"The splendid fellow!" Jules Cavan echoes Georges Delaballe, the
Breton, the "Parigot." There is the same heartfelt ring in the words of
each. And sometimes, as I muse over these heroic shades, I ask myself
which were the more admirable, officers or men. When Second-Lieutenant
Gautier received orders to take the place of Lieutenant de Pallières,
buried by a shell in the trench of the cemetery where Lieutenant Eno
had already fallen, he read his fate plainly; he said: "It's my turn."
And he smiled at Death, who beckoned him. But I know of one case when,
as Death seemed about to pass them by, the Marines provoked it; when,
after they had used up all their cartridges and were surrounded in a
barn, twelve survivors only remaining with their captain, the latter,
filled with pity for them, and recognizing the futility of further
resistance, said to his men: "My poor fellows, you have done your duty.
There is nothing for it but to surrender." Then, disobedient to their
captain for the first time, they answered: "No!" To my mind nothing
could show more clearly the degree of sublime exaltation and complete
self-forgetfulness to which our officers had raised the _moral_ of
their men. Such were the pupils these masters in heroism had formed,
that often their own pupils surpassed them. There was at the Trouville
Hospital a young Breton sailor called Michel Folgoas. His wound was
one of the most frightful imaginable: the whole of his side was shaved
off by a shell which killed one of his comrades in the trenches, who
was standing next to him, on November 2. "I," he remarks in a letter,
"was completely stunned at first. When I came to myself I walked three
hundred meters before I noticed that I was wounded, and this was
only when my comrades called out: '_Mon Dieu_, they have carried away
half your side.'" It was true. But does he groan and lament over it?
He makes a joke of it: "The Boches were so hungry that they took a
beef-steak out of my side, but this won't matter, as they have left me
a little."
Multiply this Michel Folgoas by 6,000, and you will have the brigade.
This inferno of Dixmude was an inferno where everyone made the best
of things. And the _battues_ of rabbits, the coursing of the red
German hares which were running in front of the army of invasion,
the bull-fights in which our Mokos impaled some pacific Flemish bull
abandoned by its owners; more dubious escapades, sternly repressed, in
the underground premises of the Dixmude drink-shops; a story of two
Bretons who went off on a foraging expedition and were seen coming back
along the canal in broad daylight towing a great cask of strong beer
which they had unearthed Heaven knows where at a time when the whole
brigade, officers as well as men, had nothing to drink but the brackish
water of the Yser--these, and a hundred other tales of the same kind,
which will some day delight village audiences gathered round festal
evening fires, bear witness that Jean Gouin (or Le Gwenn, John the
White, as the sailors call themselves familiarly[10]), did not lose his
bearings even in his worst vicissitudes.
Dixmude was an epic then, or, as M. Victor Giraud proposes, a French
_geste_, but a _geste_ in which the heroism is entirely without
solemnity or deliberation, where the nature of the seaman asserts
itself at every turn, where there are thunder, lightning, rain, mud,
cold, bullets, shrapnel, high explosive shells, and all the youthful
gaiety of the French race.
And this epic did not come to an end at Dixmude. The brigade did not
ground arms after November 10. The gaps in its ranks being filled from
the dépôts, it was kept up to the strength of two regiments, and reaped
fresh laurels. At Ypres and Saint Georges it charged the troops of
Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria and the Duke of Würtemberg in succession.
Dixmude was but one panel of the triptych: on the broken apex of the
black capital of the Communiers, on the livid backgrounds of the flat
country about Nieuport, twice again did the brigade inscribe its stormy
silhouette.
But at Ypres and Saint Georges the sailors had the bulk of the
Anglo-French forces behind them; at Dixmude up to November 4 they
knew that their enterprise was a forlorn hope. And in their hands
they held the fate of the two Flanders. One of the heroes of Dixmude,
Naval Lieutenant Georges Hébert, said that the Fusiliers had gained
more than a naval battle there. My only objection to this statement
is its modesty. Dixmude was our Thermopylæ in the north, as the
Grand-Couronné, near Nancy, was our Thermopylæ in the east; the
Fusiliers were the first and the most solid element of the long
triumphant defensive which will one day be known as the victory of the
Yser, a victory less decisive and perhaps less brilliant than that of
the Marne, but not less momentous in its consequences.
The Generalissimo is credited with a dictum which he may himself have
uttered with a certain astonishment:
"You are my best infantrymen," said he to the Fusiliers.
We will close with these simply, soldierly words, more eloquent than
the most brilliant harangues. The brigade will reckon them among their
proudest trophies to all time.