The Soul of the War Part 28

There was no doubt about it. The flower girls who had been early to les Halles came up the rue Royale one morning with baskets full of violets, so that all the street was perfumed as though great ladies were pa.s.sing and wafting scent in their wake. Even the old cocher who drove me down the rue Cambon had put on a new white hat. He had heard the glad tidings, this old wrinkled man, and he clacked his whip to let others know, and gave the glad-eye--a watery, wicked old eye--to half a dozen midinettes who came dancing along the rue St.

Honore. They knew without his white hat, and the clack of his whip.

The ichor of the air had got into their blood. They laughed without the reason for a jest, and ran, in a skipping way, because there was the spring-song in their feet.

Along the Champs Elysees there was the pathway of the sun.

Through the Arc de Triomphe there was a glamorous curtain of cloth of gold, and arrows of light struck and broke upon the golden figures of Alexander's Bridge. Looking back I saw the dome of the Invalides suspended in s.p.a.ce, like a cloud in the sky. It was painted over to baffle the way of hostile aircraft, but the paint was wearing off, and the gold showed through again, glinting and flas.h.i.+ng in the air-waves.

The Seine was like molten liquid and the bridges which span it a dozen times or more between Notre Dame and the Pont de l'Aima were as white as snow, and unsubstantial as though they bridged the gulfs of dreams. Even the great blocks of stone and the balks of timber which lie on the mud banks below the Quai d'Orsay--it is where the bodies of suicides float up and bring new tenants to the Morgue-- were touched with the beauty of this lady day, and invited an artist's brush.

The Eiffel Tower hung a cobweb in the sky. Its wires had been thrilling to the secrets of war, and this signal station was barricaded so that no citizens might go near, or pa.s.s the sentries pacing there with loaded rifles. But now it was receiving other messages, not of war. The wireless operator with the receiver at his ears must have heard those whispers coming from the earth: "I am spring... The earth is waking...

I am coming with the beauty of life... I am gladness and youth..."

Perhaps even the sentry pacing up and down the wooden barricade heard the approach of some unseen presence when he stood still that morning and peered through the morning sunlight. "Halt! who goes there?" "A friend." "Pa.s.s, friend, and give the countersign."

The countersign was "Spring," and where the spirit of it stepped, golden crocuses had thrust up through the warming earth, not far from where, a night or two before, fire-b.a.l.l.s dropped from a hostile air- craft.

Oh, strange and tragic spring, of this year 1915! Was it possible that, while Nature was preparing her beauty for the earth, and was busy in the ways of life, men should be heaping her fields with death, and drenching this fair earth with blood?

One could not forget. Even in Paris away from the sound of the guns which had roared in my ears a week before, and away from the moan of the wounded which had made my ears ache worse than the noise of battle, I could not forget the tragedy of all this death which was being piled up under the blue sky, and on fields all astir with the life of the year.

In the Tuileries gardens the buds were green. But there were black figures below them. The women who sat there all the afternoon, sewing, and knitting, or with idle hands in their laps, were clothed in widows' black. I glanced into the face of one of these figures as I pa.s.sed. She was quite a girl to whom the spring-song should have called with a loud, clear note of joy. But her head drooped and her eyes were steadfast as they stared at the pathway, and the suns.h.i.+ne brought no colour into her white cheeks... She s.h.i.+vered a little, and pulled her crepe veil closer about her face.

Down the broad pathway between the white statues came a procession of cripples. They wore the uniforms of the French army, and were mostly young men in the prime of life, to whom also the spring should have brought a sense of vital joy, of intense and energetic life. But they dragged between their crutches while their lopped limbs hung free. A little further off in a patch of suns.h.i.+ne beyond the wall of the Jeu de Paumes, sat half a dozen soldiers of France with loose sleeves pinned to their coats, or with only one leg to rest upon the ground. One of them was blind and sat there with his face to the sun, staring towards the fountain of the nymphs with sightless eyes. Those six comrades of war were quite silent, and did not "fight their battles o'er again." Perhaps they were sad because they heard the spring-song, and knew that they could never step out again to the dance-tune of youth.

And yet, strangely, there was more gladness than sadness in Paris now that spring had come, in spite of the women in black, and the cripples in the gardens. Once again it brought the promise of life.

"Now that the spring is here," said the old cab-driver in the white hat, "France will soon be free and the war will soon be over."

This hopefulness that the fine weather would end the war quickly was a splendid superst.i.tion which buoyed up many hearts in France.

Through the long, wet months of winter the women and the old people had agonized over the misery of their soldiers in the trenches.

Now that the earth was drying again, and the rain clouds were vanis.h.i.+ng behind a blue sky, there was new hope, and a wonderful optimism in the spirit of the people. "The spring will bring victory to France" was an article of faith which comforted the soul of the little midinette who sang on her way to the Rue Lafayette, and the French soldier who found a wild flower growing in his trench.

16

I have written many words about the spirit of Paris in war. Yet all these little glimpses I have given reveal only the trivial characteristics of the city. Through all these episodes and outward facts, rising above them to a great height of spirituality, the soul of Paris was a white fire burning with a steady flame. I cannot describe the effect of it upon one's senses and imagination. I was only conscious of it, so that again and again, in the midst of the crowded boulevards, or in the dim aisles of Notre Dame, or wandering along the left bank of the Seine, I used to say to myself, silently or aloud: "These people are wonderful!

They hold the spirit of an unconquerable race... Nothing can smash this city of intellect, so gay, and yet so patient in suffering, so emotional and yet so stoical in pride and courage!"

There was weakness, and vanity, in Paris. The war had not cleansed it of all its vice or of all its corruption, but this burning wind of love for La Patrie touched the heart of every man and woman, and inflamed them so that self-interest was almost consumed, and sacrifice for the sake of France became a natural instinct. The ugliest old hag in the markets shared this love with the most beautiful woman of the salons; the demi-mondaine with her rouged lips, knelt in spirit, like Mary Magdalene before the cross, and was glad to suffer for the sake of a pure and uncarnal love, symbolized to her by the folds of the Tricolour or by the magic of that word, "La France!" which thrilled her soul, smirched by the traffic of the streets. The most money-loving bourgeois, who had counted every sou and cheated every other one, was lifted out of his meanness and materialism and did astounding things, without a murmur, abandoning his business to go back to the colours as a soldier of France, and regarding the ruin of a life's ambitions without a heartache so that France might be free.

There were embusques in Paris-perhaps hundreds, or even thousands of young men who searched for soft jobs which would never take them to the firing-line, or who pleaded ill-health with the successful influence of a family or political "pull." Let that be put down honestly, because nothing matters save the truth. But the manhood of Paris as a whole, after the first shudder of dismay, the first agonies of this wrench from the safe, familiar ways of life, rose superbly to the call of la Patrie en danger! The middle-aged fathers of families and the younger sons marched away singing and hiding their sadness under a mask of careless mirth. The boys of eighteen followed them in the month of April, after nine months of war, and not a voice in Paris was raised to protest against this last and dreadful sacrifice.

Paris cursed the stupidity of the war, cried "How long, O Lord, how long?" as it dragged on in its misery, with acc.u.mulating sums of death, was faint at the thought of another winter campaign, and groaned in spirit when its streets were filled with wounded men and black-garbed women. But though Paris suffered with the finer agonies of the sensitive intelligence, it did not lose faith or courage, and found the heart to laugh sometimes, in spite of all its tears.

City of beauty, built out of the dreams of great artists and great poets, I have watched you through this time of war, walking through your silent streets in the ordeal of most dreadful days, mingling with your crowds when a mult.i.tude of cripples dragged their lopped limbs thiough the sunlight, studying your moods of depression, and hopefulness, and pa.s.sionate fervour, wandering in your churches, your theatres and your hospitals, and lingering on mild nights under the star-strewn sky which made a vague glamour above your darkness; and always my heart has paid a homage to the spirit which after a thousand years of history and a thousand million crimes, still holds the fresh virtue of ardent youth, the courage of a gallant race, and a deathless faith in the fine, sweet, gentle things of art and life.

The Germans, however great their army, could never have captured the soul of Paris.

Chapter IX The Soldiers Of France

1

When in the first days of the war I saw the soldiers of France on their way to the front, I had even then a conviction that the fighting qualities of the nation had not degenerated in forty-four years of peace, after the downfall in which the courage of the men had been betrayed by the corruption of a Government. Afterwards, during many months as a wanderer in this war, I came to know the French soldier with the intimacy of long conversations to the sound of guns, in the first line of trenches facing the enemy, in hospitals, where he spoke quietly while comrades snored themselves to death, in villages smashed to pieces by sh.e.l.l-fire, in troop trains overcrowded with wounded, in woods and fields pockmarked by the holes of marmites, and in the restaurants of Paris and provincial towns where, with an empty sleeve or one trouser-leg dangling beneath the tablecloth, he told me his experiences of war with a candour in which there was no concealment of truth; and out of all these friends.h.i.+ps and revelations of soul the character of the soldiers of France stands before my mind in heroic colours.

Individually, of course, the qualities of these men differ as one man from another in any nation or cla.s.s. I have seen the neurasthenic, quivering with agony in his distress of imaginary terrors, and the man with steady nerves, who can turn a deaf ear to the close roar of guns and eat a hunk of bread-and-cheese with an unspoilt appet.i.te within a yard or two of death; I have seen the temperament of the aristocrat and the sn.o.b in the same carriage with the sons of the soil and the factory whose coa.r.s.e speech and easy-going manners jarred upon his daintiness. War does not entirely annihilate all distinctions of caste even in France, where Equality is a good word, and it does not blend all intellectual and moral qualities into one type of character, in spite of the discipline of compulsory service and the chemical processes which mix flesh and blood together in the crucible of a battlefield. So it is impossible to write of the French soldier as a single figure, or to make large generalizations about the armies of France. The coward skulks by the side of the war. The priestly spirit in the ranks is outraged by the obscenities of the debauchee.

Yet out of those great ma.s.ses of men who have fought for France there does emerge a certain definite character overwhelming the details of their individual differences, and I have seen certain qualities of temperament which belong to the majority of them, as essential elements of the national spirit of France. The quality of their patriotism, for example, s.h.i.+nes very clear above all these millions of men who have abandoned all their small self-interests for the supreme purpose of defending France. England has her patriotism--we give a great proof of it in blood--but it is not like that of France, not so religious in its sentiment, not so pa.s.sionate in its convictions, not so feminine a thing. To most of these French soldiers, indeed to all that I have talked with, the love of France is like the faith of a devout Catholic in his church. It is not to be argued about. It holds the very truth of life. It enshrines all the beauty of French ideals, all the rich colour of imagination, all the poetry and music that has thrilled through France since the beginning of our civilization, all her agonies and tears. To the commonest soldier of France, "La Patrie" is his great mother, with the tenderness of motherhood, the authority of motherhood, the sanct.i.ty of motherhood, as to a Catholic the Blessed Virgin is the mother of his soul. Perhaps as one of her children he has been hardly dealt with, has starved and struggled and received many whippings, but he does not lose his mother-love. The thought of outrageous hands plucking at her garments, of hostile feet trampling upon her, of foul attempts upon her liberty and honour, stirs him to just that madness he would feel if his individual mother, out of whose womb he came, were threatened in the same way. He does not like death--he dreads the thought of it--but without questioning his soul he springs forward to save this mother-country of his and dies upon her bosom with a cry of "Vive la France!"

2

The French soldier, whatever his coa.r.s.eness or his delicacy, needs feminine consolation, and all his ideals and his yearnings and his self- pity are intimately a.s.sociated with the love of women, and especially of one woman--his mother. When Napoleon, in the island of St.

Helena, used to talk about the glories of his victorious years, and then brooded over the tragedy of his overthrow so that all his soul was clouded with despair, he used to rouse himself after the silence which followed those hours of self-a.n.a.lysis and say, "Let us talk about women--and love." Always it is the feminine spirit in which a Frenchman bathes his wounds. One small incident I saw a year or two ago gave me the clue to this quality in the French character. It was when Vedrines, the famous airman, was beaten by only a few minutes in the flight round England. Capitaine Conneau--"Beaumont,"

as he called himself--had outraced his rival and waited, with French gallantry, to shake the hand of the adversary he had defeated on untiring wings. A great crowd of smart men and women waited also at Brooklands to cheer the second in the race, who in England is always more popular than the prize-winner. But when Vedrines came to earth out of a blue sky he was savage and bitter. The loss of the prize- money was a great tragedy to this mechanic who had staked all his ambition on the flight. He shouted out harsh words to those who came to cheer him, and shook them off violently when they tried to clap him on the back. He was savagely angry. Then suddenly something seemed to break in his spirit, and his face quivered.

"Is there any woman to embrace me?" he asked. Out of the crowd came a pretty Frenchwoman and, understanding the man, though she had not met him before, she held out her arms to him and raised her face.

"Allons-donc, mon vieux!" she said. The man put his arms about her and kissed her, while tears streamed down his face, covered in sweat and dust. He was comforted, like a boy who had hurt himself, in his mother's arms. It was a queer little episode--utterly impossible in the imagination of an Englishman--but a natural thing in France.

So when a Frenchman lies dying, almost unconscious before the last breath, it is always a woman's name that he cries out, or whispers, though not always the name of his wife or mistress. One word is heard again and again in the hospital wards, where the poilus lie, those bearded fellows, so strong when they went out to the war, but now so weak and helpless before death.

"Maman! Maman!"

It is to the bosom of motherhood that the spirit of the Frenchman goes in that last hour.

"Oh, my dear little mamma," writes a young lieutenant of artillery, "it would be nice to be in my own room again, where your picture hangs over my bed looking down on the white pillows upon which you used to make the sign of the Cross before I went to sleep. I often try to dream myself into that bedroom again, but the cold is too intense for dreams, and another sh.e.l.l comes shrieking overhead. War is nothing but misery, after all."

3

Yet if any English reader imagines that because this thread of sentiment runs through the character of France there is a softness in the qualities of French soldiers, he does not know the truth. Those men whom I saw at the front and behind the fighting lines were as hard in moral and spiritual strength as in physical endurance. It was this very hardness which impressed me even in the beginning of the war, when I did not know the soldiers of France as well as I do now.

After a few weeks in the field these men, who had been labourers and mechanics, clerks and journalists, artists and poets, shop a.s.sistants and railway porters, hotel waiters, and young aristocrats of Paris who had played the fool with pretty girls, were fined down to the quality of tempered steel. With not a spare ounce of flesh on them-- the rations of the French army are not as rich as ours--and tested by long marches down dusty roads, by incessant fighting in retreat against overwhelming odds, by the moral torture of those rearguard actions, and by their first experience of indescribable horrors, among dead and dying comrades, they had a beauty of manhood which I found sublime. They were bronzed and dirty and hairy, but they had the look of knighthood, with a calm light s.h.i.+ning in their eyes and with resolute lips. They had no gaiety in those days, when France was in gravest peril, and they did not find any kind of fun in this war. Out of their baptism of fire they had come with scorched souls, knowing the murderous quality of the business to which they were apprenticed; but though they did not hide their loathing of it, nor the fears which had a.s.sailed them, nor their pa.s.sionate anger against the people who had thrust this thing upon them, they showed no sign of weakness. They were willing to die for France, though they hated death, and in spite of the first great rush of the German legions, they had a fine intellectual contempt of that army, which seemed to me then unjustified, though they were right, as history now shows. Man against man, in courage and cunning they were better than the Germans, gun against gun they were better, in cavalry charge and in bayonet charge they were better, and in equal number irresistible.

There was in England a hidden conviction, expressed privately in clubs and by women over their knitting, that the French soldiers were poor fellows as fighting men, filled with sentimentality, full of brag, with fine words on their lips, but with no strength of courage or endurance. British soldiers coming back wounded from the first battles and a three weeks' rearguard action, spread abroad the tale that "those French fellows were utterly useless and had run like rabbits before the German advance." They knew nothing but what they had seen in their own ditches on the fighting ground, they were sick with horror at the monstrous character of the war, and they had a rankling grudge against the French because they had not been supported strongly enough during those weeks in August between Charleroi and Compiegne.

Later the English Press, anxious, naturally enough, to throw into high relief the exploits of our own troops in France, and getting only sc.r.a.ps of news from the French lines, gave a distorted view of the general situation, and threw the whole picture of the war out of perspective, like the image of a man in a convex mirror. The relative importance of the British Expedition was vastly exaggerated, not because its particular importance was over-estimated, but because the French operations received very scant notice. There are still people in England who believe with a pious and pa.s.sionate faith that our soldiers sustained the entire and continual attack of the German army, while the French looked on and thanked G.o.d for our work of rescue. The fact that we only held a front of thirty miles, at most, during the first nine months of war, and that the French were successfully holding a line of five hundred miles through which the Germans were trying to smash their way by repeated attacks of ferocious character, never took hold of the imagination of many honest souls at home, who thrilled with patriotic pride at the heroism of the British troops, according to the old tradition of "How England saved Europe."

4

Well, nothing will ever minimise our services to France. The graves of our men will stand as records of the help we gave, paying our debt of honour with priceless blood. But England must know what France did in self-defence and understand the fine enduring heroism of those armies of France which, after the first mistakes, built a wall of steel against which the greatest fighting machine in Europe shattered itself in vain.