sanctuary, with a life almost tangible, though essentially spiritual,
has suddenly been plunged into the abyss of things gone by, of which
even the memory will soon pass away. The great barbarism has swept
through this place, the modern barbarism from beyond the Rhine, a
thousand times worse than the barbarism of old times, because it is
doltishly, outrageously self-satisfied, and consequently fundamental,
incurable, and final--destined, if it be not crushed, to overwhelm the
world in a sinister night of eclipse.
In truth it is strange how that statue of Joan of Arc in the choir has
remained standing calm, intact, immaculate, without even the smallest
scratch upon her gown.
VII
THE FLAG WHICH OUR NAVAL BRIGADE DO NOT YET POSSESS
_December, 1914._
At first they were sent to Paris, those dear sailors of ours, so that
the duty of policing the city, of maintaining order, enforcing silence
and good behaviour might be entrusted to them--and I could not help
smiling; it seemed so incongruous, this entirely new part which someone
had thought fit to make them play. For truth to tell, between ourselves,
correct behaviour in the streets of towns has never been the especial
boast of our excellent young friends. Nevertheless by dint of making up
their minds to it and assuming an air of seriousness, they had acquitted
themselves almost with honour up to the moment when they were freed
from that insufferable constraint and were sent outside the city to
guard the posts in the entrenched camp. That was already a little
better, a little more after their own hearts. At last came a day of
rejoicing and glorious intoxication, when they were told that they were
all going into the firing-line.
If they had had a flag that day, like their comrades of the land-forces,
I will not assert that they would have marched away with more enthusiasm
and gaiety, for that would have been impossible, but assuredly they
would have marched more proudly, mustered around that sublime bauble,
whose place nothing can ever take, whatever may be said or done.
Sailors, more perhaps than other men, cherish this devotion to the flag,
fostered in them by the touching ceremonial observed on our ships, where
to the sound of the bugle the flag is unfurled each morning and furled
each evening, while officers and crew bare their heads in silence, in
reverent salute.
Yes, they would have been well pleased, our Naval Brigade, to have had a
flag wherewith to march into the firing-line, but their officers said to
them:
"You will certainly be given one in the end, as soon as you have won it
yonder."
And they went away singing, all with the same ardour of heroes; all, I
say, not only those who still uphold the admirable traditions of our
Navy of old, but even the new recruits, who were already a little
corrupted--no more than superficially, however--by disgusting,
anti-military claptrap, but who had suddenly recovered their senses and
were exalted at the sound of the German guns. All were united, resolute,
disciplined, sobered, and dreaming of having a flag on their return.
They were sent in haste to Ghent to cover the retreat of the Belgian
Army, but on the way they were stopped at Dixmude, where the barbarians
with pink skins like boiled pig were established in ten times their
number, and where at all costs a stand was to be made to prevent the
abominable onrush from spreading farther.
They had been told:
"The part assigned to you is one of danger and gravity; we have need of
your courage. In order to save the whole of our left wing you must
sacrifice yourselves until reinforcements arrive. _Try to hold out at
least four days._"
And they held out twenty-six mortal days. They held out almost alone,
for reinforcements, owing to unforeseen difficulties, were insufficient
and long in coming. And of the six thousand that marched away, there are
to-day not more than three thousand survivors.
They had the bare necessities of life and hardly those. When they left
Paris, where the weather was warm and summery, they did not anticipate
such bitter cold. Most of them wore nothing over their chests except the
regulation jumper of cotton, striped with blue, and light trousers, with
nothing underneath, on their legs, and over all that, it is true,
infantry great-coats to which they were unaccustomed and which hampered
their movements. For provisions they had nothing but some tins of
_confiture de singe_.[1] Naturally no one was prepared for what was
practically isolation for twenty-six long days. In the same
circumstances ordinary troops, even though their peers in courage, could
never have been equal to the occasion. But they had that faculty of
fighting through, common to seafaring men, which is acquired in the
course of arduous voyages, in the colonies, among the islands, and
thanks to which a true sailor can face any emergency--a special way
with them, after all so natural and moreover so merry withal, so
tempered with ingratiating tact that it offends nobody.
Well, then, they had fought through; for after those three or four epic
weeks, in which day and night they had battled like devils, in fire and
water, the survivors were found well-nourished, almost, and with hardly
a cold among them.
The only reproach, which I heard addressed to them by their officers,
who had the honour to command them in the midst of the furnace, was that
they could not reconcile themselves to the practice of crawling.
Crawling is a mode of progression introduced into modern warfare by
German cunning, and it is well known that our soldiers have to be
prepared for it by a long course of training. Now there had not been
time to accustom these men to the practice, and when it came to an
attack they set out indeed as ordered, dragging themselves along on all
fours, but, promptly carried away by their zeal, they stood up to get
into their stride, and too many of them were mown down by shrapnel.
One of them told me yesterday, in the words I now quote, how his company
having been ordered to transfer themselves to another part of the battle
front--but without letting themselves be seen, walking along, bent
double, at the bottom of a long interminable trench--were really unable
to obey the order literally.
"The trench was already half full of our poor dead comrades. And you
will understand, sir, that in places where there were too many of them,
it would have hurt us to walk on them; we could not do it. We came out
of the ditch, and ran as fast as our legs would carry us along the slope
of the parapet, and the Boches who saw us made haste to kill us. But,"
he continued, "except for trifling acts of disobedience such as that, I
assure you, sir, that we behaved very well. Thus I remember some
officers commanding sharp-shooters and some officers of light infantry,
who had witnessed the Battles of the Marne and the Aisne. Well, when
they came sometimes to chat with our officers, we used to hear them say,
'Our soldiers they were brave fellows enough, to be sure! But to see
your sailors fighting is an absolute eye-opener all the same.'"
And that town of Dixmude, where they contrived to hold out for
twenty-six days, became by degrees something like an ante-room of hell.
There were rain, snow, floods, churning up black mud in the bottom of
the trenches; blood splashing up everywhere; roofs falling in, crushing
wounded in confused heaps or dead bodies in all stages of
decomposition; cries and death rattles unceasing, mingling with the
continual crash of thunder close at hand. There was fighting in every
street, in every house, through broken windows, behind fragments of
walls--such close hand-to-hand fighting that sometimes men were locked
together trying to strangle one another. And often at night, when
already men could no longer tell where to strike home, there were
bewildering acts of treachery committed by Germans, who would suddenly
begin to shout in French:
"Cease fire, you fools! It is our men who are there and you are firing
on your own comrades."
And men lost their heads entirely, as in a nightmare, from which they
could neither rouse themselves nor escape.
At last came the day when the town was taken. The Germans suddenly
brought up terrific reinforcements of heavy artillery, and heavy shells
fell all round like hail--those enormous shells, the devil's own, which
make holes six to eight yards wide by four yards deep. They came at the
rate of fifty or sixty a minute, and in the craters they made there was
at once a jumbled mass of masonry, furniture, carpets, corpses, a chaos
of nameless horror. To continue there became truly a task beyond human
endurance; it would have meant a massacre to the very last man, moreover
without serving any useful purpose, for the abandonment of that mass of
ruins, of that charnel-house, which was all that remained of the poor
little Flemish town, was no longer a matter of importance. It had
resisted just the necessary length of time. The essential point was that
the Germans had been prevented from crossing over to the other bank of
the Yser, at a time when, nevertheless, all the chances had seemed in
their favour; the essential point was this especially, that they would
never at any time cross over, now that reinforcements had arrived to
hold them up in the south, and now that the floods were encroaching
everywhere, barring the way in the north. On this side the barbarians'
thrust was definitely countered. And it was our Naval Brigade, who
almost by themselves, unwavering in the face of overwhelming numbers,
had there supported our left wing, though losing _half_ of their
effective and eighty per cent. of their officers.
Then they said to themselves, those who were left of them:
"Our flag--we shall get it this time."
Besides, officers in high command, touched and amazed at so much
bravery, had promised it to them, and so had the head of the French
Government himself, one day when he came to congratulate them.
But alas! they have not yet received it, and perhaps it will never be
theirs, unless those officers in high command, to whom I have referred,
who have partly pledged their word, intervene while there is yet time,
before all these deeds of heroism have fallen into oblivion.
For God's sake give them their flag, our Naval Brigade! And even before
sending it to them it would be well, methinks, to decorate it with the
Cross.
* * * * *
P.S.--Last week the Naval Brigade were mentioned at the head of the Army
Orders of the day, _for having given proof of the greatest energy and
complete devotion to duty in the defence of a strategic position of
great importance_.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Military slang term for tins of preserved meat.
VIII
TAHITI AND THE SAVAGES WITH PINK SKINS LIKE BOILED PIG
_November, 1914._
After the lapse of so many years, and in the midst of those moods of
rage and anguish or of splendid exaltation which characterise the
present hour, I had quite forgotten the existence of a certain enchanted
isle, very far away, on the other side of the earth, in the midst of the
great Southern Ocean, rearing among the warm clouds of those regions its
mountains, carpeted with ferns and flowers. In our October climate,
already cold, here in this district of Paris, bare of leaves and in
autumn colouring, where I have lived for a month, whence you have but to
withdraw a little way to the north in order to hear the cannon crashing
incessantly like a storm, and where each day countless graves are
prepared for the burial of the most precious and cherished sons of
France--here the name of Tahiti seems to me the designation of some
visionary Eden. I can no longer bring myself to believe that my sojourn
in former days in that far-away island was an actual fact. It is with an
effort that I recall to my memory that sea, bordered with beaches of
pure white coral, the palm trees with arching fronds, and the Maoris
living in a perpetual dream, a childlike race with no thought beyond
singing and garlanding themselves with flowers.
Tahiti, the island of which I had thought no more, has just been
abruptly recalled to my mind by an article in a newspaper, in which it
is stated that the Germans have passed that way, pillaging everything.
And the commander of the two cruisers, who, without running any risk to
themselves, be it understood, committed this dastardly outrage on a poor
little open town lying there all unsuspecting, cannot claim to have had
any order issued to them from their horrible Emperor--no, indeed, since
they were at the other end of the world. All by themselves they had
found this thing to do, and of their own accord they did it, from sheer
Teutonic savagery.
Yesterday in one of the forts of Paris garrisoned by our sailors, I met
an old naval petty officer who, in former days, had on two or three
occasions sailed under my orders. He seems to me to have found the name
most appropriate to the Prussians and one that deserves to stick to
them.
"Well you see, Commander," he said to me, "you and I have often visited
together all kinds of savages whom I should have thought the biggest
brutes of all, savages with black skins, with yellow skins, or with red
skins, but I now see clearly that there is another sort still--those
other dirty savages with pink skins like boiled pig, who are much the
worst of all."
And so Tahiti the Delectable, where blood had never before been shed, a
little Eden, harmless and confiding, set in the midst of mighty
oceans--Tahiti has just suffered the visitation of savages with pink
skins like boiled pig. So without profit, as without excuse, simply for
the sport of the thing, for the pure German pleasure of wreaking as much
evil as possible, never mind upon whom, never mind where, these savages,
indeed "that worst kind of all," amused themselves by making a heap of
ruins in that Bay of Papeete with its eternal calm, under trees ever
green, among roses ever in flower.
It is true this happened in the Antipodes, and it is so trifling, so
very trifling a matter, compared with the smoking charnel-houses which
in Belgium and France were landmarks in the track of the accursed army.
But nevertheless it is especially deserving of being brought up again as
a still more peculiarly futile and fatuous act of ferocity.
IX
A LITTLE HUSSAR
_December, 1914._
His name was Max Barthou. He was one of those dearly loved only sons
whose death shatters two or three lives at least, and already we had too
nearly forgotten all the skill and courage on his father's part to which
we owed the Three Years' Service Bill, without which all France to-day
would be prostrate under the heel of the Monster.
To be sure he, young Max, had done no more than all those thousands of
others who have given their lives so gloriously. It is not, then, on
that account that I have chosen to speak of him in a special manner. No;
one of my chief reasons, no doubt, is that his parents are very dear
friends of mine. But it is also for the sake of the boy himself, for
whom I had a great affection; moreover, I take a melancholy pleasure in
mentioning what a charming little fellow he was. In the first place he
had contrived to remain a child, like boys of my own generation long
ago, and this is very rare among young Parisians of to-day, most of
whom, although this sort of thing is now being brought under control,
are at eighteen insufferable little wiseacres. To remain a child! How
much that implies, not freshness alone, but modesty, discernment, good
sense, and clear judgment! Although he was very learned, almost beyond
his years, he had contrived to remain simple, natural, devoted to hearth
and home, which he seldom left for more than a few hours in the day,
when he went to attend his lectures.
During my flying visits to Paris, when I chanced to be dining with his
parents on special days as their only guest, I used to talk to him in
spite of the charming shyness he displayed, and each time I appreciated
still more deeply his gentle, profound young soul. I can still see him
after dinner in the familiar drawing-room, where he would linger with us
for a moment before going away to finish his studies. On those
occasions, unconventional though it may have been, he would lean against
his mother's knee so as to be closer to her, or even lie on the rug at
her feet, still playing the part of a coaxing child, teasing the
while--oh, very gently, to be sure--an old Siamese cat which had been
the companion of his earliest years and now growled at everyone except
him. Good God, it was only yesterday! It was only last spring that this
little hero, who has just fallen a victim to German shrapnel, would
tumble about on the floor, playing with his friend, the old growling
cat.
But what a transformation in those three months! It is scarcely a week
since I met in a lobby at General Headquarters a smart and resolute blue
hussar, who, after having saluted correctly, stood looking at me, not
venturing to address me, but surprised that I did not speak to him. Ah!
to be sure, it was young Max, whom, at first sight, I had not recognised
in his new kit--a young Max of eighteen, greatly changed by the magic
wand of war, for he had suddenly grown into a man, and his eyes now
shone with a sobered joy. At last he had obtained his heart's desire;
to-morrow he was to set out for Alsace for the firing-line.
"So you have got what you wanted, my young friend," I said to him. "Are
you pleased?"
"Oh yes, I am pleased."
That, to be sure, was clear from his appearance, and I bade him good-bye
with a smile, wishing him the luck to win that splendid medal, that
most splendid of all medals, which is fastened with a yellow ribbon
bordered with green. I had indeed no foreboding that I had just shaken
his hand for the last time.
What insinuating perseverance he had brought to bear in order that he
might get to the Front, for his father, though to be sure he would have
made no attempt to keep him back, had a horror of doing anything to
force on his destiny, and only yielded step by step, glad of heart, yet
at the same time in agony at seeing his boy's splendid spirit developing
so rapidly.
First of all he had to let him volunteer; then when the boy was chafing
with impatience in the _depots_ where our sons are trained for the
firing-line he had to obtain permission for him to leave before his
turn. The commander-in-chief, who had welcomed him with pleasure, had
wished to keep him by his side, but he protested, gently but firmly, on
the occasion of a visit his father paid to the general headquarters.
"I feel too much sheltered here, which is absurd considering the name I
bear. Ought I not, on the contrary, to set an example?"
And with a sudden return to that childlike gaiety which he had had the
exquisite grace to preserve, hidden under his soldier's uniform, he
added with the smile of old days:
"Besides, papa, as the son of the Three Years' Service Bill, it is up to
me to do at least three times as much of it as anyone else."
His father, need I say, understood--understood with all his
heart--understood so well that, divided between pride and distress, he
asked immediately that the boy might be sent to Alsace.
And he had scarcely arrived yonder--at Thann, on the day of a
bombardment--when a senseless volley of Germany shrapnel, whence it came
none knew, without any military usefulness, and simply for the pleasure
of doing harm, shattered him like a thing of no account. He had no time
to do "thrice as much as anyone else," alas no! In less than a minute
that young life, so precious, so tenderly cherished, was extinguished
for ever.
Four others, companions of his dream of glory, fell at his side, killed
by the same shell, and the next day they were all committed to the care
of that earth of Alsace which had once more become French.
And in his honour, poor little blue hussar, the people of Thann, who
since yesterday were German no longer, desired of their own accord to
make some special demonstration, because he was the son of the Three
Years' Service Bill. These Alsatians, released from bondage, had the
fancy to adorn his coffin with gilding, simple but charming, as if for a
little prince in a fairy-tale, and they carried him in their arms, him
alone, while his companions were borne along behind him on a cart.
After the service in the old church the whole assembly, at least three
thousand in number, were warned that it would be exceedingly dangerous
to go any farther. As the cemetery was in an exposed position, spied
upon by German binoculars, the long procession ran a great risk of
attracting the barbarians' shrapnel fire, for it was unlikely that they
would miss such an excellent opportunity of taking life. But no one was
afraid, no one stayed behind, and the little hussar was escorted by them
all to the very end.
And there are thousands and thousands of our sons mown down in this
manner--sons from villages or castles, who were all the hope of, all
that made life worth living for, mothers, fathers, grandfathers, and
grandmothers. Night and day for eighteen years, twenty years, they had
been surrounded with every care, brooded over with all tenderness.
Anxious eyes had watched unremittingly their physical and moral growth.
For some of them, of humbler families, heavy sacrifices had necessarily
to be made and privations endured so that their health might be assured
and their minds have scope to expand, to gain knowledge of the world, to
be enriched with beautiful impressions. And then, suddenly, there they
are, these dear boys, prepared for life with such painstaking love;
there they are, beloved young heroes, with shattered breast or brains
blown out--by order of that damnable Jack-pudding who rules in Berlin.
Oh, execrations and curses upon the monster of ferocity and trickery
who has unchained all this woe! May his life be greatly prolonged so
that he may at least have time to suffer greatly; and afterwards may he
still live on and remain fully conscious and lucid of intellect in the
hour when he shall cross the threshold of eternity, where upon that
door, which will never again be opened, may be read, flaming in the
darkness, that sentence of utmost horror, "_All hope abandon, ye who
enter here._"
X
AN EVENING AT YPRES
"In anticipation of death I make this confession, that I
despise the German nation on account of its infinite
stupidity, and that I blush to belong to it."
SCHOPENHAUER.
"The character of the Germans presents a terrible blend of
ferocity and trickery. They are a people of born liars. One
must see this to believe it."
VELLEIUS PATERCULUS,
_In the year 10 of the Christian era_.
_March, 1915._
Ruins in a mournful light which is anxious, seemingly, to fade away into
a premature darkness. Vast ruins, ruins of such delicacy! Here is a
deployment of those exquisite, slender colonnades and those archways of
mysterious charm, which at first sight conjure up for the mind the
Middle Ages and Gothic Art in its fair but transient blossoming. But in
general, surviving specimens of that Art were only to be found in
isolated examples, in the form of some old church or old cloister,
surrounded by things of modern growth, whereas at Ypres, there is an
_ensemble_; first a cathedral with additions of complicated
supplementary buildings, that might be called palaces, whose long
facades with their clock-towers present to the eye their succession of
windows with pointed arches. As an architectural group it is almost
unique in the world, actually a whole quarter of a town, built in little
columns, little arches and archaic stone tracery.