Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France Part 5

Vauvenargues' att.i.tude to the English moralists has not been sufficiently examined. So far as is known he never visited this country, although he desired to do so. In one of his letters he speaks of intending to consult a famous oculist in London, but this project was not carried out; his poverty doubtless prevented it. Whether he knew English is not certain, but he appears to have read Temple and Locke, possibly in the original, and a reference to a remarkable English contemporary appears to have hitherto escaped observation. In the "Introduction a la connaissance de l'esprit humain," he speaks of a writer who has argued that private vices are public benefits, and he attempts to show that this is a fallacy. He returns, less definitely, to the same line of thought in the "Discours sur la gloire," where he denies that vice has any part in stimulating social action. It is strange that no one, so far as I know, has observed this proof that Vauvenargues was acquainted with the celebrated paradox of Bernard Mandeville, whose "Fable of the Bees" was in 1747 continuing to cause so scandalous a sensation, and was still so completely misunderstood.

There seems, occasionally, a trace of the idealism of Shaftesbury in the colour of Vauvenargues' phrase, but on this it would be dangerous to insist.

His own views, however, were more emphatically defined, and more directly urged, in the other contribution to literature published by Vauvenargues in his lifetime, the "Reflexions sur divers sujets." Here he abandons the attempt at forming a philosophical system, and admits that his sole object is "to form the hearts and the manners" of his readers. Perhaps the most penetrating of all his sentences is that in which he says: "If you possess any pa.s.sion which you feel to be n.o.ble and generous, be sure you foster it." This was diametrically opposed to all the teaching of the seventeenth-century moralists who had preceded him, and also had taught us that we should mistrust our pa.s.sions and disdain our enthusiasms. To see how completely Vauvenargues rejected the Christian doctrine of the utter decrepitude and hopeless inherent badness of the human mind, we have but to gather some of his spa.r.s.e thoughts together. He says, in defiance of Pascal and the Jansenists, "Mankind is the only source of our happiness, outside that there is nothing." Again, "As it is the heart, in most people, that doubts, so when once the heart is converted, all is done; it leads them along the path to virtue." He deprecated the constant checking and blaming of children which was part of the system of education then in vogue; he declared that it sapped the confidence of the young, their inherent sense of virtue; and he exclaimed, "Why does no one dream of training children to be original, bold and independent?"

Those who knew Vauvenargues recognized in the purity and sweetness and severity of his teaching the record of his own conduct. Marmontel speaks of the "tender veneration" with which all the more serious of his early comrades in the army regarded him. In his works we trace the result of a curious thing, experience superseding, taking the place of, education. "He observed the weaknesses of mankind before he had time to reflect upon their duties," says a contemporary. His mind, although a.s.saulted by such a crowd of disadvantages, remained calm, and free from prejudice; remained gently indulgent to human weakness on the one hand, rigid in allegiance to his ideal pursuit of "la gloire" on the other. The n.o.ble movements of his mind were native, not acquired, and he had not been hardened or exasperated by the pressure of a mortifying theology. He does not take so exalted or so pitiless an att.i.tude as the cla.s.sic seventeenth-century moralist. Pascal scourges the ma.s.s of humanity down a steep place into the sea; Vauvenargues takes each wanderer by the hand, and leads him along the primrose path.

A singular charm in the French character lies in its gift for composite action. Frenchmen prefer marching towards victory in a body to a scattered effort of individual energy. It was part of the constructive genius of Vauvenargues to find the aim and joy of life in a combination of sentiment and action, in a community of rivals amiably striving for the crown with fellowmen of like instincts and of like experience. He was of all moralists the least solitary; he had spent his life as a soldier among soldiers, among those who did their best, in the midst of hardships, to live a life of pleasure without reflection. He was no prig, but he had formed the habit of giving fatherly counsel which was much beyond his years. He observes that "the advice of old men is like winter sunshine that gives out light without warmth," but that the words of a wise and genial young man may radiate heat and glow. His own advice, given first to his fellow-officers, then to a circle of literary friends, then to France so long as her cla.s.sic literature finds readers, was identical. He hated conscientious subterfuges which equalize good and evil. He looked upon "gloire" and "vertu" as the two great motive forces of a sane and beneficent life. In this he was unique; Voltaire notes that Vauvenargues soared, in an age of mediocrities, _un siecle des pet.i.tesses_, by his refusal to adopt the spirit of the world. He was a puritan of the intelligence, and for the ideal of Sully or Villars he put up the ideal of Oliver Cromwell.

The moral grandeur and spiritual force of Vauvenargues' philosophy demanded in the disciple a constant exercise of energy and will. Faith inspired by effort was to be pursued through sacrifice to the utmost limits of endurance, and with no ultimate reward but _gloire_. This was, however, modified, as it is in the most strenuous direction of character in the Frenchmen of to-day, by an illuminating humanity.

Lofty as was the aim of Vauvenargues, nothing could have been more tender than his practice. We are told that the expression in the eyes of a sick animal, the moan of a wounded deer in the forest, moved him to compa.s.sion. He carried this tolerance into human affairs, for he was pre-eminently a human being; "the least of citizens has a right to the honours of his country." He set a high moral value on courtesy, and exposed, as a fallacy, the pretence that to be polite is to lack sincerity. His disposition was easy-going, although his intellect was such a high-flyer; in pagan times he would have believed in ridiculous divinities rather than set himself up as an atheist. He did not believe that excess of knowledge gives firmness to the judgment, and he remarks that the opulence of learned men often leads to more errors than the poverty of those who depend on the native virtues of instinct and experience. He has phrases which seem meant to condemn the mechanical emptiness of the modern German system of _kultur_.

Full of ardour for all that is beautiful and good, tortured by disease and pinched by poverty, but never allowing his personal misfortunes to affect his view of life, or to cloud his vision of the trinity of heavenly lights, _merite_, _vertu_, _gloire_, Vauvenargues pursued his painful life in the Street of the Peac.o.c.k. He knew his feebleness, but he refused to let it depress him; "labour to get _gloire_ is not lost," he said, "if it tends to make us worthy of it." In his curious mixture of simplicity and acuteness, in his gravity and ardour, he was morally just like the best types which this great war has produced, he is like Paul Lintier in France, like Julian Grenfell among ourselves, meeting the worst blows of fate with serenity and almost with ecstasy, with no shadow of indignation or rebellion. Some posthumous reflections have let us into the secret that, as the shadows darkened around him, he occasionally gave way, if not to despair, yet to depression, and permitted himself to wonder whether all his effort in the cause of manliness and virtue had been useless. He had not awakened the sleepers in France; he doubted that his voice would ever reach them; he asked himself whether all his effort had not been in vain. This was the natural inner weakness consequent on his physical state; he gave no outward sign of it. Marmontel, who watched his last hours with enthusiastic affection, says that, "In his company we learned how to live,--and how to die." He lay like Socrates, surrounded by his friends, talking and listening to the last; he astonished them by the eloquence and gravity of his discourse. His latest recorded utterance was, "Fortune may sport with the wisdom of those who are courageous, but it has no power to bend their courage."

Gently but firmly refusing the importunities of the Church, Vauvenargues was released from his life-in-death on May 28, 1747, in his thirty-second year.

You will not find in the pages of Vauvenargues a distinct revival of that pa.s.sion for the very soil of France, "la terre sainte, la douce France," which inspired the n.o.ble "Chanson de Roland" and has been so strongly accentuated in the recent struggle for Alsace-Lorraine. But he recalled to the memory of a generation which had grown densely material the forgotten ideal of France as the champion of chivalry. We must not forget that we possess in the writings of Vauvenargues merely the commencements of reflection, the first fruit of a life which was broken before its summer was complete. But we find in his teaching, and in that of no other moralist of the early eighteenth century, the insistence on spiritual courage as the necessary opposite to brutal force and mere materialism. He connected that high ambition, that craving for _la gloire_, with all pure and elevated things, with the art and literature, with the intelligence and beauty of the French creative mind. He recommended, in that gray hour of European dulness, a fresh ornament to life, a scarlet feather, a _panache_, as our French friends say. And the gay note that he blew from his battered clarion was still sounding last year in the heroic resistance of the forts of Verdun.

THE GALLANTRY OF FRANCE

The spirit displayed by the young French officers in this war deserves to be compared in many essential respects with that which is blazoned in the glorious "Chanson de Roland." It is interesting to remember that during the long years in which the direct influence of that greatest of medieval epics was obscured, it was chiefly known through the paraphrase of it executed in German by the monk Konrad in the twelfth century. Many years ago, Gaston Paris pointed out the curious fact that Konrad completely modified the character of the "Chanson de Roland" by omitting all expressions of warlike devotion to "la douce France," and by concentrating the emotion of the poem on its religious sentiment. But the real theme of the "Chanson de Roland," as we know now, was the pa.s.sionate attachment of the heroes to the soil of France; "ils etaient pousses par l'amour de la patrie, de l'empereur francais leur seigneur, de leur famille, et surtout de la gloire."

It is a remarkable instance of German "penetration" that in the paraphrase of the "Chanson de Roland" which Germany so long foisted upon Europe, these elements were successfully effaced. There was a sort of poetical revenge, therefore, in the att.i.tude of those who answered the challenge of Germany in the true spirit of Roland and Oliver.

We have seen that Vauvenargues--to whose memory the mind incessantly reverts in contemplation of the heroes of this war--says in one of his "Maximes"--written nearly two centuries ago--"The earliest days of spring have less charm than the budding virtue of a young man." No figure of 1914 exemplifies this quality of grace more surprisingly than Jean Allard (who called himself in literature Meeus). He was only twenty-one and a half when he was killed at Pierrepont, at the very beginning of the war, but he was already one of the promising figures of his generation. Allard was looked upon as an incipient Admirable Crichton; he was a brilliant scholar, an adroit and multiform athlete, the soul of wit and laughter, the centre of a group of adoring admirers. This sparkling poet was suddenly transformed by the declaration of war into the sternest of soldiers. His poem, called "Demain," created, or rather expressed, the patriotic pa.s.sion which was simultaneously evoked all over France; it is really a lesser "Ma.r.s.eillaise." Not less popular, but more elaborate and academic, is Allard's aviation poem, "Plus haut toujours!"--an extraordinary vision of the flight and ecstasy and tragic death of a solitary airman. We may notice that in this, and many other verses describing recent inventions of science, the young French poets contrive to be very lucid and simple in their language, and to avoid that display of technical verbiage which deforms too many English experiments in the same cla.s.s.

It is not, however, so much by his writings, which are now collected in two, or perhaps three, little volumes, that Allard-Meeus strikes the imagination of a foreign spectator, as by his remarkable att.i.tude.

From the first, this lad of twenty-one exemplified and taught the value of a chivalrous behaviour. In the face of events, in that corruption of all which could make the martial spirit seem n.o.ble, that Germany has forced upon the world, this att.i.tude of young French officers at the very opening of the war is pathetic, and might even lend itself, if we were disposed for mirth, to an ironic smile. But it should be recorded and not forgotten. It was Allard who revived the etiquette of going to battle dressed as sprucely as for a wedding. We shall do well to recollect the symbolic value which the glove holds in legends of medieval prowess. When the dying Roland, under the pine-trees, turns to the frontier of Spain, he offers, as a dying soldier, his glove to G.o.d--

"_Pur ses pecchiez deu puroftrid son guant_."

Allard-Meeus at St. Cyr made all the young officers swear that they would not go into battle except in white gloves and with their _kepi_ adorned with the _casoar_, the red and white dress-plume. "Ce serment, bien francais, est aussi elegant que temeraire," he said, and the rest followed him with acclamation. He was one of the first French officers to fall in battle, at the head of his infantry, and his mother was presented by the regiment with his _casoar_ and his gloves, worn at the moment of his death, on August 22, 1914, and stained with his blood. Allard offers a fugitive but typical specimen of the splendour of French sentiment in the first flush of its enthusiasm.

On March 26, 1917, the Societe des Gens de Lettres in Paris held a solemn a.s.sembly under the presidency of M. Pierre Decourcelle to commemorate those authors who, during the present war, have fallen in the service of France. Touching and grave in the extreme was the scene, when, before a crowded and throbbing audience, the secretary read the name of one young writer after another, pausing for the president to respond by the words "Mort au champ d'honneur!" In each case there followed a brief silence more agitating in its emotion than any eloquence could be.

The great number of young men of high intellectual promise who were killed early in this war is a matter for grave and painful reflection.

Especially in the first months of the autumn of 1914 the holocaust was terrible. There was no restraining the ardour of the young, who sought their death in a spirit of delirious chivalry, each proud to be the Iphigenia or the Jephtha's Daughter of a France set free. It has been noted since that the young generation, born about 1890, had been prepared for the crisis in a very significant way. The spiritual condition of these grave and magnificent lads resembled nothing that had been seen before, since the sorrows of 1870. They gave the impression of being dedicated. As we now read their letters, their journals, their poems, we are astonished at the high level of moral sentiment which actuated them all. There is often even a species of rapturous detachment which seems to lift them into a higher sphere than that of vain mortality. Examples might be given by the sheaf, but it suffices here to quote a letter from the youthful Leo Lantil, who was killed early in 1915, in one of the obscure battles of Champagne.

He says, in writing to his parents, shortly before his death, "All our sacrifice will be of sweet savour if it leads to a really glorious victory and brings more light to human souls." It was this Leo Lantil, dying in his twenty-fifth year, whose last words were "Priez pour la France, travaillez pour la France, haussez-la!"

A story is told by M. Henri Bordeaux which ill.u.s.trates the impression made by these young soldiers. A peasant of Savoy, while ploughing his fields in the autumn of 1914, saw his wife crossing to him with the local postman, who had a letter in his hands. He took it from them, and put on his spectacles, and read that his two sons had been killed in an engagement in the Vosges. He said quietly, "G.o.d has found them ready," and then, slowly, "My poor wife!" and he returned to his yoke of oxen. It would seem that the French accepted, without reserve and without difficulty, an inward discipline for which the world had formed little conception of their readiness. There is no question now, since all the private letters and diaries prove it, that the generation which had just left college, and had hardly yet gone out into the world, had formed, unsuspected by their elders, a conception of life which might have been called fatalistic if it had not been so rigorously regulated by a sense of duty. They were singularly calm under a constant presentiment of death. When the war came, they accepted the fiery trial not merely with resignation, but even with relief. Their athletic stoicism took what fortune offered them, instead of attempting to rebel against it. Their sentiment was that a difficulty had been settled. Life had been producing upon their consciences a sense of complication, a tangle of too many problems.

Now they might, and did, cheerfully relinquish the effort to solve them. One of the most extraordinary features of the moral history of the young French officers in this war has been the abandonment of their will to the grace of G.o.d and the orders of the chief. In the letters of the three n.o.ble brothers Belmont, who fell in rapid succession, this apprenticeship to sacrifice is remarkable, but it recurs in all the records. "G.o.d found them ready!"

When all is of so inspired an order of feeling, it is difficult, it is even invidious, to select. But the figure of Paul Lintier, whose journals have been piously collected by M. Edmond Haraucourt, stands out before us with at least as much saliency as any other. We may take him as a peculiarly lucent example of his illuminated cla.s.s.

Quartermaster Lintier died on March 15, 1916, struck by a sh.e.l.l, on the Lorraine frontier, at a place called Jeandelincourt. He had not yet completed his twenty-third year, for he was born at Mayenne on May 13, 1893. In considering the cases of many of these brilliant and sympathetic young French officers, who had already published or have left behind them works in verse and prose, there may be a disposition, in the wonderful light of their experience, to exaggerate the positive value of their productions. Not all of them, of course, have contributed, or would have contributed, durable additions to the store of the literature of France. We see them, excusably, in the rose-light of their sunset. But, for this very reason, we are inclined to give the closer attention to Paul Lintier, who not only promised well but adequately fulfilled that promise. It seems hardly too much to say that the revelation of a prose-writer of the first cla.s.s was brought to the world by the news of his death.

His early training predicted nothing of romance. He was intended for a career in commerce, but, showing no apt.i.tude for trade, he dallied with legal studies at Lyons, and "commenced author" by publishing some essays in that city. At the age of twenty he joined a regiment of artillery, and seems to have perceived, a year before the war, that the only profession he was fitted for was soldiering. Towards the close of September 1914, in circ.u.mstances which he recounts in his book, he was severely wounded; he went back to the front in July 1915, and, as we have said, fell fighting eight months later. This is the history of a young man who will doubtless live in the annals of French literature; and brief as it seems, it is really briefer still, since all we know of Paul Lintier, or are likely ever to know, is what he tells us himself in describing what he saw and practised and endured between August 1 and September 22, 1914. This wonderful book, "Ma Piece," was written by the young gunner, night after night, on his knee, during seven weeks of inconceivable intensity of emotion, and it is by this revelation of his genius that his memory will be preserved.

The style of Paul Lintier is one of the miracles of art. There is no evidence that this youth had studied much or had devoted himself to any of the training which adequate expression commonly demands. We know nothing about him until he suddenly bursts upon us, in the turmoil of mobilization, as a finished author. What strikes a critical reader of "Ma Piece," as distinguishing it from other works of its cla.s.s, is a certain intellectual firmness most remarkable in a lad of Lintier's age, suddenly confronted by such a frenzy of public action.

There is no pessimism, and no rhetoric, and no touch of humour, but an obsession for the truth. This is displayed by another and an extremely popular recent publication, "En Campagne," by M. Marcel Dupont, which exhibits exactly the same determination to exaggerate nothing and to reduce nothing, but to report exactly what the author saw with his own eyes, in that little corner of the prodigious battle-field in which his own regiment was fighting. Truth, the simple unvarnished truth, has been the object of these various writers in setting down their impressions, but the result exemplifies the difference between what is, and what is not, durable as literature. For this purpose, it is well to turn from Lintier's pages to those of the honest writers of whom Dupont is the type, and then back again to Lintier. All evoke, through intense emotion, most moving and most tragic sensations, but Lintier, gifted with some inscrutable magic, evokes them in the atmosphere of beauty.

A quality of the mind of Paul Lintier which marked him out for a place above his fellows was the prodigious exact.i.tude of his memory. This was not merely visual, but emotional as well. Not only did it retain, with the precision of a photograph, all the little fleeting details of the confused and hurried hours in which the war began, but it kept a minute record of the oscillation of feeling. Those readers who take a pleasure in the technical parts of writing may enjoy an a.n.a.lysis of certain pages in "Ma Piece," for instance, the wonderful description of an _alerte_ at 2 A.M. above the village of Tailly-sur-Meuse (pp.

131, 132). With the vigorous picturesqueness of these sentences we may compare the pensive quality and the solidity of touch which combine to form such a pa.s.sage as the following account of a watch at Azannes (August 14, 1914):--"La nuit est claire, rayee par les feux des projecteurs de Verdun qui font des barres d'or dans le ciel; merveilleuse nuit de mi-aout, infiniment constellee, egayee d'etoiles filantes qui laissent apres elles de longues phosph.o.r.escences.

"La lune s'est levee. Elle perce mal les feuillages denses des pruniers et le cantonnement immobile reste sombre. ca et la, seulement, elle fait des taches jaunes sur l'herbe et sur les croupes des chevaux qui dorment debout. Le camarade avec qui je partage cette nuit de garde est etendu dans son manteau au pied d'un grand poirier.

Devant moi, la lune illumine la plaine. Les prairies sont voilees de gaze blanche. Les deux armees, tous feux eteints, dorment ou se guettent."

Lintier has no disposition to make things out better than they were.

His account of the defeat at Virton, on August 22, is grave and calm in its sad stoicism, it is even harsh in its refusal to overlook any of the distressing features of the affair. But hope rises in his heart like clear water in a troubled well, and it is just after this melancholy set-back that the n.o.ble French spirit most vividly a.s.serts itself. In the very forefront of physical and moral misery, "quelle emouvante comprehension de la Patrie s'est revelee a nous!" An army which is instantly and completely victorious can never experience the depth of this sentiment. It is necessary to have fought, to have suffered, to have feared (if only for a moment) that all was lost, in order to comprehend with pa.s.sion what the mother-country means to a man. Lying in the fog, soaked with rain, at the edge of the copses from which the German guns had ejected them, it was at that wretched moment that the full apprehension came to Paul Lintier that France comprised for him all the charm of life, all the affections, all the joys of the eyes and the heart and the brain. "Alors, on prefere tomber, mourir la, parce qu'on sent que la France perdue, ce serait pire que la mort." This is a feeling which animates the darkest pages of his book--and many of them perforce are gloomy; through all the confusion and doubt, the disquietude, the physical dejection, the sense of a kind of blind-man's buff intolerably wearisome and fatiguing--through all this, which the young author does not seek to conceal, there runs the ceaseless bright thread of hope sustained by love.

For us English the book has a curious interest in its unlikeness to anything which an English lad of twenty would have dreamed of writing.

It strikes an English reader, in comparison with the equally gallant and hardly less picturesque records which some of our own young officers have produced, as extraordinarily "grown up." The new generation which France sent into the war of defence was more simple and more ardent at the outset than our own a.n.a.logous generation was.

It was less dilettante and more intellectual. The evidences of thought, of reasoned reflection carried out to its full extent, of an adequate realization of the problems presented by life, are manifest, though in various degree, in all these records of French officers killed in the months which preceded Christmas 1914. These Frenchmen did not go out light-heartedly, nor with a pathetic inability to fathom the purpose for which they so generously went, but they had given the matter a study which seemed beyond their years. They marched to the blood-baths of Belgium and Lorraine with solemnity, as though to a sacrament.

It must be remarked as an interesting point that this generation had recovered a sense of the spirituality of a war of national defence. In simpler words, it had recovered that honest pride which France, in certain of its manifestations since the war of 1870, seemed to have lamentably lost. Posterity will compare the serene simplicity of Peguy and Lintier with the restlessness and bitter disenchantment of the 1880 generation, which arrived at manhood just when France was most deeply conscious of her humiliation. If we seek for the sources of this recovery of self-respect, which so beautifully characterized French character at the immediate crisis of 1914, we have to find it, of course, in the essential elasticity of the trained French mind. The Frenchman likes the heroic att.i.tude, which is unwelcome to us, and he adopts it instinctively, with none of our national shyness and false modesty. But, if we seek for a starting-point of influence, we may probably find it in the writings of a soldier whose name is scarcely known in England, but whose "etudes sur le Combat," first published in 1880, have been the text-book of the young French officer, and were never being so much read as just before the outbreak of the war.

The author of these "etudes sur le Combat" was Colonel Ardent du Picq, who fell at the battle of Longeville-les-Metz, on August 15, 1870. He had predicted the calamity of that war, which he attributed to the mental decadence of the French army, and to the absence of any adequate General Staff organization. Ardent du Picq had received no encouragement from within or from without, and the reforms which he never ceased to advocate were treated as the dreams of an eccentric idealist. He died, unrecognized, without having lived to see carried out one of the reforms which he had so persistently advocated. His tongue was rough and his pen was dipped in acid; the military critic who ridiculed the "buffooneries" of his generals and charged his fellow-officers with trying to get through their day's work with as little trouble to themselves as possible, was not likely to carry much weight at the close of the Second Empire. But the scattered papers of the forgotten Colonel Ardent du Picq were preserved, and ten years after his death a portion of them was published. Every sc.r.a.p which could be found of the work of so fruitful a military thinker was presently called for, and at the moment of the outbreak of the present war the "etudes sur le Combat" had become the text-book of every punctilious young officer. It is still unknown how much of the magnificent effort of 1914 was not due to the shade of Ardent du Picq.

Although the name of that author does not occur in the pages of "Ma Piece," we are constrained to believe that Lintier had been, like so many young men of his cla.s.s, an infatuated student of the "etudes." He had comprehended the essence of military vitality and the secret of military grandeur. He had perceived the paramount importance of moral force in contending with formidable hostile organizations. Ardent du Picq, who possessed the skill of his nation in the manufacture of maxims, laid it down that "Vaincre, c'est d'etre sur de la victoire."

He a.s.sented to the statement that it was a spiritual and not a mechanical ascendancy which had gained battles in the past and must gain them in the future. Very interesting it is to note, in the delicately scrupulous record of the mind and conscience of Paul Lintier, how, side by side with this uplifted patriotic confidence, the weakness of the flesh makes itself felt. At Tailly, full of the hope of coming battle, waiting in the moonlit forest for the sound of approaching German guns, suddenly the heroism drops from him, and he murmurs the plaintive verses of the old poet Joachim du Bellay to the echo of "Et je mourrai peut-etre demain!" The delicate sureness with which he notes these changes of mood is admirable; and quickly the depression pa.s.ses: "vite notre extraordinaire insouciance l'emporte, et puis, jamais heure a-t-elle ete plus favorable a la revanche?"

In defining the particular principles which have actuated the magnificent French General Staff in the present crisis, Lord Haldane has dwelt on the fact that the French have displayed throughout "that moral effect which comes from certainty of purpose and which only concentrated thought can give." The value which the higher authority sets on the cultivation of moral enthusiasm is exemplified by the fact that the French Ministry of War has encouraged the publication of those personal records, from which we have here made a selection, on the ground that they carry throughout the army a contagion of energy and courage. We are far here from the obscure jealousy of thought which made a military representative of the British War Office the other day lay down the brilliant axiom "A hairdresser is of more value to the country at war than a librarian!" Such a man could not exist in a French community, where, at the very height of hostilities, so prominent a military authority as Colonel emile Manceau could pause to say, "Let us read, let us give much time to reading!" It is a curious reflection that the present struggle has been, for the French, the most literary of all wars, the one in which the ordered expression of clear thought in language has been most carefully and consciously cultivated.

This was very far from being the case with the war of 1870, when the absence of literature was strongly felt during and after the crisis.

The old satirist of the "Iambes," Auguste Barbier, wrote, immediately after the declaration of peace, a poem in which he rehea.r.s.ed the incidents of the war, and commented on the absence from the list of its victims of a single distinguished writer. He said--

_"La Muse n'a pas vu tomber un seul poete_,"

and it was out of any one's power to refute the sinister and prosaic verse. The contrast with 1914 is painful and striking. In the existing war the holocaust of victims, poets and historians, painters and sculptors, musicians and architects, has been heartrending, and it can never in future years be pretended that the Muses have this time spared us their most poignant sacrifices. A year ago the _Revue Critique_, one of the most serious and original of the learned journals of Paris, announced the losses it had endured. It was conducted by a staff of forty scholars; by the summer of 1916 this number was reduced by twenty-seven; thirteen had been killed, eleven severely wounded, three had disappeared.

Many writers have asked, and M. Maurice Barres prominently among them, what is the reason of the fact that intelligence has taken a front place in this war? What has been the source of the spirit of self-immolation which has driven the intellectual and imaginative section of French youth to hold out both hands to catch the full downpour of the rain of death? There is no precedent for it in French history, and we may observe for ourselves how new a thing it was, and how unexpected, by comparing with the ardent and radiant letters and poems of the youngest generation the most patriotic expressions of their elders. A single example may suffice. No man of letters has given a n.o.bler witness to the truth of his patriotism than Colonel Patrice Mahon, known in letters as Art Roe. His novels, which dealt largely with modern Russian life, in relation with the French army, were virile and elevated productions, but he was a man of fifty at the time of his heroic death at the head of his troops, in the battle of Wisembach (August 22, 1914), and his tone was not that of such young men as Camille Violand and Marcel Drouet. To read again the "Pingot et moi" of Art Roe is to return to a book of the utmost sincerity and valour, but it was published in 1893, and there is no touch of the splendour of 1914 about it.

A figure which stands midway between the generation of Art Roe and that of the adolescent comrades of a new Sophocles of whom we shall presently speak, is Captain E.J. Detanger, who seems to be transitional, and to share the qualities of both. This name has, even now, scarcely grown familiar to the eye and ear, but it proves to have been the real name of emile Nolly, whose romances of modern life in the Extreme East had been widely read just before the war. Nolly's earliest books, "Hien le Maboul" and "La Barque Annamite" (but particularly the latter), gave promise of a new Pierre Loti or a new Rudyard Kipling, but totally distinct in manner from both. Detanger was just thirty-four when the war broke out, and he was one of its early victims, dying at Blainville-sur-l'Eau on September 5. He greatly distinguished himself by his personal bravery, and the cross of the Legion of Honour was pinned to his blood-stained uniform on his last battle-field. The tribute of a fellow-officer to this devoted man of letters may be quoted here. It is an example of the sudden and complete transformation which turned artists into soldiers at the first sound of the bugle:--

"emile Nolly proved a magnificent soldier. He had a youthful, blithe, fervent and resolute soul; he had the soul of a hero completely prepared to sacrifice himself with joy for his country. After having served valiantly and brilliantly in Indo-China, and then in Morocco, it was with a radiant hope that he set out for the frontier of Lorraine. 'What does the life of any one of us matter?' he said to me just before he left. 'All that is essential is that France should live, that she should be victorious.'"

Marcel Drouet, who has just been mentioned, was much younger. He was a native of the invaded department of the Ardennes, and had not completed his twenty-sixth year when he was killed in the trenches of Consenvoye, in the Woevre, when he was taking part in the outer defence of Verdun. He seems to have been distinguished by a refinement of spirit, which is referred to, in different terms, by every one who has described him. He leaves behind him a volume of poems, "L'Ombre qui tourne," and various essays and fragments. The journal of the last days of his life has been edited by M. Maurice Barres, and is a record of singular delicacy and courage. We see him facing the dreadful circ.u.mstances of the war, made the more dreadful to him because the horrors are committed in the midst of the familiar scenes of his own home, and we find him patiently waiting for the signal to lead his men into action while he holds a volume of Chateaubriand open upon his knee. The reflections of Marcel Drouet differ in some respects from those of his most enthusiastic companions. There is a note of tenderness in them which is unusual, and which is very pathetic. At the very close of his brief and heroic life, the thoughts of Drouet reverted to the historic town in which he was born, to Sedan which still shuddered in his infancy at the recollection of the horrors of 1870. He thought of the dead who fell on that melancholy field; and then his thoughts turned to those dear faces which he had so recently left behind. The following pa.s.sage, in its simplicity, in its sweetness, deserves to live in the memorial literature of the war:--

"Je pense a vous, mes chers vivants, aux mains des barbares en ce moment sans doute, mais en le coeur de qui j'ai foi, tant je connais votre devouement aux choses sublimes.

"Mais aussi je pense a vous, mon Dieu, qui avez voulu toutes ces choses pour votre plus grand gloire et pour l'etabliss.e.m.e.nt de votre justice. Tous ces malheurs, ces tristesses, tout ce sang repandu sont imposes par vous, mon Dieu, en maniere de redemption. Mais votre soleil glorieux eclairera bientot, j'en suis absolument certain, la victoire du bon droit qui attend depuis pres d'un demi-siecle. J'y coopere de toutes mes forces, de toute mon ame. Et si vous me retirez de ce monde, o Dieu de bonte, permettez que ce soit pour me joindre a ceux qui m'out precede dans votre sejour, et dont l'affection terrestre me fut precieuse. C'est toute la priere ardente que je fais devant le soleil levant, ce jour de Toussaint que sillonnent deja les obus semeurs de mort, en cette annee 1914 qui verra retablir la paix du monde, par l'aneantiss.e.m.e.nt du peuple barbare, et la regenerescence de la nation francaise."

In most cases there rests an obscurity over the brief lives of these gallant young officer-authors, whose nature was little observed until the flash of battle illuminated them for one last brilliant moment. We feel a strong desire, which cannot be gratified, to follow them from their childhood to their adolescence, and to see for ourselves what impulses directed them into the path of heroism. It is rarely that we can do this, but one of these poets has left behind him two friends who have recaptured the faint and shrouded impressions of his early life. The piety of M. Henri Albert Besnard, who was his intimate companion, and of that practised narrator M. Henri Bordeaux, who is his biographer, enable us to form a clearer and fuller conception of Camille Violand than of any of his compeers. Born in 1891, he was typical of that latest generation of which we have spoken, in whom all seemed to be unconsciously preparing for the great and critical sacrifice. He was born at Lyons, but was brought up in the Quercy, that wild and tortured district just north of the Pyrenees, where nature seems to gather together all that she possesses of the grotesque and violent in landscape; but he was educated at Alencon, and trained at Vouziers, in the midst of the orchards of Normandy.

Thus both sides of France, the Midi and the Manche, were equally known to him, but the ceaseless peregrinations which he underwent, so far from enlarging his horizon, seem to have plunged his soul in melancholy. At the age of twenty he struck M. Bordeaux as being the typical _deracine._

The letters of Camille Violand and the memories of his friends present to us the record of a vague and uneasy boyhood. He began quite early to exercise his mind in prose and verse, but without energy or aim. He was not fixed in any plan of life. His letters--for he wrote with abundance, and something undefined seems to have induced his family to keep his letters--are steeped in sombre and objectless melancholy. He was tormented by presentiments of misfortune; he indulged a kind of romantic valetudinarianism. In the confusion of his spirit as he pa.s.sed uneasily from boyhood into manhood, the princ.i.p.al moral quality we perceive is a peevish irritation at the slow development of life.

He was just twenty-one when the death of his mother, to whom he was pa.s.sionately attached, woke him out of this paralyzed condition, and it is remarkable that, in breaking, like a moth from a chrysalis, out of his network of futile and sterile sophisms, it was immediately on the contingency of war that he fixed his thoughts. The news of his mother's death, by a strange and rapid connexion of ideas, reminded him of his future responsibility as an officer in the coming struggle.

He wrote, in 1913, "Je m'effraie en pensant a cette responsabilite qui pesera certainement un jour sur moi, car je considere la guerre comme a peu pres certaine a bref delai."