London Times Literary Supplement of Oct. 1, and which the French
Government ordered to be read in all Parisian schools, M. Rene
Bazin writes in l'Echo de Paris:_
Is not this language admirable? What full and flowing phrases. They are
like a ship filled with grain sailing into port with her sails full.
Preserve them, these fugitive lines written by a neighbor, and read them
to your children. They will teach them the greatness of France and the
greatness of England.
The whole world recognizes two qualities in the Englishman: his bravery
and his common sense. We know that the Englishman is true to his given
word, and that even in the antipodes he never changes his habits. As I
write, the postman brings me a letter from the front, dated Oct. 17. The
cavalryman who sends it tells of our Allies. "We are fighting the
enemy's cavalry," he writes, "and for two days my brigade was in action
with the British. They know how to fight and they astonish us by their
marvelous powers of organization and their coolness."
Yes, we know that of old. We also know that England never closes her
doors to liberty. We have a confused memory of the hospitality given to
our priests in the times of the Revolution. Now England provides us with
fresh proof of her kindness of heart. You have heard the news--the
professors and students of the Catholic University of Louvain invited to
Cambridge. The destroyed Belgian university reconstituted in the home of
the celebrated English university. What a magnificent idea!
I do not know whether the author who has spoken so well of France in the
great English newspaper has ever visited this country. But he has surely
meditated on our history and has divined the reason of the very
existence of France; why she merits love beyond her frontiers, and why
she should be defended "like a treasure." England is not made up of
traders, soldiers, sailors, politicians, but also--and that is what the
French people will learn better every day--of poets, subtle
philosophers, and of thoughtful and religious spirits.
In truth, the day which Joan of Arc foresaw has arrived. She did not
hate the English. It was only their intolerable rule of the kingdom
which was hateful to her. The good maid of Lorraine said that after
having driven the English out of France she would reconcile them with
the French and lead them together in a crusade. This has become true.
Her dream is accomplished. The crusade is not against the Saracens, but
it is a crusade all the same.
*France*
*From The London Times Literary Supplement*
Among all the sorrows of this war there is one joy for us in it: that it
has made us brothers with the French as no other two nations have ever
been brothers before. There has come to us, after ages of conflict, a
kind of millennium of friendship; and in that we feel there is a hope
for the world that outweighs all our fears, even at the height of the
worldwide calamity. There were days and days, during the swift German
advance, when we feared that the French armies were no match for the
German, that Germany would be conquered on the seas and from her eastern
frontier, that after the war France would remain a power only through
the support of her Allies. For that fear we must now ask forgiveness;
but at least we can plead in excuse that it was unselfish and free from
all national vanity. If, in spite of ultimate victory, France had lost
her high place among the nations, we should have felt that the victory
itself was an irreparable loss for the world. And now we may speak
frankly of that fear because, however unfounded it was, it reveals the
nature of the friendship between France and England.
That is also revealed in the praise which the French have given to our
army. There is no people that can praise as they can: for they enjoy
praising others as much as some nations enjoy praising themselves, and
they lose all the reserve of egotism in the pleasure of praising well.
But in this case they have praised so generously because there was a
great kindliness behind their praise, because they, like us, feel that
this war means a new brotherhood stronger than all the hatreds it may
provoke, a brotherhood not only of war but of the peace that is to come
after it. That welcome of English soldiers in the villages of France,
with food and wine and flowers, is only a foretaste of what is to be in
both countries in a happier time. It is what we have desired in the past
of silly wrangles and misunderstandings, and now we know that our desire
is fulfilled.
*"That Sweet Enemy."*
For behind all those misunderstandings, and in spite of the difference
of character between us, there was always an understanding which showed
itself in the courtesies of Fontenoy and a hundred other battles. When
Sir Philip Sidney spoke of France as that sweet enemy, he made a phrase
for the English feeling of centuries past and centuries to be. We
quarrelled bitterly and long; but it was like a man and woman who know
that some day their love will be confessed and are angry with each other
for the quarrels that delay the confession. We called each other
ridiculous, and knew that we were talking nonsense; indeed, as in all
quarrels without real hatred, we made charges against each other that
were the opposite of the truth. We said that the French were frivolous;
and they said that we were gloomy. Now they see the gayety of our
soldiers and we see the deep seriousness of all France at this crisis of
her fate. She, of all the nations at war, is fighting with the least
help from illusion, with the least sense of glory and romance. To her
the German invasion is like a pestilence; to defeat it is merely a
necessity of her existence; and in defeating it she is showing the
courage of doctors and nurses, that courage which is furthest removed
from animal instinct and most secure from panic reaction. There is no
sign in France now of the passionate hopes of the revolutionary wars;
1870 is between them and her; she has learned, like no other nation in
Europe, the great lesson of defeat, which is not to mix material dreams
with spiritual; she has passed beyond illusions, yet her spirit is as
high as if it were drunk with all the illusions of Germany.
And that is why we admire her as we have never admired a nation before.
We ourselves are an old and experienced people, who have, we hope,
outlived gaudy and dangerous dreams; but we have not been tested like
the French, and we do not know whether we or any other nation could
endure the test they have endured. It is not merely that they have
survived and kept their strength. It is that they have a kind of
strength new to nations, such as we see in beautiful women who have
endured great sorrows and outlived all the triumphs and passions of
their youth, who smile where once they laughed; and yet they are more
beautiful than ever, and seem to live with a purpose that is not only
their own, but belongs to the whole of life. So now we feel that France
is fighting not merely for her own honor and her own beautiful country,
still less for a triumph over an arrogant rival, but for what she means
to all the world; and that now she means far more than ever in the past.
*Furia Francese.*
This quarrel, as even the Germans confess, was not made by her. She saw
it gathering, and she was as quiet as if she hoped to escape war by
submission. The chance of revenge was offered as it had never been
offered in forty years; yet she did not stir to grasp it. Her enemy gave
every provocation, yet she stayed as still as if she were spiritless;
and all the while she was the proudest nation on the earth, so proud
that she did not need to threaten or boast. Then came the first failure,
and she took it as if she had expected nothing better. She had to make
war in a manner wholly contrary to her nature and genius, and she made
it as if patience, not fire, were the main strength of her soul. Yet
behind the new patience the old fire persisted; and the _Furia Francese_
is only waiting for its chance. The Germans believe they have determined
all the conditions of modern war, and, indeed of all modern competition
between the nations to suit their own national character. It is their
age, they think, an age in which the qualities of the old peoples,
England and France, are obsolete. They make war, after their own
pattern, and we have only to suffer it as long as we can. But France has
learned what she needs from Germany so that she may fight the German
idea as well as the German armies; and when the German armies were
checked before Paris there was an equal check to the German idea. Then
the world, which was holding its breath, knew that the old nations, the
old faith and mind and conscience of Europe, were still standing fast
and that science had not utterly betrayed them all to the new barbarism.
Twice before, at Tours and in the Catalaunian fields, there had been
such a fight upon the soil of France, and now for the third time it is
the heavy fate and the glory of France to be the guardian nation. That
is not an accident, for France is still the chief treasury of all that
these conscious barbarians would destroy. They knew that while she
stands unbroken there is a spirit in her that will make their Kultur
seem unlovely to all the world. They know that in her, as in Athens long
ago, thought remains passionate and disinterested and free. Their
thought is German and exercised for German ends, like their army; but
hers can forget France in the universe, and for that reason her armies
and ours will fight for it as if the universe were at stake. Many forms
has that thought taken, passing through disguises and errors, mocking at
itself, mocking at the holiest things; and yet there has always been the
holiness of freedom in it. The French blasphemer has never blasphemed
against the idea of truth even when he mistook falsehood for it. In the
Terror he said there was no God, because he believed there was none, but
he never said that France was God so that he might encourage her to
conquer the world. Voltaire was an imp of destruction perhaps, but with
what a divine lightning of laughter would he have struck the Teutonic
Antichrist, and how the everlasting soul of France would have risen in
him if he could have seen her most sacred church, the visible sign of
her faith and her genius, ruined by the German guns. Was there ever a
stupidity so worthy of his scorn as this attempt to bombard the spirit?
For, though the temple is ruined, the faith remains; and whatever war
the Germans may make upon the glory of the past, it is the glory of the
future that France fights for. Whatever wounds she suffers now she is
suffering for all mankind; and now, more than ever before in her
history, are those words become true which one poet who loved her gave
to her in the Litany of Nations crying to the earth:
I am she that was thy sign and standard bearer,
Thy voice and cry;
She that washed thee with her blood and left thee fairer,
The same am I.
Are not these the hands that raised thee fallen, and fed thee,
These hands defiled?
Am not I thy tongue that spake, thine eye that led thee,
Not I thy child?
*The Soldier of 1914*
*By Rene Doumic.*
_In spite of the great European war, which struck France with the
full force of its horrors, the Institute of France, which includes
the world-famous French Academy, held its regular session on Oct.
26 last. The feature of this session, widely heralded beforehand,
was the address of the celebrated critic, M. Rene Doumic of the
Academy, on "The Soldier of 1914." "Every sentence, every word of
it, was punctuated with acclamations from the audience," says Le
Figaro in its report. Below is a translation of M. Doumic's
address:_
The soldier of 1914. We think only of him. We live only for him, just as
we live only through him. I have not chosen this subject; it has forced
itself upon me. My only regret is that I come here in academician's
costume, with its useless sword, to speak to you about those whose
uniforms are torn by bullets, whose rifles are black with powder.
And I am ashamed, above all, of placing so feeble a voice at the service
of so great a cause. But what do words matter, when the most brilliant
of them would pale before acts of which each day makes us the witnesses?
For these acts we have only words, but let us hope that these, coming
from the heart, may bring to those who are fighting for their country
somewhere near the frontier the spirit of our gratitude and the fervor
of our admiration.
Our history is nothing but the history of French valor, so ingenious in
adopting new forms and adapting itself each time to the changing
conditions of warfare. Soldiers of the King or of the republic, old
"grognards" of Napoleon, who always growled yet followed just the same,
youngsters who bit their cartridges with childish lips, veterans of
fights in Africa, cuirassieurs of Reichshofen, gardes-mobiles of the
Loire, all, at the moment of duty and sacrifice, did everything that
France expected of her sons.
So, too, for this war, the soldier needed has arisen. After so many
heroes he has invented a new form of heroism.
I say the soldier, for the soldier is what one must say. Here begins
what is clearly expressed in one phrase only--the French miracle. This
national union in which all opinions have become fused is merely a
reflection of the unity which has been suddenly created in our army.
*When War Broke Out.*
When war broke out it found military France ready and armed; mere
troopers, officers none of whom ever thought that he would one day lead
his men under fire, and that admirable General Staff which, never
allowing itself to be deflected from its purpose, did its work silent
and aloof.
But there was beside this France another France, the France of
civilians, accustomed by long years of peace to disbelieve in war;
which, in conjuring up a picture of Europe delivered over to fire and
blood, could not conceive that any human being in the world would assume
the responsibility for such an act before history. War surprised the
employe at his desk, the workman in his workshop, the peasant in his
field. It snatched them from the intimacy of their hearths, from the
amenities of family life which in France is sweeter than elsewhere.
These men were obliged to leave behind beings whom they loved tenderly.
For the last time they clasped in their arms the beloved partners of
their lives, so deeply moved yet so proud, and their children, the
eldest of whom have understood and will never forget. And all of them,
artist and artisan, priest and teacher, those who dreamed of revenge and
those who dreamed of the fraternity of nations, those of every mind,
every profession, every age, as they stepped into their places, were
endowed with the soul of the soldier of France, every one of them, and
became thus the same soldier.
The war which lay in wait for these men, many of whom did not seem made
for war, was a war of which nobody had ever seen the like. We have heard
tell of wars of giants, of battles of nations, but nobody had ever seen
a war extending from the Marne to the Vistula, nor battles with a front
of hundreds of kilometers, lasting weeks without respite day or night,
fought by millions of men. Never in its worst nightmares had
hallucinated imagination conjured up the progress made in the art of
mowing down human lives. The German Army, to which the German Nation has
never refused anything, either moral support or money, the nerve of war,
has been able to profit by all this progress, to reduce to a formula the
violence which drives forward the attack, to prepare the spy system
which watches over the unarmed foe, to organize even incendiarism, and
to become thus, forged by forty-four years of hatred, the most
formidable tool of destruction that has ever sown ruin and death.
*German Meets Belgian.*
The Germans arrived, with the irresistible impetus of their masses, with
the fury of a tempest, with the roar of thunder, enraged at having been
confronted on their road by that little Belgian Nation which has just
inscribed its name among the first on the roster of heroism. Already the
German chiefs imagined themselves lords of Paris, which they threatened
to reduce to ashes--and which did not tremble.
It was to meet this colossus of war that our little soldier marched
forth. And he made it fall back.
To this new war he brings his old qualities, the qualities of all time.
Courage--let us not speak of that. Can one speak of courage? Just read
the short sentences in the army orders.
Corporal Voituret of the Second Dragoons, mortally wounded on a
reconnoissance, cries: "Vive la France! I die for her! I die happy!"
Private Chabannes of the Eighteenth Chasseurs, unhorsed and wounded,
replies to the Major who asks him why he had not surrendered: "We
Frenchmen never surrender!" And remember those who, mortally wounded,
stick to their posts so as to fight to the end with their men, and those
wounded men who have but one desire--every one of us can vouch for
this--to return to the firing line! And that one who, hopelessly
mutilated, said to me: "It is not being crippled that hurts me; it is
that I shall not be able to see the best part of the thing!" These, and
the others, the thousands of others, shall we speak of their courage?
--what would it mean to speak of their courage?
And the dash of them!--the only criticism to which they lay themselves
open is that they are too fiery, that they do not wait the right moment
for the charge, in order to drive back the enemy at the point of the
bayonet. What spirit! What gayety! All the letters from our soldiers are
overflowing with cheerfulness. Where, for instance, does that nickname
come from applied by them to the enemy--the "Boches"? It comes from
where so many more have come; its author is nobody and everybody; it is
the spontaneous product of that Gallic humor which jokes at danger,
takes liberities with it.
What pride! What sense of honor! Whereas the German officer, posted
behind his men, drives them forward like a flock of sheep, revolver in
his hand and insults on his lips, we, on our side, hear nothing but
those beautiful, those radiant words: "Forward! For your country!"--the
call of the French officer to his children, whom he impels forward by
giving them the example, by plunging under fire first, before all of
them, at their head.
*The Password: "Smile!"*
And--supreme adornment of all--with what grace they deck their
gallantry! A few seconds before being killed by an exploding shell, Col.
Doury, ordered to resist to the last gasp, replies: "All right! We will
resist. And now, boys, here is the password: Smile!" It is like a flower
thrown on the scientific brutality of modern war, that memory of the
days when men went to war with lace on their sleeves. There we recognize
the French soldier such as we have always known him through fifteen
centuries of the history of France.
But now we look upon him in a form of which we did not suspect the
existence, the form in which he has just revealed himself to us.
To go forward is all very well; but to fall back in good order, to
understand that a retreat may be a masterpiece of strategy, to find in
himself that other kind of courage which consists in not getting
discouraged, to be able to wait without getting demoralized, to preserve
unshaken the certainty of the final outcome--in these things lies a
virtue which we did not know we possessed: the virtue of patience. It
won us our victory of the Marne. One man is its personification today,
that great chief, wise and prudent, who spares his men, who makes up his
mind not to give battle except in his own time on his own ground, that
chief toward whom at this moment the calm and confident eyes of the
entire country are turned.
To carry a position by assault is one thing. But to stand impassive in a
rain of shot, amid exploding shells, amid infernal din and blinding
smoke; to fire at an invisible enemy, to dispute foot by foot ground
covered with traps, to retake the same village ten times, to burrow into
the soil and crouch there, to watch day after day for the moment when
the beast at bay ventures from his lair--where have we acquired the
phlegmatic coolness for such things? Has it come from the proximity of
our English allies? It is in the English reports that we read the
eulogies of our army for its endurance and tenacity.
We have always known how to pluck the laurels of the brave on fields of
battle and to water them with our blood. We Frenchmen, all of us, are
lovers of glory. The stories of war which we read in our childhood
days--captures of redoubts, fiery charges, furious fights around the
flag--made us thrill. And, like the Athenians who left the performance
of a tragedy by Aeschylus thirsting to close their books and march on
the enemy, we dreamed of combats in which we were to win fame.
But since those days military literature has undergone somewhat of a
change, and the communiqués which we devour twice a day, hungry for
news, give us no such tales of prowess.
"On the left wing we have progressed. On the right wing we have repulsed
violent counter-attacks. On the front the situation remains without
change." Where are our men? What troops are meant? What Generals?
Nothing is told of such things. The veil of anonymity shrouds great
actions, a barrier of impenetrable mystery protects the secret of the
operations.
*Great Things Done Simply.*
Our soldiers have endured every hardship, braved every danger, never
knowing whether each dawning day was their last, yet the cleverest
manoeuvring, the most gallant feats, are obliterated, effaced, lost, in
the calculated colorlessness of an enigmatic report. But that sacrifice
also have they made. To be at the post assigned to them, to play a great
or infinitesimal role in the common work, is the only reward they
desire. Can it be that the disease of individualism is a thing of
yesterday? The soldier of 1914 has cured us of it. Never have
disinterestedness and modesty been pushed so far.
Let us say it in a word: Never have great things been done so simply.
But he knows why he is fighting. It is not for the ambition of a
sovereign or the impatience of his heir, for the arrogance of a caste of
country squires or the profit of a firm of merchants. No; he fights for
the land where he was born and where his dead sleep; he fights to free
his invaded country and give her back her lost provinces, for her past,
struck to the heart by the shells that bombarded the Cathedral of
Rheims; he fights so that his children may have the right to think,
speak, and feel in French, so that there may still be in the world a
French race, which the world needs. For this war of destruction is aimed
at the destruction of our race, and our race has been moved to its
depths. It has risen as one man and assembled together; it has called up
from its remotest history all its energy, in order to reincarnate them
in the person of him whose duty is to defend the race today; it has
inspired in him the valor of the knights of old, the endurance of the
laborer bending over his furrow, the modesty of the old masters who made
of our cathedrals masterpieces of anonymity, the honesty of the
bourgeois, the patience of humble folk, the consciousness of duty which
mothers teach to their children, all those virtues which, developed from
one generation to another, become a tradition, the tradition of an
industrious people, made strong by a long past and made to endure. It is
these qualities, all of them together, which we admire in the soldier of
1914, the complete and superb type of the entire race.
*A Holy Intoxication.*
When it has such an aim, the noblest of all, war is sublime; all who go
into it are as if transfigured. It exalts, expands, and purifies souls.
On approaching the battlefield a holy intoxication, a holy happiness,
takes possession of those for whom has been reserved the supreme joy of
braving death for their country. Death is everywhere, but they do not
believe in it any more. And when, on certain mornings, to the sound of
cannon that mix their rumblings with mystic voices of bells, in the
devastated church which cries to the heavens through every breach opened
in its walls, the Chaplain blesses the regiment that he will accompany
the next minute to the firing line, every head will be bent at the same
time and all will feel on their brows the breath of God.