the same air of vital confidence. "Have you seen the new pump?" the
general asked me. "We are pumping good water all over this sector
into the front trenches, too.... Oh, we are _bien installé!_ ... It
may be another year, two, perhaps more, but the end is certain. There
is one man in the trenches, another just behind in reserve, still
another resting somewhere in the woods for his week off, and more,
all the men we want back in the _dépôts_!" And he turns the talk to
the good health of his men, their fine spirit. For one of the human,
lovable qualities of the officers whom I met is that they prefer to
talk about the comfort, the _morale_, the _esprit_, of their men to
discussing "operations."
Just here I see where the French have risen above the machine idea
of the German lesson. There is a something plus, over and above
"preparation," "organization," "efficiency," which the Latin has
and on which his confidence in ultimate victory largely rests. That
is his belief in the individual, his reliance on the strength of the
individual's spirit. To the French officer this seems the all-important
factor in the army: military force depends ultimately upon the _esprit_
of the individual which creates the _morale_ of the whole. Of course,
the army must be equipped in the modern way and fought in the modern
way with all the resources of science, with aeroplanes, bombs, motor
transport, and heavy artillery. But without the full devotion of the
individual, without the coöperation of his _esprit_, the army would
be a dead machine, especially in this nerve-rending endurance contest
of the trenches. Here is the Latin idea, which is absolutely opposed
to the German machine theory of war.
The German staff has done marvels with its machine. It hurls armies
over the map of Europe of initiative and devotion in the common soldier,
who in the Latin conception of the word remains a human being with a
soul. An officer remarked to me, "We cannot have our men come from the
trenches glum and downcast--a Frenchman must laugh and joke or something
is wrong with him. So we started these vaudevilles behind the lines, and
sports." Instead of more drill they give their men "shows," so that they
may laugh and forget the horrors of the trench. Good psychology!
* * * * *
The civilian shines through every French soldier--the civilian who is
a human being like you or me, with the same human needs. The officers
chat and joke familiarly with their men. Comradeship is substituted for
tyranny. France, one comprehends, is a real democracy, and still takes
the ideal of equality seriously. When I asked an officer at Rheims why
he had not had a day's leave in ten months while English officers went
home on leave, he said, with a shrug,--"France is a republic: our men
must get their leaves first."
The machine system gives startling results--in a short campaign. But
when it comes to an endurance contest, to the long, long strains of
trench warfare, something other than drill and organization is necessary,
something that will rouse the human being to the last atom of effort
that he has in him. When men must stand up to their waists in icy water,
live in the inferno of constant bombardment, not for hours and days, but
for weeks and months, something other than discipline is needed to keep
them sufficiently alive to be of use. Doctors tell how willingly,
unquestioningly, the wounded go back to the hell they have escaped,--not
once, but twice, three times. To evoke the capacity for heroism in the
individual soldier has been the triumph of the Latin system.
The faith of the French rests justly on their heroic resolution, their
ability to endure as individuals, more than on the lesson learned of
preparation and organization.
* * * * *
Faith is a belief in the evidence of things unseen. French faith
is of many kinds, not purely material, not military. They believe
so profoundly in the perfect justice and high importance of their
cause that it would seem as if they counted upon the cause alone to
win the victory. No nation, they say, ever spent itself in a better
cause. Victims of an unprovoked attack, unprepared, which is the best
evidence of peaceable will, witnesses of the outrage of a neighbor
people, bleeding from the wounds of their own country,--what better
cause for war could men have? And the Latin intelligence of the
French enables them from the humblest to the highest to perceive the
universality of the principles for which they are called upon to die.
It is no selfish, not even a merely national, cause--it is the cause
of nothing less than humanity in which they fight.
The philosopher Bergson expressed this sublime confidence in the
cause thus (I give the substance of his words from memory): "Not all
wars can be avoided--perhaps nine out of ten can. But this one, no!
For it is a war of principles. It will be a long war because the enemy
is strong and we were unprepared. But we can wait the end confident in
the result. The Germans have created a false belief, a wrong idea, and
have carried that idea into action with extraordinary thoroughness. But
the belief rests upon error. When the day comes that they meet reverses,
when their idol of force no longer works miracles for them, then they
will collapse, from within. There will be a general breakdown of
personality from realizing the falsity of their idea. There lies our
victory."
The philosopher's belief is based on the faith that the principles
of justice, of law, of humanity are stronger, more enduring than any
organization of force no matter how efficient, for this is a moral
world. And the individual or nation who relies upon might to enforce
wrong must in the end, perceiving the irrationality of his world,
collapse. The grinding of the mill may be heart-breakingly slow, but
the grist is as sure as life itself.
Similarly, the statesman Hanotaux has expressed "The Moral Victory":
"It is the noblest, the highest of causes which has been submitted
to the arbitrament of arms. Its grandeur justifies the terrible extent
of the drama and the immense sacrifices it imposes. The material results
of victory will be immense, the moral results will be even greater....
Moral forces are superior to physical forces, and in spite of all they
will have the last word.... Our youth has gone to the front in the
serene conviction that it was fighting not only for the _patrie_, but
for humanity, that this war was a sort of crusade, that they could
claim place beside St. Louis and Jeanne d'Arc."
It is that heroic consciousness of a righteous martyrdom that I read
on the faces of the black-robed women in the street, too proud for
tears; in the silent figures on the hospital beds, suffering without
protest an agony too deep for words. And when I encountered a file
of soldiers in the muddy trenches, flattening themselves out against
the earth walls to let me pass, carrying pails of soup to the comrades
up front, or sitting motionless beside their burrows along the trench
wall, their hands clasping their rifles,--dirty, grimed, and bearded,--I
saw the same thing in their tired eyes, their drawn faces. Mute martyrs
in the cause of humanity, in _my_ cause, they were giving their lives
for others, for _me_, not merely that the German might be driven from
France, but that justice and honor and peace between men might prevail
in the world!
* * * * *
Because the French people are inspired with the grandeur and the
moral significance of their cause, they cannot understand a certain
cynical attitude of mind, well illustrated by a former Senator of
the United States, who has been high in the councils of the defunct
Progressive Party. After spending ten days in Paris last spring, he
remarked at a luncheon given him by some distinguished Frenchmen,--"Don't
tell me about the justice of your cause or about the atrocities. I am
not interested in that. What I want to know is, who is going to win!"
Who is going to win! There spoke the barbarian mind. The barbarian
mind cannot comprehend that the winning itself in a world cause is
inextricably involved in the justice and worth of the cause.
For the same reason the French people have been puzzled by the sort
of neutrality preached and practiced at Washington since the outbreak
of the war. It is plain enough that neither France nor England desires
to have the United States go to war with Germany. We can help them
better as a huge supply house than as an ally, much as that might
offend our vanity. The French appreciate also our President's desire
to keep his country at peace. They are a peace-loving people and know
the frightful costs of war. But they cannot understand a neutrality
that avoids committing itself upon a moral issue such as was presented
to the world in Belgium, in the sinking of the Lusitania. And in spite
of the strict censorship, which for obvious reasons has muzzled the
French press in its comment upon our diplomacy with Germany, occasionally
flashes of a biting scorn of the Wilson neutrality have appeared in print,
as the following from Hanotaux: "We should be wanting truly in frankness
toward our great sister republic if we left her in the belief that this
series of documents, of a tone particularly friendly and affectionate,
addressed to the German Government after such acts as theirs, had not
occasioned in France a certain surprise.... Up to this time the Allies,
who have not, God be praised, compromised or even menaced the life of
any neutral, of any American, have not received the twentieth part of
these friendly terms that the German Government has brought forth by
its implacable acts.... What the world awaits from President Wilson is
not merely a note, it is a verdict. What do neutral peoples, what does
the American Government, what does President Wilson think of the German
doctrine,--'Necessity knows no law--the end justifies the means'?...
Every Government that acts or speaks at the present hour decides the
nature of the real peace, whether it will be an affirmation of those
eternal principles that are alone capable of directing humanity toward
its sacred end."
To our eternal shame as a nation our Government has evaded, up to
this hour, pronouncing the expected verdict, has preferred to quibble
and define, in its vain attempt to hold the barbarian to a "strict
accountability"--whatever that may mean. France does not want our
army or our navy, not even our money and our factories, except on
business terms, but she has looked in vain for our affirmation as
a nation of our belief in her great cause, which should be our own
cause--the cause of all free peoples.
* * * * *
What a timid and verbal interpretation of neutrality has prevented
our Government from affirming, the American people, let us be
thankful, have done generously, abundantly. They have pronounced
a not uncertain verdict, and they have followed this moral verdict
with countless acts of sympathy. The cause of France, the faith of
the French, have roused the chivalry of the best Americans. Our youths
are fighting in the trenches, our doctors and nurses are giving their
services, our money is helping to stanch the wounds of France. As
a people we too have affirmed our faith in the cause and are doing
generously, spontaneously, as is our wont, what we can to win that
cause for the world. The splendid hospital of the American Ambulance
at Neuilly, equipped and operated on the generous American scale,
is the real monument to the beliefs, the hopes, the faith of the
American people.
In that modification of the Anglo-Saxon tradition which America is
fast evolving, there is a subtle sympathy and likeness with the Latin,
which this crisis has brought into evidence. We are less English than
French in spirit, in our ideal of culture, of life.
VI
_The New France_
"This is a return for a new departure!" the Italian poet cried to
his people at Quarto when they were still hesitating between the
paths of a prudent neutrality and intervention in the world decision.
Probably in the poet's thought there was more of concrete ambition
for "national aspirations" than of spiritual rebirth. But for the
French nation it is the spiritual rebirth alone that has any meaning.
No material enlargement of France has ever been seriously contemplated.
The acquisition of Alsace can hardly be termed conquest, and whatever
hopes of indemnity or other material advantages the French may have
permitted themselves to dream of must fade as the financial burden of
all Europe mounts ever higher. Even the recovery of Alsace, according
to those best able to judge,--in spite of German assertions,--would
never have roused France to an aggressive war. Conquest, material
growth, is not an active principle in the French character. How often
I have heard this thought on French lips,--"We want to be let alone,
to be free to live our lives as we think best, to develop our own
institutions,--that is what we are fighting for!" For forty years
the nation has lived under the fear of invasion, a black cloud
always more or less threatening on the frontier, and when the day of
mobilization came every Frenchman knew instinctively what it meant--the
long-expected fight for national existence. And the hope that sustains
the people in their blackest moments is the hope of ending the thing
forever. "Our children and our children's children will not have to
endure what we suffer. It will be a better world because of our
sacrifice."
The conquest that France will achieve is the conquest of herself,
and the fruits of that she has already attained in a marvelous measure.
The reality of a new France is felt to-day by every Frenchman and is
aboundingly obvious to the stranger visiting the country he once knew
in her soft hours of peace. To be sure, intelligent French people say
to you, when you comment on the fact, "But we were always really like
this at bottom, serious and moral and courageous, only you did not see
the real France." Pardonable pride! The French themselves did not know
it. As so often with individual souls, it took the fierce fire of
prolonged trial to evoke the true national character, to bring once
more to the surface ancient and forgotten racial virtues, to brighten
qualities that had become dim in the petty occupations of prosperity.
After I had been in France a short time, nothing seemed falser
to me than the pessimistic assertions of certain German-Americans
and faint-hearted other Americans, that whatever the outcome of the
world war France was "done for," "exhausted," "ruined," must sink to
the level of a third-rate power, and so forth. Nor can I believe the
words of those saddened sympathizers and helpers in the ambulances
and hospitals, that "France is proudly bleeding to death." Her wounds
have been frightful, and through them is still gushing much of the
best blood of the nation. Her bereavement has been enormous, but not
irreparable. Once a real peace achieved, the triumph of the cause,
and I venture to predict that France will give an astonishing
spectacle of rapid recovery, materially and humanly. For the New
France is already a fact, not a faith.
* * * * *
Evidence of this rebirth is naturally difficult to make concrete
as with all spiritual quality. It is not merely the solidarity of
the nation, the fervent patriotism, the readiness for every sacrifice,
which are qualities more or less true of all the warring nations,
especially of Germany. It is more than the perpetual Sunday calm
along the rue de la Paix, the absence of that parasitic frivolity
with which Paris--a small part of Paris--entertained the world.
It is not simply that French people have become serious, silent,
determined, with set wills to endure and to win--for that moral
tenacity may relax after the crisis has passed. It is all these
and much more which I shall try to express that has revealed a
new France.
To start with some prosaic proofs of the new life, I will take
the liquor question, a test of social vitality. It is significant
to examine how the different belligerent nations have treated this
problem, which becomes acute whenever it is necessary to call upon
all national reserves in a crisis. Turkey, Italy, and Germany
apparently have no liquor problem; at least the war has not called
attention to it. Russia, whose peasantry was notoriously cursed with
drunkenness, eradicated the evil, ostensibly, by one arbitrary ukase,
though, if persistent reports from the eastern war region are true,
her great reform has not yet reached her officers. England has played
feebly with the question from the beginning when the ravages of drink
among the working population--what every visitor to England had
known--became painfully evident to the Government in its efforts
to mobilize war industries and increase production. Various minor
restrictions on the liquor traffic have been imposed, but nothing
that has reached to the roots of the matter--probably because of
the powerful liquor interest in Parliament as much as from the
Englishman's fetish of individual liberty. Although the direct
handicap of drunken workmen did not affect France as it did England,
the French authorities quickly realized the indirect menace of
alcoholism and have taken real measures to combat it. Absinthe has
been abolished. For the army--and that includes practically all the
younger and abler men--the danger has been minimized by the strict
enforcement of regulations as to hours and the non-alcoholic nature
of drinks permitted, which are posted conspicuously in all cafés
and drinking-places and which are carefully observed, as any one who
tries to order liquor in company with a man in uniform will quickly
find out! I never saw a soldier or an officer in the least degree
under the influence of liquor while I was in France, either at
the front or outside the military zone, and very few workingmen.
Not content with the control of liquor in the army, the French have
seriously attacked the whole problem, which in France centers in the
right of the fruit-grower to distill brandy,--an ancient custom that
in certain provinces has resulted in great abuses. Legislation
against the _bouilleurs de crue_ is one inevitable outcome of the
awakened sense of social responsibility in France.
Connected with the liquor evil is the birth-rate question, to which
since the war the attention of all serious-minded people has been
drawn. The French Academy of Sciences has undertaken an elaborate
series of investigations into the relations between the birth-rate
and the consumption of alcohol, which would seem to show that there
is cause and effect between the excessive use of alcohol and a
declining birth-rate. This will undoubtedly tend to create a popular
sentiment favorable to restrictive liquor legislation, specifically
to abolishing the right to distill spirits. But what is of more real
significance is the changing sentiment among the French in favor of
larger families. Due, no doubt, directly to the necessities of a
draining war, it is also an expression of those deeper experiences
that trial has brought. The French have always prized family life,
and French family life is, perhaps, the best type of the social bond
that the world knows. Under the stress of widespread bereavement the
French are realizing that the base of the family is not love between
the sexes, but the existence of children. They want children, not
only to take the place of their men sacrificed, but as symbols of
that greater love for the race that the war has evoked. Although
the crudity of the "war-bride" method of increasing the population
is not evident in France, every working-girl wears the medallion of
some "hero" on her breast. Girls say frankly that they want children.
The Latin will never accept the German principle of indiscriminate
breeding. As in every other aspect of life, the Latin emphasizes the
individual, the personal; but an awakened patriotism and pride of
race, a deepened sense of the real values of life will lead to a
greater devotion to the family ideal.
* * * * *
To shift to the political life of France, the history of the republic
has been tempestuous in the past. There has been a succession of
_coups d'état_, plots, and scandals. One political _cause célèbre_
has followed another--the Boulanger, the Dreyfus, and quite lately
the Caillaux. The wide publicity which these political scandals have
had is due partly to the Latin love of excitement, also to the Latin
frankness about washing dirty political linen in public. To the
foreigner it has seemed strange that a republic could endure with
such abysses of intrigue and personal corruption beneath its political
life as have been shown in the Panama and Dreyfus scandals. The Germans
probably have been misled by them into considering the French nation
wholly despicable and degenerate. But France has not only endured in
spite of these rotten spots, but her republicanism has grown stronger.
Americans experienced in their own sordid politics should understand
how uncharacteristic of the real citizenship of a democracy politicians
can be. The real France has never taken with entire seriousness the
machinations of "those rats in the Chamber." These "rats" were quite
active during the first months of the war. Aside from the incompetence
of the first war ministry, which kept the public in ignorance of the
danger so completely that the enemy was at Soissons before Paris was
aware that the French army was being driven back, and all the blunders
of the raid into Alsace, France had its sinister political menace in
Joseph Caillaux, who it has been rumored plotted a disgraceful peace
with Germany before the battle of the Marne. Caillaux, when his
creature, the grafting paymaster-general, was exposed, found it wise
to go to South America. An able and on the whole a competent ministry
was placed in power.
When Caillaux returned last spring, rumors of legislative unrest
and plotting against the Joffre-Millerand control of the army
began once more. Outwardly it was an attempt of party leaders in
the Chamber to gain greater legislative control of the conduct of
the war, ostensibly for the improvement of bureaucratic methods,
as in the sanitary service, which was notably deficient. But beneath
this agitation were the dangerous forces of political France seeking
to oust Joffre, and there lay the menace that a political clique might
get control of the army. This agitation, however, did not disturb
the public. As one Frenchman put it, "If those rats get too active,
Gallieni will take them out and shoot them. France is behind the
army, and the people will not tolerate legislative interference with
it." The political unrest has at last resulted in a new and larger
cabinet, admittedly the most representative body that France could
have. The danger of political interference has passed without resort
to summary methods. It is a triumph of democracy. France will fight
the war to an end under constitutional government, a much more
difficult task than Germany's. Obviously, as may be seen in England,
parliamentary government is a great hindrance to a nation in the
abnormal state of war. Free societies have this handicap to contend
with when they fight an autocratic machine. To maintain her republican
government without scandals throughout the war will be a political
triumph for France, indicative of the new spirit that has entered
into the nation. The seriousness of the present situation has sobered
all men and has suppressed the politicians by the mere weight of
responsibility. The New France emerging from the trial of war can
profit by this experience to purge her political life of the
scandalous elements in it.
Italy has closed her Parliament and relapsed temporarily into autocracy.
England and France are struggling to maintain popular government as we
did through the Civil War.
* * * * *