Praise, they say, is stricken dumb by the greatest names, and also, we
may add, by the greatest deeds. It is only by the bare simplicity of
faithful narrative that we can hope not to belittle these.
But yesterday the public had no knowledge of the great, heroic things
accomplished by the Brigade of Marines (_Fusiliers Marins_). They were
hidden under a confused mass of notes, _communiques_, instructions and
plans of operations, private letters, and newspaper articles. It has
been no easy task to bring them to light--the discreet light permitted
by the censorship. Everything seems simple and obvious to those who can
look at facts in their logical order and regular sequence. The historian
who has to handle new matter knows what a labour it is to introduce, or
rather to re-establish, such order and sequence. History has to be
written before the philosophy of history can be evolved.[1]
Our readers must not be surprised, therefore, to find here only such
considerations as are in direct relation to events. We have been
concerned with facts rather than with ideas. And in the result nothing
will be lost hereby, for we provide materials ready for use in the
establishment of that war mysticism which the sombre genius of Joseph de
Maistre presaged, which Vigny showed at work in certain souls, and which
is marked out as our national religion of to-morrow. It is obvious that
such an immense effort, such prolonged tension, such whole-hearted
sacrifice, as were demanded from the handful of men with whom we are
concerned, could not have been obtained by ordinary methods. A special
compact was required, a peculiar state of grace; the miracle was only
possible as the outcome of a close communion, and, to use the proper
word, of a true spiritual fraternity between men and officers.
True, this fraternity has been manifested in every branch of the service
and on every battlefield during the course of the present struggle; but
nowhere perhaps has it been so absolute as among the Marines. They had,
no doubt, been well prepared. The sea is a perpetual battlefield, and a
trench is hardly more of a prison than a ship. Community of danger soon
creates community of hearts; how otherwise can we account for the fact
that the most turbulent and individualist of men become the most
perfectly disciplined on board ship? This is the case with the Bretons.
At Dixmude under the command of their own officers, retaining not only
the costume, but the soul and the language of their profession, they
were still sailors. Grouped with them were seamen from all our naval
stations, Bayonne, Toulon, Dunkirk, etc., and the battalion of Commander
de Sainte-Marie, formed at Cherbourg, even contained a fair sprinkling
of natives of Les Batignolles. I had opportunities of talking to
several of these "Parigots," and I should not advise anyone to speak
slightingly of their officers before them, though, indeed, so few of
these have survived that nine times out of ten the quip could be aimed
only at a ghost. The deepest and tenderest words I heard uttered
concerning Naval Lieutenant Martin des Pallieres were spoken by a Marine
of the Rue des Martyrs, Georges Delaballe, who was one of his gunners in
front of the cemetery the night when his machine-guns were jammed, and
five hundred Germans, led by a major wearing the Red Cross armlet, threw
themselves suddenly into our trenches.
"But why did you love him so?" I asked.
"I don't know.... We loved him because he was brave, and was always
saying things that made us laugh, ... but above all because he loved
us."
Here we have the secret of this extraordinary empire of the officers
over their men, the explanation of that miracle of a four weeks'
resistance, one against six, under the most formidable tempest of
shells of every calibre that ever fell upon a position, in a shattered
town where all the buildings were ablaze, and where, to quote the words
of a _Daily Telegraph_ correspondent, it was no longer light or dark,
"but only red." When the Boches murdered Commander Jeanniot, his men
were half crazy. They would not have felt the death of a father more
deeply. I have recently had a letter sent me written by a Breton lad,
Jules Cavan, who was wounded at Dixmude. While he was in hospital at
Bordeaux he was visited by relatives of Second-Lieutenant Gautier, who
was killed on October 27 in the cemetery trenches.
"Dear Sir," he wrote to M. Dalche de Desplanels the following day, "you
cannot imagine how your visit went to my heart.... On October 19, when
my battalion took the offensive at Lannes, three kilometres from
Dixmude, I was wounded by a bullet in the thigh. I dragged myself along
as best I could on the battlefield, bullets falling thickly all around
me. I got over about five hundred metres on the battlefield and reached
the road. Just at that moment Lieutenant Gautier, who was coming towards
me with a section, seeing me in the ditch, asked: 'Well, my lad, what is
the matter with you?' 'Oh, Lieutenant, I am wounded in the leg, and I
cannot drag myself further.' 'Here then, get on my back.' And he carried
me to a house at Lannes, and said these words, which I shall never
forget: 'Stay there, my lad, till they come and fetch you. I will let
the motor ambulance men know.' Then he went off under the fire. Oh, the
splendid fellow!"
"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 Pallieres, 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 recognising 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 metres 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[2]), 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 depots, 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 Wuertemberg 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 Hebert, said that the Fusiliers had gained more than
a naval battle there. My only objection to this statement is its
modesty. Dixmude was our Thermopylae in the north, as the Grand-Couronne,
near Nancy, was our Thermopylae 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 simple, soldierly words, more eloquent than the
most brilliant harangues. The brigade will reckon them among their
proudest trophies to all time.