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LETTERS OF A SOLDIER
You do not know the things that are taught by him
who falls. I do know.
(_Letter of October 15, 1914._)
LETTERS OF A SOLDIER
1914-1915
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
A. CLUTTON-BROCK
AND A PREFACE BY
ANDRÉ CHEVRILLON
AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY
V.M.
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
1917
Printed in Great Britain
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
PREFACE BY ANDRÉ CHEVRILLON 3
LETTERS 33
INTRODUCTION
I have been asked to write an Introduction to these letters; and I do
so, in spite of the fact that M. Chevrillon has already written one,
because they are stranger to me, an Englishman, than they could be to
him a Frenchman; and it seems worth while to warn other English readers
of this strangeness. But I would warn them of it only by way of a
recommendation. We all hope that after the war there will be a growing
intimacy between France and England, that the two countries will be
closer to each other than any two countries have ever been before. But
if this is to happen we must not be content with admiring each other.
Mere admiration will die away; indeed, some part of our present
admiration of the French has come from our failure to understand them.
There is a surprise in it which they cannot think flattering, and which
ought never to have been. Perhaps they also have been surprised by us;
for it is certain that we have not known each other, and have been
content with those loose general opinions about each other which are the
common result of ignorance and indifference.
What we need then is understanding; and these letters will help us to
it. They are, as we should have said before the war, very French, that
is to say, very unlike what an Englishman would write to his mother, or
indeed to any one. Many Englishmen, if they could have read them before
the war, would have thought them almost unmanly; yet the writer
distinguished himself even in the French army. But perhaps unmanly is
too strong a word to be put in the mouth even of an imaginary and stupid
Englishman. No one, however stupid, could possibly have supposed that
the writer was a coward; but it might have been thought that he was
utterly unfitted for war. So the Germans thought that the whole French
nation, and indeed every nation but themselves, was unfitted for war,
because they alone willed it, and rejoiced in the thought of it. And
certainly the French had a greater abhorrence of war even than
ourselves; how great one can see in these letters. The writer of them
never for a moment tries or pretends to take any pleasure in war. His
chief aim in writing is to forget it, to speak of the consolations which
he can still draw from the memories of his past peaceful life, and from
the peace of the sky and the earth, where it is still unravaged. He is,
or was, a painter (one cannot say which, for he is missing), and the
moment he has time to write, he thinks of his art again. It would hardly
be possible for any Englishman to ignore the war so resolutely, to
refuse any kind of consent to it; or, if an Englishman were capable of
such refusal, he would probably be a conscientious objector. We must
romanticise things to some extent if we are to endure them; we must at
least make jokes about them; and that is where the French fail to
understand us, like the Germans. If a thing is bad to a Frenchman, it is
altogether bad; and he will have no dealings with it. He may have to
endure it; but he endures gravely and tensely with a sad Latin dignity,
and so it is that this Frenchman endures the war from first to last. For
that reason the Germans, after their failure on the Marne, counted on
the nervous exhaustion of the French. It was a favourite phrase with
them--one of those formulæ founded on knowledge without understanding
which so often mislead them.--Their formula for us was that we cared for
nothing but football and marmalade.--But reading these letters one can
understand how they were deceived. The writer of them seems to be
always enduring tensely. It is part of his French sincerity never to
accept any false consolation. He will not try to believe what he knows
to be false, even so that he may endure for the sake of France. Yet he
does endure, and all France endures, in a state of mind that would mean
weakness in us and utter collapse in the Germans. The war is to him like
an incessant noise that he tries to forget while he is writing. He does
not write as a matter of duty, and so that his mother may know that he
is still living; rather he writes to her so that he may ease a little
his desire to talk to her. We are used to French sentiment about the
mother; it is a commonplace of French eloquence, and we have often
smiled at it as mere sentimental platitude; but in these letters we see
a son's love for his mother no longer insisted upon or dressed up in
rhetoric, but naked and unconscious, a habit of the mind, a need of the
soul, a support even to the weakness of the flesh. Such affection with
us is apt to be, if not shamefaced, at least a little off-hand. Often it
exists, and is strong; but it is seldom so constant an element in all
joy and sorrow. The most loving of English sons would not often rather
talk to his mother than to any one else; but one knows that this
Frenchman would rather talk to his mother than to any one else, and that
he can talk to her more intimately than to any woman or man. One can see
that he has had the long habit of talking to her thus, so that now he
does it easily and without restraint. He tells her the deepest thoughts
of his mind, knowing that she will understand them better than any one
else. That foreboding which the mother felt about her baby in Morris's
poem has never come true about him:
'Lo, here thy body beginning, O son, and thy soul and thy life,
But how will it be if thou livest and enterest into the strife,
And in love we dwell together when the man is grown in thee,
When thy sweet speech I shall hearken, and yet 'twixt thee and me
Shall rise that wall of distance that round each one doth grow,
And maketh it hard and bitter each other's thought to know?'
This son has lived and entered into the strife indeed; but the wall of
distance has not grown round him; and, as we read these letters, we
think that no French mother would fear the natural estrangement which
that English mother in the poem fears. The foreboding itself seems to
belong to a barbaric society in which there is a more animal division of
the sexes, in which the male fears to become effeminate if he does not
insist upon his masculinity even to his mother. But this Frenchman has
left barbarism so far behind that he is not afraid of effeminacy; nor
does he need to remind himself that he is a male. There is a philosophy
to which this forgetfulness of masculinity is decadence. According to
that philosophy, man must remember always that he is an animal, a proud
fighting animal like a bull or a cock; and the proudest of all fighting
animals, to be admired at a distance by all women unless he condescends
to desire them, is the officer. No one could be further from such a
philosophy than this Frenchman; he is so far from it that he does not
seem even to be aware of its existence. He hardly mentions the Germans
and never expresses anger against them. The worst he says of them almost
makes one smile at its naïve gentleness. 'Unfortunately, contact with
the German race has for ever spoilt my opinion of those people.' They
are to him merely a nation that does not know how to behave. He reminds
one of Talleyrand, who said of Napoleon after one of his rages: 'What a
pity that so great a man should have been so badly brought up.' But
there was malice in that understatement of Talleyrand's; and there is
none in the understatement of this Frenchman. He has no desire for
revenge; his only wish is that his duty were done and that he could
return home to his art and his mother. To the philosophy I have spoken
of that would seem a pitiable state of mind. No one could be less like a
Germanic hero than this French artist; and yet the Germans were in error
when they counted on an easy victory over him and his like, when they
made sure that a conscious barbarism must prevail over an unconscious
civilisation.
These letters reveal to us a new type of soldier, a new type of hero,
almost a new type of man; one who can be brave without any animal
consolations, who can endure without any romantic illusions, and, what
is more, one who can have faith without any formal revelation. For there
is nothing in the letters more interesting than the religion constantly
expressed or implied in them. The writer is not a Catholic. Catholic
fervour on its figurative side, he says, will always leave him cold. He
finds the fervour of Verlaine almost gross. He seems afraid to give any
artistic expression to his own faith, lest he should falsify it by
over-expression, lest it should seem to be more accomplished than it is.
He will not even try to take delight in it; he is almost fanatically an
intellectual ascetic; and yet again and again he affirms a faith which
he will hardly consent to specify by uttering the name of God. He is shy
about it, as if it might be refuted if it were expressed in any dogmatic
terms. So many victories seem to have been won over faith in the modern
world that his will not throw down any challenge. If it is to live, it
must escape the notice of the vulgar triumphing sceptics, and even of
the doubting habits of his own mind. Yet it does live its own humble and
hesitating life; and in its hesitations and its humility is its
strength. He could not be acclaimed by any eager bishop as a lost sheep
returning repentant to the fold; but he is not lost, nor is the
universe to him anything but a home and the dear city of God even in the
trenches.
His expression of this faith is always vague, tentative, and
inconclusive. He is certain of something, but he cannot say what; yet he
knows that he is certain, although, if he were to try to express his
certainty in any old terms, he would reject it himself. He knows; but he
cannot tell us or himself what he knows. There are sentences in which,
as M. Chevrillon says, he speaks like an Indian sage; but I do not think
that Indian philosophy would have satisfied him, because it is itself
satisfied. For he is in this matter of faith a primitive, beginning to
build a very small and humble temple out of the ruins of the past. He
has no science of theology, nothing but emotions and values, and a trust
in them. They are for a reality that he can scarcely express at all; and
yet he is the more sure of its existence because of the torment through
which he is passing. He uses that word _torment_ more than once. The war
is to him a martyrdom in which he bears witness to his love, not only
for France, but also for that larger country which is the universe. The
torment makes him more sure of it than ever before; it heightens his
sense of values; and he knows that what matters to a man is not whether
he is joyful or sorrowful, but the quality of his joy and his sorrow.
There are times when, like an Indian sage, he thinks that all life is
contemplation; but this thought is only the last refuge of the spirit
against a material storm. He is not one of those who would go into the
wilderness and lose themselves in the depths of abstract thought; he is
a European, an artist, a lover, one for whom the visible world exists,
and to whom the Christian doctrine of love is but the expression of his
own experience. For a century or more our world, confident in its
strength, its reason, its knowledge, has been undermining that doctrine
with every possible heresy. In sheer wilfulness it has tried to empty
life of all its values. It has made us ashamed of loving anything; for
all love, it has told us, is illusion produced by the will to live, or
the will to power, or some other figment of its own perverse thought.
And now, as a result of that perversity, the storm breaks upon us when
we seem to have stripped ourselves of all shelter against it. The
doctrine of the struggle for life becomes a fact in this war; but, if it
were true, what creature endowed with reason would find life worth
struggling for? Certainly not the writer of these letters. He fought,
not only for his country, but to maintain a contrary doctrine; and we
see him and a thousand others passing through the fiercest trial of
faith at the moment when the mind of man has been by its own perverse
activity stripped most bare of faith. So he cannot even express the
faith for which he is ready to die; but he is ready to die for it. A
few years ago he would have been sneered at for the vagueness of his
language, but no one can sneer now. The dead will not spoil the spring,
he says No, indeed: for by their death they have brought a new spring of
faith into the world.
A. CLUTTON-BROCK.
LETTERS OF A SOLDIER
AUGUST 1914-APRIL 1915
PREFACE BY ANDRÉ CHEVRILLON
PREFACE BY ANDRÉ CHEVRILLON
The letters that follow are those of a young painter who was at the
front from September [1914] till the beginning of April [1915]; at the
latter date he was missing in one of the battles of the Argonne. Are we
to speak of him in the present tense or in the past? We know not: since
the day when the last mud-stained paper reached them, announcing the
attack in which he was to vanish, what a close weight of silence for
those who during eight months lived upon these almost daily letters! But
for how many women, how many mothers, is a grief like this to-day a
common lot!
In the studio and amid the canvases upon which the young man had traced
the forms of his dreams, I have seen, piously placed in order on a
table, all the little papers written by his hand. A silent presence--I
was not then aware what manner of mind had there expressed
itself--revisiting this hearth: a mind surely made to travel far abroad
and cast its lights upon multitudes of men.
It was the mind of a complete artist, but of a poet as well, that had
lurked under the timid reserves of a youth who at thirteen years of age
had left school for the studio, and who had taught himself, without help
from any other, to translate the thoughts that moved him into such words
as the reader will judge of. Here are tenderness of heart, a fervent
love of Nature, a mystical sense of her changing moods and of her
eternal language: all those things of which the Germans, professing
themselves heirs of Goethe and of Beethoven, imagine they have the
monopoly, but of which we Frenchmen have the true perception, and which
move us in the words written by our young countryman for his most dearly
beloved and for himself.
It is singularly touching to find in the spiritual, grave, and religious
temper of these letters an affinity to the spirit of many others written
from the front. During those weeks, those endless months of winter in
the mud or the frost of the trenches, in the daily sight of death, in
the thought of that death coming upon them also, closing upon them to
seal their eyes for ever, these boys seem to have faced the things of
eternity with a deeper insight and a keener feeling, as each one, in the
full strength of life and youth, dwelt upon the thought of beholding the
world for the last time:
'Et le monde allait donc mourir
Avec mes yeux, miroir du monde.'
Solemn thought for the man who has watched through a long night in some
advance-post, and who, beyond the grey and silent plain where lurks the
enemy, sees a red sun rise yet once more upon the world! 'O splendid
sun, I wish I could see you again!' wrote once, on the evening of his
advance upon French ground, a young Silesian soldier who fell upon the
battlefield of the Marne, and whose Journal has been published. Suddenly
breaks in this mysterious cry in the course of methodical German notes
on food and drink, stages of the march, blistered feet, the number of
villages set on fire. And in how many French letters too have we found
it--that abrupt intuition! It is always the same, in many and various
words: in those of the agriculturist of the Seine-et-Marne, whom I
could name, and who for perhaps the first time in his life takes an
interest in the sunset; in those of the young middle-class Parisian who
had seemed incapable of speech save in terms of unbelief and burlesque;
in those of the artist who utters his emotion in poetry and lifts it up
to the heights of stoical philosophy. Through all unlikenesses, in the
hearts of all--peasant, citizen, soldier, German schoolmaster--one
prevailing thought is revealed; the living man, passing away, feels, at
the approach of eternal night, an exaltation of his sense of the
splendour of the world. O miracle of things! O divine peace of this
plain, of these trees, of these hillsides! And how keenly does the ear
listen for this infinite silence! Or we hear of the immensities of night
where nothing remains except light and flame: far off, the smouldering
of fires; far up, the sparkle of stars, the shapes of constellations,
the august order of the universe. Very soon the rattle of machine-guns,
the thunder of explosives, the clamour of attack will begin anew; there
will again be killing and dying. What a contrast of human fury and
eternal serenity! More or less vaguely, and for a brief moment, there
comes into passing life a glimpse of the profound relation of the simple
things of heaven and earth with the mind of him who contemplates them.
Does man then guess that all these things are indeed himself, that his
little life and the life of the tree yonder, thrilling in the shiver of
dawn, and beckoning to him, are bound together in the flood of universal
life?
* * * * *
For the artist of whom we are now reading, such intuitions and such
visions were the delight of long months in the trenches. Under the free
sky, in contact with the earth, in face of the peril and the sight of
death, life seemed to him to take a sudden and strange expansion. 'From
our life in the open air we have gained a freedom of conception, an
amplitude of thought, which will for ever make cities horrible to those
who survive the war.' Death itself had become a more beautiful and a
more simple thing; the death of soldiers on whose dumb shapes he looked
with pious eyes, as Nature took them back into her maternal care and
mingled them with her earth. Day by day he lived in the thought of
eternity. True, he kept a feeling heart for all the horror, and
compassion for all the pain; as to his duty, the reader will know how he
did that. But, suffering 'all the same,' he took refuge in 'the higher
consolations.' 'We must,' he writes to those who love him and whom he
labours--with what constant solicitude!--to prepare for the worst, 'we
must attain to this--that no catastrophe whatsoever shall have power to
cripple our lives, to interrupt them, to set them out of tune. . . . Be
happy in this great assurance that I give you--that up till now I have
raised my soul to a height where events have had no empire over it.'
These are heights upon which, beyond the differences of their teachings
and their creeds, all great religious intuitions meet together; upon
which illusions are no more, and the soul rejects the pretensions of
self, in order to accept what _is_. 'Our sufferings come from our small
human patience taking the same direction as our desires, noble though
they may be. . . . Do not dwell upon the personality of those who pass
away and of those who are left; such things are weighed only in the
scales of men. We should gauge in ourselves the enormous value of what
is better and greater than humanity.' In truth, death is impotent
because it too is illusory, and 'nothing is ever lost.' So this young
Frenchman, who has yet never forgone the language of his Christianity,
rediscovers amid the terrors of war the stoicism of Marcus
Aurelius--that virtue which is 'neither patience nor too great
confidence, but a certain faith in the order of all things, a certain
power of saying of each trial, "It is well."' And, even beyond stoicism,
it is the sublime and antique thought of India that he makes his own,
the thought that denies appearances and differences, that reveals to man
his separate self and the universe, and teaches him to say of the one,
'I am not _this_,' and of the other, '_that_, I am.' Wonderful encounter
of thoughts across the distance of ages and the distance of races! The
meditation of this young French soldier, in face of the enemy who is to
attack on the morrow, resumes the strange ecstasy in which was rapt the
warrior of the _Bhagavad Gita_ between two armies coming to the grapple.
He, too, sees the turbulence of mankind as a dream that seems to veil
the higher order and the Divine unity. He, too, puts his faith in that
'which knows neither birth nor death,' which is 'not born, is
indestructible, is not slain when this body is slain.' This is the
perpetual life that moves across all the shapes it calls up, striving in
each one to rise nearer to light, to knowledge, and to peace. And that
aim is a law and a command to every thinking being that he should give
himself wholly for the general and final good. Thence comes the grave
satisfaction of those who devote themselves, of those who die, in the
cause of life, in the thought of a sacrifice not useless. 'Tell ----
that if fate strikes down the best, there is no injustice; those who
survive will be the better men. You do not know the things that are
taught by him who falls. I do know.' And even more complete is the
sacrifice when the relinquishment of life, when the renunciation of
self, means the sacrifice of what was dearer than self, and would have
been a life's joy to serve. There was the 'flag of art, the flag of
science,' that the boy loved and had begun to carry--with what a thrill
of pride and faith! Let him learn to fall without regrets. 'It is enough
for him to know that the flag will yet be carried.'
A simple, a common obedience to the duty at hand is the practical
conclusion of that high Indian wisdom when illusions are past. Not to
retreat into the solitude, not to retire into the inaction, that he has
known and prized; to fight at the side of his brothers, in his own rank,
in his own place, with open eyes, without hope of glory or of gain, and
because such is the law: this is the commandment of the god to the
warrior Arjuna, who had doubted whether he were right in turning away
from the Absolute to take part in the evil dream of war. 'The law for
each is that he should fulfil the functions determined by his own state
and being. Let every man accept action, since he shares in that nature
the methods of which make action necessary.' Plainly, it is for Arjuna
to bend his bow among the other Kshettryas. The young Frenchman had not
doubted. But it will be seen by his letters how, in the horror of
carnage, as in the tedious and patient duties of the mine and the
trench, he too had kept his eyes upon eternal things.
I would not insist unduly upon this union of thought. He had hardly
gained, through a few extracts from the _Ramayana_, a glimpse of the
august thought of ancient Asia. Yet, with all the modern shades of
ideas, with all the very French precision of form, the soul that is
revealed in these letters, like that of Amiel, of Michelet, of Tolstoi,
of Shelley, shows certain profound analogies with the tender and
mystical genius of the Indies. Strange is that affinity, bearing witness
as it does not only to his profound need of the Universal and the
Absolute, but to his intuitive sympathy with the whole of life, to his
impulses of love for the general soul of fruitfulness and for all its
single and multitudinous forms. 'Love'--this is one of the words most
often recurring in these letters. Love of the country of battle; love of
the plain over which the mornings and the evenings come and go as the
emotions come and go over a sensitive face; love of the trees with their
almost human gesture--of one tree, steadfast and patient in its wounds,
'like a soldier'; love of the beautiful little living creatures of the
fields which, in the silence of earliest morning, play on the edges of
the trench; love of all things in heaven and earth--of that tender sky,
of that French soil with its clear and severe outlines; love, above all,
of those whom he sees in sufferings and in death at his side; love of
the good peasants, the mothers who have given their sons, and who hold
their peace, dry their tears, and fulfil the tasks of the vineyard and
the field; love of those comrades whose misery 'never silenced laughter
and song'--'good men who would have found my fine artistic robes a bad
encumbrance in the way of their plain duty'; love of all those simple
ones who make up France, and among whom it is good to lose oneself; love
of all men living, for it is surely not possible to hate the enemy,
human flesh and blood bound to this earth and suffering as we too
suffer; love of the dead upon whom he looks, in the impassive beauty,
silence, and mystery revealed beneath his meditative eyes.
It is by his close attention to the interior and spiritual significance
of things that this painter is proved to be a poet, a religious poet who
has sight, in this world, of the essence of being, in ineffable
varieties: painter, and poet, and musician also, for in the trenches he
lives with Beethoven, Handel, Schumann, Berlioz, carrying in his mind
their imaginings and their rhythms, and conceiving also within himself
'the loveliest symphonies fully orchestrated.' Secret riches, intimate
powers of consolation and of joy, able, in the gloomiest hours, in the
dark and the mud of long nights on guard, to speak closely to the soul,
or snatch it suddenly and swiftly to distances and heights. Schumann,
Beethoven: between those two immortal spirits that made music for all
human ears, and the harsh pedants, the angry protagonists of Germanism,
who have succeeded in transforming a people into a war-machine, what
likeness is there? Have we not made the genius of those two ours by
understanding them as we understand them, and by so taking them into our
hearts? Are they not friends of ours? Do they not walk with us in those
blessed solitudes wherein our truest self awakens, and where our
thoughts flow free?
It is the greatest of all whom a certain group of our soldiers invoke in
those days before the expected battle in which some of them are to fall.
They are in the depths of a dug-out. 'There, in complete darkness,
night was awaited for the chance to get out. But once my fellow
non-commissioned officers and I began humming the nine symphonies of
Beethoven. I cannot tell what great thrill woke those notes within us.'
That almost sacred song, those heroic inspirations at such a moment--how
do they not give the lie to German theories as to the limitations of
French sensibility! And what poet of any other race than ours has ever
looked upon Nature with more intimate eyes, with a heart more deeply
moved, than his whose inner soul is here expressed?
* * * * *
These letters, despatched day by day from the trench or the billet,
follow each other progressively as a poem does, or a song. A whole life
unfolds, the life of a soul which we may watch through the monotony of
its experiences, overcoming them all, or, again, rapt at the coming of
supreme trials (as in February and in April) into perfect peace. It is
well that we should trace the spiritual progress of such a dauntless
will. No history of an interior life was ever more touching. That will
is set to endurance, and terrible at times is the effort to endure; we
divine this beneath the simple everyday words of the narrative. Here is
an artist and a poet; he had chosen his life, he had planned it, by no
means as a life of action. His whole culture, his whole self-discipline,
had been directed to the further refining of a keen natural sensibility.
Necessarily and intentionally he had turned towards solitude and
contemplation. He had known himself to be purely a mirror for the world,
tarnishable under the breath of the crowd. But now it was for him to
lead a life opposed to his former law, contrary to his plan; and this
not of necessity but by a completely voluntary act. That _ego_ he had so
jealously sheltered, in face of the world yet out of the world, he was
now to yield up, to cast without hesitation or regret into the thick of
human wars; he was no longer to spend his days apart from the jostling
and the shouldering and the breath of troops; he was to bear his part in
the mechanism that serves the terrible ends of war. And the close of a
life which he would have pronounced, from his former point of view, to
be slavery--the close might be speedy death. He had to bring himself to
look upon his old life--the life that was lighted by his visions and
his hopes, the life that fulfilled his sense of universal existence--as
a mere dream, perhaps never to be dreamed again.
That is what he calls 'adapting himself.' And how the word recurs in his
letters! It is a word that teaches him where duty lies, a duty of which
the difficulty is to be gauged by the difference of the present from the
past, of the bygone hope from the present effort. 'In the fulness of
productiveness,' he confesses, 'at the hour when life is flowering, a
young creature is snatched away, and cast upon a barren soil where all
he has cherished fails him. Well, after the first wrench he finds that
life has not forsaken him, and sets to work upon the new ungrateful
ground. The effort calls for such a concentration of energy as leaves no
time for either hopes or fears. And I manage it, except only in moments
of rebellion (quickly suppressed) of the thoughts and wishes of the
past. But I need my whole strength at times for keeping down the pangs
of memory and accepting what is.'
Indeed, strength was called for day by day. This 'adaptation' was no
transformation. But by a continuous act of vital energy he assimilated
all that he drew from his surroundings. Thus he fed his heart, and kept
his own ideals. This was a way to renounce all things, and by
renunciation to keep the one thing needful, to remain himself, to live,
and not only to live but to flourish; to have a part in that universal
life which produces flowers in nature, art and poetry in man. To gain so
much, all that was needed was to treasure, unaltered by the terrors of
war, a heart eager for all shapes of beauty. For this most religious
poet, beauty was that divine spirit which shines more or less clearly in
all things, and which raises him who perceives it higher than the
accidents of individual existence. And he receives its full influence,
and is rid of all anxiety, who is able to bid adieu to the present and
the past, to regret nothing, to desire nothing, to receive from the
passing moment that influence in its plenitude. 'I accept all from the
hands of fate, and I have captured every delight that lurks under cover
of every moment.' In this state of simplicity, which is almost a state
of grace, he enters into communion with the living reality of the
world. 'Let us eat and drink to all that is eternal, for to-morrow we
die to all that is of earth.'
That emancipation of the soul is not achieved in a day. The earlier
letters are beautiful, but what they teach is learnt by nearly all our
soldiers. In these he tells of the spirit of the men, their fire of
enthusiasm, their imperious sense of duty, their resolve to carry 'an
undefiled conscience as far as their feet may lead.' Yet already he is
seeking to maintain control of his own private self amid all the
excitement of numbers. And he succeeds. He guards himself, he separates
himself, 'as much as possible,' in the midst of his comrades, he keeps
his intellectual life intact. Meanwhile he is within barrack walls, or
else he is jotting down his letters at a railway station, or else he is
in the stages of an interminable journey, 'forty men to a truck.' But to
know him completely, wait until you see him within the zone of war, in
billets, in the front line, on guard, when he has returned to contact
with the very earth. As soon as he breathes open air, his instincts are
awake again, the instinct 'to draw all the beauty out,' and--in the
shadow where the future hides--'to draw out the utmost beauty as quickly
as may be.' 'I picked flowers in the mud; keep them in remembrance of
me,' he will write in a day of foreboding. A most significant trait is
this--in the tedium of trench days, or when imminent peril silences the
idle tongues, he gathers the greatest number of these magical flowers.
In those moments when speech fails, his soul is serene, it has free
play, and we hear its own fine sounds. Hitherto we had heard the
repetition of the word of courage and of brotherhood uttered by all our
gathering armies. But here, in battle, face to face with the eternities,
that spirit of his sounds like the chord of an instrument heard for the
first time in its originality and its infinite sensibility. Nor are
these random notes; they soon make one harmonious sound and acquire a
most touching significance, until by daily practice he learns how to
abstract himself altogether from the most wretched surroundings. A quite
impersonal _ego_ seems then to detach itself from the particular _ego_
that suffers and is in peril; it looks impartially upon all things, and
sees its other self as a passing wave in the tide that a mysterious
Intelligence controls. Strange faculty of double existence and of
vision! He possesses it in the midst of the very battle in which his
active valour gained him the congratulations of his commanding officer.
In the furnace in which his flesh may be consumed he looks about him,
and next morning he writes, 'Well, it was interesting.' And he adds,
'what I had kept about me of my own individuality was a certain visual
perceptiveness that caused me to register the setting of things--a
setting that dramatised itself as artistically as in any
stage-management. During all these minutes I never relaxed in my resolve
to see _how it was_.' He then, too, became aware of the meaning of
violence. His tender and meditative nature had always held it in horror.
And, perhaps for that very reason, he sought its explanation. It is by
violence that an imperfect and provisional state of things is shattered,
and what was lax is put into action again. Life is resumed, and a better
order becomes possible. Here again we find his acceptance, his
submission to the Reason that directs the universe; confidence in what
_takes place_--that is his conclusion.
Such times for him are times of observation properly so called, of purer
thought in which the impulses of the painter and the poet have no share.
That kind of observation is not infrequent with him, when he is dealing
with the world and with human action. It awakes at a war-spectacle, at a
trait of manners, at the reading of a book, at a recollection of history
or art; it is often to the Bible that he turns, and, amid the worst
clamours, to the beautiful plastic images of Greece. Admirable is such
serene energy of a spirit able to live purely as a spirit. It is
admirable, but it is not unique; great intellectual activity is not
uncommon with the French; others of our soldiers are philosophers among
the shells. What does set these letters in a place apart is something
more profound and more organic than thought, and that is sentiment;
sentiment in its infinite and indefinite degrees, its relation to the
aspects of nature--in a word, that poetic faculty which is akin to the
musical, proceeding as they both do from the primitive ground-work of
our being, and uniting in the inflexions of rhythm and of song. I have
already named Shelley in connexion with the poet we are considering.
And it is a Shelleyan union with the most intimate, the most
inexpressible things in nature that is revealed in such a note as the
following: 'A nameless day, a day without form, yet a day in which the
Spring most mysteriously begins to stir. Warm air in the lengthening
days; a sudden softening, a weakening of nature.' In describing this
atmosphere, this too sudden softness, he uses a word frequent in the
vocabulary of Shelley--'fainting.' In truth, like the great English
poet, whom he seems not to have known, he seeks from the beauty of
things a faculty of self-forgetfulness in lyrical poetry, an
inexpressible and blissful passing of the poet's being into the thing he
contemplates. What he makes his own in the course of those weeks, what
he remembers afterwards, and what he would recall, never to lose it
again, is the culminating moment in which he has achieved
self-forgetfulness and reached the ineffable. The simplest of natural
objects is able to yield him such a moment; see, for instance, this
abrupt intuition: 'I had lapsed from my former sense of the benediction
of God, when suddenly the beauty--all the beauty--of a certain tree
spoke to my inmost heart; and then I understood that an instant of such
contemplation is the whole of life.' And still more continuous, still
more vibrant, is at times his emotion, as when the bow draws out to the
utmost a long ecstatic tone from a sensitive violin. 'What joy is this
perpetual thrill in the heart of Nature! That same horizon of which I
had watched the awakening, I saw last night bathe itself in rosy light;
and then the full moon went up into a tender sky, fretted by coral and
saffron trees.' It is very nearly ecstasy with him in that astonishing
Christmas night which no one then at the front can ever forget--a solemn
night, a blue night, full of stars and of music, when the order and the
divine unity of the universe stood revealed to the eyes of men who, free
for a moment from the dream of hatred and of blood, raised one chant
along six miles, 'hymns, hymns, from end to end.'
Of the carnage in February there are a few precise notes, sufficient to
suggest the increasing horror. The narrative grows quicker; the reader
is aware of the pulse and the impetus of action, the imperious summons
of duty; the young sergeant is in charge of men, and has to execute
terrible tasks. But ever across the tumult and the slaughter, there are
moments of recollection and of compassion; and, in the evening of a day
of battle, what infinite tranquillity among the dead! At this period
there are no more notes of landscape effects; the description is of the
war, technical; otherwise the writer's thought is not of earth at all.
Once only, towards the end, we find a sorrowful recollection of himself,
a profound lamentation at the remembrance of bygone hopes, of bygone
work, of the immensity of the sacrifice. 'This war is long, too long for
those who had something else to do in the world! Why am I so sacrificed,
when so many others, not my equals, are spared? Yet I had something
worth doing to do in the world!' Most touching is that sigh, even more
touching than the signs of greatness in his soul, for it suddenly
breathes an anguish long controlled. It is a human weakness--our own
weakness--that is at last confessed, on the eve of a Passion, as in the
Divine example. At rare times such a question, in the constant sight of
death, in fatigue and weariness, in the long distress of rain and mud,
checks in him the impulse of life and of spiritual desire. He was
himself the young plant of which he writes, growing, creating fragrance
and breaking into flower, sure of God, feeling Him alive within itself.
But all at once it knows frost is coming and the threat of unpitying
things. What if the universe were void, what if in the infinity of the
exterior world there were nothing, across the splendid vision, but an
insensate fatality? What if sacrifice itself were also a delusion? 'Dark
days have come upon me, and nothingness seems the end of all, whereas
all that is in my being had assured me of the plenitude of the
universe.' And he asks himself the anxious question, 'Is it even sure
that moral effort bears any fruit?' It is something like abandonment by
God. But that darkening of his lights passes quickly away. He comes
again to the regions of tranquil thought, and leaves them thenceforward
only for the work in hand. 'I hope,' he writes, 'that when you think of
me you will have in mind all those who have left everything behind, and
how their nearest and dearest think of them only in the past, and say
of them, "We had once a brother, who, many years ago, withdrew from this
world."' How strange is the serenity of these lofty thoughts, how
entirely detached from self and from all human things is this spirit of
contemplation. Two slight traits give us signs: One night, on a
battlefield 'scattered with fragments of men' and with burning
dwellings, under a starry sky, he makes his bed in an excavation, and
lies there watching the crescent moon, and waits for dawn; now and again
a shell bursts, earth falls about him, and then silence returns to the
frozen soil: 'I have paid the price, but I have had moments of solitude
full of God.' Again, one evening, after five days of horror ('we have no
officers left--they all died as brave men'), he suddenly comes upon the
body of a friend; 'a white body, splendid under the moon. I lay down
near him.' In the quietness, by the side of the dead man, nothing
remains but beauty and peace.
* * * * *
These letters are to be anonymous, at least so long as any hope remains
that he who was lost may return. It is enough to know that they were
written by a Frenchman who, in love and faith, bore his part in the
general effort, the common peril, glad to renounce himself in the pain
and the devotion of his countrymen. By a happy fortune that he did not
foresee when he left his clean solitude for the sweat, the servitude,
and the throng, he no doubt produced the best of himself in these
letters; and it may be doubted whether, in the course of a successful
artist's life, it would have been given to him to express himself with
so much completeness. This is a thought that may strengthen those who
love him to accept whatever has come to pass. His soul is here, a more
essential soul perhaps, and a more beautiful, than they had known. It
was in war that Marcus Aurelius also wrote his thoughts. Possibly the
worst is needful for the manifestation of the whole of human greatness.
We marvel how the soul can so discover in itself the means to oppose
suffering and death. Thus have many of our sons revealed themselves in
the day of trial, to the wonder of France, until then unaware of all
that she really was. That is how these pages touch us so closely. He who
wrote them had attuned himself with his countrymen. Through the more
mystical acts of his mind we perceive the sublime message sent to us
from the front, more or less explicitly, by others of our brothers and
our sons--the high music that goes up still from the whole of France at
war. In all his comrades assembled for the great task, he too had
recognised the best and the deepest things that his own heart held, and
so he speaks of them constantly--especially of the simplest of the
men--with so great respect and love. Far from ordinary ambitions and
cares, the things that this rough life among the eternities brings into
all hearts with a heretofore unknown amplitude are serenity of
conscience and a freshness of feeling in perpetual touch with the
harmonies of nature. These men do but reflect nature. Since they have
renounced themselves and given themselves, all things have become simple
for them. They have the transparence of soul and the lights of
childhood. 'We spend childish days. We are children.' . . .
This new youthfulness of heart under the contemned menace of death, this
innocence in the daily fulfilment of heroic duty, is assured by a
spiritual state akin to sanctity.
LETTERS
LETTERS OF A SOLDIER
_August 6, 1914._
MY VERY DEAR MOTHER,--These are my first days of life at war, full of
change, but the fatigue I actually feel is very different from what I
foresaw.
I am in a state of great nervous tension because of the want of sleep
and exercise. I lead the life of a government clerk. I belong to what is
called the dépôt, I am one of those doing sedentary work, and destined
eventually to fill up the gaps in the fighting line.
What we miss is news; there are no longer any papers to be had in this
town.
_August 13._
We are without news, and so it will be for several days, the censorship
being of the most rigorous kind.
Here life is calm. The weather is magnificent, and all breathes quiet
and confidence. We think of those who are fighting in the heat, and this
thought makes our own situation seem even too good. The spirit among
the reservists is excellent.
_Sunday, August 16._
To-day a walk along the Marne. Charming weather after a little rain.
A welcome interlude in these troubled times. We are still without news,
like you, but we have happily a large stock of patience. I have had some
pleasure in the landscape, notwithstanding the invasion of red and blue.
These fine men in red and blue have given the best impression of their
_moral_. Great levies will be made upon our dépôts, to be endured with
fortitude.
_August 16_ (from a note-book).
The monotony of military life benumbs me, but I don't complain. After
nine years these types are to be rediscovered, a little less marked,
improved, levelled down. Just now every one is full of grave thoughts
because of the news from the East.
The ordinary good-fellowship of the mess has been replaced by a finer
solidarity and a praiseworthy attempt at adaptation. One of the
advantages of our situation is that we can, as it were, play at being
soldiers with the certainty of not wasting our time. All these childish
and easy occupations, which are of immediate result and usefulness,
bring back calm to the mind and soothe the nerves. Then the great stay
which supports the men is a profound, vague feeling of brotherhood which
turns all hearts towards those who are fighting. Each one feels that the
slight discomfort which he endures is only a feeble tribute to the
frightful expense of all energy and all devotedness at the front.
_August 25._
This letter will barely precede our own departure. The terrible conflict
calls for our presence close to those who are already in the midst of
the struggle. I leave you, grandmother and you, with the hope of seeing
you again, and the certainty that you will approve of my doing all that
seems to me my duty.
Nothing is hopeless, and, above all, nothing has changed our idea of the
part we have to play.
Tell all those who love me a little that I think of them. I have no time
to write to any one. My health is of the best.
. . . After such an upheaval we may say that our former life is dead.
Dear mother, let us, you and I, with all our courage adapt ourselves to
an existence entirely different, however long it may last.
Be very sure that I won't go out of my way to do anything that endangers
our happiness, but that I'll try to satisfy my conscience, and yours. Up
till now I am without cause for self-reproach, and so I hope to remain.
_August 25_ (2nd letter).
A second letter to tell you that, instead of our regiment, it was
Pierre's that went. I had the joy of seeing him pass in front of me when
I was on guard in the town. I accompanied him for a hundred yards, then
we said good-bye. I had a feeling that we should meet again.
It is the gravest of hours; the country will not die, but her
deliverance will be snatched only at the price of frightful efforts.
Pierre's regiment went covered with flowers, and singing. It was a deep
consolation to be together till the end.
It is fine of André[1] to have saved his drowning comrade. We don't
realise the reserve of heroism there is in France, and among the young
intellectual Parisians.
In regard to our losses, I may tell you that whole divisions have been
wiped out. Certain regiments have not an officer left.
As for my state of mind, my first letter will perhaps tell you better
what I believe to be my duty. Know that it would be shameful to think
for one instant of holding back when the race demands the sacrifice. My
only part is to carry an undefiled conscience as far as my feet may
lead.
[Footnote 1: Second Lieutenant André Cadoux, who died gloriously in
battle on April 13, 1915.]
_August 26._
MY VERY DEAR MOTHER,--I was made happy by Maurice Barrés's fine article,
'l'Aigle et le Rossignol,' which corresponds in every detail with what I
feel.
The dépôts contain some failures, but also men of fine energy, among
whom I dare not yet count myself, but with whom I hope to set out. The
major had dispensed me from carrying a knapsack, but I carry it for
practice and manage quite well.