Critical Studies Part 5

'It is an epic, this departure of the troops. I have never felt what I feel now. There is a sense and scent of battle in the air; the midsummer sun shining on the musket-barrels and sparkling on the accoutrements sets fire to one's brain. The earth trembles under the pa.s.sage of artillery which is about to vomit death; and one's heart dances in one's breast whilst the ponderous caissons, with their iron-circled wheels, shake the stones, and the mouths of the bronze guns display their yawning jaws. Bands play warlike tunes, men chant the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_, the gold of epaulets and the lace on uniforms glow in the light; the flags flap against the flagstaffs, on whose summits eagles spread their wings; the shoes of the chargers glitter like silver crescents; and one feels some mighty spirit of war soar above these hearts of flesh and of iron who are about to face the shock of battle. The blood steams in one's veins; the fever of the hour devours one; and one shouts louder and louder, faster and faster, not to become mad.

'It is market-day. The square is filled by country people who have brought in their vegetables and fruits for sale. Their stalls are under all the trees, and, here and there, take up the pavement. We are standing between a woman selling salads and an old man who has onions, and is on all fours beside his skips, because every moment or so an onion slides off the heap and rolls towards the gutter, unless he stops it. What a funny old fellow he is to take so much trouble for an onion! Ah!

there goes another one! The old man hurries to catch it, but an officer, booted and spurred, steps on it; slips, slides, tumbles down. The onion-seller takes off his cap: "Oh, sir! a thousand pardons!"

'The officer gets up, takes his riding-whip by the whip-end, and brings it with all his force on the uncovered head of the old man, who falls backward on his skull. Blood bespatters his skips of onions.

'"Here comes the regiment!" screams Leon.

'The band sounds at the end of the street. We run towards it.

'"Did you see the poor old man?" I ask.

'"Yes. He deserved what he got. Only think! The officer might have broken his legs, eh?"

'I do not answer. I am absorbed in watching the soldiers whom we escort, walking on the pavement, keeping step with them.

'The soldiers do not all keep step with one another; emotion, enthusiasm, the delights of going to thrash the Prussians, the natural sorrow at leaving those they love--a thousand different feelings. There is an old soldier, a decorated soldier next to me, who is very unsteady on his legs. A young officer, very young, almost beardless, puts his musket straight on the old fellow's shoulder every second. It is admirable to see the harmony which reigns between privates and officers. The Colonel, a grey-beard, salutes with his sword when the people cheer him; and a trumpeter in the front rank has stuck a great bouquet of roses to the banner of his instrument, and carries it as a priest carries the host. Other nosegays are thrust into the barrels of muskets. Bottles of wine show their corks from under the piles of knapsacks, and two or three dogs are stretched out on the haver-sacks in the baggage-waggons. The crowd cheers the dogs.

'All the peasants throng to see, shouting their applause to the regiment. Before the chemist's shop at the corner, a knot of young men wave their caps in the air; the chemist waves his white handkerchief; behind him I see the blue blouse of the old onion-seller, who lies unnoticed on the ground.

'All at once the music breaks out into the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_.

'"Allons, enfans de la patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrive!"

'Oh, how beautiful it all is! The soldiers fall into line. The populace, shouting and cheering, accompanies them to the station. Through the bars of the station-gates a private pa.s.ses me his drinking-cup, and asks me to get it filled at the wine-shop in front of the gates.

'"Wait; here is the money."

'But I do not wish for the brave fellow's money, I have a franc in my pocket. I will pay for his pint. In a moment I run back again.

'"Thanks, young sir," says the soldier. "It is perhaps the last drop I shall ever drink."

'"The last!" cries Leon, red as a turkey-c.o.c.k; so proud is he to be able to rouse the spirit of a warrior. "The last? Ah! we shall give you floods of wine when you come back from victory."

'The townspeople, who are crowding round us, cheer. The soldier shakes his head dubiously.

'"Thanks all the same," he says sadly.

'He does not seem very confident of success.

'"Doubt that we shall be victorious?" says Leon in disgust as we go homeward. "Leave the town for the frontier with so little confidence! I would give--oh, what wouldn't I give?--to be old enough to go and beat the Prussians. My dear Jean, that soldier has no soul!"

'I am not sure. The soldier perhaps does not look on the campaign as a picnic. Perhaps he sees more clearly than we do?

Perhaps? A great many things I had never thought of before crowd into my brain.'

A few days later, after Sedan, Jean sees the Germans enter Versailles.

'"Here they are!"

'It is the octroi-guards who cry out this as they come flying from the gates across the town. They brush me roughly as they pa.s.s, and their abject terror gains on me.

'I follow them. But as I run I see on the other side of the boulevard five or six inquisitive persons, who have stopped in their walk, and hide themselves behind the trees. If they stay to see, why may not I? I, too, get behind the stem of a tree, and I watch with staring eyes to see what will happen. On the road, fifty yards from the gates, a dozen hors.e.m.e.n are coming onward at a walk. They stop a moment before the octroi-officers; then they come on into the town in two lines, almost touching the pavement.

'"The Uhlans!" says someone behind me. Ah, I think with a thrill, these are the Uhlans!

'They draw near us; their pistols are c.o.c.ked. They pa.s.s me close, and I feel that I shall fall from fright; my nails clutch the bark of the tree which screens me. These riders are covered with blood. There is blood on the pennons of their lances, on the hocks of their horses, on the rents in their torn uniforms, and one of the foremost has a white linen band stained with red on his forehead. Ah! it is hideous! I want to run away--I want to run away; it is impossible. Before me there are these Germans, riding slowly, searching with piercing glances the streets which open out to the left and to the right. Behind them comes on a dense dark ma.s.s. One can hear the tramp of feet. One can distinguish the spikes of helmets, the barrels of muskets, the little drums no bigger than tambourines, and the fifes which are playing a march. These drummers and pipers are followed by linesmen in dark blue, shod with boots drawn up above their trousers, the musket held straight on the shoulder, the cloak rolled.

'And these men, grey with dust and mud, black with powder, with their coats in rags--these men, who fought no doubt this morning, and who have just made a forced march--preserve the most marvellous exact.i.tude, the most perfect regularity in the dressing of their ranks, and the rhythm of their steps keeps measure from the first line to the last of the whole column.

'They pa.s.s--they pa.s.s--they will never end. I have almost forgotten my fear. I am partly in front of my sheltering tree.

The drums and the fifes cease to sound, and music replaces it from a band marching in front of a group of staff-officers.

They play a warlike march, a battle-hymn, and all down the line of troops, from the foremost company which has reached the Chateau of Versailles, to the last which is leaving the Chesnay, shouts of triumph arise and drown the brazen voice of the cymbals. The victorious chant thunders down the wind. It is the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_--the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_ which our own troops played as they left for the frontier, the hymn which was to render every French soldier invincible, which I had sung myself when we had been so sure of supremacy, and when I had planted my little tricolour flags on the map, all along the route from Paris to Berlin in a Via Triumphalis!

'Now the artillery comes on; its black cannon on their blue gun-carriages, with their attendants on foot and in saddle, wearing helmets surmounted with bra.s.s b.a.l.l.s. There are flowers in the mouths of the cannon, and they are garlanded with ivy and green boughs. The cavalry follow on the artillery; dragoons, cuira.s.siers, hussars with white facings and a death's-head on their shakoes. Then come the carriages, the waggons, the vehicles with ladders, the baggage-carts.... All at once my heart sickens and stands still. Behind the wheels of the last waggons I seem to see some red cloth. Yes, it is our red cloth--our soldiers. Between two rows of Prussians, who have their bayonets fixed, our prisoners march without arms, dirty, ragged, miserable, and ashamed. There are at least two hundred of them, and I strain my eyes after these, my countrymen, who are destined to rot in German fortresses.'

It seems to me that in no contemporary fiction do we possess studies of spectacles, of sentiments, of street-life in a momentous hour, more accurate, more vivid, more simple in diction, more touching in suggestion, than in the above pa.s.sages.

The sustained and withering irony and censure in this sketch, which yet never goes out of the selected orbit of a boy's observation and experiences, seem to me to be perfect in their kind. The incompleteness of the child's understanding gives only a keener incisiveness to the satire embodied in his narrative. The general reader will never forgive such portraits as that of the elder Barbier, who, after shouting, 'Sursum Corda! Prenons serment de defendre le sol sacre de la Patrie!'

accepts the large Prussian orders, sets his steam-saws going in his timber yard, and furnishes the wood for the besiegers of Paris; or of that of the tobacconist Legros, who, after crying, 'Un soldat qui renie son drapeau? Qu'il creve comme un chien!' stands bareheaded with bent spine to sell cigars to Bavarian officers. This is human nature: human nature as commerce and modern teaching and the cheap Press have made it; but Barbier and Legros will never pardon the limner who thus portrays them. To the reproach that such portraits are nearly always those which he selects, Darien would, no doubt, reply that it is not his fault if they are what have been in his path to the exclusion of finer and n.o.bler figures. He is a realist in the full sense of that often-abused word, and he has the courage to represent the realities which he finds.

The _Annee Terrible_ casts its black shadows over the childhood of this writer, and as long as his life shall last the gloom it has left will stay with him. If France herself should ever forget, which Heaven forbid, he will not do so. His soul has been dipped in the Styx.

What will, no doubt, alienate from him a large number of readers will be his almost absolute want of human sympathy, or, at least, of expressions of such sympathy. It is exceedingly rare with him to give way to any sign of any emotion of pity. He sees human nature, in all its phases, with little compa.s.sion for it. He sees (and this is, too often, either through weakness or through policy, ignored by writers and thinkers) that the great majority of men are neither the martyrs nor the heroes, neither the victims nor the tyrants of their time, but a ma.s.s considerable alone by its numbers, inconsiderable by any mental or moral worth, and chiefly absorbed in different forms of selfishness and the desire of gain. It is probably an error, though one consecrated by usage and talent, to represent the generality of human beings as worthy subjects either of blessing or of curse. But the author who says so will never be forgiven by that ma.s.s of mediocrity which forms nine-tenths of the population of the world. Darien says it, and shows it, and it is this which will always make his works appear dreary and depressing to the general reader, who cannot accept and pardon this manner of looking at life for the sake of its veracity and courage.

Of course, also, in the Press generally, the accusation of exaggeration is always brought against exposures and delineations which are unwelcome and embarra.s.sing. But the writer's word may certainly be taken for it that nothing in his descriptions is exaggerated or invented, and many recent inquiries into the causes of deaths in the ranks, and of executions after summary, and almost secret, court-martial in Algeria, have confirmed the veracity of the statements made in _Biribi_. The French Government, indeed, was, as I have said, so apprehensive of the effect of these on the public mind that, although it did not suppress the book, it forbade large coloured cartoons of the events described in it to be posted up on the boulevards. In all nations the public is treated like a child by authority; and as a child who will only walk straight and submissively if its eyes be bandaged and its feet hobbled.

But in these pages we are not so much concerned with the political and military side of these works as with their literary qualities; and these are considerable and of a strong and rare originality of style. _Il vous empoigne_, and it is impossible to read either of his two works without recognising their courage and ability, if we feel pained by their withering scorn and rugged wrath. They are at times hard as the stones over which the sick and swooning soldier is dragged, tied to the tail of a mule. They are at times ferocious as the licensed torturer with the three stripes on the sleeve, who throws his helpless prisoner, gagged and bound, on the burning sands. Terrible they always are, with all the terror of truths which have been lived through by the person who chronicles them. It is not any betrayal of confidence to say that the author of _Biribi_ has experienced in his own person the tortures of which the dread record is made under this little playful-sounding word.

After such scenes as are herein described, and such sufferings as these, the blood in a man's veins cannot be rose-water. 'La haine c'est comme les balles; en la machant on s'empoisonne.' And it is impossible that the military system can beget any other than hatred, violent, unforgiving, imperishable, in the victims of that system.

'A young soldier, a conscript, a cha.s.seur a cheval, has lost two cartridges as the battalion is about to leave for Tunis.

'The Corporal informs the Captain in command, who turns and looks in silence. The boy Loupat gazes at him with the eyes of an animal watching the descent of the club which is about to brain it, and from which it knows not how to escape.

'In pa.s.sing through Tunis the Corporal says to him, "We shall leave you here. That will teach you to sell your cartridges."

'The boy understands. The council of war, the sentence as a thief, the indelible shame stamped on the brow of a youth because he has lost two of the cartridges of the State! The following morning the bugle sounds the _reveil_ at four o'clock. It is still dark. At twenty minutes to five the company, with knapsacks on their backs, is drawn up in line on the road which runs through the camp. The trumpets sound the roll-call, and all down the line each man answers "Present" as his name is spoken.

'"No one is missing?"

'"Yes, Loupat, my Captain."

'"Loupat is absent?"

'"Yes, my Captain."

'"The scoundrel! He has slunk off in the night to escape court-martial, but we will find him. Go on. No one else missing?"

'"Look there!" A soldier points to the gymnasium. All the men look where he points. Under the portico, on the great architrave on the left, a body is swinging, black, at the end of a cord.