irresistibly toward the better, toward the good. It has constituted the
inexhaustible reserve, the invincible army of moral values, out of which
the liberties, the justices, the dignities of the race, and every law of
truth, have come to being. History stands ready to number the victories
of this moral force over the most strongly organized lawlessness and the
mightiest tyrannies. And I ask no better demonstration than this:
The State which has declared that might is right, which has trampled
under foot all weakness and respects only that which is strong--how
comes it that this State finds itself constrained to lie to its own
people and to all the nations about the true causes of this war and the
men who are responsible for it? How comes it that this State never
fails, whenever chance offers, to repeat the dreary lie and mouth it
over desperately, absurdly, vainly? Thus does it betray its terror of
the universal Conscience. The power which, one year ago, feared neither
heaven nor hell, felt instantly and must ever feel the avenging and
triumphant assault of all the consciences of humanity--enemy, neutral,
and even subject to itself.
PAUL HERVIEU
_de l’Académie Française_
_July 31, 1915_
[Illustration: _J. L. GÉRÔME_
TURKISH SOLDIER
FROM THE ORIGINAL PENCIL DRAWING MADE IN 1857]
_GÉNÉRAL HUMBERT_
LES ARABES AVAIENT RAISON
Le 28 août 1914, après une sanglante bataille, la 1^{ère} Division du
Maroc avait refoulé l’ennemi de la Fosse à l’Eau dans la direction de
Thin-le-Moutiers.
La nuit venue, malgré des pertes cruelles, la satisfaction était grande:
chacun espérait pour le lendemain l’achèvement de la victoire.
Mais contrairement à ces prévisions, l’ordre arriva, sur le coup de onze
heures du soir, de se dégager au plus vite et de marcher en retraite
vers les plateaux qui dominent à l’Est la route de Mézières à Rethel.
Ce mouvement était une conséquence de la manœuvre géniale conçue dès le
25 août par le Général JOFFRE et qui devait aboutir, comme chacun sait,
à la victoire de la Marne; mais nous l’ignorions.
Donc, il fallut se “décrocher” immédiatement. La nuit était très noire;
les troupes accablées par une dure journée de combat, couchaient sur
leurs positions.
Néanmoins, les ordres se transmirent rapidement et, à minuit, dans un
silence complet, la Division retraitait en plusieurs colonnes face à
l’Est.
L’ennemi allait-il éventer le mouvement? Il faillait craindre en tout
cas qu’à l’aube, c’est à dire après 3 heures de marche, il ne s’en
aperçut et ne commençât une poursuite qui aurait été fort gênante.
Il nous aurait en effet rattrapés au pied du plateau, alors que la
Division était obligée de se former en une colonne de route unique pour
y accéder.
Mais, contrairement à nos craintes rien ne gêna notre opération; à midi,
les troupes étaient rassemblées et en ordre parfait dans les environs de
Neuvizy, à l’Est de Launois.
Que s’était-il passé? L’ennemi était-il resté sur place? Avait-il
lui-même battu en retraite?
C’est dans la journée seulement que l’explication de son attitude nous
fut connue.
Par suite de l’obscurité de la nuit ou pour tout autre motif, un
bataillon de Tirailleurs Algériens, celui du Commandant MIGNEROT,
n’avait pas été touché par l’ordre de repliement.
Il était en toute première ligne et ne possédait d’autre ordre que celui
qu’il avait reçu la veille en fin de journée: “Avant-postes de combat;
résister à tout prix.”
Aussi à l’aube, lorsque l’ennemi se rendant compte enfin de notre
dérobade, voulut pousser de l’avant, il trouva, au centre de notre
front, tel qu’il était la veille, ce bataillon en position, ferme,
résolu à exécuter son ordre coûte que coûte.
La lutte, au dire des témoins, fut homérique; accablé par des forces
supérieures, écrasé par l’artillerie, le bataillon résista sur place
d’abord, puis lorsqu’il fut enveloppé sur ses ailes, recula pas à pas,
défendant vigoureusement chaque pouce de terrain.
C’est cette superbe attitude qui, à mon insu, assura à la Division, le
temps voulu pour exécuter son ascension sur le plateau.
Mais, hélas, ce fut au prix des plus douloureux sacrifices; ce
magnifique bataillon qui comptait plus de 1,000 combattants avait perdu
le Commandant, la plupart des officiers et 600 hommes.
Au cours de cette glorieuse résistance se produisit l’incident que je
veux raconter.
Lorsque le repli commença, il ne pouvait être question de relever morts
ou blessés.--Grande fut la stupéfaction des Arabes. C’étaient de vieux
soldats, qui avaient combattu un peu partout, en Algérie, au Maroc;
toujours ils avaient vu leurs chefs veiller soigneusement à ce qu’aucun
blessé, aucun cadavre ne risquât d’être massacré ou profané par
l’ennemi--le Berbère ou le Chleuh.--Voici que cette fois, on abandonnait
les blessés et les morts. Ils n’en croyaient pas leurs yeux. Des
murmures s’élevèrent dans les rangs; un vieux sergent alla même jusqu’à
menacer de son fusil un officier en l’appelant traître.
On eut toutes les peines du monde à leur rappeler ce qu’on leur avait
pourtant dit: dans les armées de l’Europe, les blessés, les morts,
lorsqu’ils tombent aux mains de l’ennemi constituent un dépôt sacré;
ils sont traités avec humanité, avec respect.
Hélas, les Arabes avaient raison. Combien de fois l’avons-nous constaté
avec indignation et colère!
Mais, au début de la guerre, qui de nous n’eût pas accordé à l’ennemi
les sentiments qui sont l’honneur d’une armée: la générosité,
l’humanité, le respect des conventions, de la parole donné?
Qui eut imaginé que 45 ans de “Kultur” produiraient de si tristes
résultats?
Heureusement, nous avons trouvé à ces désillusions de douces
consolations:
Comme tout se compense dans l’univers, il s’est rencontré des âmes
exquises qui se sont ingéniées à opposer aux misères de la guerre, les
remèdes les plus touchants.
Telle est l’œuvre des Sans-Foyer.
Pour les bienfaits qu’elle a prodigués, pour les nombreux affligés
qu’elle a secourus, notre reconnaissance lui est acquise.
Honneur à ses Fondateurs.
GÉNÉRAL HUMBERT
_Q. G. IIIᵉ Armée, 28 Août 1915_
AN HEROIC STAND
[TRANSLATION]
On the 28th of August, 1914, after a hard-fought battle, the First
Moroccan Division drove the enemy back from la Fosse à l’Eau, in the
direction of Thin-le-Moutiers.
Despite our many losses we were exultant when night fell, and confident
of winning a decisive victory the next morning.
But at eleven o’clock, contrary to our expectations, we got an order to
retreat at once towards the east, in the direction of the heights which
command the road from Mézières to Rethel.
This movement was part of the strategic plan made by General Joffre on
the 25th of August, a plan which led, as every one now knows, to the
victory of the Marne--but of that we knew nothing at the time.
The night was pitch dark. The men, worn out by the long day’s fighting,
had fallen asleep where they had halted, but the order was rapidly
transmitted, and at midnight, in dead silence, the columns of our
Division set their faces eastward.
There was a chance that the enemy might discover our purpose. We feared
that in three hours when daylight came, we should be pursued, and if we
were overtaken it might be awkward, for, to mount to the plateau that
lay ahead of us the Division would be obliged to take the narrow road in
single column.
Nothing, however, interfered with us; we carried our movement through
successfully, and soon the troops were assembled in perfect order to the
east of Launois, near Neuvizy.
We could not understand why we had not been molested. Had the enemy
remained where we left him, or had he retreated?
Later in the day we learnt the reason of our security. Because of the
darkness, or for some other reason, the order to fall back was not
transmitted to a battalion of the Tirailleurs Algériens, led by
Commandant Mignerot.
The battalion therefore remained where it was, in the first fighting
line, in obedience to an order of the day before, which had been to hold
its ground at whatever cost.
Thus at dawn, when the enemy found we had given him the slip, and tried
to follow us up, this battalion, bent on carrying out the only order it
had received, was there to face him.
Those who saw the battle said it was Homeric. Overwhelmed by superior
numbers, crushed by artillery, the battalion at first fought where it
stood, and then, enveloped on both wings, fell back step by step,
fiercely contesting every inch of ground.
That splendid stand gave the Division time to climb the heights in
safety. But a heavy price was paid; when the fight began the battalion
numbered more than a thousand; when it was over the Commandant, almost
all his officers and six hundred of his men were dead.
It was in the course of this glorious resistance that the following
incident took place. When the battalion was forced back it was
impossible to carry off the dead and wounded. The Arabs were amazed.
They were old soldiers who had fought all over Morocco and Algeria, and
they had always seen their leaders take the utmost care that no wounded
comrades, no corpse of a brave man, should be left behind to be
massacred or defiled by savage tribesmen. And now they were abandoning
their wounded and their dead. They could not believe their eyes; murmurs
arose from the ranks; one old sergeant went so far as to menace his
officer with his rifle and call him “traitor.”
Often as they had been told by their chiefs of the respect with which
the dead and wounded are treated by European armies, it was almost
impossible to reassure them as to the fate of their comrades.
How often since, alas, with bitter wrath, we have had reason to recall
their instinctive distrust of the foe!
But in those early days of the war, which one of us would have hesitated
to give our enemies credit for the feelings which are part of an Army’s
very soul: generosity, humanity, respect for the word of honour?
Who could have imagined that forty-five years of “Kultur” would have
borne such fruit?
Fortunately there is consolation even for such disillusionment. This is
a universe of compensations, and compassionate souls are striving to
lessen the inevitable misery of this most terrible of wars.
Among them we gladly reckon those who come to the aid of the Homeless.
And in the name of the many helpless sufferers whom they relieve we
offer them our gratitude.
GENERAL HUMBERT
_Commanding the Third Army of France_
[Illustration: _JOHN SINGER SARGENT, R.A._
PORTRAIT OF HENRY JAMES
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTING]
_HENRY JAMES_
THE LONG WARDS
There comes back to me out of the distant past an impression of the
citizen soldier at once in his collective grouping and in his impaired,
his more or less war-worn state, which was to serve me for long years as
the most intimate vision of him that my span of life was likely to
disclose. This was a limited affair indeed, I recognise as I try to
recover it, but I mention it because I was to find at the end of time
that I had kept it in reserve, left it lurking deep down in my sense of
things, however shyly and dimly, however confusedly even, as a term of
comparison, a glimpse of something by the loss of which I should have
been the poorer; such a residuary possession of the spirit, in fine, as
only needed darkness to close round it a little from without in order to
give forth a vague phosphorescent light. It was early, it must have been
very early, in our Civil War, yet not so early but that a large number
of those who had answered President Lincoln’s first call for an army had
had time to put in their short period (the first term was so short then,
as was likewise the first number,) and reappear again in camp, one of
those of their small New England State, under what seemed to me at the
hour, that of a splendid autumn afternoon, the thickest mantle of heroic
history. If I speak of the impression as confused I certainly justify
that mark of it by my failure to be clear at this moment as to how much
they were in general the worse for wear--since they can’t have been
exhibited to me, through their waterside settlement of tents and
improvised shanties, in anything like hospital conditions. However, I
cherish the rich ambiguity, and have always cherished it, for the sake
alone of the general note exhaled, the thing that has most kept
remembrance unbroken. I carried away from the place _the_ impression,
the one that not only was never to fade, but was to show itself
susceptible of extraordinary eventual enrichment. I may not pretend now
to refer it to the more particular sources it drew upon at that summer’s
end of 1861, or to say why my repatriated warriors were, if not somehow
definitely stricken, so largely either lying in apparent helplessness or
moving about in confessed languor: it suffices me that I have always
thought of them as expressing themselves at almost every point in the
minor key, and that this has been the reason of their interest. What I
call the note therefore is the characteristic the most of the essence
and the most inspiring--inspiring I mean for consideration of the
admirable sincerity that we thus catch in the act: the note of the quite
abysmal softness, the exemplary genius for accommodation, that forms the
alternative aspect, the passive as distinguished from the active, of the
fighting man whose business is in the first instance formidably to
bristle. This aspect has been produced, I of course recognise, amid the
horrors that the German powers had, up to a twelvemonth ago, been for
years conspiring to let loose upon the world by such appalling engines
and agencies as mankind had never before dreamed of; but just that is
the lively interest of the fact unfolded to us now on a scale beside
which, and though save indeed for a single restriction, the whole
previous illustration of history turns pale. Even if I catch but in a
generalising blur that exhibition of the first American levies as a
measure of experience had stamped and harrowed them, the signally
attaching mark that I refer to is what I most recall; so that if I
didn’t fear, for the connection, to appear to compare the slighter
things with the so much greater, the diminished shadow with the
far-spread substance, I should speak of my small old scrap of truth,
miserably small in contrast with the immense evidence even then to have
been gathered, but in respect to which latter occasion didn’t come to
me, as having contained possibilities of development that I must have
languished well-nigh during a lifetime to crown it with.
One had during the long interval not lacked opportunity for a vision of
the soldier at peace, moving to and fro with a professional eye on the
horizon, but not fished out of the bloody welter and laid down to pant,
as we actually see him among the Allies, almost on the very bank and
within sound and sight of his deepest element. The effect of many of the
elapsing years, the time in England and France and Italy, had indeed
been to work his collective presence so closely and familiarly into any
human scene pretending to a full illustration of our most generally
approved conditions that I confess to having missed him rather
distressfully from the picture of things offered me during a series of
months spent not long ago in a few American cities after years of
disconnection. I can scarce say why I missed him sadly rather than
gladly--I might so easily have prefigured one’s delight in his absence;
but certain it is that my almost outraged consciousness of our
practically doing without him amid American conditions was a revelation
of the degree in which his great imaging, his great reminding and
enhancing function is rooted in the European basis. I felt his
non-existence on the American positively produce a void which nothing
else, as a vivifying substitute, hurried forward to fill; this being
indeed the case with many of the other voids, the most aching, which
left the habituated eye to cast about as for something to nibble in a
state of dearth. We never know, I think, how much these wanting elements
have to suggest to the pampered mind till we feel it living in view of
the community from which they have been simplified away. On these
occasions they conspire with the effect of certain other, certain
similar expressions, examples of social life proceeding as by the
serene, the possibly too serene, process of mere ignorance, to bring to
a head for the fond observer the wonder of what is supposed to strike,
for the projection of a furnished world, the note that they are not
there to strike. However, as I quite grant the hypothesis of an observer
still fond and yet remarking the lapse of the purple patch of militarism
but with a joy unclouded, I limit myself to the merely personal point
that the fancy of a particular brooding analyst _could_ so sharply
suffer from a vagueness of privation, something like an unseasoned
observational diet, and then, rather to his relief, find the mystery
cleared up. And the strict relevancy of the bewilderment I glance at,
moreover, becomes questionable, further, by reason of my having, with
the outbreak of the horrors in which we are actually steeped, caught
myself staring at the exhibited militarism of the general British scene
not much less ruefully than I could remember to have stared, a little
before, at the utter American deficit. Which proves after all that the
rigour of the case had begun at a bound to defy the largest luxury of
thought; so that the presence of the military in the picture on the mere
moderate insular scale struck one as “furnishing” a menaced order but in
a pitiful and pathetic degree.
The degree was to alter, however, by swift shades, just as one’s
comprehension of the change grew and grew with it; and thus it was that,
to cut short the record of our steps and stages, we have left
immeasurably behind us here the question of what might or what should
have been. That belonged, with whatever beguiled or amused ways of
looking at it, to the abyss of our past delusion, a collective state of
mind in which it had literally been possible to certain sophists to
argue that, so far from not having soldiers enough, we had more than we
were likely to know any respectable public call for. It was in the very
fewest weeks that we replaced a pettifogging consciousness by the most
splendidly liberal, and, having swept through all the first phases of
anxiety and suspense, found no small part of our measure of the matter
settle down to an almost luxurious study of our multiplied defenders
after the fact, as I may call it, or in the light of that acquaintance
with them as products supremely tried and tested which I began by
speaking of. We were up to our necks in this relation before we could
turn round, and what upwards of a year’s experience of it has done in
the contributive and enriching way may now well be imagined. I might
feel that my marked generalisation, the main hospital impression, steeps
the case in too strong or too stupid a synthesis, were it not that to
consult my memory, a recollection of countless associative contacts, is
to see the emphasis almost absurdly thrown on my quasi-paradox. Just so
it is of singular interest for the witnessing mind itself to feel the
happy truth stoutly resist any qualifying hint--since I _am_ so struck
with the charm, as I can only call it, of the tone and temper of the man
of action, the creature appointed to advance and explode and destroy,
and elaborately instructed as to how to do these things, reduced to
helplessness in the innumerable instances now surrounding us. It
doesn’t in the least take the edge from my impression that his sweet
reasonableness, representing the opposite end of his wondrous scale, is
probably the very oldest story of the touching kind in the world; so far
indeed from my claiming the least originality for the appealing
appearance as it has lately reached me from so many sides, I find its
suggestion of vast communities, communities of patience and placidity,
acceptance submission pushed to the last point, to be just what makes
the whole show most illuminating.
“Wonderful that, from east to west, they must _all_ be like this,” one
says to one’s self in presence of certain consistencies, certain
positive monotonies of aspect; “wonderful that if joy of battle (for the
classic term, in spite of new horrors, seems clearly still to keep its
old sense,) has, to so attested a pitch, animated these forms, the
disconnection of spirit should be so prompt and complete, should hand
the creature over as by the easiest turn to the last refinements of
accommodation. The disconnection of the flesh, of physical function in
whatever ravaged area, _that_ may well be measureless; but how
interesting, if the futility of such praise doesn’t too much dishonour
the subject, the exquisite anomaly of the intimate readjustment of the
really more inflamed and exasperated part, or in other words of the
imagination, the captured, the haunted vision, to life at its most
innocent and most ordered!” To that point one’s unvarying thought of the
matter; which yet, though but a meditation without a conclusion, becomes
the very air in which fond attention spends itself. So far as commerce
of the acceptable, the tentatively helpful kind goes, one looks for the
key to success then, among the victims, exactly on that ground of the
apprehension pacified and almost, so to call it, trivialised. The
attaching thing becomes thus one’s intercourse with the imagination of
the particular patient subject, the individual himself, in the measure
in which this interest bears us up and carries us along; which name for
the life of his spirit has to cover, by a considerable stretch, all the
ground. By the stretch of the name, moreover, I am far from meaning any
stretch of the faculty itself--which remains for the most part a
considerably contracted or inert force, a force in fact often so
undeveloped as to be insusceptible of measurement at all, so that one
has to resort, in face of the happy fact that communion still does hold
good, to some other descriptive sign for it. That sign, however,
fortunately presents itself with inordinate promptitude and fits to its
innocent head with the last perfection the cap, in fact the very crown,
of an office that we can only appraise as predetermined goodnature. We
after this fashion score our very highest on behalf of a conclusion, I
think, in feeling that whether or no the British warrior’s goodnature
has much range of fancy, his imagination, whatever there may be of it,
is at least so goodnatured as to show absolutely everything it touches,
everything without exception, even the worst machinations of the enemy,
in that colour. Variety and diversity of exhibition, in a world
virtually divided as now into hospitals and the preparation of subjects
for them, are, I accordingly conceive, to be looked for quite away from
the question of physical patience, of the general consent to suffering
and mutilation, and, instead of that, in this connection of the sort of
mind and thought, the sort of moral attitude, that are born of the
sufferer’s other relations; which I like to think of as being different
from country to country, from class to class, and as having their
fullest national and circumstantial play.