the popular revolt had hardly died down, and contrasted with that too
great energy of sound and of young fury was this silent room opening
upon the garden, and the figure lying there. He asked in a whisper
for the Sacraments--he who had said in a phrase which showed the man
like lightning: “No Christian believes as I do, nor is any man more
sceptical than I.”
On the next day, Monday, the 3rd, his life still dragged on and
diminished, yet he whispered to his nephew, who took down the words
from his lips: “I declare before God my retraction of all there may
be in my writings contrary to the Faith, to good morals, and in
general to the principles which are conservative of good.” And his
nephew put down beneath those lines: “Signed for my uncle, whose hand
can no longer sign.” He had the declaration read to him; he tried to
read it with his own failing eyes. Yet another night dragged on; but
it was not until Tuesday, the 4th, that he died, and there had come
back to that death-bed the friend, the old woman--Madame Récamier.
Besides her there was but his nephew, his confessor, and a Sister of
Charity. It was a little after eight in the morning. The priest and
the Sister of Charity were kneeling at the end of the bed; the two
others stood and saw his passing.
So he died.
* * * * *
A fortnight later, upon Tuesday, July 18, 1848, they brought the body
of Chateaubriand for burial to the place which he had chosen. That
insecure, moving, intense soul of his was steeped in its own time,
thinking that sublime which to-day we think grotesque, and which
to-morrow our descendants may think sublime again. He had determined,
in his passion for things both singular and glorious, in his vanity,
but also in his love of greatness, upon a peculiar tomb, and it was
now to receive him.
The Cathedral of Saint Malo was filled with the sailors of the place,
with peasants come in from the countryside, with the clergy of the
province, with all the officials of the town and even of Rennes--a
vast crowd. They laid the coffin in the Chapel of the Sacred Heart,
blazing with candles, and all that afternoon and all night long the
crowd kept pouring in to pass by this lying-in-state and to pray, in
a stream that did not end hour after hour.
On the next day, the Wednesday after the last Mass to be said over
him, the runners harnessed the horses, and the whole train set out
for that rock which is an island at high tide and in which his tomb
had been cut. It had been placed for him alone, and he had ordered--a
last singularity--that there should be no name or inscription upon
it whatsoever. As they laid him in his tomb the guns sounded a
last salute, the walls of the city were covered with men and women
watching that strange sight, and even the rocks to seaward and along
the shore were black with people. They say that fifty thousand stood
by and saw the sight.
And there he is to-day; and no one can say at all whether, with the
passage of time, he who was at that moment the greatest of the great
will become greater still, or insignificant.
A SOLDIER OF ’70
(_June 1870_)
In the height of a scorching summer, in June 1870, a young man, tall,
lean, long in features, active in gesture, something fanatical, with
deep-set and fixing eyes, pushed a perambulator (of all things!)
along a pavement of the South Bank in Paris. By his side was the
mother of the child: nor was she his wife.
I have said “young man,” but in years he was a boy. He was but
twenty years old. That household he had set up was a curious
adventure indeed. His parents, as he thought, knew nothing of it;
and perhaps he was right. The strict laws of the French family would
have forbidden a marriage. But his allowance was sufficient and his
happiness was complete. At that age one is immortal; and as he lived
in an undefeated society at the height of its hope and wealth, as he
had himself hope and wealth beneath him in the largest measure for
his foundation, nothing mattered but the intensity of his affection
in this opening of his life.
There he was, in this comically small domestic manner, at the summit
of whatever this life can bring, and trusting rightly to chance for
the regulation of all things.
It was, I say, in the middle of that burning summer, and if the
foreign affairs of the country were talked of at all (after small but
supposedly splendid foreign victories), they were for him and his
like but newspaper talk. They did not touch realities between waking
and sleeping.
There was this difference between him and his like--that he had in
him a certain material which could catch fire, and having caught fire
would blaze unfed until he should die.
Ten weeks later this young man, or boy, having volunteered, was on
the field of Sedan. The capitulation was announced; the men were
already beginning to pile arms, and he, by a chance, was arguing with
certain bearers who were moving a body. They maintained that the man
was dead; he said that he was alive. He had his way, and he proved
right. This also was a sharp point in his life, which he remembered
always, even more clearly than any other episode of that disaster:
how, while it was yet full light, he had argued with the bearers. The
man whom he had saved he kept close to years after, making him a
friend; for they went off as prisoners together into the Germanies.
That young man broke prison, and found his way to the Rhine and
farther. He spoke no German; he did but ask his way; and when he
had reached his own country again he went to the nearest centre and
re-enlisted.
They sent him to the Loire. All this while he had heard nothing from
his own people, or from what was nearer to him than his own people.
So he served through that memorable and terrible winter under Chanzy,
and saw the failure to relieve the capital. In those snows he came of
age.
He did not see Paris again until he came there with the rank
of captain in the troops of Thiers, for the suppression of the
Commune. It was against one of the last barricades, near the foot
of the Northern Hill, that he received his third wound in all that
fighting, national and civil. To his old age he remembered that
scene as a comedy for all its slaughter. He saw himself something
of a chromo-lithograph, waving a sword and leading his men, who
were Bretons. He turned his face toward the barricade, and at that
moment saw, peering between two stones, the face of a boy younger
than himself--a boy in no uniform, with a bandolier slung over
the blue canvas of his blouse. He saw the boy’s musket resting
on the stones and pointed towards him. He remembered that it was
singularly fore-shortened ... and almost in the same instant that
he saw this thing he felt as though a horse had kicked him with
full strength on the left arm. He fell down, stunned, without pain;
but a very few moments afterwards, as they carried him back, the
pain grew intolerable. It was the worst thing he had suffered in
all those months, and it was a day before the confusion of his
thoughts relaxed. When his mind grew slowly clear again, he saw (more
vividly than the dirty walls of the gaunt ward in which he lay) the
barricade, and the boy in the blue canvas, and the fore-shortened
barrel.
* * * * *
All these enormous things had run their course, and reached a
settlement: the empire gone, Prussia supreme, the nation half
murdered--a stillness and bitterness over everything. That which
had been his life such a very little time before had ceased for him
altogether. Some who read this would know too well whom I mean if I
were to give the details of his misfortune, or of how he followed,
but only at a distance, and supported his child: of how he learnt
that the mother had left him for ever.
Note this strange thing: that to this young man, even now not yet in
his twenty-third year, the torrents of violent emotion had settled
into a sort of lake; a permanent feeling, profound, unchangeable,
nourishing an unvarying output of appeal. Whatever he had lived,
in whatever ways, his own small concealed home, his family for a
moment estranged, his tradition and his proud name--all these had
distilled into a lyrical patriotism, the fruits of which seemed at
first more than half contemptible to the hard French temper about
him. Those fruits took many forms. In the first place, he expended
his whole self in a perpetual and open insistence upon the necessity
for raising the nation against its conqueror; and this he did in
a society where all such open and direct expression is greeted as
insufficient and unworthy.
He acted thus, ingenuous and direct, in the midst of a Paris and of
a France especially bent upon reserve, and he maintained that form
of expression in spite of a much ridiculing and, what wounded him
more, a patronizing affection. Through all his youth, through all his
manhood, on into his middle age and to the verge of old age, this
exalted mood affected him to verse, most of it of the second-rate
sort; all of it rhetorical; all of it sincere. You may guess how this
popular versifying jarred on the critical French ear and soul.
There was no occasion during thirty years, during forty years, in
which he did not make it his business to preach continually the duty
of reassertion and of warring down a conqueror who had become now
assured in strength and rooted, and of whose achievement and mastery
there seemed at last no question. It was the moment when Renan said:
“France is dying. Let us not brawl at her death-bed.”
Long after Alsace-Lorraine had become mere names to a younger
generation which knew nothing of the war, through mighty civil
contests of opinion and even of religion (which the French alone
wage in our time), his simple note sounded continually: at first
acclaimed by the poor; always ridiculed by the too-cultured or the
too-fatigued: latterly almost grotesque, still sounding in a world
which had completely changed. In some part of his expression he had
aged prematurely. In body he was still alert, though his last illness
was upon him; in the vigour of his gesture, the fire of his glance,
he was more than he had ever been.
By the year 1912--so oddly do human things turn about in the short
unit of one lifetime--his career, his verse, his rhetoric, his
perpetual insistence, had become a sort of institution for the
nation. Societies love to take those of an older generation and to
make them symbols. Even his literary insufficiency was half forgiven,
and men talked of him as a sort of curious relic from the days when
war was possible, and when the glory of a national rehabilitation
(now impossible) could be reasonably entertained. But with this
position of his among his fellow-citizens (which was quaintly mixed
up with the love we bear for ancient things, almost because they are
odd, and largely because we are sure they can never return) there
now went something of grandeur. He was now, they said, an old man;
and his very insistence in harping upon so single and so unfertile a
theme had given him his definite place. And just as men would say,
“So and so is now our great poet, So and so our great actor, So and
so this, and So and so that,” in the same way they pointed to the man
now grown old and said, “He, of course, is our great patriot,” but
they said it with a smile. One man, however, who loved him, called
him “Tyrtæus”: quizzically enough, I think.
No one thought it possible that his war would come.
His illness grew upon him fast. By one of those accidents which show
the lives of men to be ordered, as the parts of an actor are ordered
upon the stage, this man died just in those days before the war, when
it was far too late for any man to remember great wars in Western
Europe as a reality, and still some weeks too early for men to have
grown uneasy and to think they already heard the guns. But as though
so simple, so direct, and so very great a life were a presage, his
funeral made a great picture.
There was a sort of silence after his death, like that which comes
before a storm. Nor was the moment long delayed.
Upon a certain day, memorable to all of us, the Cabinet of Berlin
presented a brief note to the Government of Paris. Prussia would
fight in the East, and demanded as a guarantee the frontier garrisons
of the French, over and above a promise of neutrality. We know the
reply, and we know what followed.
The first young men to cross the frontier in arms (which was in the
pine forests on the crests of the Vosges) pulled up the frontier
post for a trophy. There was no discussion as to what should be done
with that trophy. The decision seemed inevitable. It was sent back
to be set upon this man’s grave, and there I saw it the other day.
It had been set up hurriedly, and was leaning a little sideways.
It always remains in my mind as the most significant monument in
Europe. The grave is in a small cemetery upon the country hills which
lie to the west of Paris, a cemetery so domestic and of such small
consequence to the little village it belongs to that no good road
leads to it, but the dead of the village are brought up from the main
road a quarter of a mile off by bearers who follow a rough track.
Up this track, with a ritual dear to the French people, did certain
delegates bear that frontier post, as we bear dead men for whom we
proclaim the resurrection. They took it through the rustic gate into
that small, neglected place, and put it upon the grave of the man
who had lived so strange and inartistic a life: who stirred, and was
gladdened in his sleep.
TWO MEN OF THE MARNE
(_September 9, 1914_)
It was a little after five in the afternoon of Wednesday, 9th
September, when a general officer with the Ninth French Army rode
with one companion up the road from Sezanne. He had clearly in his
mind on a landscape map the memory of three disastrous days just
past. He saw the line upon that map like a small, vivid picture; he
saw it as it was also in reality--the crushing of his centre back
and back, day after succeeding day, through the Sunday, the Monday,
the Tuesday, and the early hours of this the Wednesday, in which the
crisis had come: the crisis of the Marne.
To the north the ceaseless noise of the guns which had filled those
four days still rolled, and as he heard it he considered the 42nd
Division. It had just arrived behind the gap opening between the
11th and the 9th Corps. To his right, and also to the northward, but
behind the line of the battle, a great storm-cloud was growing to
cover the sky, and beneath it, where it darkened the last brilliance
of that intensely hot day, the sharp edge of the Champagne hills,
the steep down near the marshes of St. Gond, and the strangely
isolated height of the Mont Aimé stood out unnaturally clear, the
latter with the western light of the declining sun full on it against
the ominous livid purple of the thunder-cloud. At its base the
Prussian Guard had stretched out to the limit of their numbers; they
were already too far extended; they were still advancing. Behind
again to the right (he did not know in what confusion, but the
confusion had come) bunched the Saxons.
That vast modern battle was not one in which, as in those of our
fathers’ time, the decisive moment was grasped by the eye, and the
decisive manœuvre conducted upon a field actually seen by the man
deciding it. In that vast modern battle the critical moment was
the end of calculation infinitely complex and stretching back for
days; yet there was, in this moment of the late afternoon, on that
Wednesday, essentially the same process maturing in a length of days
which had with the great Napoleon matured in an hour; and what was
about to be done was essentially the same as what Marlborough had
done at Blenheim, when he drew that heavy phalanx of white-coated
German cavalry from the right, under the heights, and launched it
at the French left centre and decided Blenheim; for the enemy line,
though still advancing, was stretched to its utmost, was breaking:
the gap in the German line had been perceived, and proved fatal to
the Germans.
The general officer returned from his ride a little after six
o’clock. He sat in the room of a private house, which during the last
twenty-four hours had been the conning tower of the fight. He had
the great map before him, scored with rough chalk. He saw through
the tall windows before him the lowering sky. He received minute by
minute the telephone messages, and marked their news in sharp pencil
jabs upon the sheet. The dull noise to the north was the same; the
reports pouring in from the front showed little change, but that
little change was as significant as the slight movement after slack
water in a harbour, when the tide begins to turn.
It was still full daylight; the storm had broken on those northern
hills; there were lightning flashes against the dead cloud, and the
noise of distant thunder mingled with the ceaseless thudding of the
guns. The general ceased his labour and could lean back in his chair,
resting his eyes from the map, and make certain that the thing was
accomplished. An order had been given upon the enemy’s side, and it
was an order for retreat....
The evening fell, the rain drove through darkness, the thunder
lessened, grumbled and withdrew. None slept. All followed the more
distant, the withdrawing signal of the artillery. The reserve troops
came marching through, hurrying to the north. The tide had indeed
turned.
The general officer was mounted again with his few companions and
riding north with the rest through the storm. Before midnight a great
glare was seen on the horizon, blurred with rain. He informed himself
what it was, and heard it was the station of La Fère Champenoise
burning: the enemy had abandoned it three hours before. And still
they went northwards, and still the far noise of the guns retired
before them, miles away.
* * * * *
There is a house in Luxembourg built for a large school and standing
upon the public square opposite the post office. Here was housed,
in that same September of 1914, the Central Command of the German
armies. Hence proceeded the central determining orders which moulded
the battle reaching along one hundred and fifty miles of front, two
hundred miles away.
The little hill-town on its splendid gorge was quiet enough. The
German officers came and went through the streets, courteous, not
ill-liked, among a people whom they had always regarded as one of
their own; no cruelties had marked this violation of what they
thought to be no more than a technical neutrality. The coinage, the
customs, the railways had been German for a lifetime; German speech
was all about them, and the traditions they knew. The afternoon was
fair and warm in Luxembourg, high though the town stands. Here was
all the odd, ironic air of peace, though here was the heart of the
attack and of the enormous war.
Into that great empty building, now filled with its busy groups of
writing and telephoning men, its big, bare deal tables with their
masses of maps pinned down, its walls covered with further maps,
lines in blue and red chalk drawn upon them and numbers hastily
inscribed, came for the first time, after so many days of triumphant
advance, the note of change. There was half an hour of too great
calm, during which decision wrestled against decision and a proud
refusal to accept inevitable things; but the moment came; it was
the reflex of that same moment, a little after five o’clock, when
the thunderstorm had broken far away beyond the reedy belts of the
Marne River. An order had been given at the front: the man upon whose
responsibility it went--a man already broken with illness--rose and
went out uncertainly, as though he were far older than his age,
leaning upon the plain iron rail of the school staircase as he
painfully descended the steps; then slowly, with bent head, wandered
into the neglected court and garden.
Between him and the public square there was but a low wall supporting
high, open rails far apart. He came in his full uniform, this general
officer, who had accepted and ordered the retirement. He was a
nobleman, superior in military talent to his fellows, even amid that
great organization, which was the best designed for war in Europe.
He leaned against the railings a moment with his left hand, his
whole body was bowed, and then he sat him down, careless of dignity,
careless of prestige. He sat down publicly on the low stone wall that
supported the railings, his head bending more and more forward, and
staring on the ground. He bore a name with very different memories
of cold triumph. It was Moltke.
A group of boys playing in the square ceased from play to gaze at
the old boy, timidly approached the railings, and stared at that
poor, broken figure. They could know nothing of the traditions of the
Prussian army, nor of how strange a sight they saw, but they felt its
enormity. He, for his part, had forgotten what was around him--the
place, the children; he stared at the ground, remembering as in a
vivid dream his urgent appeal to his emperor, his agony at defeat,
his intelligence too great for his heart, and the knell still ringing
there: “The campaign has failed.... The campaign has failed.”
THE END
_Biography and Memoirs_
JOHN WANAMAKER
BY HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS
“A correct perspective of the man and his work ... has been admirably
supplied in a new and adequate biography. It may be said at the
outset that the author was not only peculiarly fitted for his task,
he has performed it with distinction. Understanding his subject,
and familiar with the scenes of his business and civic life, he has
written with facility and authority.”--_Philadelphia Public Ledger._
THROUGH MANY WINDOWS
BY HELEN WOODWARD
“Not only the epic of a woman’s battles in New York for her place
in the sun, but it is a study in business psychology, the best, the
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A MUSICIAN AND HIS WIFE
BY MRS. REGINALD DE KOVEN
“The author has lived among the great folk of the world, and has
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have lived. Mrs. de Koven is a charming raconteur.”--_Musical Leader._
MY LIFE AND TIMES
BY JEROME K. JEROME
Of this fascinating story of the life of the famous author of “The
Passing of the Third Floor Back” and “Three Men in a Boat” Richard Le
Gallienne says: “This very companionable book of memories will the
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PORTRAITS AND PORTENTS
BY A. G. GARDINER
The distinguished author of “War Lords” and “Priests, Prophets and
Kings” here presents a striking series of pictures of contemporary
celebrities. The editor for nearly twenty years of the _London Daily
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HARPER & BROTHERS
_Publishers Since 1817_ New York
_Books of Travel_
GIFTS OF FORTUNE
BY H. M. TOMLINSON
Among modern writers of travel books H. M. Tomlinson is preëminent
in the ability to convey the sense of actuality and the thrill of
adventure. With that skill which is peculiarly his own he again
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CONSTANTINOPLE
BY H. G. DWIGHT
“No American has ever better caught the spirit of Turkey than Harry
Dwight. He has a sense of humor and leisure that are altogether
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Adams Gibbons._
ROYAL SEVILLE
BY E. ALLISON PEERS
“According to Mr. Peers, there is no other place like Seville. And
indeed, unique in its way as Venice, it does intrigue as uniquely.
It is this peculiarly individual appeal that Mr. Peers not only
describes but interprets. He disclaims an attempt or even desire to
write a guidebook of the delectable city, Seville. Rather has he
written desultorily of the magic of its enticement....”--_Boston
Transcript._
TOM-TOM
BY JOHN W. VANDERCOOK