'To-day the last regiment quartered here goes to the front; it
is a regiment of the line.
'Leon and I wait in the market-place to go with the soldiers to
the railway station.
'It is an epic, this departure of the troops. I have never felt
what I feel now. There is a sense and scent of battle in the
air; the midsummer sun shining on the musket-barrels and
sparkling on the accoutrements sets fire to one's brain. The
earth trembles under the passage of artillery which is about to
vomit death; and one's heart dances in one's breast whilst the
ponderous caissons, with their iron-circled wheels, shake the
stones, and the mouths of the bronze guns display their yawning
jaws. Bands play warlike tunes, men chant the _Marseillaise_,
the gold of epaulets and the lace on uniforms glow in the
light; the flags flap against the flagstaffs, on whose summits
eagles spread their wings; the shoes of the chargers glitter
like silver crescents; and one feels some mighty spirit of war
soar above these hearts of flesh and of iron who are about to
face the shock of battle. The blood steams in one's veins; the
fever of the hour devours one; and one shouts louder and
louder, faster and faster, not to become mad.
'It is market-day. The square is filled by country people who
have brought in their vegetables and fruits for sale. Their
stalls are under all the trees, and, here and there, take up
the pavement. We are standing between a woman selling salads
and an old man who has onions, and is on all fours beside his
skips, because every moment or so an onion slides off the heap
and rolls towards the gutter, unless he stops it. What a funny
old fellow he is to take so much trouble for an onion! Ah!
there goes another one! The old man hurries to catch it, but an
officer, booted and spurred, steps on it; slips, slides,
tumbles down. The onion-seller takes off his cap: "Oh, sir! a
thousand pardons!"
'The officer gets up, takes his riding-whip by the whip-end,
and brings it with all his force on the uncovered head of the
old man, who falls backward on his skull. Blood bespatters his
skips of onions.
'"Here comes the regiment!" screams Leon.
'The band sounds at the end of the street. We run towards it.
'"Did you see the poor old man?" I ask.
'"Yes. He deserved what he got. Only think! The officer might
have broken his legs, eh?"
'I do not answer. I am absorbed in watching the soldiers whom
we escort, walking on the pavement, keeping step with them.
'The soldiers do not all keep step with one another; emotion,
enthusiasm, the delights of going to thrash the Prussians, the
natural sorrow at leaving those they love--a thousand different
feelings. There is an old soldier, a decorated soldier next to
me, who is very unsteady on his legs. A young officer, very
young, almost beardless, puts his musket straight on the old
fellow's shoulder every second. It is admirable to see the
harmony which reigns between privates and officers. The
Colonel, a grey-beard, salutes with his sword when the people
cheer him; and a trumpeter in the front rank has stuck a great
bouquet of roses to the banner of his instrument, and carries
it as a priest carries the host. Other nosegays are thrust into
the barrels of muskets. Bottles of wine show their corks from
under the piles of knapsacks, and two or three dogs are
stretched out on the haver-sacks in the baggage-waggons. The
crowd cheers the dogs.
'All the peasants throng to see, shouting their applause to
the regiment. Before the chemist's shop at the corner, a knot
of young men wave their caps in the air; the chemist waves his
white handkerchief; behind him I see the blue blouse of the old
onion-seller, who lies unnoticed on the ground.
'All at once the music breaks out into the _Marseillaise_.
'"Allons, enfans de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrive!"
'Oh, how beautiful it all is! The soldiers fall into line. The
populace, shouting and cheering, accompanies them to the
station. Through the bars of the station-gates a private passes
me his drinking-cup, and asks me to get it filled at the
wine-shop in front of the gates.
'"Wait; here is the money."
'But I do not wish for the brave fellow's money, I have a franc
in my pocket. I will pay for his pint. In a moment I run back
again.
'"Thanks, young sir," says the soldier. "It is perhaps the last
drop I shall ever drink."
'"The last!" cries Leon, red as a turkey-cock; so proud is he
to be able to rouse the spirit of a warrior. "The last? Ah! we
shall give you floods of wine when you come back from victory."
'The townspeople, who are crowding round us, cheer. The soldier
shakes his head dubiously.
'"Thanks all the same," he says sadly.
'He does not seem very confident of success.
'"Doubt that we shall be victorious?" says Leon in disgust as
we go homeward. "Leave the town for the frontier with so
little confidence! I would give--oh, what wouldn't I give?--to
be old enough to go and beat the Prussians. My dear Jean, that
soldier has no soul!"
'I am not sure. The soldier perhaps does not look on the
campaign as a picnic. Perhaps he sees more clearly than we do?
Perhaps? A great many things I had never thought of before
crowd into my brain.'
A few days later, after Sedan, Jean sees the Germans enter Versailles.
'"Here they are!"
'It is the octroi-guards who cry out this as they come flying
from the gates across the town. They brush me roughly as they
pass, and their abject terror gains on me.
'I follow them. But as I run I see on the other side of the
boulevard five or six inquisitive persons, who have stopped in
their walk, and hide themselves behind the trees. If they stay
to see, why may not I? I, too, get behind the stem of a tree,
and I watch with staring eyes to see what will happen. On the
road, fifty yards from the gates, a dozen horsemen are coming
onward at a walk. They stop a moment before the
octroi-officers; then they come on into the town in two lines,
almost touching the pavement.
'"The Uhlans!" says someone behind me. Ah, I think with a
thrill, these are the Uhlans!
'They draw near us; their pistols are cocked. They pass me
close, and I feel that I shall fall from fright; my nails
clutch the bark of the tree which screens me. These riders are
covered with blood. There is blood on the pennons of their
lances, on the hocks of their horses, on the rents in their
torn uniforms, and one of the foremost has a white linen band
stained with red on his forehead. Ah! it is hideous! I want to
run away--I want to run away; it is impossible. Before me there
are these Germans, riding slowly, searching with piercing
glances the streets which open out to the left and to the
right. Behind them comes on a dense dark mass. One can hear the
tramp of feet. One can distinguish the spikes of helmets, the
barrels of muskets, the little drums no bigger than
tambourines, and the fifes which are playing a march. These
drummers and pipers are followed by linesmen in dark blue, shod
with boots drawn up above their trousers, the musket held
straight on the shoulder, the cloak rolled.
'And these men, grey with dust and mud, black with powder, with
their coats in rags--these men, who fought no doubt this
morning, and who have just made a forced march--preserve the
most marvellous exactitude, the most perfect regularity in the
dressing of their ranks, and the rhythm of their steps keeps
measure from the first line to the last of the whole column.
'They pass--they pass--they will never end. I have almost
forgotten my fear. I am partly in front of my sheltering tree.
The drums and the fifes cease to sound, and music replaces it
from a band marching in front of a group of staff-officers.
They play a warlike march, a battle-hymn, and all down the line
of troops, from the foremost company which has reached the
Chateau of Versailles, to the last which is leaving the
Chesnay, shouts of triumph arise and drown the brazen voice of
the cymbals. The victorious chant thunders down the wind. It is
the _Marseillaise_--the _Marseillaise_ which our own troops
played as they left for the frontier, the hymn which was to
render every French soldier invincible, which I had sung myself
when we had been so sure of supremacy, and when I had planted
my little tricolour flags on the map, all along the route from
Paris to Berlin in a Via Triumphalis!
'Now the artillery comes on; its black cannon on their blue
gun-carriages, with their attendants on foot and in saddle,
wearing helmets surmounted with brass balls. There are flowers
in the mouths of the cannon, and they are garlanded with ivy
and green boughs. The cavalry follow on the artillery;
dragoons, cuirassiers, hussars with white facings and a
death's-head on their shakoes. Then come the carriages, the
waggons, the vehicles with ladders, the baggage-carts.... All
at once my heart sickens and stands still. Behind the wheels of
the last waggons I seem to see some red cloth. Yes, it is our
red cloth--our soldiers. Between two rows of Prussians, who
have their bayonets fixed, our prisoners march without arms,
dirty, ragged, miserable, and ashamed. There are at least two
hundred of them, and I strain my eyes after these, my
countrymen, who are destined to rot in German fortresses.'
It seems to me that in no contemporary fiction do we possess studies of
spectacles, of sentiments, of street-life in a momentous hour, more
accurate, more vivid, more simple in diction, more touching in
suggestion, than in the above passages.
The sustained and withering irony and censure in this sketch, which yet
never goes out of the selected orbit of a boy's observation and
experiences, seem to me to be perfect in their kind. The incompleteness
of the child's understanding gives only a keener incisiveness to the
satire embodied in his narrative. The general reader will never forgive
such portraits as that of the elder Barbier, who, after shouting,
'Sursum Corda! Prenons serment de defendre le sol sacre de la Patrie!'
accepts the large Prussian orders, sets his steam-saws going in his
timber yard, and furnishes the wood for the besiegers of Paris; or of
that of the tobacconist Legros, who, after crying, 'Un soldat qui renie
son drapeau? Qu'il creve comme un chien!' stands bareheaded with bent
spine to sell cigars to Bavarian officers. This is human nature: human
nature as commerce and modern teaching and the cheap Press have made it;
but Barbier and Legros will never pardon the limner who thus portrays
them. To the reproach that such portraits are nearly always those which
he selects, Darien would, no doubt, reply that it is not his fault if
they are what have been in his path to the exclusion of finer and nobler
figures. He is a realist in the full sense of that often-abused word,
and he has the courage to represent the realities which he finds.
The _Annee Terrible_ casts its black shadows over the childhood of this
writer, and as long as his life shall last the gloom it has left will
stay with him. If France herself should ever forget, which Heaven
forbid, he will not do so. His soul has been dipped in the Styx.
What will, no doubt, alienate from him a large number of readers will be
his almost absolute want of human sympathy, or, at least, of expressions
of such sympathy. It is exceedingly rare with him to give way to any
sign of any emotion of pity. He sees human nature, in all its phases,
with little compassion for it. He sees (and this is, too often, either
through weakness or through policy, ignored by writers and thinkers)
that the great majority of men are neither the martyrs nor the heroes,
neither the victims nor the tyrants of their time, but a mass
considerable alone by its numbers, inconsiderable by any mental or moral
worth, and chiefly absorbed in different forms of selfishness and the
desire of gain. It is probably an error, though one consecrated by usage
and talent, to represent the generality of human beings as worthy
subjects either of blessing or of curse. But the author who says so will
never be forgiven by that mass of mediocrity which forms nine-tenths of
the population of the world. Darien says it, and shows it, and it is
this which will always make his works appear dreary and depressing to
the general reader, who cannot accept and pardon this manner of looking
at life for the sake of its veracity and courage.
Of course, also, in the Press generally, the accusation of exaggeration
is always brought against exposures and delineations which are unwelcome
and embarrassing. But the writer's word may certainly be taken for it
that nothing in his descriptions is exaggerated or invented, and many
recent inquiries into the causes of deaths in the ranks, and of
executions after summary, and almost secret, court-martial in Algeria,
have confirmed the veracity of the statements made in _Biribi_. The
French Government, indeed, was, as I have said, so apprehensive of the
effect of these on the public mind that, although it did not suppress
the book, it forbade large coloured cartoons of the events described in
it to be posted up on the boulevards. In all nations the public is
treated like a child by authority; and as a child who will only walk
straight and submissively if its eyes be bandaged and its feet hobbled.
But in these pages we are not so much concerned with the political and
military side of these works as with their literary qualities; and these
are considerable and of a strong and rare originality of style. _Il vous
empoigne_, and it is impossible to read either of his two works without
recognising their courage and ability, if we feel pained by their
withering scorn and rugged wrath. They are at times hard as the stones
over which the sick and swooning soldier is dragged, tied to the tail of
a mule. They are at times ferocious as the licensed torturer with the
three stripes on the sleeve, who throws his helpless prisoner, gagged
and bound, on the burning sands. Terrible they always are, with all the
terror of truths which have been lived through by the person who
chronicles them. It is not any betrayal of confidence to say that the
author of _Biribi_ has experienced in his own person the tortures of
which the dread record is made under this little playful-sounding word.
After such scenes as are herein described, and such sufferings as these,
the blood in a man's veins cannot be rose-water. 'La haine c'est comme
les balles; en la machant on s'empoisonne.' And it is impossible that
the military system can beget any other than hatred, violent,
unforgiving, imperishable, in the victims of that system.
'A young soldier, a conscript, a chasseur a cheval, has lost
two cartridges as the battalion is about to leave for Tunis.
'The Corporal informs the Captain in command, who turns and
looks in silence. The boy Loupat gazes at him with the eyes of
an animal watching the descent of the club which is about to
brain it, and from which it knows not how to escape.
'In passing through Tunis the Corporal says to him, "We shall
leave you here. That will teach you to sell your cartridges."
'The boy understands. The council of war, the sentence as a
thief, the indelible shame stamped on the brow of a youth
because he has lost two of the cartridges of the State! The
following morning the bugle sounds the _reveil_ at four
o'clock. It is still dark. At twenty minutes to five the
company, with knapsacks on their backs, is drawn up in line on
the road which runs through the camp. The trumpets sound the
roll-call, and all down the line each man answers "Present" as
his name is spoken.
'"No one is missing?"
'"Yes, Loupat, my Captain."
'"Loupat is absent?"
'"Yes, my Captain."
'"The scoundrel! He has slunk off in the night to escape
court-martial, but we will find him. Go on. No one else
missing?"
'"Look there!" A soldier points to the gymnasium. All the men
look where he points. Under the portico, on the great
architrave on the left, a body is swinging, black, at the end
of a cord.
'A lieutenant runs to the place, climbs to the body takes hold
of it, lets it go, returns.
'"Dead?" says the officer in command. "Is it Loupat?"
'"He is already cold."
'"The scoundrel!" says the Captain again. "Well! he has done
justice on himself. Right flank, march!"
'We are crowded pell-mell into the railway waggons which are
bound for Tunis. I look through the opening in the door and see
far away below me--already far away--a small dark shape which
swings in the wind as on a gibbet, and which is lighted solely
by the first rays of the rising sun.
* * * * *
'Another soldier, Barnaux, has had some liqueurs given him by a
comrade; Barnaux is drinking with the men of his _marabout_,
when a sergeant enters, espies the irregularity, takes the
offender before the officer in command.
'Barnaux refuses to say who the giver of the liqueur was. The
Captain orders him to be put in irons. They have put him _a la
crapaudine_, that is, with his arms bound behind him and
chained to his ankles. He is cast down thus on the sand of the
camp. Because he moans with pain they gag him with a dirty rag,
they tie his chin to his head with a cord. He remains all the
night thus, tied up into a shapeless packet. In the morning
when they change sentinels they perceive that he is dead. The
gag has stifled him.
* * * * *
'Then the horror of the hospital; those hells which these men
so dread that they will tear the bandages off their wounds, or
cut their veins with a bit of broken glass, rather than live to
enter them.
'The muleteers set us down at a great tent which serves as an
infirmary; within there are planks on trestles and large pails
filled with reddened water.
'"You see that," says Palot, who has divined with the instinct
of the dying the destination of those sinister planks. "Well,
that will be my last bed."
'An assistant, a filthy apron round his body, signs to us to
enter.
'The great tent is an unutterably miserable place; it has been
battered about by wind and weather; the currents of air blow
unchecked through it, and clouds of dust arise from the ground.
Some twenty iron beds are there, not more; and beyond those a
pile of mattresses, on which men are lying, rolled up in rough
counterpanes. There are not sheets enough for all. They make a
sick man rise and give up his place to Palot, whose pulse the
surgeon feels.
'"Done for," says the doctor, between his teeth, without
heeding whether Palot hears him or not.
'To the rest of us they assign the mattresses lying on the
earth; these are full of vermin; they throw on us some
covering, stained with the vomit of our predecessors.
'How wretched it is, this hospital! How weary are the days
passed, with no other companions than the dying, whose
characters are poisoned by suffering and whose cries of horror
and anguish ring in one's ears! When, moved by the disgust and
despair which comes over you in this foetid hole filled with
filth and misery, you drag yourself out on your trembling limbs
into the sun, you feel so feeble, so exhausted, so helpless,
you cannot walk a step. You sit down in the torrid heat; you
are chilly, despite the high temperature; your teeth chatter,
your body is drenched with sweat. And at evening you are
obliged to return to the tent, where you pass such hideous
nights, troubled by such frightful nightmares, by such vague
sudden shapeless terrors, which seem to seize you by the throat
and freeze the blood in your veins. Oh! those horrible nights
when you see the dying shake off their covering with shrunken
fingers and try to raise their haggard faces, lighted by the
yellow-green rays of a lanthorn!
'These nights in which the living, who so soon will be the
dead, clutch at the rags which cover them, and shriek with rage
and fear as though they saw an enemy descend on them! These
nights in which one hears the childlike sobs of young Palot,
who is delirious, and who in his long agony calls on his
mother, "Mamma! Mamma!"
'They will ring for ever in my ears those two piteous words
which through three whole nights fill that wretched place with
their unpitied lament. A lament, low and tender at first,
broken with choking tears, ending in screams which make one's
hair stand up on one's skull with horror. The desperate screams
of a perishing life which has lost all sense and measure of
things or of time, of one who knows only that he will die, and
in one supreme appeal protests against his severance from those
he loves.'
* * * * *
And the youth Palot dies in that appeal, and they dig a hole in the red
clay under a low wall beside a Barbary fig-tree.
'Ah! poor little soldier, who breathe your last, calling on
your mother; you who, with your glazing eyes, saw the vision of
your home; you who are laid there, at twenty-three years of
age, to be devoured by the worms of that foreign soil on which
you have suffered so much, and where you have met your death
alone, forsaken, without a friend to soothe your last struggle,
without a hand to close your eyelids, except the brutal hand of
the hospital servant, which shut on your mouth like a muzzle
when your desperate cries disturbed his sleep. Ah, I know why
your sickness was mortal; I know it much better than the
surgeon whose steel dissected your emaciated body; and I pity
you, poor victim of the State, with all my heart and soul as I
pity your mother who waits for you, counting the days of your
absence, and who will only receive in her solitude the dry
official notice of your death!
* * * * *
'Ah, no! I will not pity you, young dead soldier, nor your
mother who mourns your loss! I will not pity you, sons, who are
killed by the drinkers of blood, mothers who conceive what they
send to the shambles. Mad women who endure the pangs of
childbirth only to give up the fruit of their womb to the
Minotaur which devours them! Know you not that the she-wolves
let themselves be slain sooner than lose their offspring; that
there are beasts which die of grief when their cubs are borne
away from them? Do you not understand that it would be better
to tear your new-born creatures limb from limb than to bring
them up for one-and-twenty years, only to throw them into the
hands of those who want their flesh to feed the cannon?... And
you would ask our pity when, in some dark hour, the end comes,
and the bones of your children are gnawed by hyaenas and
whitened by the sun in some forgotten corner of the earth?'
There are many such passages in _Biribi_, burning with truth and with
pain; and it would be well if they could be stamped into the mind and
the memory of the peoples of this epoch, who go meekly and stupidly as
sheep to the slaughter, under the pressure of their sovereigns and
statesmen. Of course, such a teaching as this carries with it its own
condemnation by what is called authority, and by all those classes of
which I have spoken, to whom war is a necessity and a standing army is
the ark of the Government. But it would be well if the populace of every
country could read, learn, and digest it, and realise its truth and its
justification. As I have said, I place _Bas les Coeurs_ higher, in a
purely literary sense, than _Biribi_, in the sense of construction and
of concentration. For _Biribi_ is abrupt, at times confused; is rather a
series of terrible records and tragical incidents than a consecutive and
harmonious narrative, although it relates the career of the same
soldier from the time when he enters the ranks, to the last day
in which he flings from him for ever the grey coat and _kepi_ of the
punishment-battalion. In that punishment-battalion he has been placed,
let the reader remember, for no especial crime against law or decency,
but for those offences against the military code (the unwritten code)
which make the offender more guilty in the eyes of a court-martial than
any actually criminal accusation: to have lost a regimental article, to
have forgotten to salute a superior, to have stopped to drink at a brook
on a march, to have omitted to put the regulation number on a clothes
brush or a pewter platter, to have been out without leave, to have lost
cartridges or buttons--any one of those innumerable and incessantly
recurring actions or omissions which make a soldier an _insoumis_ to his
military superior, whether sergeant or general, corporal or colonel,
which to the military mind constitute crimes too heinous to be named,
offences which fill a punishment-book with accusations of acts in which
only the semi-insanity of perverted authority could see any provocation.
Read only of the punishment of the _tombeau_ for simple sins of
negligence or thoughtless mirth. The _tombeau_ is a canvas cover,
stretched on stakes, making a cage a metre long by sixty centimetres
wide, into which the soldier condemned to this torment is obliged to
creep on his stomach as best he can. In this cage he spends days,
weeks, months, at the caprice of his tyrants, with a litre of water as
his only drink, and nothing but the canvas between him and scorching
heat or icy rain, or blinding desert dust. On hot days the water in his
little can evaporates rapidly; and at the will of the corporals in
charge of him he may be kept thirty-six hours without other drink and
without food at all. Remember, as you read these lines, that the
_tombeau_ has been the home for months of the man who describes it; a
home on the scorching Algerian sand in the parching African weather; a
home in which he envied the jackal its lair and the vulture its wings; a
home in which his flesh rotted and his manhood swooned.
It is, perhaps, the finest compliment one can pay to an author to be so
much impressed by his theme that one almost forgets to speak of his
purely intellectual qualities. It is difficult to treat of either of
these works in a coldly critical spirit. For they are written with tears
of blood--such tears as are wrung from the heart's depths of all those
by whom France is beloved.
For if militarism be her only armour, her only resource against her
foes, then must we tremble for her indeed; and tremble no less for the
whole of Europe, of which all the male youth is bruised and crushed
under militarism as in a mortar. The charge of want of patriotism has
been brought against Georges Darien for both these volumes. But it is
the flaw in human nature, not in French nature only, which he exposes;
the cynicism, the selfishness, the cowardice, the meanness, which are
so conspicuous in all modern society, in all nations and in all grades.
Were there a German invasion of Italy or of England next year, there
would probably be as many Italians or English ready to succumb to, to
cringe before, and to profit by, the conquerors as there are Versaillais
ready to do so in the volume called _Bas les Coeurs_. There is a moral
motor ataxy in the spinal marrow of modern nationalities; the love of
money, the fear of poverty, and the continual concentration of the mind
on personal interests taught by modern education and by modern commerce
make up a large percentage of human beings, who are mere time-servers,
always ready to hold the stirrup-leather of the strongest. It is not
alone the French bourgeois of 1870 who is satirised in these pictures of
Versailles under German domination; it is the whole modernity of the
last quarter of the nineteenth century under the teaching of modern
science, modern trade, and modern morality. All humanity has been
inoculated with the serum of concentrated cowardice and egotism; some
are robust enough to resist the contagion, but the majority absorb it
and develop the disease. That which Darien calls not cowardice, but
fear, is enormously developed by modern influences, and will probably
continue to increase in the coming century. He asks himself and his
reader of what elements is it composed that discipline, that blind
obedience, which is enforced in military life (and which is already
demanded in civil life by the scientific and medical tyrannies). He
replies, and it is a subtle distinction which will escape the
comprehension of many, that the soldier who thus cringes to base orders
is not a coward but a craven (_pas un lache; un peureux_).
'This craven would throw himself into fire or flood to-day to
save a comrade's life; but he would blow his comrade's brains
out to-morrow at the word of command of a non-commissioned
officer. He is not base: he is frightened. His courage
disappears before a watch-word: his boldness shrinks and
vanishes under a regimental order. What cows him is the
apprehension of punishment, the fear of the men set above him.
Fear is the keystone of the ark of the temple of Janus. The
army is a laundry where they throw the consciences of men into
a tub of soap-suds, and where the characters of men are wrung
and twisted like wet linen, and are placed, shapeless, under
the wooden beater of a brutalising discipline. It is only by
means of fear that the military system has been able to
establish itself. It is only by such fear that it maintains its
position. It is obliged to affect the imagination by terror, as
it must extinguish the soul and sense of nations to prevent
each from seeing farther than the stupid limit of a frontier.
It is obliged to surround itself with a mysterious ceremony,
with a religious pomp in which horror is united to
magnificence; in which the trumpet-blast joins in the
death-shrieks; in which one can see confused together the
blood-stained robe of glory, the plume of generals, the
handcuffs of gendarmes, the marshal's baton, and the dozen
balls of the execution-volley, the golden palms of triumph and
the shattered bones of the dead. It must present this
spectacle to the crowds which stare and tremble before it as
they stand open-mouthed before a charlatan quack doctor at a
fair, whose tinsel and feathers attract them, but from whom
they shrink alarmed as soon as they see a forceps or a lancet
glitter ominously in his hand. It must do this in order that
the people, always in ecstasy before the marvellous, which it
does not attempt to analyse, shall be seized before it with awe
and admiration: even as a savage who prostrates himself in
terror and respect before the shooting-iron which he does not
understand, but which he knows possesses the power to strike
him to the earth.'
Many will protest against this figure as an insult to the general
public, but like many other insults which carry an intolerable sting in
them, it may claim that it is merited, and does not overpass the truth.
Darien writes with that force which can, indeed, only come from the
intimate persuasion that what it tells mankind is true, and should be
told.
'"It is commonly said," he continues, "that the army incarnates
the nation. History puts this into our heads by means of all
her subtlest lies. Ten martial anecdotes sum up a century; a
boast describes a reign. History preaches hatred of the people,
respect for the pillager, the sanctification of carnage, the
glorification of slaughter. The weak, the sensitive, the timid
succumb beneath it, and are buried in the red clay or left on
the sand for the vultures and jackal. The strong (sometimes,
not always) lives to have his whole future poisoned by these
memories, his whole temperament warped and embittered; or he
forces his tormentors to shoot him by some unpardonable breach
of discipline; some blow to a superior, or some intentionally
insolent reply; death is the continually recurring sentence in
the military code; if the man does not bend he must be broken:
broken in two with a volley which smashes his spine. The
punishment-battalions, the workshops of the Travaux Forces, are
the immediate consequences of the standing armies. Society, to
protect its interests, makes of a young citizen a soldier, and
of the soldier a galley slave at the first effort in him to
shake off the yoke of that discipline which degrades and
brutalises him, requiring like all tyrants and usurpers to
support its rule by terror, to make itself dreaded that its
prestige may dazzle and its tottering throne be secured. What
society requires is an obedience passive and blind, a total
imbecility, a humiliation which has no limit or hesitation; the
response of the machine to the mechanic, of the dancing dog to
the stick of his teacher. Take your man, make him surrender all
free will, power of choice, liberty, and conscience, and you
create and possess a soldier. To-day, at the end of the
nineteenth century, there is as much difference between the two
words, soldier and citizen, as there was in the time of Caesar
between two similar words--Milites and Quirites. The standing
army is the corner-stone of the actual social structure; it is
a force which sanctions and secures the conquests of force; it
is a barrier raised much less to combat foreign invasion than
to resist and paralyse the just claims of nations. Soldiers,
those sons of the people armed against their fathers, are
nothing more or less than gendarmes in disguise."'
This is surely absolute truth--that truth which is of all others most
feared by those in authority; those who, whether as sovereigns,
ministers, financiers, professional men, or tradesmen, live on and by
the servility and gullibility of the nations.
'What is discipline except fear? The soldier is reared to dread
what is behind him more than what he is forced to face; he must
be more afraid of the fellow-trooper who will be told off to
shoot him in the back, than of the adversary whom he is ordered
to attack. The army is the incarnation of fear. The soldier
must dread his commanders as a burnt child dreads the fire. He
must never laugh at their absurdities, nor raise a voice
against their injustice or their tyrannies. He must never
speak. He must not even think. His superiors do both for him.
If he laugh, or resent, or speak, or think, if he be neither a
coward nor a dolt, he is a mutineer: he must be tamed, beaten,
broken _a Biribi_.'
And when the dreamer, Queslier, says that it will not be long before the
people will become awake to this abuse of them, and will see that the
military caste is established on prejudices and interests hostile to
them, and will arise and destroy it, Darien replies, with equal
truth:--
'There will flow much water under all the bridges of the world
before the people will have ceased to adore their vain idols
bathed in blood and tears.'
Vain idols, indeed! For thousands of years the Juggernaut of military
despotism has rolled over the living pavement of the prostrate
multitudes, and there is no sign as yet that those multitudes will arise
and shiver the blood-stained car to atoms. Darien has but little hope in
the resistance of the people. He fears that the majority of them will
always continue to be daunted, dazzled, made dumb and helpless by the
powers which ruin and slay them. William of Germany makes his insolent
and inhuman declaration that the soldier must slaughter his own
progenitors if his 'war-lord' bid him do so; and yet William of Germany
is allowed to continue his reign.
What are we to look for from nations which lie down to be stamped on
thus? which lick the spurred boots of those who outrage them?
_Biribi_, and what _Biribi_ represents, has its prototype in every
country of Europe; and wherever Europe introduces her 'civilisation'
there she introduces also her quick-firing cannon, her numbered
battalions of slaves, her organised butchery, her pulverisation of
virility and of volition, her destruction of initiative and of liberty.
England considers that such arguments as those contained in this book do
not concern her because she has no conscription. But how long will she
be able, or be allowed, to be free from enforced service? The present
field-marshal, commanding-in-chief, Lord Wolesley, desires
conscription. It may well be that events, in the not far distant future,
may strengthen his hands and enable him to enforce it.[4]
[Footnote 4: This was written by me in 1897; England has not waited long
to confirm the truth of it.]
'Ah, Mascarille! who wished to put history into madrigals!'
cries Darien. 'History has given us Chauvinism (Jingoism), that
epidemic which makes a nation run headlong like the Gadarene
swine, to fall into the pit of absolutism! The army incarnates
the nation, you say? No. It diminishes it. It incarnates
nothing but force, brutal and blind, which lies at the service
of whoever most pleases it; or--sad to say--whoever pays it
highest. The army is the social cancer; is the octopus of which
the tentacles drain the blood of the nations; the hundred arms
and feelers which the people should sever with blows of their
hatchets if they desire themselves to live.'
Such language is very strong, and will rouse strong opposition in those
who have long been cradled in conventional opinions, and believe that
the established order of society, now existing, is admirable, and
intangible, because it has had the force and the cunning to so establish
itself. It is language which may, of course, be challenged by adverse
argument, which may at anyrate be met by counter-statements deserving to
be weighed against it; but it is language which is more needed than any
other in the present state of Europe, with every nation armed to the
teeth and every country an arsenal.