The Forerunners Part 8

"Such as these are your enemies quite as much as any of the German soldiers who now share your wretchedness. The German soldiers are no more than poor dupes odiously betrayed and brutalised, domesticated beasts.... But the others are your enemies wherever they were born, whatever the fas.h.i.+on in which they utter their names, and whatever the language in which they lie. Look at them in the heavens above and on the earth beneath! Look at them everywhere! Look well, till you know them, that you may never forget their faces!"

Such is the wail of these armies. But the book closes with a note of hope, with the unspoken oath of international brotherhood, what time a rift forms in the black skies and a calm ray of light falls upon the flooded plain.

One ray of sunlight does not make the sky clear, nor is the voice of one soldier the voice of an army. The armies of to-day are nations; and in such armies, as in every nation, there must doubtless conflict and mingle many different currents. Barbusse's story is that of a single squad, almost entirely composed of workers and peasants. But the fact that among these humble folk, among those who, like the third estate in '89, are nothing and shall be all,--that in this proletariat of the armies there is obscurely forming an awareness of universal humanity,--that so bold a voice can be raised from France,--that those who are actually fighting can make a heroic effort to ignore environing wretchedness and imminent death, to dream of the fraternal union of the warring peoples,--I find in this a greatness which surpa.s.ses that of all the victories, I find something whose poignant splendour will survive the splendour of battle. I find something which will, I hope, put an end to war.

_February, 1917._

"Journal de Geneve," March 19, 1917.

XVI

AVE, CaeSAR, MORITURI TE SALUTANT

_Dedicated to the Heroic Onlookers in Safe Places._

In one of the scenes of his terrible and admirable book, _Under Fire_, a record of experiences in the trenches of Picardy, dedicated "To the memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119,"

Henri Barbusse depicts two privates going on leave to the neighbouring town. They quit the h.e.l.l of mud and blood; for months they have been suffering unnamable tortures of body and mind; they now find themselves among comfortable bourgeois who, being at a safe distance from the front, are, of course, bursting with warlike enthusiasm. These carpet-heroes welcome the two men as if they had just returned from a wedding feast. No questions are asked concerning what goes on at the front. The soldiers are told all about it. "It must be splendid, an attack! These ma.s.ses of men marching forward as to a revel; there's no holding them; they die laughing!" All that our poilus can do is to hold their tongues. One of them says resignedly to his companion: "_They_ know more than you do about war and all that goes on at the front. When you get back, if you ever do, with your little bit of truth you will be quite out of it amid that crowd of chatterers."

I do not believe that when the war is over, when all the soldiers have returned home, they will so readily submit to being put in their places by these braggarts of the rear. Already the real fighters are beginning to speak in a singularly bitter and vengeful tone. Barbusse's book bears powerful witness to the fact.

We have other testimonies from the front, less known but no less moving.

All of those to which I shall refer have been published. It is my rule, as long as the war lasts, to make no use of personal confidences, oral or written. Things I have been told by friends, known or unknown, are a sacred trust. I shall not use them without special permission, nor until the conditions make it safe. The testimonies I reproduce here have been published in Paris, under a censors.h.i.+p which is extremely strict in the case of the few newspapers that have remained independent. This proves that they describe things that are widely known, things which it is useless or impossible to conceal.

I leave the authors to speak for themselves. Comment is superfluous. The tones are sufficiently clear.

Paul Husson, _L'Holocauste_ (a collection ent.i.tled _Vers et Prose_, published by F. Lacroix, 19 rue de Tournon, Paris, January 10, 1917).--This is the note book of a soldier from the Ile de France. The author "went to the front without enthusiasm, detesting war and devoid of martial ardour. As a soldier he did what all the others did."

p. 19. "In the name of what superior moral principle are these struggles imposed on us? Is it for the triumph of a race? What remains of the glory of Alexander's soldiers or of Caesar's? To fight, one must have faith. A man must have faith that he is fighting in G.o.d's cause, in the cause of some great justice; or else he must love war for its own sake.

But we have no faith; we do not love war and we know nothing about it.

Yet men fight and die believing neither in the cause of G.o.d nor in the great justice; men who do not love war, and who die none the less with their faces to the enemy.... Many, unawakened, go to their deaths without thinking; but others die with anguish in their hearts, anguish at the futile sacrifice and at their realisation of the madness of men."

p. 20. In the trenches. "Everyone was cursing the war, everyone hated it. Some were saying: 'Frenchmen or Germans, they are men like ourselves, they suffer as we do in body and in mind. Do not they, too, dream of the home-coming?' Pa.s.sing through a village and seeing a man unfit for service because he had lost two fingers, the soldiers had said to him: 'You lucky devil; you needn't go to the war!'"

p. 21. "I am not one of those who believe in the coming of Beauty, Goodness, and Justice.... Nor am I one of those who regild the idols of the past, symbols of obscure forces which it behoves us to wors.h.i.+p in silence. I am neither submissive nor a believer.--I love Pity, for we are unfortunates, and it does us good to be solaced, even if we be executioners and butchers. If we do not need consolation for the ills we are suffering, we need consolation for the ills we have done or shall do. We need solace because we have to make others suffer, to kill and be killed."

p. 22. "Lying p.r.o.ne, while the sh.e.l.ls whistle overhead, I think. Die!

Why should we die on this battlefield?... Die for civilisation, for the freedom of the nations? Words, words, words. We are dying because men are wild beasts killing one another. We are dying for bales of merchandise; we are dying for squabbles about money.--Art, civilisation, and culture are equally beautiful, be they Romance, Teutonic, or Slav.

We should love them all!"

p. 59. "With Baudelaire, we detest the weapons of warriors.... The great epoch was the one in which we were living before the war. The flapping of the banners, the long files of soldiers, the roaring of the guns, and the blare of the bugles--these things cannot inspire us with admiration for collective murder and for the monstrous enslavement of the peoples.... Young men lying to-day in your graves, they strew flowers on your tombs and proclaim you immortal. What to you are empty words? They will pa.s.s even more quickly than you have pa.s.sed! It is true that, in any case, within a few years you would have ceased to be. But these few years of life would have been your universe and your strength."

Andre Delemer, _Waiting_ (leading article in the fourth issue, dated March, 1917, of the review "Vivre," edited by Andre Delemer and Marcel Millet, 68 boulevard Rochechouart, Paris).

"If the patriarch of Yasnaya Polyana had been granted a few additional years, superadded to a life already long and full of grief, he would have shuddered before the tragedy of the younger generations. Tolstoi was a man of infinite compa.s.sion, and his heart would have been torn with suffering as he contemplated our fate, the fate of those who were suddenly thrust into this colossal war, those who had proclaimed their love for life, those whose faith in the future had seemed an infallible talisman, those who had fervently uttered this great cry of vital affirmation:

"'To live out our youth'--how poignant is the irony of these words; what vistas do they suddenly evoke! All the happiness we have failed to secure, the joys of which we have been deprived, because one evening the order came to us to shoulder our rifles! In twenty years' time people will write about what we have suffered, a suffering which may be compared with the Pa.s.sion; but we die daily. One galling privilege is ours, that we have lived through a convulsion, that we have been the ransom of past errors and a pledge for the tranquillity of the future.

This mission is at once splendid and cruel; simultaneously it exalts and revolts; for the spasm through which we are pa.s.sing wounds us and immolates us!... To-day the poor quivering refuse raked from the furnace knows all the bitterness of the laurels. Such pride as we retain makes it impossible for us to accept an illusory and transient glory. We know the falsity of att.i.tudinising, and we have probed the emptiness of certain dreams. The fire has licked up the scenery, has reduced the tinsel to ashes. We are now face to face with ourselves, perhaps more fully awakened, certainly more sincere and more disillusioned, for we have secret wounds to heal and great sufferings to lull in the shade!

The pa.s.sing of the days is like wormwood in the mouth.... How painful will be the transition, and how numerous will be the waifs! Already a fresh anguish oppresses our minds; it is this that will afflict when the day comes for the return of those who are still fighting. Terrible will be the anguish as we gaze upon the ruins and the dead enc.u.mbering the battlefields! How it will cramp the young wills and annihilate the fine courage of their souls! Troubled and confused epoch, wherein men will be doggedly seeking safer roads and less cruel idols!...

"Young man of my generation, it is you of whom I think as I write these lines, you whom I do not know, though I know that you are still fighting or that you have returned broken from the trenches. I have met you in the street, wearing an almost shamefaced air, doing your best to conceal some infirmity; but in your eyes I have read the intensity of your inward agony. I know the terrible hours through which you have lived, and I know that those who have endured like trials end by having like souls.... I know your doubts; I share your uneasiness. I know how you are obsessed with the question, 'What next?' You, too, are asking what can be seen from the heights, and what is going to happen. I understand your 'What next?'--'To live!' You sing this straight to the hearts of all of us. 'To live!' You embody the cry of our cruel epoch. I have heard this cry, simple yet tremendous, from the lips of the wounded who were aware of the oncoming footsteps of victorious death. I have heard it in the trenches, murmured low like a prayer.--Young man, this is a grievous hour. You are a survivor from the ghastly war; your vitality must affirm itself; you must live. Stripped of all falsehoods, freed from every mirage, you find yourself alone in your nakedness; before you stretches the great white road. Onward, the distance beckons. Leave behind you the old world, and the idols of yesterday. March forward without turning to listen to the outworn voices of the past!"

In the name of these young men and their brothers who have been sacrificed in all the lands of the world engaged in mutual slaughter, I throw these cries of pain in the faces of the sacrificers. May the blood sting their faces!

"Revue mensuelle," Geneva, May, 1917.

XVII

AVE, CaeSAR ...

THOSE WHO WISH TO LIVE SALUTE THEE

In an earlier article I referred to the writings of certain French soldiers. After _Under Fire_, by Henri Barbusse, _L'Holocauste_ by Paul Husson and the poignant meditations of Andre Delemer gave expression to their touching and profoundly human cry. In place of the scandalous idealisations of the war, manufactured far from the front--crude Epinal images, grotesque and false--they give us the stern face of truth, they show us the martyrdom of young men slaughtering one another to gratify the frenzy of criminal elders.

I wish to-day to make known another of these voices, more acerb, more virile, more vengeful, than the stoical bitterness of Husson and the despairing tenderness of Delemer. It is that of our friend Maurice Wullens, editor of "Les Humbles, the literary review of the primary school teachers."

He was severely wounded, and has just been given the war cross with the following honourable mention:

"Wullens (Maurice), soldier of the second cla.s.s in the eighth company of the seventy-third infantry regiment, a good soldier to whom fear was unknown, dangerously wounded during the defence, against a superior force, of a post which had been entrusted to him."

In "demain," for August, 1917, we find the wonderful story of the fight in which this man was wounded and was then given brotherly help by the German soldiers. As he lay gasping, in expectation of the death-blow, a lad leaned over him smiling, holding out a hand, and saying in German, "Comrade, how do you feel?" And when the wounded man doubted his enemy's sincerity, the latter went on: "Oh, it's all right, comrade! We'll be good comrades! Yes, yes, good comrades." The tale is dedicated:

"To my brother, the anonymous Wurtemberg soldier who, in Grurie Wood, on December 30, 1914, withheld his hand when about to slay me, generously saved my life;

"To the (enemy) friend who, in Darmstadt hospital, cared for me like a father;

"And to the comrades E., K., and B., who spoke to me as man to man."

This soldier without fear and without reproach, returning to France, discovered there the braggart army of the scribblers at the rear. Their venom and their stupidity infuriated him. But instead of taking refuge, like many of his comrades, in disdainful silence, he did what he had always done, and turned bravely to the attack upon "a superior force."

In May, 1916, he became editor of a small magazine, ent.i.tled "Les Humbles," but which somewhat belies its name by the ruggedness of its accents and by its refusal to allow its voice to be stifled. He boldly declares:

"Emerged from the whirlwind of the war, but still struggling in its eddies, we do not propose to resign ourselves to the environing mediocrity, to content ourselves with the servile utterance of official plat.i.tudes.... We are weary of the daily and systematic stuffing of people's heads with official pabulum.... We have not abdicated any of our rights, not even our hopes."[37]