soldier spent at Versailles, in order to obtain his brevet of
second-lieutenant, I remained unaware of his presence in France! Péguy
has left an eloquent description of his friend and young alumnus,
telling how he lived like a king in the palace of the École Militaire,
but a step from the dome of the Invalides whither in the summer
mornings, in the freshness of the dawn, he used to escort his slender
little three-inch cannon--‘ses 75, ces petits jeunes gens de canons
modernes, ces gringalets de canons modernes, au corps d’insecte, aux
roues comme des pattes d’araignées’--filing them off under the shadow
of the monstrous historic artillery of the great Pensioners’ Hospital,
the cannon of Fontenoy and Malplaquet, bronze mastodons and leviathans
of an earlier age. I can imagine Ernest, ‘l’homme au regard pur’ (as
Péguy calls him); I can see him, a young Hippolytus of the School of
War, in my mind’s eye--but I did not see him in the world of facts.
Before I learned of his presence in my neighbourhood he had left--he
and his battery--for the deserts of Mauritania, and there, in the
desolate tropical country that lies between the burning plains of
Senegal and the sands of the Sahara, he spent three happy years. He
sent home a little book--_Terres de soleil et de sommeil_--which marked
the awakening of his literary gift; but the real event of those three
years, for Ernest, was his ardent conversion to the Catholic Church.
Ernest was a mystic; the only life possible to his insatiable heart
was the spiritual life; and in the Sacraments he sought that assurance
of a world beyond our own, in constant communication with our own,
which other minds may find by other means. His fervour, his faith, was
henceforth a remedy for all his sins and all his sorrows; and, young as
he was, he had had his sorrows--doubtless, also, his sins.
It was, I think, in the end of 1912 that Ernest left that immense
and mortal splendour of the Sahara and came back to France, bringing
with him a short military novel, _L’Appel des Armes_, which (coming
after Péguy’s elaborate pæan) received, on its publication in 1913,
an honourable, a more than honourable, welcome.... I was one of the
welcomers. Few things are pleasanter to the hoary critic than the
_éclosion_ of a fresh young talent, and naturally all the more when
that talent flowers on a dear familiar stem. On this occasion I renewed
my long-interrupted friendship with the young author, and we promised
ourselves a more frequent communication of our ideas. Fate however,
decided otherwise. Ernest and his battery were sent to the cliffs of
Cherbourg. And, a year later the great war began....
Thus it happens that Ernest Psichari’s fame must rest on three small
volumes, of which the finest by far appeared after his death--that
_Voyage du Centurion_, which is the unforgettable record of a mystic’s
conversion in the blazing African desert. There is less genius and
less force in this earlier, tiny volume called _l’Appel des Armes_,
so full of inexperience, of an ardent evident _parti-pris_, but also
of a sincerity, a living sensibility, a moral earnestness such that I
would recommend it to the English reader (and I am sure there are many
such) puzzled by the great spirit, the heroic steadfastness that the
French have shown in this war, for which he finds little warrant in
the ‘yellow-backs’ on his table. Among many others, this brief record
of the mind and conscience of a young French officer is a _document à
l’appui_ of no mean value. It relates the story of a youth of twenty
who turns from the Radical, humanitarian views of his father, the
village schoolmaster, to find salvation (for it is, in his case, really
a sort of religious conversion, a change of heart) as a soldier in
Africa. And the reader will remark here--as also in the last novels of
Émile Nolly--an almost mystical view of military matters recalling the
recent German theories.
‘“Croyez bien,” répondait Nangès, “que la force est toujours du
côté du droit.”
‘L’instituteur se récriait:--
‘“Mais certainement,” expliquait Timothée. “Qu’est-ce que la
force? C’est l’intelligence, la ténacité, c’est la patience, c’est
l’habileté, c’est la courage, c’est la volonté. Voilà, Vincent, les
facteurs de la force. Voilà les fibres du tissu. Ne croyez-vous pas
qu’avec toutes les vertus qui la composent, la force n’a pas de
grandes chances d’avoir toujours le droit pour elle?”
‘Naturellement, Vincent ne comprenait pas.’
(_L’Appel des Armes_, p. 84.)
Alas, how soon were events to show our young neophyte that
intelligence, that tenacity--that patience, ingenuity, courage,
force of will--that the most indisputable military qualities may
be associated with inhuman, with indeed a devilish perversity! But
Ernest did not live long enough to learn all the ripe iniquity of his
enemy. He fell in the very beginning of the war, at Rossignol, on the
frontiers of Luxembourg, midway between Virton and Montmédy--quite
close to Sedan, in fact; and the Germans thought to make another great
haul there.... The fight at Rossignol was a sort of southern branch
of that terrible battle of Charleroi which no living European can
ever forget. The French Headquarters, perceiving the ruse and danger
of the enemy’s plan, set on the low hill of Rossignol some twelve
thousand men, with orders to hold the heights to the last man and
shield the road beneath where the French troops were passing in one
constant stream; and the men who died there were not less heroic than
those of Thermopylæ. Twelve thousand, they were; and I am told that
scarce one of them survived.... A few are prisoners of war in Germany.
Picked men, famous regiments, the nearest thing the French possessed
to our time-hardened professional soldiers, for they were the Colonial
Infantry and Artillery. The batteries were set up, and then the storm
began. They fought all day--thirteen hours--against more than a hundred
thousand Germans, holding the passage (one cannot call it a pass, for
the hills there are too low), and, towards evening, they saw on the
horizon a moving gray mass, and thought for a moment that this meant
reinforcements. Oh, despair! they were German reinforcements! I say,
despair! for such a feeling indeed fills my breast at reading of this
supreme deception; but the young officer who gave this account to
Psichari’s mother, affirms that even then (feeling how useful was the
part they played) not despair but a noble exhilaration was the intimate
feeling of those heroes on the hill. At last the German army, creeping
steadily nearer, and distant now by no more than thirty metres,
prepared to take the last irreducible French batteries by assault.
At this moment Lieutenant X saw Ernest Psichari lead his Captain,
grievously wounded, to the _poste de secours_, immediately returning to
face the enemy. He came on with that quick half-racing, half-dancing
step which the soldiers call the ‘pas gymnastique,’ on his face a
bright excited smile, and ran with this springing gait to his battery,
standing there a moment, still smiling, as he watched the oncoming
mass. And then he fell right across his cannon--slipped heavily to the
ground; a ball in the temple had shattered that young head, so full of
dreams.
‘Pourtant, dans sa grande peine, une consolation lui venait. Car
il croyait que le sang des martyrs était utile. Sa conviction
était que rien n’est perdu dans le monde, que tout se reporte et
se retrouve au total; ainsi tous les actes sublimes des héros
formaient pour lui une sorte de capital commun dont les intérêts se
reversaient obscurément sur des milliers d’âmes inconnues.’
(_L’Appel des Armes_, pp. 295-296.)
And the blood of the martyrs is the seed of Faith.
ÉMILE NOLLY
No man had welcomed the war with greater enthusiasm than Captain
Détanger: he wrote under the pseudonym of Émile Nolly. I was not in
Paris on that August morning when he left for Lorraine, eager (he said)
‘to water his horse in the Rhine.’ But I had bidden him good speed a
few years ago, when he set out for Morocco. Shall I ever forget the
transfiguration of that moody, noble, saturnine face? or the gleam
in the great light-gray eyes, so often sad, or even morose, and now
lit with a wild joy? or the tall, lithe figure--striding feverishly
up and down my little drawing room while, in a torrent of eloquence,
the Captain tried to explain to my languid feminine imagination
(which can only look on, and listen, and gasp in amazement) ‘la joie
du combat!’ That campaign in Morocco brought him chiefly fatigue and
disappointment, since he and his black troops had little fighting to
do, and were chiefly employed in convoying from sandy desert to sandy
desert the provisions and munitions needed on the front. It brought
him also, however, the material for a fine book--a fine, bitter,
disenchanted, weary yet energetic book, eminently characteristic of its
writer--_Gens de Guerre an Maroc_.
One of his three fine books! It was not those, however, which brought
him the celebrity, almost the fame, on which he was entering when he
fell in battle. The ardent soul of Détanger had thrown his talent
overboard, as a wandering apostle might fling from his wallet some
useless bauble and go on unencumbered save by his staff and scrip. His
last two books, the famous ones--_Le Chemin de la Victoire_ and _Le
Conquérant_--have indeed little literary grace and no sort of style;
they are like those varnished Images d’Epinal in cut-out coloured paper
which bring to the humblest cottage a sort of symbol of the wars of
Napoleon, of the glories of Turenne; or again, like the Stations of
the Cross in some wayside church. They preach a truth so august, and
in the author’s eyes so necessary to salvation, that art is of little
consequence, the one thing needful being to make the meaning plain.
That meaning was the same in each: the saving grace of the Army, and
the glorious fact that any young ne’er-do-well, any weak dilettante
creature even, so he be brave and willing to consent to discipline,
may find a personal salvation there, while building a bulwark of glory
round his country.
I never really ventured to tell Émile Nolly what I thought of those
books, so I said nothing about them--a language which he perfectly
understood and accepted with that grim, not untender smile of his. No
one better than he knew the charm of art and romance. And I imagine
he felt a certain fierce pleasure in flinging all that to the winds,
in order, as he thought, to be more useful, reach a wider public,
and influence it with the directness of a popular sermon. What use,
after all, was there in his two stories of Indo-China, or in _Gens de
Guerre au Maroc_? They were inclined, if anything, to inspire a morbid
pessimism. On the whole, it is the first of his novels which I shall
most often re-read--_Hiên le Maboul_, a book so poignant, clear and
mild in its sadness, that it haunts our imagination for years after
the last page is closed. No one, perhaps, has so well expressed the
peculiar beauty of Tonquin.... When, after Egypt, Aden, Ceylon, the
Frenchman reaches the Delta, his first instinctive expectation is of
something stranger still; are we not here at the end of the world?
‘χθονὸς μεν ἐς τηλoυρὸν ἠκoμεν πέδoν,
Σκύθην ἔς oῖμoν, ἂβατον εἰς ἒρημίαν.’
But what is this gray land where the silvery winter sunshine floats
veiled by an imperceptible haze? Is it Brittany? Or a misty March day
in the _Landes_, when the sun shines? And see, that ruined tower set
on the round breast of a hill, with the far-off scaurs and peaks in
the background--is it Auvergne? Nor, in the character of the conquered
people, does there appear at first the difference that separates the
Frenchman from the solemn Arab or the barbarous Kanak; the Annamite,
with his wide intelligence, his keen and quizzical wit, his love
of hearth and home, his respect for tradition and his religious
indifference, appears at once a man and a brother. A certain aloofness
adds to his charm.... Such was the new and yet half-familiar world with
which Émile Nolly made us acquainted. _Hiên le Maboul_ is a yellow
brother of Loti’s _Mon frère Yves_.
And yet, on reopening the charming book (so appealing in its tender
hopelessness, its elegant sobriety), I find, even here, the Pragmatist
apostle who wrote Nolly’s later works! For what is the nexus of the
novel? It is surely the despair of the young French lieutenant when
he finds himself impotent to save the native _tirailleur_ who, in
an hour of moral anguish, comes to ask his infallible superior ‘les
paroles qui guérissent.’ Alas, with all his science, the ‘Ancestor with
the two stripes’ does not know the words that save; his philosophy
affords him nothing but idle formulas void of faith and healing. And
thenceforth his whole system of civilisation seems to him wanting and
inefficacious. For Hiên goes out in silence and hangs himself to a
banyan-tree.
Since then Nolly had learned the words that save. He was, I think, no
ardent Catholic, like Psichari or Péguy; but his faith in the destinies
of human society, his conviction that the army of France is indeed a
Salvation Army, not only for Frenchmen, but for his dear Senegalese,
for black, red, and yellow--every shade of skin or soul--gave him the
persuasiveness of the men of Napoleon’s army. And he went out into the
highways and the by-ways and compelled them to come in.
And now these young men--so much younger than I, who sit by my lonely
fire and remember them--these young men with a future, as it seemed,
are all dead for their country and for the faith that was in them.
Their bodies lie in wayside tombs, or in the middle of the fields,
with a rough cross over them, and a name traced in ink that the autumn
rains efface. And that name, which was beginning to shine in the
literary record of their nation, that name which they looked to burnish
in the course of the next thirty years, can now receive no further
lustre. From the personal, individualist point of view, their fame is
sacrificed, even as their lives are sacrificed. They are mulcted in
their works, as in their race, for, among them all, only Péguy was a
father. And, so far as they knew, their immense suffering and sacrifice
was in vain. They lie, perhaps, among those dreadful heaps which the
shell at once agglomerates and scatters, and from which all individual
difference is wiped out. So many of them!
The saddest fate of all, I think, was Émile Nolly’s--to die so slowly
and so painfully of his wounds, in hospital, while the fight in which
he longed to join was raging, still undecided.
HENRI BARBUSSE
Before the war, the name of Henri Barbusse was practically unknown.
And now he is, of all French writers, the most widely read: he is
the Prince of Best-sellers. Bourget has his tens of thousands, his
scores of thousands; but _Le Feu_ is in its 250th thousand, _L’Enfer_
in its 200th thousand, and _Clarté_ (published in January, 1919) had
reached its fortieth thousand by the beginning of March. And all these
novels have appeared in war time, despite the endless difficulties of
book-production.
What is the reason of this prodigious success? How is it that
Barbusse, who was an unknown young poet in 1913, should satisfy to-day
the souls of so vast a public. One may say that he has inherited the
immense unsatisfied public left desolate since the death of Zola.
He has most of Zola’s qualities, imagination; a tragic realism that
impresses an image lastingly on the reader’s brain; and a sort of
public passion, rather than public spirit, that makes him feel other
men’s grievances and wrongs more keenly than his own. Moreover, he
has all Zola’s faults--and they are of a kind that do not prejudice
the sale of a book--he has Zola’s filth, his sexual obsession; Zola’s
anarchism, and his Utopias; Zola’s abuse of horror in the evocation of
physical torture.
_L’Enfer_, M. Barbusse’s first great success, is a really bad book!
a far worse book, I think, than _Pot-bouille_, with which it invites
comparison. Zola showed us an ordinary Paris mansion, or system of
‘flats,’ and, taking off the roof Asmodeus-wise, revealed on every
floor the iniquities it contained, and by so doing the novelist sought
to demonstrate the corruption of society in its actual form. His
earnestness to some extent redeemed his foulness. And the same holds
good of Barbusse. But how miserable is his treatment of the theme.
He imagines a respectable boarding-house a kind of Maison Vauquer of
a less dilapidated sort. The narrator is one of the boarders. In his
wall, a cleft or crevice in a panel puts his bedroom into unsuspected
communication with the chamber on the other side. He looks and listens;
and what goes on under his spyhole is the unsavoury theme of the volume
tersely called: Hell. Debauch, despair, adultery, death, birth; at
one moment the consultation of two doctors on a case of cancer; at
another, the vigil beside a corpse; such are the things discovered by
the peephole of an undreamed-of witness. They are described with a
luxury of nastiness which suggests some medical student afflicted with
erotomania. He spies upon lust; he prys into the last spasms of pain;
his mind is unbalanced. And we imagine him saying to himself, ‘Oh,
I’ll make your flesh creep and your blood run cold!’ When he leaves
description for theory, he is an Anarchist. Above all, he is a cad.
(We are speaking, of course, of the fictitious narrator, and not of M.
Henri Barbusse.) But we must admit that he is a gifted and sensitive
cad. That is why, although we devote the book to the flames, we read it
first....
We have heard how Gautama, brought up until adolescence amid the false
enchantments of a sequestered palace, one day crossed the threshold and
met, ere he had taken twenty steps, a corpse, a leper, and an old man
bent double and blind in his decrepitude: Death--Disease--Old Age--and
was told it was the common lot. Whereupon Gautama forsook the world and
henceforth his conversation was in Heaven.
M. Barbusse also has met the three spectres, and with them their
attendant spirits, Lust and Cruelty. But pity has turned in his heart,
not to prayer, but to a passionate anger, a violent reaction against
civilisation as it stands. On every page of this first book he shouts
‘Follow your instincts! Eat, drink, and make merry, for to-morrow you
die!’ And _sotto voce_ he seems to add: ‘Destroy! lest ye be destroyed!’
The popularity of Barbusse is therefore a disquieting symptom, but
all his novels are not as outrageous as _L’Enfer_. In _Le Feu_ he
discovered a theme exactly suited to his genius. _Le Feu_ is perhaps
the only war book which really gives a living image of the war. It is
unique and unforgettable. _L’Enfer_, as I have said, is a bad book; but
_Le Feu_, with all its faults, is a masterpiece.
It is the journal of a squad--fifteen or a dozen common soldiers in
the trenches; their infinite pettiness, their infinite grandeur; the
horrors they succumb to or surmount. The first page shows the strange
moats or living wells of the trenches--and the strange creatures (huge
bears, no doubt) who growl and waddle and stumble therein--‘des espèces
d’ours qui pataugent et grognent. C’est nous.’
The book is a series of episodes rather than a novel. Strange
how this form--which the French call the ‘Chest-of-Drawers,’ the
_roman-à-tiroirs_, comprising a set of independent though sequestered
events contained in a solid framework--has taken possession of French
literature. M. Duhamel also employs it. _Jean-Christophe_ was a
_roman-à-tiroirs_. Most popular during the Middle Ages and Renaissance
(both the Divine Comedy and Don Quixote are on this model), the
Nineteenth Century preferred the firm organic contexture of the novel
of character. _La Cousine Bette_ or _Madame Bovary_, _The Mill on the
Floss_, _Vanity Fair_, _The Old Curiosity Shop_, appeared to us of the
Nineteenth Century, a finer development, an evolution. But the world
goes round!
Some of these episodes, once read, are fixed in the memory for ever;
and of these the finest, I think, is _Le Portique_. Who can forget
the death of Poterloo in the explosion of the obus, as he rises from
the earth, bolt upright, black, his two arms stretched full length as
on a cross, and a flame on his shoulders in place of the shattered
head? We cannot banish that terrible image if we would. There are
pages of _Le Feu_, which, just glanced at, imprint themselves on our
consciousness--like the death of the horse, Trompette, in the mine of
_Germinal_, for we are always brought back to our initial comparison
of M. Barbusse with Zola. And those who appreciate what I can but call
the epic grandeur of _Germinal_ or _L’Assommoir_, will do well to read
_Le Feu_; while those who cannot endure the foul images, the filthy
realism, the coarse slang, the half-mad enthusiasms and indignations of
Zola, will be wise in avoiding any book by Henri Barbusse.
For M. Barbusse, like Zola, is an apostle and writes inspired by the
energy of his social revolt. Like Péguy--although he is so different
from Péguy--he longs to fly to the rescue. There was a medieval saint
and poetess, Mechtild of Magdeburg, who sang in one of her lyric
prayers, ‘Ô Christ on the Cross, lend me Thine arms to save a suffering
world!’ That is the prayer of M. Barbusse, only he addresses it to
Socialism--or rather, if I understand him aright, to Bolshevism. He
would save the dumb dwellers in that dark underworld which, in the
present state of things, appears to have no issue. ‘And he went down
into Hell.’ More than once the line has slid into my mind in reading
his unedifying pages, and I understood that here, too, was a sort of
Gospel--the most modern of the apocrypha.
One may doubt of the wisdom of a social theory which, seeing the stain
on our vesture, would simply turn it wrong side out. The stain may go
right through. The world may prove no stronger and no saner if you
set it upside down. I am not M. Barbusse’s political convert. But I
admire him for his reaction, his revolt against that which most of us
so readily accept--the sufferings of the unknown mass. It is well that
there should be writers who rouse and reveal, though their trumpet
notes be harsh and unmodulated--well there should be those who shake
the sleepers from their sloth and bid them save their neighbours and
themselves, building anew, lest the pillars of the temple fall and
crush us all in their ruin.
In _Clarté_ the ideas of M. Barbusse are explained at full length:
abolition of inheritance, universal disarmament, universal equality,
universal Republic in the Federation of the World. In this book (which
concerns the life of a clerk in the office of a factory, who marries,
goes to the war, and returns to look at his wife and society, with not
unkindly but disenchanted eyes)--M. Barbusse has lost his coarseness,
but also that biting acid which imprinted on our remembrance the scenes
of _Le Feu_. In his feminine characters--in the old aunt, in Marie, the
wife, in the little blind girl whom every one pities and for whom no
one cares--he shows a new quality of tenderness.
What will he give us to-morrow?
GEORGES DUHAMEL
Like Henri Barbusse, M. Georges Duhamel has found his great opportunity
in the events of the war. Before 1914 we knew him as a young writer of
promise in only too many directions. He had written a play, _À l’Ombre
de Statues_, which Antoine produced at the Odéon Theatre, and which
was (with Marie Lenéru’s _Affranchis_) the chief success of Antoine’s
heroic voyage of discovery in the perilous tracts of unknown youthful
genius. M. Duhamel was also just coming into notice as a poet and
especially as a critic of poetry in the columns of the _Mercure de
France_. We liked his young uncompromising voice and the deliberate
way in which he said that he was proud to be born in the century
which produced a Paul Claudel. He had as yet published no novel. But
the mobilisation revealed his capacity as a doctor, and it was as an
army-surgeon that he joined the forces.
His _Vie des Martyrs_ (which Mr Heinemann has published in English
as the _New Book of Martyrs_) revealed a considerable writer, with
that rare gift of insight, of recognition, which pierces at a glance
to the core of things. Tenderness, infinite pity, regret, a sense of
the helplessness of science, a sense of the hopelessness of so-called
progress which ends in such an explosion of organised disorder--it is
these feelings that inspire the good physician as he bends above the
murdered youths, the martyrs, whom it is his destiny always to torture
and sometimes to cure or to relieve. _La Vie des Martyrs_ is a set of
brief sketches of the lives and deaths of wounded soldiers in hospital
on the front.