Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France Part 6

Having once formed this conviction, a complete revolution affected the character of the young Violand. His melancholy ceased; his uncertainty fell from him; it seemed as though his soul threw off her fetters.

From the close of 1913, when the chancelleries of Europe were still profoundly unconscious of the tremendous upheaval which was in store for them, this young man, hitherto so timorous and irresolute, is seen to be filled with a species of prophetic ecstasy:--

_"The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness!

The vaporous exultation not to be confined!

.........the animation of delight Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light, And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind"_

This remarkable change of character was encouraged by the military discipline which now regulated his life, and which he accepted with rapture and devotion. His mother's one aim had been to make of Camille a soldier and a Christian, and he became the very type of that combination.

To use a striking phrase of M. Henri Bordeaux, the war found Camille Violand in a state of preparedness. He saw it arrive, not with anxiety or trepidation, but with solemn joy. His father was placed in command of a brigade of dragoons, and he himself, at another part of the frontier line, was given the rank of second lieutenant and a command which filled him with the pride of responsibility. Three weeks later he was wounded in the head at the battle of Virton, but not until he had seen the Germans, after a hard fight, retire before the attack of his men. "Il a connu l'ivresse de la victoire: il a vu fuir l'ennemi"--so a friend announced it. He was taken back to the hospital at Limoges, but the victory of the Marne intoxicated him, and it was found impossible to hold him back. With a head still bandaged, he made his appearance once more in his beloved regiment, which was now fighting in the forest of the Argonne, but on the first occasion on which he led his men, Violand was wounded again, now in the shoulder.

He was sent far back, into Brittany, to Quimper, where, a second time, by a subterfuge he contrived to escape from the hospital before his wound was properly healed. He was absolutely intractable in his determination to get back promptly to the fighting line: "il etait comme ca, avec son air delicat et tranquille!" Again brought back, he was set to training men at Quimper. But he could not endure the restraint, and his nerves broke down.

It was found impossible to hold him back, and on October 8 the military authorities consented to his return to his regiment, and with the permission was combined the news that he had been nominated for the cross of the Legion of Honour. The letter in which he announces that fact to the ladies at home--"mes cheres Grand'mere et Tante"--is charming in its simplicity. "La croix gagnee sur un champ de bataille, c'est a mes yeux le plus beau reve qu'un jeune Francais put faire; je regrette seulement de ne pas l'avoir meritee davantage; mais l'avenir me permettra, j'espere, de justifier cette recompense, que je considere comme anticipee." The official notification specifies the wounds which he had received and the fact that, by the testimony of all who saw him under fire, the young lieutenant gave evidence of very great courage and of indomitable energy. That he was, by what he calls a queer coincidence, the youngest officer of his regiment and its only member of the Legion of Honour, afforded him an unaffected satisfaction.

From this time--the end of October 1914--the letters of Camile Violand testify to the rapid development of his mind and character. He loses a certain childishness which had hitherto clung to him, and he expresses himself with a more virile sobriety. Nothing could exceed the pathos of his pictures of the terrible life in the Argonne, and we are made to feel how rapidly the suffering and the responsibility of his military life were bringing out all the deepest and most serious elements in his character. There is a remarkable letter of January 7, 1915, describing an engagement in which he lost several of his best men, and in particular an experienced corporal in whose skill he much confided. The briefest fragment broken from this pathetic description, addressed to his father, will give a notion of the tone of it:--

"J'etais absorbe par les blesses dans mon poste de commandement et quand je pus me rendre dans la tranchee ou il etait, il tombait dans le coma. Ses derniers mots avaient ete: 'Adieu, ma Patrie!' Pourtant, il me reconnut a la voix, me repondit faiblement. Je l'a.s.sistai dans ses derniers moments. Ce fut bien rapide, bien simple et bien beau.

_J'etais pour lui le chef, ce qui est plus que le Pere et le Pretre reunis_. Je l'ai bien senti la; quand ce fut presque fini, je l'embra.s.sai et le quittai pour retourner aux soucis que nous donne l'ennemi."

Thus was this lad of three-and-twenty fortified and ripened by the arduous warfare in the Argonne. He was now spending what leisure the fighting gave him in a careful study of Homer. We gather that he had just finished re-reading the "Iliad" when the end came. On March 4, 1915, at Mesnil-les-Hurlus, a ball pierced his heart, splintering in its pa.s.sage the cross of the Legion of Honour of which he was so proud. In his pocket was found his last letter, still unposted, in which he told his father of a fresh distinction for valour which he had just received, and in the course of which, with a manifest presentiment of his approaching end, he wrote, "Je mourrai, si Dieu veut, en bon chretien et en bon Francais."

It is not to be denied that ordinary observers were not in any degree prepared for the heroic devotion displayed by such young officers as these at the beginning of the war. The general opinion in peace time was expressed by M. Maurice Maeterlinck when he laid it down that "courage, moral and physical endurance (if not abnegation, forgetfulness of self, renunciation of all comfort, the faculty of sacrifice, the power to face death) belong exclusively to the most primitive, the least happy, the least intelligent of peoples, those which are least capable of reasoning, of taking danger into account."

It was the common hypothesis among moralists that, as men's nerves grew more sensitive and the means of destruction more cruel and irresistible, no human being would be able to support the strain of actual fighting. It seemed inevitable that soldiers would rapidly become demoralized, when exposed to the multifarious horrors of modern mechanical battle. Nothing, therefore, could have been more surprising than the temper shown by thousands of young men, suddenly called up from sedentary and safe pursuits, and confronted by the terrors of shrapnel and liquid fire and mines and gas, and all the other horrible ingenuities of an unseen enemy for killing and mutilating. Their imaginations were unaccustomed to these terrors, it is true, but the higher faculties of the human mind a.s.serted themselves, and in the vague collective battle of the trenches these young French officers; despite the refinement and the security in which they had always been acustomed to exist, instantly reverted to the chivalrous att.i.tude which their remote ancestors had adopted in a warfare that was romantic and personal in its individualism.

No doubt a not inconsiderable part of the serenity, which is so remarkably evident in the letters and journals of these young men, was due to the fact that they had arrived, for the first time, at a comprehension of the unity of life. There is no tedious alternative of choice in the active military career. All is regulated, all is arranged in accordance with a hierarchical discipline, and war becomes what dogmatic religion is to a weak soul that has been tossed about by the waves of doubt. It must be also borne in mind that the incessant dread of invasion, especially in the neighbourhood of the eastern frontier, had kept the spirits of those who knew that responsibility would fall upon them, in a state of unceasing agitation. It is a paralyzing thing to exist under a perpetual menace which nothing can precipitate and yet nothing can avert. Captain Belmont, in his admirable letters, speaks much of the "romanticism" which attracted many of his companions, and of the natural satisfaction which the declaration of war gave to their restless faculties. The two sentiments were probably one and the same, and to a poetical temperament that might well seem "romantic" which filled a less vivid mind with restlessness and languor.

It is noticeable, too, that when once the sickening suspense was removed, and the path of pain and glory lay clear before these youthful spirits, they grew very rapidly in intellectual stature. They had found their equilibrium, and no more time and force were wasted in useless oscillations. Each of them had, at last, the occasion, and therefore the power, to fill out the lines of his proper individuality. As M. Henri Bordeaux excellently says, "L'esprit inquiet ne se contente de rien, le coeur inapaise se croit incompris."

But now these men knew their vocation, and a precocious experience of life developed in them a temper of meditation. It is extraordinary what an intelligent philosophy, what a delicate study of nature, were revealed at once in the writings of these heroic boys of twenty.

Lieutenant Belmont, who fought in Alsace, had spent his infancy and adolescence in the neighbourhood of Gren.o.ble, and his memory was full of the rich Dauphine valley, with its great river and its eastern horizon of the Alps. In the misery of the September nights of 1914, in the harshness of misty mornings among the Alsatian pines, his thoughts return to the luminous twilights of his old home under the great oaks of the Isere, and he expresses his nostalgia in terms of the most exquisite and the most unstudied grace. Here is a fragment of one of his letters home (October 1914):--

"Les journees sont exquises, tristes et pales, egalement differentes des crudites de nos idees et des tenebres de l'hiver. L'imagination a vite fait de s'envoler, a travers cette lumiere adoucie, vers tous les horizons familiers de la pet.i.te patrie, vers la vallee de Gren.o.ble, paresseus.e.m.e.nt allongee dans ce bain de leger soleil, au pied des Alpes deja engourdies, vers les terres rousses de Lonnes longees par les futaies jaunissantes ou s'abritent les gibiers, tranquilles cette annee."

No doubt, the reason why this war has been, for France, so peculiarly a literary war, is that the mechanical life in the trenches, alternately so violent and so sedentary, has greatly enforced the habit of sustained contemplation based on a vivid and tragic experience. This has encouraged, and in many instances positively created, a craving for literary expression, which has found abundant opportunity for its exercise in letters, journals, and poems; and what it has particularly developed is a form of literary art in which Frenchmen above all other races have always excelled, that a.n.a.lysis of feeling which has been defined as "le travail de ciselure morale."

This moral carved-work, or chasing, as of a precious metal, revealing the rarity and value of spiritual surfaces, is characteristic of the journals of Paul Lintier, of the beauty of which we have already spoken. His art expends itself in the effect of outward things on the soul. He speaks of mysterious sights, half-witnessed in the gloaming, of sinister noises which have to be left unexplained. He does not shrink from a record of unlovely things, of those evil thoughts which attend upon the rancour of defeat, of the suspicion of treason which comes to dejected armies like a breath of poison-gas. That portion of his "Souvenirs" which deals with the days of the retreat on Paris is written in a spasm of savage anger; a whole new temper is instantly revealed when once the tide turns at Nanteuil. Nature herself thus endorses his new mood, as he writes "There are still clouds heaped up to the west, but the blue, that cheers us, is chasing them all away."

Among the n.o.ble young poets whose pathetic and admirable fragments the piety of surviving friends has preserved, it is difficult to select one name rather than another. But in the rank of these Rupert Brookes and Julian Grenfells and Charles Listers of France, we may perhaps pause before the ardent figure of Jacques de Choudens. He was a Breton, and was trained for the law on the other side of France, at Lille. He found that the call of the sea was irresistible, and after two years at a desk in that dreary and dusty city, he suddenly flung up his cap and would have no more of such drudgery. To the despair of his family, he started on the high seas, and explored the wonderland of Haiti. After various adventures, he was about to return to France, when the sea again took him by the throat, and he vanished, like Robert Louis Stevenson, in the Pacific. Having sailed twice round the world, "beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars," a tired Ulysses under thirty, Jacques de Choudens had just come back to France when the war seized him with a fresh and deep enchantment. He entered into it with a profound ardour, and proved himself to possess exceptional military qualities. He was severely wounded on the second day of the battle of Charleroi, but slowly recovered, only to be killed in an engagement on June 13, 1915. His poems, written since war broke out, have been carefully collected and published by his friend, M. Charles Torquet. They are few, and they suffer from a certain hardness of touch; Jacques de Choudens had, as yet, a deeper acquaintance with life than with literature; but they breathe a spirit of high and romantic heroism. Let the sonnet called "Autre Priere" be offered as an example:--

"_Terres, fleuves, forets, o puissances occultes, C'est votre ame qui bat au bleu de nos poignets; Notre orgueil s'est enfin cabre sous les insultes Dont, depuis quarante ans, o France, tu saignais.

Dans le livre ou s'apprend le plus hautain des cultes, Marque la page avec nos sabres pour signets; Ceins la couronne d'or qu'en l'An deux tu ceignais, Car c'est dans notre chair a nous que tu la sculptes.

France! France! Benis chaque arme et chaque front; C'est d'ardeur, non de peur, que tremble l'eperon.

Nous sommes tes martyrs volontaires, superbes,

Sous l'aureole d'or des galons du kepi....

Nous allons preparer aux faucilles des gerbes, Puisqu'ou tombe un soldat pousse un nouvel epi._"

The poet, shortly before he fell, wrote to a friend "Nous travaillerons mieux apres la victoire, ce que nous ferons ayant ete muri par la fatigue et les angoisses. La vie est bonne et belle et la guerre est une chose bien amusante." This is the type of Frenchman who fights for the love of fighting, who puts above all other happiness the prize of military honour and glory won in a good cause. We meet with it in the lyrical effusion of an adventurous poet like Jacques de Choudens and in the straightforward evidence of a practised soldier like Captain Ha.s.sler, whose "Ma Campagne" is a record extraordinary alike for its courage, for its vivacity, and for its modesty.

The peculiar spirit of ardent gallantry to which we have dedicated these few pages is ill.u.s.trated, as will be observed, by examples taken without exception from the first months of the war. It would be rash to say, without a careful sifting of evidence, how much of this sentiment survived the days which preceded the battle of the Marne.

France has, in the succession of her attacks up to the present hour, continued and confirmed the magnificent tradition of her courage. But it is impossible to overlook the elements which have taken the romantic colour out of the struggle. No chivalry could survive close experience of the vile and b.e.s.t.i.a.l cruelty of German methods. The sad and squalid aspects of a war of resistance, fought in the very bleeding flesh of the beloved mother-country, were bound to be fatal to "cette bonne humeur bienfaisante" which so marvellously characterized the young French officers of August 1914. Moreover, the mere physical element of fatigue has been enough to quench that first radiant flame. We find it deadening, at last, even the high spirit of Paul Lintier, and we listen to his confession: "To sleep! to sleep! O to live without a thought, in absolute silence. To live, after having so often nearly died. I could sleep for days, and days, and days!"

These are considerations which belong to a heavier and a wearier time.

As a matter of history--so that in our hurrying times a gesture of so much beauty may not, because it was so ephemeral, be forgotten--I have endeavoured to catch a reflection of the glow which blazed in the hearts of young intellectual officers at the very beginning of the war. If in the inevitable wear and tear of the interminable struggle, this beauty fades into the light of common day, so much the more is there need that we should fix it in memory, since in a world which savagery and treason have made so hideous, we cannot afford to let this jewel of pure moral beauty be trampled into oblivion.

_breve et irreparabile tempus Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere facti Hoc virtutis opus._

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The writings of La Rochefoucauld were subjected to accurate and detailed examination in the edition begun by Gilbert in 1868, and brought to a pause at his untimely death in 1870. It was completed in 1883 by J. Gourdault. After the lapse of half a century, the short biography by Gilbert, with which this edition began, naturally requires some revision, and is open to several additions. An earlier volume (1863), by E. de Barthelemy, is of a more technical character, but may be referred to with advantage by those curious regarding detail. The MSS of Rochefoucauld still in existence--one of these, known as the Liancourt MS., is in the Duke's handwriting--are numerous, and may still, no doubt, reward investigation. The best recent summary is that by J. Bourdeau (1895), published in M.

Jusserand's charming series. There is not, so far as I am aware, any English biography of the author of the "Maximes."

The complete works of La Bruyere were elaborately edited in three volumes (1865-1878) by G. Servois. Much curious information is to be found in Allaire's "La Bruyere dans la Maison de Conde" (1887), and an excellent summary in the Life by M Paul Morillot, 1904. But the latest and fullest account of La Bruyere's career is to be found in M. Emile Magne's Preface to the selected works (1914). Editions of "Les Caracteres" are countless.

The writings of Vauvenargues were collected by the Marquis de Portia in 1797, by Suard in 1806, by Briere in 1821, by Gilbert in 1857, and again in 1874; each of these editions added considerably to knowledge.

The only recent Life is that by M Maurice Paleologue (1890).

The princ.i.p.al volumes referred to in "The Gallantry of France" are the following:--

"Ma Piece" Souvenir d'un canonnier de 1914. Par Paul Lintier. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1916.

"Anthologie des ecrivains francais morts pour la Patrie." Par Carlos Larronde. Preface de Maurice Barres. I-IV. Paris: Larousse. 1916-1917

"La Jeunesse Nouvelle." Par Henri Bordeaux. Paris: Librairie Plon 1917.

"En Campagne" (1914-1915). Impression d'un officier de Legere. Par Marcel Dupont. Paris: Librairie Plon. 1916.

"Ma Campagne de jour de jour." Par le Capitaine Ha.s.sler. Paris: Librairie Plon. 1917.