imagine where. I had a comrade who was a _clerc de contentieux_. I
have never known, nor has anybody I have asked known, what on earth was
a _clerc de contentieux_. He himself did not know, and when questioned
about it he would answer, ‘Something in the way of law.’ He knew nothing
more about his own profession. I am sure that he had none, but those
magic words saved him two years’ service.”
One of the worst consequences of militarism has of late years been
witnessed in France for the stupefaction and edification of Europe—the
terrorising of all classes. In 1898, we saw how the army comported
itself in the Palace of Justice, which it may be said to have carried
by assault. The whole place was packed with officers in uniform and in
mufti, spurred and sabred menace going through the hall. The law was
laughed at with amazing cynicism by these booted warriors. They refused
to reply to the questions put to them, and threatened the civilians
who presumed to differ from them with the horror of “a butchery.” They
held the field with unexampled effrontery, and the terrorised jury
spoke at their bidding. You must go far back in the Middle Ages to find
another such tale of wholesale assassinations, perjuries, forgeries,
cynical traffic with justice, insolent manipulation of documents,
suppressed correspondence, distorted telegrams, bribed evidence, strident
vituperation and manifestation of despotism, the more extraordinary by
the multiplicity of despots; and so delighted was the befooled populace
by this parade of rabid defiance and booted revolt against national
tribunals (had the magistrates been honest and the jury courageous,
and both held out in the performance of their duty, the suffrages of
the people would just as likely have been on their side, since the
successfulness of success is proverbial) that _Vive l’armée_ came to
mean everything on earth, from the servant-maid’s traditional love of
a uniform, the street Arab’s passion for the blare of a trumpet, the
sentimental citizen’s yearning for Alsace and Lorraine, and the longing
of Imperialist, Royalist, and every other form of fractious opponent of
the Republic to overthrow the Government. In a word, it became the cry
of sedition, admirably worked up by the Church, the Army, and Society.
M. Urbain Gohier’s famous book, _L’Armée contre la Nation_, undoubtedly
contains much exaggerated abuse of French officers and French chiefs,
but it also contains many indisputable truths. When one hears French
officers speaking of civilians with indescribable contempt as “pekins,”
and remembers that all of these miserable pekins have served in the army
and will be called upon, without reward or pay, to defend their country
with their lives, it is difficult not to regard such a passionate attack
as his as justified. The Nationalists to-day have the hardihood to
describe themselves as the only true patriots, the only pure Frenchmen.
The _Temps_ once pertinently asked what they expected to do in war more
than any other kind of Frenchman or patriot—carry two muskets instead of
one? One sees MM. Coppée, Lemaître, and Barrès, the literary chiefs of
the patriots, thus accoutred with an incredulous smile. After twenty-five
years the patriots are still stalking the shades of Alsace and Lorraine,
and hurling defiance towards the Vosges, while every honest Alsatian with
them passes for a traitor.
The army owes its present unwonted prestige and popularity to the
fear war breeds in the modern mind, and this fear it has evidently
utilised through its mouthpiece—the militarist Press. Every event is
pressed into its service; the return from Fashoda of a brave man, the
procession of the École Polytechnique at the grand review, admired for
its ill-treatment of an eminent professor, M. Georges Duruy, the son of
Victor Duruy, because in the intervals of lecturing to them he presumed
to write articles in the _Figaro_ expressing doubts of the culpability
of an unfortunate French officer, one of themselves. The sight of
these young gentlemen suffices to create a delirious enthusiasm, which
is fondly hoped by the authors of the frantic display will prove the
death-knell of the Republic. Never has a nation worshipped stranger, more
incongruous warrior-gods than France of to-day. She has embraced and
wept rapturously over the military virtues and honour of an Esterhazy;
she has melted in the furnace of adoration before Major Marchand; she
has prostrated herself in reverence and gratitude at the feet of General
Mercier, and now she is pantingly waiting for the generalissimo of her
dreams—another Boulanger, plumed, handsome, and haughty, on a black
charger. It used to be for the _revanche_ she so ardently desired this
deliverer, but now the hated enemy is no longer beyond the Vosges, but
on the other side of the Channel. A French boy once wrote to an English
comrade that he wanted to put his hand through the sleeve (the channel,
in French, _la manche_), and shake hands cordially with him. Alas! it is
her sword that bellicose France wishes to put through the sleeve, if we
are to believe the Nationalists, and slay perfidious Albion.
It is, perhaps, an exaggeration to describe barracks, as M. Urbain
Gohier does, as “the school of all crapulous vices: idleness, lying,
debauchery, drunkenness, obscenity, and moral cowardice.” But there is
much truth in his contrasting statement, that “the surprising vitality
and progress in every way of the Anglo-Saxon races are due to the fact
that these latter escape the corrupting and degrading influence of the
barracks.” In war men may herd together and be the better for it, since
they suffer and bear privation together. But in peace it is impossible
that general life of this comfortless kind can have any but a disastrous
action upon character. The twenty-eight days of the reservists may be
an excellent farce, if the discomforts and trials are borne with high
spirits and a sense of fun. From this point of view it is easy enough to
laugh at such amusing plays as _Champignol Malgré Lui_, and the coarse
and witty comedies of Courteline, whose military studies are steeped
in a good-humoured but terrible realism. You must laugh at that brutal
but brilliant little piece, _Lidoire_, capitally acted at Antoine’s,
even while you are filled with an unutterable sense of sadness in
contemplation of the futile suffering of barrack-life. Why should grown
men, under pretext that their country may some day be attacked, be
submitted to the disennobling trials of the general dormitory, to the
annihilating process of inflexible and petty discipline, at the mercy
of the temper and caprices of superiors? The audience at Antoine’s
shout with laughter when the sober fellow is brutalised for his drunken
comrade, whom he is trying to shield, but the thinking spectator is
saddened by the realistic travesty of justice so peculiar to-day in
militarist France. One applauds the more the magnificent outburst
against the army in that remarkable play of MM. Donnay and Descaves, _La
Clairière_, where the tortured workman shouts, “There is no such thing
as an intelligent bayonet.” Think, then, what it must mean for the young
fellow dragged reluctantly from his chosen work, to waste three years
fretting in servitude that does his country no good, to share the common
life of men more often than not repulsive to him. In the case of the
poor it is far worse, for they have no means of avoiding the obligatory
three years’ service; and if you would have some idea of the corrupting
influence of this experience on a farmer’s son, read M. René Bazin’s
charming story, _La Terre qui Meurt_, where the young soldier back from
Africa has acquired such habits of idleness, of café loungings, of
little glasses, and martial vanity that his downward career is traced out
almost on the page that introduces him, and the poor fellow goes to the
dogs, not from inherent viciousness, but because the barracks has spoiled
him for farm-work, for steady labour.
The lucky students destined for civil professions when they leave the
Polytechnique, the École Centrale, the École Forestière, have only a
year’s service, and that under the most comfortable circumstances.
They are officers at once, with £100 a year, a servant, and lodgings
in town. This cannot be said to be much of a sacrifice upon the
altar of patriotism compared with that the ordinary citizen makes in
shouldering his gun and heavy knapsack, in undergoing all the weary and
repugnant experiences of barrack-life. As Urbain Gohier says: “Under a
Democratic Republic there is only one way of escaping from the terrible
barracks—the wearing of the epaulette; there is only one means of not
being a soldier—becoming an officer.” You will find in France that it is
precisely the people who benefit by these means of escaping the worst
consequences of militarism, and women who know nothing at all about it
and could never endure five minutes of the martyrdom, who are its most
violent eulogists. It is difficult to explain military arrogance in
France, for it certainly is not based on the fact that officers alone go
to the wars. When the battle-cry rings over the land the whole nation
arms itself and goes off to fight, as well as the officers, and when
the nation stays at home, so do the officers. When I asked a friend of
General de Gallifet the motives of his resignation, he replied haughtily:
“How could you expect Gallifet to tolerate the interference in military
affairs of a miserable pekin like Waldeck-Rousseau?” In vain did I
point out that when an officer mixes himself up in politics and tries,
in a mischievous and underhand fashion, to injure the Government, the
Prime Minister has every right to interfere, since, in his quality of
“miserable pekin,” politics is his business and not a general’s. And
the man who was speaking to me was but a “pekin” himself, who, like the
Prime Minister, had served in the army, and yet quite approved of martial
contempt for all who do not wear a sabre or a plumed kepi. Watch these
generals ride through the streets of Paris, beribboned and befrogged, and
note the lofty, godlike way they gaze down upon the adoring multitude.
Are they back from the wars? Do all these glorious and shining medals
mean battles won? Where has Zurlinden fought with conspicuous glory?
Where Mercier? Billot? Gonse? And yet they all look as proud and fatuous
as the marshals of Bonaparte returning from their successful raids across
Europe.
I have heard in France a great deal of fine talk, which would be
admirable and noble if it were true, about the soldier’s abnegation, his
lack of ambition, his disinterestedness, and modest pay. A Frenchman
who had just returned from a tour through America once said to me: “It
is our army which maintains our superiority; through it we keep intact
a high ideal. I was struck by this fact in America, where there is no
army and consequently no ideal. There must be a generous part of the
nation kept aside for disinterested work.” We need only glance through
the military history of the world to recognise the utter bombast and
falseness of this view. Officers are no more disinterested than other
men, and there are, in fact, no men so splendidly paid for their services
in all lands. The general who wins a battle is a hero for ever, though no
better brains, no finer qualities may go to the winning of that battle
than go to the making of a useful law, the winning of an election, and
less than goes to a scientific discovery or the writing of a great book.
He has, as well as his pay, his prestige, his popularity; probably a
title and an estate. Jove himself could scarcely ask for more. Take,
then, the ordinary officer. What does he work for if it is not for
military advancement? Is not the title of captain, of major, of colonel,
of general, dearer to him far than the millions of the millionaire? And
surely our payment is measured by the price we put upon it! The man who
prefers millions nowadays does not become a soldier, though in Napoleon’s
days, with the sacking of all Europe in view, it was perhaps the swiftest
road to fortune. But he is paid for his services in the coin he loves
best; and what more can he require? Why pose as the victim of his own
virtues, and prate of his disinterestedness? I was very much struck by
a tragic military novel written recently by two French officers: _Au
Tableau_, a tale of army deceptions and bitternesses in preferment.
Here is the truth put nakedly, and here is a revelation of military
want of judgment, of justice. The general is a dense brute and a snob,
who chooses his officers by their rank and fortune, and not by their
merit. The hero, of Irish extraction, is a man of culture, of delicate
sentiment, of intensely active conscience and brains. He is sacrificed
all along the line to the base intrigues of inferior men, comrades who
spy and tittle-tattle, idiot aristocrats who look down on their untitled
brother officers, and dazzle by their expensive hospitality. Defeated and
discouraged, he leaves the army to find himself an outcast, a _déclassé_,
with nothing before him but suicide. The moral of the tale, of course,
is, that even in the army it is better to stay there, however hard
things may go with an officer; for outside there is nothing for him but
suspicion, averted glances, ill-will, and slander. But the picture it
draws of the army from within is one of unspeakable sadness. This vaunted
French school of abnegation is full of intrigues, perfidies, injustices,
petty persecutions, petty miseries. It makes men glad to be outside it,
breathing the air of liberty and personal responsibility.
An Englishman said to me one day, “There was only one honest man in the
French army, and they turned him out.” This is naturally an extravagant
assertion, but it expresses in wild fashion a secret feeling in the
minority. “I was bred in the worship of the army, and brought up a
fervent Catholic,” said an eminent French writer lately; “well, it is
with difficulty now I keep myself from looking away when I see an officer
or a priest.” There can be no denial that soldiers with a delicate
conscience are not approved of in the French army. They are regarded as
dangerous subjects, apt to create “affairs.” When a colonel exposed a
scandalous abuse in a certain regiment, the President of the day sent him
word that “a due regard for the honour of the army should prevent every
officer from making an accusation, however justified, or creating any
scandal that could diminish the prestige of the army.” The army, we see,
is the one institution insusceptible to the rigours of justice, wherein
ill-doers enjoy immunity (if they are not of Jewish persuasion) for the
sake of that extraordinary thing called the “honour of the army.”
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