Chapter VI: Part 6

Calmness and equality of temper are the characteristics of General Roques, who succeeded General Gallieni as Minister of War. Possessing as great will power as his predecessor, he has a quiet and attractive way of gaining his ends without compromising their essential character. He finds the formula suitable to the occasion, and possesses the ideal temperament for a Minister of the Republic. Like Joffre, he has passed the greater part of his career in the colonies, where he learned the same lessons of self-reliance and of organisation. Like Joffre, too, he worked as an engineer in Madagascar, helping the future Generalissimo to build Diego Suarez, and afterwards linking by railway Antananarivo with the sea. Seven fruitful years in Madagascar were prefaced by similar periods in Algeria and Tonking and an expedition with General Dodds to Dahomey, which he undertook soon after leaving the Polytechnique.

Succeeding Joffre as Director of Engineers at the Ministry of War, he became Director of Aeronautics at the moment when France began to realise the military possibilities of the aeroplane. General Roques's spirit of organisation was as potent at the Rue Saint-Dominique as in command of troops. Mounting by the usual stages of Division, Army Corps, and Army, he distinguished himself in the two latter situations on active service, and in the former at manoeuvres one year before the Great War. For his personal bravery and skill in the field he received the War Cross and the Grand Cross of the Legion. With the dust of Verdun still upon him he took charge of Gallieni's portfolio and soon showed a vivid sense of the realities of modern war. His conciliation and tact and his quiet mastery of details earned for him the good-will and confidence of the army and of his subordinates. To that perfect mastery over himself which is necessary to mastery over others, he added a decision of character invaluable in high responsibility. He is of the school of Generals formed overseas. Of such are Joffre and Gallieni, Gouraud and Marchand.

Gouraud resembles Petain in his judgment and charm as well as in his power over men. He inspires devotion, and carries the secret of command in a splendid face and figure. The empty right sleeve is a touching testimony to his valour, and for months he walked limping with a stick, for his right thigh and left leg had been injured also at the Dardanelles--the place of his dismemberment. It was after a day's bombardment and the Commander-in-Chief was watching the embarkation of wounded on a hospital ship, for there was no place to put them on that rocky shore, searched minutely by the enemy shells. One breaking from a Turkish naval gun threw the General over a wall and inflicted the injuries I have described. On the way home by ship to Marseilles, gangrene supervened in the arm, demanding its amputation.

I saw him just after his recovery when, with a glad note in his voice, he announced his approaching return to the Front. In conversation with him one realised why he was called the "lion of the Argonne." There is something king-like in his looks--the brown beard, and the manly, well-formed features--and you are certain that the khaki tunic covers a lion's heart. His whole career has been of the noble sort: whether tracking Samory, the negro chieftain, into the recesses of his virgin forest, where he captured him after he had waged fitful war with France for seventeen years; or whether he was leading a sortie from Fez and clearing a savage horde from its walls. For this latter feat he gained the three stars at a time of life when most French officers have not reached a colonelcy. When the Great War broke out Gouraud hastened from Morocco to the east of France, where he led Colonial troops in unexampled feats of bravery. He was shot in the shoulder, but bullets cannot stop such a man; he seems to bear a charmed life as he passes heedlessly amidst a storm of flying, shrieking metal. His heroic soul is unmoved by the Inferno of the battle. Even the worst inventions of the devil are powerless against this perfect knight, dressed in the invincible and shining armour of his faith and patriotism.

It was good to hear him speak of his career as simply as if he were relating the banal life of some village attorney. Perhaps an ancestor who served in Napoleon's artillery, or a great-uncle who helped the Duc d'Aumale to conquer Algeria, were in measure responsible for his military tastes. Certainly he did not get them from his father following the pacific profession of a doctor in a Paris hospital. At sixteen or seventeen years of age the Tonking campaign attracted him with its promise of adventure, but his youthful imagination was mainly fired by reading the travels and explorations of Livingstone, of Cameron, Stanley, Brazza and Gallieni. And the Colonies, whatever their bad old reputation in France for forming soldiers who were theatrical and had no notion of modern warfare, since they fought against savages, has proved in this war the nursery of manly virtues. Therein a man learns courage and endurance, self-reliance and a faculty for improvising everything. It has produced men of the type of Marchand, one of the most romantic figures that ever donned the uniform of the Republic. His hold over his men is quite extraordinary; they are ready to follow him into the jaws of death. His exploits in the Soudan recall a time when there was no smile on the face of John Bull as he looked across to France. A poet in his ideality and lyric quality, he has the sublime courage of the Early Christian, the personal sway of the born leader, the heart and tenderness of a woman.

No French general has come into closer contact with the English than Foch, for his army neighboured theirs for long months together, and none has a higher opinion of their qualities or was more sensible of the vast improvement effected in their fighting methods during the progress of the war. Foch is one of the most learned of the chiefs of the army; he directed the War School during a period of his career, and his lectures on the art of leading troops in battle are models of their kind. When war broke out, he was commanding at Nancy the 20th Army Corps, which includes the famous Iron Division. As disciplinarian he offers no excuses for himself or for others for any failure in duty; and there is no soldier, if it is not Petain, who has adapted his science more successfully to the problems of a twentieth-century war. Looking forty-five, though twenty years older, he is of those who prepared assiduously for the great day of the battle. Alas! his own family were early victims of it, for at Charleroi fell his son and his son-in-law. Amongst his officers at Nancy was General Balfourier in charge of a brigade. Tall and slim and dark until active service had whitened his hair, Balfourier has the perfect manners of a man of the world. You would take him for a courtier if you did not know that he was a soldier and a particularly brave one. The Tsar's congratulations reached him in the midst of the gigantic battle of Verdun, where he had handled the 20th Corps with such skill and daring as to attract universal attention. There was always a perfect union between his infantry and artillery. He and his wife kept open house at Nancy to the officers under his command, and their handsome fortune enabled them to entertain lavishly both here and at their residence at Chantilly. The General's father was as far removed from Gouraud's from the trade of arms, for he followed the unlikely profession of a notary; but both obeyed the call to a soldier's life and achieved an equal distinction.

These, then, are the men who have led France to victory. To-morrow others will spring from her fruitful soil and represent her courage, her hope, and her resourcefulness. The Great War has demonstrated the adaptability of the race. It is perennial in its freshness and inspiration.

*CHAPTER XV*

*CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIGHTING*

When the German horde surged upon Verdun, and was hurled back; when, again and again, they swept to the attack and left their dead piled high before the might and heroism of France--then was it most clearly demonstrated that the days of old-fashioned forts were no more. The fortress of stone crumbles before the mighty guns of to-day, and the hideous machines of war, belching forth tons of metal, grind steel and concrete into dust. Before Verdun it was proved that the fortress of France was the soul of her soldiers: a fortress that the mightiest guns could not shake nor all the horrors of modern warfare humble. To the armed barbarity of science the French soldier opposed his chest, and barbarism was swept back. That is the first lesson of the war of millions. In spite of all the fearful war machines--the huge guns, the gas, the liquid fire, engines of destruction before which man is as puny as a fly--in spite, too, of the impersonal strategy that moves regiments as pieces in a game of chess and seems to take no stock of the little soul of a man, yet, after all, it is the man that counts. Both combatants can pour out money, both can heap up _materiel_, but the side that can expend the richest store of heroism is the side that will win. This personal element in the battle of to-day was the only factor overlooked by the war expert. Bloch, the great Russian writer on military science, foresaw only one end to fighting, and that was immobilisation, for each side would sit down in trenches and wait for the other; but the strange thing was that this new game of sap and mine, by a curious detour, conducted to the old hand-to-hand encounters, in which the right arm played the determining part and even the bowie-knife was resuscitated as a deadly weapon, so that we seemed to live again in the days of Fenimore Cooper and the Indian fights; and though the Germans sent at our trenches liquid fire, asphyxiating gases, flying torpedoes and all manner of explosives, all this science was accompanied by ambuscades, by acts of treachery and _ruses de guerre_ not unworthy of the Redskin in the most romantic pages of the novelist. Thus modern civilisation and savagery met and shook hands as men of the same family, unconscious of any difference in their mental equipment, unembarrassed certainly by any divergence in _Kultur_. And perhaps because of this personal factor in the fighting, which it was thought would be blotted out and suppressed in modern warfare, there was developed an individual courage so remarkable and romantic as to be unbelievable in its splendour, its intensity, and its quality of rich lavishness. Never since the world began has there been such an _etalage_ of personal valour, such outpouring of splendid deeds of indomitable and deathless daring. Seemingly in the sombre monotony of modern warfare there could arise no glorious exploit, and yet the trenches were frequently the unlikely frame of the most palpitating and stupendous defiance of man's nervous system. For the weak envelope triumphed by the grace of the soul; and man, though his teeth chattered by the mere brutal concussion of monstrous weapons, yet showed in his moral resistance a wealth and splendour of achievement unknown to the old and picturesque days. Thus, though the nations warred in such incredible masses that there seemed no room for personal bravery, yet never before had it been so richly poured out, so that even the spies were brave and went to their doom with hands untied and eyes unbandaged in utter calmness. Never in the history of warfare has there been a more splendid show of every human quality, whether fighting this desperate affair of the trenches or out in the open, under the pitiless rain of unheard-of bombardments, as at Verdun, where, in one single day, were fired 3,000,000 shells. And if there had never been a greater squandering of metal than in this Titanic conflict of the arsenals, there had never been a greater expenditure of those splendid treasures of sacrifice, or such a vast extravagance of youth and manhood, gold and precious stones from the treasury of all the manly virtues.

But if Bloch had discounted the personal element of modern warfare, his theories otherwise were justified by events. The Germans knew their Bloch and heartily believed his doctrine, but in the opening stages of the battle they made a desperate effort to escape from his conclusions. They began in what Mr. Wells in a famous chapter called the "1900 spirit," that is to say, they were convinced that neither England nor France was alive to the latest trench warfare. Their first methods, the precipitate attack, massed movements and enveloping tactics, were dictated by the thought that their adversaries were old-fashioned fighters who had not learned this doctrine of the squatting war, who had not, in fact, read their Bloch or drawn from him the lessons the Germans had. And so they fought in the open in these first phases of the campaign, trusting by their force and speed, superior leadership and brutal shock tactics to bear down the Allies before they were prepared to meet them. And, of course, they were greatly aided in this traditional method of fighting by the fact that they had been allowed to build unchallenged strategic railways to their frontiers, which enabled them to pour a million men into the country, instead of the 300,000 that the French General Staff expected by the northern route.

The ready adaptation of the Allies to the new exigencies of war forced the Germans to rush to earth. There came a change so sudden that it seemed as if one had jumped literally from one century to another. "We have driven them underground," said M. Paul Deschanel, the eloquent President of the Chamber. But after they sank into the earth the Germans still made desperate efforts to escape Bloch's conclusion: that immobility which he predicted as being the inevitable result of the conflict of armed nations. They endeavoured by their inventive genius to break that immobility. By asphyxiating gas, by liquid fire, by aerial warfare (especially against England), did they seek, as Mr. Wells points out, to create, such diversion as would avoid so barren a conclusion to armed effort.

With the second phase of the battle the pulsing, stirring features of the old warfare largely disappeared. There was no longer the crowded rustle of the ranks, except when men crept in the semi-darkness from their trenches and attacked in the open against barbed wire and murderous missiles. The long, sinuous line of red, with its sheen and shimmer of weapons glancing back the sun, gay plumes to give a nodding note of youth, almost of feminine finery, had passed to the limbo of military museums and the pages of the historians of past battles. None of these things; instead, men in musty garments, covered with dust in summer or the mud of winter rains, and, in place of the cavalry charge in the open, the terrible twilight war began. Those who waged it shirked the daylight, dwelt in pits and crouched in dark ramparts as if the sight of God's good sun shamed them. Gone was the brave display riotous in colour and glory, glittering from ten thousand points. In its place was a lone and dismal landscape, a drab expanse of trenches interminably long; of furrows deeply drawn through the earth hiding living grain in their depths. Singular country, like some vast cemetery, stretching indefinitely towards a dull horizon dead in its outer aspects, and yet hiding in its bowels the quick and the dead, the living happily outnumbering those who live no more. Of course, the great novelty of the war was its vast length of front. In France it stretched from the North Sea to the rocky ramparts of Switzerland, 700 kilometres across the fair land of France; and if one counted all the ramifications and convolutions, then 10,000 kilometres represented the sum of this amazing and ceaseless industry which turned soldiers into navvies; moreover, this trench warfare was universal where fighting occurred, and was not special merely to Belgium and France, for it existed in Russia, in Mesopotamia, and the Balkans. A French Army Corps numbers 35,000 men, and, taking the general character of the ground, the parts that can be naturally defended with those that require barricades of barbed wire and other obstacles to reinforce their strength, this Army Corps can hold a line of ten kilometres. Thus 2,000,000 men is about the normal garrison of a line of 500 kilometres. But it must not be supposed that the lines are uniform; they vary considerably. For instance, where the ground is steep and rocky, the defence is rendered easier and the guards of the first trench may be less numerous than in cases where the conditions are more favourable to attack. But such matters are settled by the local commandant, who takes into consideration all the conditions and makes his dispositions accordingly. There are parts of the line where it is not necessary to place men because the parts are enfiladed by cannon, and other places where every mechanical means has been resorted to for strengthening the trenches. The telephone is largely used, and is linked with advanced posts, called _postes d'ecoute_, where the observer can note the least activity in the enemy's trenches. Thus the men guarding the first-line trenches can be sensibly reduced, leaving a greater proportion to remain in the second-line trenches and in rest chambers dug out of the earth at the ends of the lines. Of course, the trenches vary considerably, and the commander takes note of the character of the soil. He makes use of a hill-side, even of the ditches with embankments on the side of the road, of every natural conformation of the soil, and the number of men necessary to defend the line varies according to these circumstances.

It is true, certainly, that trench warfare has inflicted a great loss of the picturesque, of glittering movements, of kaleidoscopic effects which turned and twisted into wonderful pictures; the picture to-day is replaced by a melancholy waste of earth scored and humped into mounds.

Within was life, and no end to labour, for there were trenches, always more trenches to be dug as the line swayed or curved in new forms, yielding to pressure or being broken by it. And in the trenches themselves there was a perpetual search for improvement, and the longer the troops stayed there, the more highly organised became their abodes. If there was not an abundance of hot water there was generally enough of cold, and gas on every floor; alas! too much of it. There were wooden floors and wooden walls and pictures, and even sculpture adorned them. In these subterranean passages dwelt our men in a kind of heroic enjoyment Of a battle without issue, of a sort of deadly ding-dong, only varied by the blackening of the sky with the monstrous smoke of projectiles that count a man a mere atom in their whirlwind path--fearful engines that lay waste the country, that reduce villages to a hopeless jumble of stones and bent iron and splintered wood, with derisive-looking chimneys floating in a troubled sea, like derelicts in the track of a tornado.

It was clear that in this squatting war all traditions had crumbled hopelessly and wilted away. The monstrous engines belched fire and destruction. From the caverns themselves, deeply cut in the once fertile fields, issued a storm of shot and shell from machine-guns, from mortars of an old-fashioned type, from cannon of the newest type--every imaginable engine of destruction, down to the old hand-grenade, again in usage from a distant past--a past so ancient that Scott reminds us in _Rob Roy_ that "in those days this description of soldiers" (_i.e._ the Grenadiers) "actually carried that destructive species of firework from which they derive their name." Thus every device known to man's inventive and destructive brain was directed into a new and diabolical channel, and from time to time the vast engines employed emitted a rending noise as if the earth were spitting flame and its rocky ribs had shattered into quivering fragments--a volcano in its most fearful mood, sending forth a mad jumble of rocks and a living stream of lava devastating and devouring.

A gaunt and desolate country haunted by the melancholy crows, resounding with clacking detonations of fusillades and a hoarse bass of heavy cannon, is the place of invisible war. One rubs shoulders with it without being aware of it. One comes suddenly upon it in all innocence. A journalistic friend, at the beginning of the war, dashed into its area all unknowing that he had come on top of it. To his unpractised eye the lines were no more clearly marked than the Equator or the North Pole. And, of course, every effort is made to conceal the battle-field. Beet-root grows riotously on battlements, guns hide behind trees and are covered with branches, so that the airman, peering from his height, sees nothing but the flicker of leaves. The line hides itself as soon as it fights, and without loss of time prepares against a possible retreat. That is the method of it. Should it be driven back, there are strong positions in the rear for the rallying, for the defence _a outrance_, and for the counter-attack. Fronts have two or three lines of shelter trenches, deep enough to cover a man and generally a yard in width. These trenches are proportioned to the effectives employed. They contain redoubts and blockhouses where guns are placed; they are linked by zigzag paths, and, as a last resort, with a trench of cement, a veritable fortress where are cannon as well as machine-guns. These covered over and fortified trenches nearly always contain rest chambers and magazines for rifles and the different sorts of ammunition required.

The lesson of this trench warfare, therefore, is that if a combatant retires before it is too late he has every chance to survive to fight another day; and he has all the more chance of a new offensive, or at least of maintaining a strong defensive, if he retires in the direction of his resources, or what is called his line of operation, whence he receives his munitions, food and material of war. He retires from the battle, therefore, at the psychological moment when he sees he is likely to be overwhelmed, and reconstitutes himself in the rear. The opening phases of 1914 gave us two parallel retreats: from the Belgian frontier to the Seine by the Allies, and from the Marne to the Aisne by the Germans. The campaign in Poland also showed a similar disposition, and the Russians reformed their line and beat the Germans after they retreated before them. Therefore a mere retreat may be, literally, little more than a strategic movement in the rear. It does not mean, certainly, that all is lost or that the position of the retreating force is one of utter hopelessness.

After the opening phases of the war, the subterranean character of the fighting was maintained, until such big offensives as Verdun re-evoked the old-time battle, when the Kaiser watched the operations from an eminence, and on a front of twenty miles scenes of the old onslaught were re-enacted. But in this case the initiative was left to the Germans. To them also the greater part of the losses, for whilst they manoeuvred in the open and hurled masses of their grey-green warriors upon the French trenches, the defenders enfiladed the masses and mowed them down with the gigantic scythes that their science had forged since the war began.

A curious feature of the fighting in the Great War was the element of fatigue. We have met with it everywhere. It follows closely the course of the war; it is seen in every phase. At Charleroi and Mons and those terrific fights that marked the beginning of the war, the retreating armies of England and France escaped because of the exhaustion of the Germans. If cavalry had harried their rearguards and mobile cannon had cannonaded their flanks the retreat might have been turned into a rout. For the French, largely composed of reservists, were within an ace of demoralisation. And again the Allies, as conquerors, showed extreme fatigue in the battle of the Marne, when the victory might have been more decisive had it been followed up by unwearied troops, or, again, by masses of cavalry.

The cavalry, indeed, of both combatants proved singularly ineffectual, and, as I have just pointed out, failed as a means of attack or to pursue retreating armies; and an interesting feature was the dismounting of the cavalry and its employment as infantry in the trenches. Cavalrymen were divorced from their horses and given infantry guns; and their equipment and appearance approached very nearly that of the foot-soldier. The Cuirassiers, for instance, took off their picturesque manes and removed the top pieces of their helmets, and thus very nearly imitated the _bourguinet_, or low, mediaeval-looking helmet of the French infantry. Even reconnaissance, the old duty of the cavalry, has been undertaken by the aeroplane; and the horse-soldier, indeed, has little place in modern warfare. Some experts, however, hold that a new role has emerged from the war which the cavalry is qualified to fill. It consists in their employment in large forces flanked by mobile cannon and cyclists, whereby their offensive radius is greatly extended.

In these few pages I have endeavoured to sketch the varied phases of a war that opened with the glittering pageant of the time of Napoleon and merged into the dreary and sombre monotony of trench warfare. The "heroic" days of battle were over, but a new heroism arose. Men fought no longer to triumph as men among men; they were content to go forward, nameless and unrecognised: "to march heroically" (in the words of the French writer), to become, not men among men, but--

"des morts parmi les morts."

*CHAPTER XVI*

*MILITARY COMMAND AND THE REVOLUTION*

"On nous fait une guerre ennuyeuse!" How often was the plaint heard in France, where this war of "wait and see," this terrible game of patience, racked the nerves not only of the soldiers in the trenches, but of the multitudes who scanned the morning news in the hope of some startling manoeuvre and stunning victory which should end the hideous nightmare of trench warfare. Had Napoleon and his like passed, then, for ever? Could France never produce his peer? A man who would rise above all difficulties; who would drag guns over the snows in hollowed-out tree-trunks; who would arrive where no man had arrived; who would achieve the impossible? Times, it is true, had changed, but sound opinion urged the recognised fact that there is only one kind of strategy, just as there is only one geometry. The geometric truth of to-day is the geometric truth of a thousand years ago; it never changes. Thus, strategy is always strategy though the circumstances may change, and the cafe critic was a little inclined to blame the military command for the dreary monotony of the conduct of the war.

Historians such as Dupuis and Aulard, the eminent professor at the Sorbonne recalled Convention days, when youthful Generals were selected through the intervention of commissioners from the Government, who visited the armies, interrogated everybody and discovered talent. Sometimes they did not discover it, but only thought they did. The unhappy man, perhaps only just promoted from non-commissioned ranks, was dragged from his obscurity and placed, often against his own will, in command of an army and told to get victories or take the consequences. Good patriots were not allowed to refuse such signal honour as serving the country in a position of responsibility; and, placed between the devil of their own incompetence and the deep sea of the guillotine (for if they failed they would be hailed, certainly, before the tribunal and treated as traitors), they occasionally managed in sheer desperation to win; but more often they miserably failed, and joined the number of the suspected in the Conventional prisons.

Not only were these unfortunate people appointed, willy-nilly, to the command of armies whenever they attracted the eye of the representatives, but, once arrived at the perilous summit of their power, they were watched and their conduct noted as if they were the most disreputable of mortals. And their judges were not only the Convention, but the secret committees and clubs which flourished at that moment. Nevertheless, the results of this terrible system were astonishing. The most celebrated of the representatives was Carnot, who was in every way an exceptional man. On the eve of the battle of Wattignies, in October 1793, he obliged Jourdan, the General-in-Chief, to effect a frontal attack, which failed. Thereupon a council was held, and the two men were seen to differ materially in their views. Carnot, with characteristic impetuosity, offered to assume responsibility for his opinion and even to see to the execution of his plan. On the morrow, Carnot, who kept Jourdan under close observation, noted a column falling back before the pressure of the enemy. Instantly he seized a rifle, placed himself at the head of the retreating force and led them back into action. Thanks largely to his energy, the battle was won.

Saint Just was a man of similar type. In the operations on the Sambre, which were unfortunate, for a time, for the Revolutionaries, Saint Just and Le Bas pushed the armies to combat, it has been said, like a pack of dogs, without observing any rule of war. There is a memorable scene related by Dupuis. Saint Just convoked the Generals to a midnight council. "You are convoked," he said, "to do something great--worthy of the Republic. To-morrow there must be a siege or a battle; decide!" On Kleber smiling satirically, Saint Just rushed out into the darkness of the garden and remained there, hatless, for two hours, though the rain was falling in torrents. However, from all this confusion and tyrannous intervention and diversity of counsel emerged the victory of Fleurus, in the neighbourhood of Mons and Charleroi, which speaks so closely nowadays to our hearts. The Revolutionaries crossed and recrossed the river many times before they succeeded finally in overcoming the Austrians. And this victory marked the end of the peril of invasion, which was the excuse of the presence of the representatives with the armies. Washington said that an army must be led with absolute despotism to ensure victory; the armies of the Revolution certainly merited success from that point of view rather than by the talent of terrorised chiefs--men whose previous career was often that of a sous officier, and totally unfitted them for positions of authority. Balland, who commanded a division at Wattignies, was a drummer in a company of grenadiers, and, according to a contemporary historian, "cleaned our boots and ran our errands."

Yet some of outstanding character and talents profited by this system, which advanced a man like Napoleon to dazzling heights. The terror and confusion of the time gave him the chance he needed to soar. Whilst weaker men drowned in the storm, he rose triumphantly above it. And his first chance came through his connection with Saliceti, one of the representatives, who was a fellow Corsican and had taken part with Napoleon in struggles in the island against the dictatorship of Paoli. They met on the Riviera, where Napoleon, a simple captain, was transporting war stores. Toulon was being besieged; Napoleon, in the ardour of his temperament, proposed a plan to Saliceti and his colleague, Augustin Robespierre, the brother of the dictator, who happened to be there, insisted on conferring on him the rank of Brigadier-General, with command over the artillery in the army of Italy. Without these influences, Napoleon would have had to wait long for his preferment. Robespierre was particularly struck by Napoleon, whom he regarded as of transcending merit and, moreover, a sound and perfervid Republican!

Though Napoleon was accompanied, as the others had been, by the commissioners of the Convention in his campaign in Italy, they were men of an ordinary type, and he knew how to get the better of them. Moreover, he was extremely astute in his dealings with his possible accusers, and played a definite political role. He became, then, the favourite of Barras, the most influential of the Directorate, and finally, thanks to Barras and Carnot, obtained command of the Italian Army, which was the height of his ambition. Here he was able to give the measure of his military genius. His ardour and audacity were equal to every situation, and his popularity rose to such heights with the masses dazzled by his victories, and he inspired such confidence amongst the Convention itself, that he conquered his independence of action. Under the former tyrannous rule of the Convention the strategist was a mere puppet in the hands of the Government; Napoleon was not long in restoring all the old power to the General and giving to strategy its full amplitude, for he was able, as he rose to be Consul Life Consul, and finally Emperor--all in four years--to control the political destinies of France, and thus add to the military arm the civil power, and make the former serve the ends of his foreign and internal policy.

It is well to remember that Napoleon owed much of his advancement--his promotion at the age of twenty-seven to the rank of Commander-in-Chief--to his clever utilisation of the social disorder which followed the Revolution, and he obtained that liberty of which he had need to beat the enemy, as Colonel Dupuis points out, by his adroit relations with the Government. His personal prestige soon placed him above those who had given him the power. Finally, strong in his immense successes he threw off the remaining shackles and conquered the right to act as he thought best. He himself became the Executive. He was in the enviable situation of a man who gives orders to himself.

This page of the past is sufficient answer to the clamour for the heroic methods of the Revolution. French people have only to look back to recognise the danger of allowing ambition to realise itself either in the army or in politics--still worse when the two are united. A later instance, and one even more terrifying than that of Napoleon I, was that of Napoleon III; for, though his Empire similarly ended in disaster, brought about by foreign intervention, in the one case it represented the paling of a star of surpassing effulgence, whereas in the other it was the mere pricking of a bubble, if "historic," reputation. But in each event it brought humiliation and the foot of the invader on the soil. Joffre, therefore, a democratic and constitutional commander--the antithesis of Napoleon--is the only type of general really acceptable to the French Republic; and though the thoughtless individual may sigh for the breathless succession of events of Napoleonic days, there is hardly a Frenchman who would be prepared to accept the consequences of a return of the Napoleonic system; and Joffre, working for war that he may accomplish peace, eschewing inspiration and "strokes of genius," steadily developing in quietude and reflection the details of a preconceived plan, is an ideal figure in a country as profoundly democratic as France, where a chief modelled on the Prussian type or given to vain display and the "panache" would inevitably cause a reaction unfortunate in the interests of national defence. Never again will the French, having learned in the bitter school of experience, place power in the hands of a man who, by his masterly temperament, raises in their minds the fears of a dictator. _Non bis in idem_.

But not until the second year of the war was Joffre given that supreme command and that independence of action so essential to success. Only in 1916 was it recognised that there must be a co-ordination of effort in the different fields; that the Allies could not act separately without relation to each other and hope thereby to advance the common cause; they must carry out a certain preconceived plan and carry it out with a common energy, subserving all questions of persons and national prestige to the unique end of winning the war. The English Army, after the retirement of Marshal French, was placed directly under the orders of Joffre; thereafter it had its exact place in the common movement and represented a certain intimate part of the general machine. England thereby showed her loyalty and her conception of the necessities of the hour in bending to the principle of French dominance. It was inevitable, for the French were the chief combatants on the Western Front; their army was necessarily the more numerous and they were defending their own hearths and homes; the war to them was in reality a war of liberation. After, then, the general objects of the Allies were defined, it was seen that there must be unity of command. I remember how urgently a celebrated French General spoke to me on this subject after the war had lasted a year. "For the sake of our common action," he said, "do insist in England on the necessity of oneness in the command. Otherwise, the problem is impossible." And when that principle was at last acknowledged, and England merged her military fortunes more deeply with those of France, sacrificing also some of her independence in the field, the Allies were approaching the German homogeneity, where the Kaiser conducted the mixed orchestra and called the tune. Whatever the music was like, the general effect was certainly better than if there had been two or more chiefs and as many tunes.

But although Revolutionary times were no more, when generals of twenty-three gained such triumphs as when Rocroi was won by Conde, yet the fierce spirit of the Revolution remained. In that sombre hour France triumphed because she had the fierce determination to win; because she was ruthless with old-established reputations unless they responded to the exigencies of the hour; and also because, having her back against the wall, she realised that it was literally a case of "conquer or die." So in the war of to-day, the military command was aided by the popular clamour which speeded up the machine. When Charles Humbert, Senator of the Meuse, and certainly one of the organisers of victory, claimed almost daily in _Le Journal_, which he directs with such vigour, "more cannon and more munitions," he was but repeating, at a distance of one hundred and twenty years, the cry of Carnot and Lindet, who were rather disdainfully called "the Workers" by their colleagues of the Convention. But the harvest of the Revolution that the Generalissimo reaps most richly is that extraordinary and unsuspected virtue which our Allies have shown, that bull-dog tenacity and resistance which, blending with the natural _allegresse_ of the French, made them irresistible in battle where the conditions were at all equal. In the last resort, the quality of the fighter prevails; every observer has recognised that fact. The guns may thunder and deal out death and destruction, but the machine which finally counts is the white arm, "Rosalie," as the bayonet is named in the familiar speech of the "poilu." This fact accounts for the superiority of the French on the field of battle; for the final word is to the common soldier, to that astonishing peasant and tiller of the land, who constitutes the greater part of the armies of the Republic. He fights, as I have said earlier in this book, not because he must, but because he feels he is privileged to defend his fields against the invader. Ever present to his mind, as he meets the Hun, are the depredations and deeds of horror of this civilised savage, and his arm is nerved by the determination to save his own village and his own kith and kin, if possible, from his devastations. The personal feeling enforces the personal element in battle; and, after all, a Holy Cause is the best sort of armour in which to engage in battle and the deadliest weapon to wield against those who have sinned against all the laws of humanity.

*CHAPTER XVII*

*THE SPIRIT OF THE TRENCHES*

The spirit of the trenches is the spirit of France. Never did mirror more faithfully reflect the personal traits than those endless trenches across France the splendid valour of the race. In no preceding war in history has courage been so abounding. Trench warfare created a spirit of intimacy as well as a spirit of adventure. Men of differing stations, of utterly opposed traditions, of antagonistic education, were thrown together in a narrow, self-contained comradeship, and the result was a firm and singular fusion. They partook of the same risks, they experienced the same emotions, whether standing shoulder to shoulder in the trenches, or racing, side by side, in some rush attack, storming villages, or retiring, it might be, beneath the pressure of an overwhelming cannonade. And out of this comradeship grew a conventual feeling. Though isolated from the ordinary world, they were yet of it, for family ties triumphed over even so radical a difference in experience and mode of life. The rigours and segregation of the camp-life could not separate from kith and kin.

Some have compared their existence with the cloistered life. True, they took no vows of celibacy, nor was continence the necessary attribute of their association, but they had sworn to serve in a deathless constancy. They slept and lived hard, exposed to inclemency; passed days in a narrow semi-darkness, and at night slept in the roughest shelters or in grottoes deep in the ground. Yet there was an essential difference in their state and that of those bound to the Church, for their thoughts were of earth rather than of Heaven--of some distant spot whereon stood a little white house surrounded with trees, with green fields beyond, where cattle grazed, children played, and geese cackled. Tender memories accompanied their vigils, and such human sentiments removed them from the category of the saints, who are not supposed to listen to the heart, and from the old professional class of soldier, the _grognards_ of Napoleon's day. For between waiting France and fighting France there passed hourly a warm current of correspondence, ascending and descending, informed with honest passion, homely and kindly virtues, which softened and humanised the soldier's solitude and heartened the civilian. It was the "poilu" who, going to the war, comforted those who remained behind, and the strange thing was that pessimism more readily took root in security, far from the lines, than at the Front itself. And the soldier's courage was as much seen in his letters as in his conduct in the field--wonderful tribute to its depth and sincerity. For there were moments in the interminable war to try the nerves of the hardened campaigner, much more those of the young man but lately broken to its severities.

Yet there was never a tremor in the living wall encircling _la patrie_, no touch of despair in the letters that Dupont pencilled home in the intervals of bombardment. His natural gaiety found an expression there, as well as his courage and his calm. Letters from only sons, out of reach for the first time of maternal solicitude, manifested an almost disconcerting enjoyment of danger and the independent life. And those women who had feared hitherto for the health of their darlings now seemed to rejoice in new proofs of their courage and contempt of death. Lads, apparently the most deeply wedded to the soft and unheroic existence of towns, found an unexpected satisfaction in the strenuous routine of camps. The influence of the _milieu_, the daily contact with the hard practices and risks of the _metier_, riveted armour about the soul and bound the brows with brass. Men, whose habit in civil life led none to suspect the martial temperament, proved lions in the fight. And I knew a timid soul, a little delicate, much given to study and reflection who, after a few months' actual experience of the trenches, became utterly changed. No longer apologising for existence as in the old days, he bore himself proudly in the field, and performed acts of exceptional bravery. Of his civilian friends he asked with strange calm: "Do you know how many Boches I've killed since the war began?" And in the surprised silence which followed, he gave a tally, which was staggeringly significant.

Apart from the professional pride which dictated an air of gaiety, when a visitor arrived, the occupant of the trench did not in his off moments assume the mien of the troubadour. On the contrary, he looked grave and serious, and often austere. It was remarkable that when he went to Paris for a few days' relief from the monotony of danger, he found little enjoyment in the old-time pleasures. And those who had been distinguished for a high thoughtlessness, for an abandonment to the Red Gods, proved hardy and virile warriors in the new life, with a speed that astonished all who had not realised the French adaptability. Frivolous in the days before the war, they now adopted an attitude of disapproval and even of positive disgust towards some outward symptoms of the "light heart."

There was not necessarily opposition between "poilu" and "pekin" (as the civilian is amusingly called by the army), but there was, nevertheless, a gulf fixed between the two: the one had seen visions and experienced realities which were denied the other in his peaceful civilian path. It made all the difference in the world. Whatever his sympathy, the civilian brother had not suffered as had the "poilu"; he had been immune from the hourly risk, he had not endured cold and hunger; he had not lain out in the frosty moonlight, in the No Man's Land of the trenches, terribly wounded by one of the murderous engines of war; he had not known the anguish of mind in hospital, the doubt whether the limb could be saved or not, or whether he must go through life halt and maimed. No, for all his sympathy and moral suffering, the civilian had not reached the experiences of the other.

Reflections of this sort no doubt obtruded on the mind of the soldier in his hours of lonely watch. Sometimes, when echoes of the old life were wafted back to him in the trenches, or when he saw the report in newspapers of some futile discussion in the Chamber, a smile of disdain crossed his lips. Frankly, he was a little tired of this sort of thing. "If the Deputies were here, they would not talk quite so loudly," he reflected with bitterness. And then the headings of another column caught his eye: "Great scandal, a contractor charged with fraud! Huge and hidden profits." "Ah!" he exclaims, and his lips purse again. This time his comments are far severer than against the Parliamentarians. "After all," he says, "those Deputies are paid to talk; it is their business; but the blackguards who make money out of us, out of our lives and limbs----" The phrase is never finished, but the intonation leaves you in no doubt as to the fate of the offenders if they had fallen into his hands. On the following day, perhaps, he sees another scandal of the sort, and now his anger knows no bounds. "What--again? Then they are all at it!" he exclaims. In his excited imagination a considerable part of civilian France is engaged in plundering military France. Happily, there was great exaggeration in his sweeping assumptions. Certainly there were scandals in France during the Great War, as there were scandals elsewhere; but they were few and far between--so few that their rarity magnified their importance.

The soldier's sufferings in the trenches had warped a little his judgment. He was rather hard on others, disregarding their sacrifices and their griefs, none the less real because they had not been exposed to sudden death. The hard work of munition workers turning out shot and shell with ceaseless activity often escaped him, and if, as might happen, he was deceived in his most intimate affections, and a moral catastrophe awaited him at home, then his cup of bitterness was filled, and in his wrath he declared that all women were faithless and all men perjurers and conspirators against his honour or security. And these were the people for whom he was risking his life and sacrificing his professional prospects!

The close union of every day with men engaged in the strong-hearted and ruthless profession of war was bound to have a reaction upon thoughts and ways of life. In the rude existence of camps, something of the veneer of drawing-rooms disappeared and man returned to primitive directness and simplicity of thought and speech. He became impatient of subtlety and complicated ways, which seemed to him duplicity and the enemy of plain-dealing. A thing must be frank and clear to appeal to him. He had the soldier's disgust of those who whispered in secret in the warmth and shelter whilst he was exposed to the blast. A new temperament was forged in the out-of-doors born of the sun and wind and rain. And the thoughts of those who struggle with the elements and the incredible difficulties of a man-made warfare often take on the rugged character of their surroundings.

Directness of manner and speech are hardly looked for in the traditional French, but war as it is to-day, is no school of politeness, but of vigour and energy. A new _naivete_ accompanied the new strength of soul, and one of its manifestations was an art, which at other moments would have astonished by its crudity and garishness. It was visible in the shop-windows, where cards showed the soldier in the trench. Above him, in a luminous break in filmy clouds, appeared the vision of the wife and children gathered about the evening lamp. They were thinking obviously of the absent "papa." Maudlin and mawkish though it was, it appealed to the simple soul. Exile from the social round, from the life of affairs, from the frequentation of cafes and theatres in the small country towns, had affected the mentality of the countryman. This incredible existence of the trenches, with its hairbreadth escapes and daily incidents in which life and death played a tragic game of hide-and-seek, developed such essential manliness and such rough and hearty heroism that the mechanism of the mind reverted to the simplest expression. Before the great and serious question of to be or not to be, the minor aspects of life ceased to have importance. A man dying of hunger does not discuss ortolans or peacocks' tongues, nor do the subtleties of sauce appeal to the meatless. And the soldier of France, divorced from his usual pleasures, and being in no mind to complicate existence, turns to the readiest and simplest forms of literary or pictorial expression to satisfy his emotions: it might be the cinematograph behind the lines, it might be the _feuilleton_ in the halfpenny paper.

No doubt the mass became infected with the peasant spirit, for peasants formed the bulk of the army, especially when the townsman became the munition-worker. The peasant's mind is both childlike and suspicious, slow to anger, secretive, inclined to deep reflection. He attaches himself slowly, and only after long proof, to those who win his reluctant confidence, and deeply tenacious are his purposes. He will defend his land to the death; he loves it as he loves liberty. He insists on his independence as he insists upon equality, and only upon that principle will he submit to discipline. Injustice arouses his intense resentment, and General Gallieni's crusade against the shirker found its deepest roots and efficacy in his tacit recognition.