Chapter V: Part 5

But in that case Alissa would not tragically have died, leaving behind a long train of sterile regret and hopeless memories, and M. Gide would not have composed the frail and spiritual story, which, in its purity and charm, reminds us sometimes of _Dominique_.

CHARLES PÉGUY

When war broke out between Austro-Germany and the Allies, Charles Péguy went to the front as a lieutenant in the reserves of the line and was struck by a ball, or a fragment of shell, on the forehead as he was leading his men into action at the Battle of the Marne. This heroic death fitly crowns a career devoted to the love of country and the gospel of fraternal self-sacrifice.

In its light, I re-read the trivial pages, the feeble half-affectionate pleasantries with which I had saluted the poet and teacher who, no doubt, occasionally abused the privilege which genius sometimes claims to alloy the sublime with the ridiculous--or the merely ultra-lyrical and wearisome. Is it possible that I did not appreciate, in his lifetime, the prophet, the hero, the poet, whom France reveres to-day? I examine my conscience. It is clear that I was not drawn to Péguy in his habit, as he lived.... I see him still. An odd little man with the look of a small farmer from the Loire--a farmer, a village schoolmaster, a country doctor, a curé even--there was something of all that in the refined and yet rather common little man with the bent shoulders, the charming hands, the square jowl, and the deep-set blue eyes whose glance was at once so keen and so gentle, often so quizzical, sometimes so mystically tender, and sometimes so irritable and angry.

‘Un petit homme barbu (said Barrès) un paysan, sobre, poli,
circonspect, défiant et doué du sens de l’amitié, bien campé sur
la terre, et toujours prêt à partir en plein ciel. C’était un
petit homme terne et lent, de qui se dégageait un merveilleux
rayonnement.’

He seemed to me like some preaching friar of the Middle Ages, vowed to Dame Poverty; and, for himself, content with a crust in his wallet,--a wretched living picked up as he went along the roads, yet, where his Order was concerned, insatiable, a relentless beggar for the Love of God. Pitiless to any human hobby or pursuit of yours which did not square with that sublimer hobby and pursuit of his; himself disinterested, and yet in his ardent piety as dauntless an intriguer as any Jesuit of Eugène Sue’s; cordial and frank by fits and starts, with that engaging air of rustic simplicity and popular plain-dealing, yet, on the morrow, infinitely wily, full of craft, subtlety, and innocent guile. I thought him (notwithstanding the mysterious, irradiating kindness which beamed from that wonderful glance of his) on the whole a crotchety creature, ‘difficile à vivre,’ with a temper full of sudden twists and turns and unsuspected asperities.

Admirable he was, nevertheless. Patient as a peasant and courageous as an apostle, wise and witty, bitter and gay, Péguy was full of sense and of charity--was almost that rarest of geniuses, a saint--and failed there (remaining merely a poet and a hero) chiefly, perhaps, because of that insatiable vanity of his. He hungered and thirsted not only after righteousness, but after praise. And in his lifetime he never had his due share of it. That meed so scantily meted I might in some small degree have swelled, and now regret my suspended judgment; but Péguy roughed me up in every fibre, and I disapproved of him almost as much as I admired him. There was something of Rousseau in the fiery little autodidact with his penetrating delicacy of sentiment, and that sore vanity of his as touchy as a gouty foot which always fears the man across the way may stumble on it. When that aching place was hurt, the poet, so exquisite in his sense of friendship, so abundant in his recognition of encouragement, would surprise those most who knew him best by certain restive or morbid quarrels--the blemishes of a too sensitive temperament.

Despite this temperament, which was not great, there was something really great and grand in Péguy. There was in him the most generous passion of rescue--the desire at all risks to rush in and save. The grandeur and misery of Man and his need of salvation was the idea which dominated all his life. Péguy was a mystic; Time was nothing to him, and he was sincere in saying that an act of rescue such as that which cost him his life was worth a career of thirty years. Yes, Péguy was a mystic, and one of the real, the greater race, no romantic idealist, not at all vague or dreamy, but positive and practical and intensely alive to every detail, because every fact in nature (and indeed all the best things in industry and in art) appeared to him, in Meister Eckhart’s phrase, ‘the words of God,’ and therefore infinitely precious and important. One day that his friend and mine, Daniel Halévy, that subtle and yet substantial critic, found him reading Dante’s _Paradiso_, in view of a certain Mystery he meant to write: Le Propre de l’Espérance (and the part, the lot, of Hope is Paradise), M. Halévy asked the audacious poet if those whirling worlds of Dante’s and all those whorls of singing aureoled angels did not inspire him with at least a certain vertigo? ‘Not at all,’ replied Péguy. ‘My Paradise will be quite different.’

‘“Il y aura dans mon Paradis des choses réelles.... Toutes les
cathédrales.” ... Et il faisait avec les deux mains le geste d’y
poser quelque chose. “Je les y mettrai.”’

And in fact (continues M. Halévy in the letter from which I am quoting) Péguy would have admitted to his Paradise, not only the great Cathedrals, but anything perfect in its own peculiar sphere. For instance, he adduces:--

‘this ink with which I am writing to you, which indeed was Péguy’s
ink, made of the oak, coal-black, indelible; and his pens--they too
would have gone into his Paradise, certainly, all his pens! You
have understood I am sure; Péguy extends the future life, not only
to souls and sentiments, but to all that has achieved existence;
a resurrection not only of the flesh but of the things made,
cherished, and perfected by man on earth.’

It was more or less Swedenborg’s Paradise. In Péguy’s eyes the soul vivified and transfigured and made alive all that it touched. Hence his utter incomprehension of all attempts to examine matter that the soul had _not_ transfigured, his withering contempt for science and scientists, the scorn he would pour on those miserable insects, the ‘puissants millepieds’ of the University, in their laboratories and archives:--

‘Et ce ne sera pas ces distingués cloportes
Qui viendront nous chercher dans notre enterrement....
Et ce ne sera pas par leur usage externe
Que nous nous lèverons de notre pourriture;
Mais la Foi qui nous sauve et seule nous discerne
Saura nous retrouver dans la fange et l’ordure.’
(_Eve._)

What discussions I have had with Daniel Halévy concerning the final value of this poem of _Eve_, whose mighty jog-trot extends interminably over a length which exceeds the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_ together! My friend, to whose opinion I attach the greatest weight, insists on ranking Péguy with Victor Hugo for poetry and with Rabelais for prose! And no doubt he emphasises his expressions in order to spur my tranquil spirit to the fray. Indeed the incitement never yet failed of its effect; I rush to the encounter; sometimes, at the point of the bayonet, M. Halévy recedes from his position as regards Victor Hugo; but he maintains unshaken that comparison with the creator of Pantagruel.

Well, all that is vain; Péguy now will never fill his measure. His monument is a broken column, like those we see in cemeteries. In these brief passages of recollection, I may not even stay to point out the extraordinary design and intention of that monument; nor to quote that prose, surely unlike any other prose, which creeps up, wave after wave, with infinite repetitions and over-lappings, until, like the tide on the strand, it has submerged and sucked in all the subject it meant to cover. How, in two words, could I give an idea of that style?

Péguy is a great prose writer, a wonderful wielder of image and trope, a master juggler with all the intricacies of French syntax. And the nation which produced Agrippa d’Aubigné, Pascal, Voltaire, has always loved the prose of a brisk polemic. The prose works of Péguy are due to polemics. And he lays into his enemy with a dexterity, a surety, a variety of attack unrivalled--here a shower of swift and sudden blows, there a slow and paralysing envelopment of the adversary. Péguy is an incomparable wrestler.

For the rest, shall we say that Péguy was the Walt Whitman of France? Shall we translate him into English under the name of Carlyle--or even W. E. Henley? There was something of all of them in the irascible, quizzical, and lovable idealist whose life was one long struggle against conventional standards and a conventional style; against middle-class prosperity, modern commodities (generally ‘tout le confort moderne’); against the preferences of a well-to-do democracy; against also, and no less, Parliamentary ideals; documentary historical methods and culture; and, compendiously and inclusively, all that is political as opposed to mystical, all that is temporal as opposed to spiritual, all that is matter as opposed to soul, all that is personal as opposed to general, and, one may add by extension, all that is rich as opposed to all that is honourably, contentedly, and modestly poor.

With these dispositions it is natural that Péguy should have begun life as a Socialist. Born of humble stock in 1874 (on those prosperous banks of Loire where the humblest have all things pleasant and comely about them, and are themselves men of a slow, wise wit and kindly culture) Péguy rose from class to class, from board school to training college, until at twenty he found himself at the University of Paris, one of the future glories of the École Normale. In the old house of the Rue d’Ulm he wrote his first poem, _Jeanne d’Arc_ (for already this son of Orleans was possessed by the memory of the Maid), of which the singular dedication reflects not only his young ideas of fraternal democracy, but that extraordinary tide-like style, creeping on inch by inch, wave by wave, until it submerge the whole ground of the matter, which Paris, in later days, was so often to admire, to praise, or to deride:--

‘À toutes celles et à tous ceux qui auront vécu,

À tout celles et à tous ceux qui seront morts pour tâcher de porter
remède au mal universel;

En particulier,

‘À toutes celles et à tous ceux qui auront vécu leur vie humaine,

À toutes celles et à tous ceux qui seront morts de leur mort
humaine, pour tâcher de porter remède au mal universel humain.

‘Parmi eux,

À toutes celles et à tous ceux qui auront vécu leur vie humaine,

À toutes celles et à tous ceux qui seront mort de leur mort humaine
pour l’établissement de la République Socialiste universelle,
ce poème est dédié.

Prenne à présent sa part de la dédicace qui voudra!’

‘Tâcher de porter remède au mal universel humain’: To attempt to ease the universal disease of humanity! All Péguy is there! As time went on, he ceased to believe in the establishment of the universal Socialist Republic; and, indeed, although ineradicably attached to the Republican ideal, he became increasingly anti-radical, anti-democratic, almost tending towards the military, and aristocratic theory of a State strongly constituted in definite classes, each respectable, respected, and informed with the same sense of national honour and personal self-sacrifice. But Péguy went back on no word of that early dedication. He simply made over, so to speak, his stock in the universal Socialist Republic to the credit of the Catholic Church. For before Claudel, before Francis Jammes, after Brunetière (or we should rather say along with him) Péguy suffered a conversion to the faith of his fathers.

Yet such was his respect for the individual conscience, that he continued, in the eyes of the Church, to live in sin. His wife, the daughter of a Socialist, was a Free-thinker; she had never been baptized; she had married Péguy before the Mayor of her Commune and not before the priest of her parish; she had not followed him in his conversion and still maintained her rights. Péguy, that arch-persuader, could not shake her. And, since the indissolubility of the marriage-tie was the very cornerstone of Péguy’s social doctrine, he continued to live with this free-souled woman, who shared his life but not his faith, in an unblessed union, that the Church condemned; his children were not baptized. Rome bade him bring them into her fold. Péguy, in his pride of _pater-familias_, upheld his claim to consider the convictions of their mother. Deprived of the sacraments, he ceased to go to Church, while still continuing to believe and pray.... Anti-clerical and ardently Catholic; tenderly preoccupied with his children’s welfare and yet accepting for them that which his new-found creed must have made him conceive as the most dreadful risk of all--such was the stubborn and irascible convert whom the Church honours in his death, but whom in his lifetime she covered with reprimands and ardent reproaches.

Such was Péguy in his life--an enigmatic being; nor was he less difficult to appreciate in his art, which attempts to enlarge our sensibility and quicken our moral vision much in the same way as instantaneous photography has increased and instructed our sense of sight. I am the first to concede that this art of his (which proceeds, perhaps, rather from Dostoievski than from any great French tradition) appears, in its disconcerting diversity, as one of the most interesting phenomena of a new age. It is full of audacity, interest, genius, adventure. But is it an art? Let us open any page of Péguy and take at random a charming page, where the book opens, p. 63 of the _Porche de la Deuxième Vertu_:--

‘Et pourtant on est si fier d’avoir des enfants!

(Mais les hommes ne sont pas jaloux):

Et de les voir manger, et de les voir grandir.

Et le soir de les voir dormir comme des anges.

Et de les embrasser le matin et le soir et à midi.

Juste au milieu des cheveux.

Quand ils baissent innocemment la tête comme un poulain qui baisse
le tête.

Aussi souples comme un poulain, se jouant comme un poulain.

Aussi souples du cou et de la nuque. Et de tout le corps, et du dos.

Comme une tige bien souple et bien montante d’une plante vigoureuse.

D’une jeune plante.

Comme la tige même de la montante espérance!

Ils courbent le dos en riant comme un jeune, comme un beau poulain,
et le cou, et la nuque, et toute la tête.

Pour présenter au père, au baiser du père, juste le milieu de la
tête.

Le milieu de la tête, la naissance, l’origine, le point d’origine
des cheveux.

Ce point, juste au milieu de la tête, ce centre, d’où tous les
cheveux partent en tournant, en rond, en spirale.

Ça les amuse ainsi.

Ils s’amusent tout le temps.’

The volume, the sensitiveness, the stammering reiteration, the precision, the tenderness, the subtlety of Péguy are all in this passage. One would say an artist of genius, afflicted with general paralysis, attempting to describe a miraculous vision. And he is telling us that a father kisses his small boy on the crown of his cropped little pate. And this passage of Péguy’s is no more extraordinary than any other passage of Péguy’s on any other possible subject. Imagine Walt Whitman turned a Christian mystic and endowed with ten thousand times his original flux of words.

And now, having relieved my soul, having put the accent on this intolerable defect of our poet’s--and it is almost, to my thinking, a redhibitory vice--let me turn to his bright side and discover what it is that attracts to him so many and such distinguished admirers.

It is, first of all, a touch on the canvas, a liquid and a living palette, an animation and abundance of composition which, in his too rare happy moments, suggest some large and brilliant sketch of the school of Rubens. Take the opening quatrains of the poem to which I have referred; let us open _Eve_:--

‘Ô mère ensevelie hors du premier jardin
Vous n’avez plus connu ce climat de la grâce,
Et la vasque et la source et la haute terrasse,
Et le premier soleil sur le premier matin.

‘Et les bondissements de la biche et du daim
Nouant et dénouant leur course fraternelle,
Et courant et sautant et s’arrêtant soudain
Pour mieux commémorer leur vigueur éternelle.’

There is, in Péguy at his best, something not so much antique as unchanged since ancient times, like the pronunciation of certain peasants; and this something makes us understand how there once was in France a people of artists, the unknown, unnamed, immortal builders of the great Gothic cathedrals; we almost believe there might still be such in reading his verse.

There is also in Péguy at his best a peculiar humanity which makes me often remember those lines of Mrs Browning concerning her favourite Greek poet:--

‘Our Euripides the Human
With his droppings of warm tears,’

and an imagination so naturally and naïvely religious that it would enchant me but for its familiarity. No Baptist minister over his tea and muffins, is on more intimate terms with the Eternal.

The interminable poem of _Eve_ (as long--but not as beautiful! as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ united) fulminates against the Intellectuals of France in an outburst of rhetoric which too often degenerates into mere violence. Péguy is more really poetic in his prose. The description of rural life on the banks of the Loire, in _Victor-Marie_, _Comte Hugo_; the death of Bernard Lazare in _Notre Jeunesse_; above all, the long but the inspired elevations and prayers of Jeannette--especially the conversation with her little fourteen-year-old friend Hanorette (which we keep in our remembrance along with the dialogue of Antigone and Ismene, and with the scene in the Gospel of Martha and Mary, as a perfect characterisation of the two great types of Charity and Piety)--are to our thinking far more interpretative of Péguy’s true genius than the mighty jog-trot of his later muse. Still there is a power and an eloquence in that. So far as the meaning goes, all his voluminous outpourings have the same. There is but one thing needful, and that is to be a hero or a saint. Preferably, perhaps, a hero!

‘Ainsi Dieu ne sait pas, ainsi le divin maître
Ne sait quel retenir et placer hors du lieu,
Et pour lequel tenir, et s’il faut vraiment mettre
L’amour de la patrie après l’amour de Dieu.’

The saints that Péguy sang were patriot saints: Geneviève, who preserved the city of Paris from the Huns of Attila; Jeanne, who hunted the English out of France. Of all glories, of all honours, that dearest to this poet was military glory and national honour--

‘Il n’y a rien à faire à cela, et il n’y a rien à dire. Le soldat
mesure la quantité de terre où on parle une langue, où règnent des
mœurs, un esprit, une âme, un culte, une race. Le soldat mesure la
quantité de terre où une âme peut respirer. Le soldat mesure la
quantité de terre où un peuple ne meurt pas.

This was Péguy’s firm conviction: no duty so important as the military duty! When the war broke out, man of forty as he was and father of a struggling family--man, too, much engrossed and overworked by his triple occupation as poet, prose-writer, and publisher--he changed from the Territorials into a regiment sent on active service to the front. ‘No man hath greater love than this....’

Thanks to the recital of one of his soldiers, Victor Bondon, we can witness the fall--or rather I would say the assumption--of the poet and brother of Joan of Arc. For he too fell in driving the invader out of France! There is an extraordinary breath of heroism in this page of an unknown private soldier relating the end of a great man. I cannot do better than translate it here, with some abridgments and suppressions:--

‘On the 5th September in the morning, the 55th division of the army
of Paris was ranged on the left of the forces which had received
the general order, “Die where you stand, rather than retreat.”
In front of us, on the wooded hills that reach from Dammartin to
Meaux, von Klück and his Boches, who had followed us step by step
from Roye during our terrible retreat, lay in wait for us, hidden
in their trenches, like beasts of prey.

‘The heat was tropical; the battalion halted a moment at the pretty
village of Nantouillet. I see again, with the mind’s eye, our dear
Lieutenant Péguy, seated on a stone, white with dust (as indeed
we all were), covered with sweat, his beard rough and shaggy, his
eyes shining behind his pince-nez. Such he was, as we had seen
him in Lorraine during the retreat, impervious to fatigue, brave
under a storm of shells, going from one to another of his men
with a cheering word for each throughout the whole length of our
company (the 19th), sharing our rations (and we eat as a rule one
day in three), never complaining despite his forty years, as young
as the youngest, knowing just the right way to take the Parisians
that we were, heartening the discouraged with a word, satirical
enough sometimes, but more often a friendly quizzical quip, always
brave, always an example; ah, yes! I see again our dear lieutenant,
bidding us fight in hope, raising our flagging spirits in an hour
when many were near despairing, with the assurance of his own
absolute confidence in our final victory.’

‘At last the sun began to slope towards evening; it was five
o’clock. After four hours’ incessant fire, our 75’s had silenced
the Prussian batteries on the ridge, and the infantry were ordered
to attack their entrenchments. The black troops from Morocco, in
what had seemed an invincible rush, had tried once, and failed. Now
Péguy’s company starts in skirmishing order; the German batteries
are quiet, but when our men reach the ridge they are greeted by a
storm of bullets. The ground is covered with tangled, down-trodden
oats that catch the feet; and in front, just on a level with
their heads, that burst of fire. Péguy’s voice, ringing and glad,
commands the assault: “Feu! En avant!...”

‘Ah! cette fois c’est fini de rire. Escaladant le talus et
rasant le sol, courbés en deux, pour offrir moins de prise aux
balles, nous courons à l’assaut.... Le capitaine Guérin, M. de la
Cornillière, sont tués raides, “Couchez-vous (hurle Péguy) et feu
à volonté!” mais lui-même reste debout, la lorgnette à la main,
dirigeant notre tir, héroïque dans l’enfer.

‘Nous tirons comme des enragés, noirs de poudre, le fusil nous
brûlant les doigts.... Péguy est toujours debout, malgré nos cris
de “Couchez-vous,” glorieux fou dans sa bravoure. Le plupart
d’entre nous n’ont plus de sac, perdu lors de la retraite, et le
sac, en ce moment, est un précieux abri. Et la voix du lieutenant
crie toujours: “Tirez! Tirez! Nom de Dieu!” D’aucuns se plaignent:
“Nous n’avons plus de sac, mon lieutenant, nous allons tous y
passer!” “Ça ne fait rien! (crie Péguy dans la tempête qui siffle).
Moi non plus! Je n’en ai pas, vous voyez. Tirez toujours!” Et il
se dresse comme un défi à la mitraille, semblant appeler cette
mort qu’il glorifiait dans ses vers. Au même instant, une balle
meurtrière fracasse la tête de ce héros, brise ce front généreux
et noble. Il est tombé, sans un cri, ayant eu l’ultime vision de
la victoire proche; et quand, cent mètres plus loin, bondissant
comme un forcené, je jette derrière moi un rapide coup d’œil
alarmé, j’aperçois là-bas, comme une tache noire au milieu de tant
d’autres, le corps de ce brave, de notre cher lieutenant.’

And here for a threnody let me quote that noble psalm, now familiar to the soldiers of France, which, until Péguy’s death, lay hidden in that vast storehouse of lumber and treasure, the poem of _Eve_. Be sure it will remain for ever among the ultimate residue--the pure regulus--of all that has been written on the war. And these stanzas were written before the battle was declared, since Péguy (and therein lies his true grandeur) was a prophet rather than a poet.

‘Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre charnelle,
Mais pourvu que ce fut dans une juste guerre;
Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour quatre coins de terre,
Heureux ceux qui sont morts d’une mort solennelle.

‘Heureux ceux qui sont morts dans les grandes batailles,
Couchés dessus le sol à la face de Dieu;
Heureux ceux qui sont morts sur un dernier haut lieu
Parmi tout l’appareil des grandes funérailles.

‘Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour des cités charnelles.
Car elles sont le corps de la cité de Dieu;
Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour leur âtre et leur feu
Et les pauvres honneurs des maisons paternelles.

‘Heureux ceux qui sont morts, car ils sont retournés
Dans la première argile et la première terre;
Heureux ceux qui sont morts dans une juste guerre;
Heureux les épis mûrs et les blés moissonnés!’

‘Qui Dieu mette avec eux dans le juste plateau
Ce qu’ils ont tant aimé: quelques grammes de terre;
Un peu de cette vigne, un peu de ce coteau.
Un peu de ce ravin sauvage et solitaire.

‘Mère, voici vos fils qui se sont tant battus!
Qu’ils ne soient pas pesés comme Dieu pèse un ange:
Que Dieu mette avec eux un peu de cette fange
Qu’ils étaient en principe et sont redevenus....’

And, as we say a collect after singing an anthem, let us conclude, in memory of all those heroic comrades that fell with Péguy in the battle, with a noble passage from his _Mystery of the Holy Innocents_:--

‘Une génération d’hommes (dit Dieu).

‘Une promotion, c’est comme une belle longue vague qui s’avance
d’un bout à l’autre sur un même front et qui d’un seul coup d’un
bout à l’autre.

‘Toute ensemble déferle sur le rivage de la mer.

‘Ainsi une génération, une promotion, est une vague d’hommes.

‘Tout ensemble elle s’avance sur un même front.

‘Et toute ensemble elle s’écroule comme une muraille d’eau quand
elle touche au rivage éternel.’

Thus Péguy died with the generation that he led to victory.[1]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I refer those of my readers, who wish to learn more of Péguy, to my friend Daniel Halévy’s volume: _Charles Péguy et les Cahiers de la Quinzaine_, Payot et Cie, Paris, 1919.

ERNEST PSICHARI

I think that Péguy never learned the death of his young friend, Ernest Psichari; for the retreat of Charleroi was, after all, such a little while before the battle of the Marne, and news in those difficult days travelled so slowly.... One of Péguy’s last preoccupations was the hope of meeting Ernest on the road to battle, and in fact they must have been in Lorraine together, but no chance encounter by road or rail set the two friends face to face. They both started for the front in the same mood of heroic exaltation:--

‘Si je tombe (said Péguy), ne me pleurez pas. Ce que je vais faire vaut trente ans de travail.’

But the first to fall was Ernest Psichari. I knew him root and branch--knew his parents and grandparents before him, and the earliest image that I preserve of him (since the first of all are forgotten) is of a little lad between eight and nine years of age, unaware of my presence in his grandmother’s drawing-room, as he talks to his little brother in the twilight: ‘When I am grown up (says Ernest) I shall be a great man! Et j’aurai ma statue sur tous les marchés de France!’ And the little one of seven ripples with laughter at Ernest’s having so satisfactorily ‘gone one better’: ‘Il y a du chemin à faire, mon frère! (says he). Il y a bien de chemin à faire!’ Whereat I too laughed and broke the spell, the two little boys informing me that, while waiting for their violin-lesson, ‘on s’amusait à raconter des blagues.’

Even in Ernest’s fun there was a desire of greatness; that, and an intense sensibility, a rare faculty of moral imagination, were what I chiefly noticed in the child, of whom I saw less and less as his studies absorbed him more and more: youths between twelve and twenty have little time for their mother’s friends. A quiet young man, with charming, living eyes, and in his whole aspect something ardent, firm, and grave: that is all that Ernest Psichari was to me.

And then came a bolt from the blue. It was on the morrow of the Dreyfus case when France was divided into two camps, and each faction feverishly counted its men and the great families which centralised these men on either side. As Daniel Halévy wrote, in a passage already celebrated: ‘Paris a ses familles comme Florence eut les siennes, et ses maisons, non couronnées de tours, n’en abritent pas moins des factions guerrières.’ Ernest was born into one of these houses--one of the most important to the Liberals--for those grandparents of his (both dead before that shock of schism shook France to her foundations), those grandparents of whom I have written, were Ernest Renan and his wife. And his father was Jean Psichari, a Greek philologist of most ‘advanced’ opinions. It came, therefore, almost as a defection, an apostasy, when the rumour spread in the ruffled circles of the Dreyfusards that Ernest Psichari had gone into the Army--that Renan’s grandson, at nineteen, had enlisted as a volunteer in the Colonial Artillery.

Although myself a Dreyfusard with the best of them, I could not feel hurt by this change of front, which seemed to me just the counterpart of Renan’s own conversion. Given a young man with a passion for justice, the more you treat him as a partisan, the more his mind, by some dim process of unconscious cerebration, will conjure up the arguments for the other side. Besides Renan, although he gave his casting vote to the Liberals, exhaled often an exquisite regret in his vision of the other side. He finally voted for Caliban; but few writers have set forth more nobly the arguments for the aristocratic ideal. Renan’s mind was singularly full. Imagine a pair of scales, either balance heaped high,--even the lighter of them was filled with more reasons to believe, to rule, and to conquer than many a fanatic could furnish forth; it is true the reasons for doubting turned the scale. The man who sacrificed everything to Truth and Liberty was just the man to understand the young apostle of Force and Faith; he too had felt the spell of Force and Faith! Ernest Psichari--grave, straightforward, active, patient--represented the France of to-day in its modern cult of sacrifice and duty, even as the grandsire stood for his own generation. The symbols are different, but the character is much the same--a like curiosity, an equal contempt for worldly goods and mundane honours, a conviction that life is worth living only when employed in some vast impersonal service. The wise Merlin of the Nineteenth Century would have smiled: ‘ah! cher enfant, combien vous avez raison!’

‘Le fils a pris le parti de ses pères contre son père’; so Ernest himself defined the situation in his _Appel des Armes_. Just as his Breton ancestors, curious of the vast world on the other side the seas, most incurious of worldly advancement, would sail the world over in the Service of the State, before the mast, seamen content with the salt air and their duty, so this grandson of theirs spent five years with his cannon in the Congo, a non-commissioned officer. When at twenty-four years of age he returned to Paris, he could scarcely understand why his friends pressed him to enter a school for officers. ‘One can serve the country as well in the ranks; one is perhaps more useful!’ But he yielded to his mother--to her, indeed, he always yielded.

How I regret that during those eighteen months which the young soldier spent at Versailles, in order to obtain his brevet of second-lieutenant, I remained unaware of his presence in France! Péguy has left an eloquent description of his friend and young alumnus, telling how he lived like a king in the palace of the École Militaire, but a step from the dome of the Invalides whither in the summer mornings, in the freshness of the dawn, he used to escort his slender little three-inch cannon--‘ses 75, ces petits jeunes gens de canons modernes, ces gringalets de canons modernes, au corps d’insecte, aux roues comme des pattes d’araignées’--filing them off under the shadow of the monstrous historic artillery of the great Pensioners’ Hospital, the cannon of Fontenoy and Malplaquet, bronze mastodons and leviathans of an earlier age. I can imagine Ernest, ‘l’homme au regard pur’ (as Péguy calls him); I can see him, a young Hippolytus of the School of War, in my mind’s eye--but I did not see him in the world of facts. Before I learned of his presence in my neighbourhood he had left--he and his battery--for the deserts of Mauritania, and there, in the desolate tropical country that lies between the burning plains of Senegal and the sands of the Sahara, he spent three happy years. He sent home a little book--_Terres de soleil et de sommeil_--which marked the awakening of his literary gift; but the real event of those three years, for Ernest, was his ardent conversion to the Catholic Church. Ernest was a mystic; the only life possible to his insatiable heart was the spiritual life; and in the Sacraments he sought that assurance of a world beyond our own, in constant communication with our own, which other minds may find by other means. His fervour, his faith, was henceforth a remedy for all his sins and all his sorrows; and, young as he was, he had had his sorrows--doubtless, also, his sins.

It was, I think, in the end of 1912 that Ernest left that immense and mortal splendour of the Sahara and came back to France, bringing with him a short military novel, _L’Appel des Armes_, which (coming after Péguy’s elaborate pæan) received, on its publication in 1913, an honourable, a more than honourable, welcome.... I was one of the welcomers. Few things are pleasanter to the hoary critic than the _éclosion_ of a fresh young talent, and naturally all the more when that talent flowers on a dear familiar stem. On this occasion I renewed my long-interrupted friendship with the young author, and we promised ourselves a more frequent communication of our ideas. Fate however, decided otherwise. Ernest and his battery were sent to the cliffs of Cherbourg. And, a year later the great war began....

Thus it happens that Ernest Psichari’s fame must rest on three small volumes, of which the finest by far appeared after his death--that _Voyage du Centurion_, which is the unforgettable record of a mystic’s conversion in the blazing African desert. There is less genius and less force in this earlier, tiny volume called _l’Appel des Armes_, so full of inexperience, of an ardent evident _parti-pris_, but also of a sincerity, a living sensibility, a moral earnestness such that I would recommend it to the English reader (and I am sure there are many such) puzzled by the great spirit, the heroic steadfastness that the French have shown in this war, for which he finds little warrant in the ‘yellow-backs’ on his table. Among many others, this brief record of the mind and conscience of a young French officer is a _document à l’appui_ of no mean value. It relates the story of a youth of twenty who turns from the Radical, humanitarian views of his father, the village schoolmaster, to find salvation (for it is, in his case, really a sort of religious conversion, a change of heart) as a soldier in Africa. And the reader will remark here--as also in the last novels of Émile Nolly--an almost mystical view of military matters recalling the recent German theories.

‘“Croyez bien,” répondait Nangès, “que la force est toujours du
côté du droit.”

‘L’instituteur se récriait:--

‘“Mais certainement,” expliquait Timothée. “Qu’est-ce que la
force? C’est l’intelligence, la ténacité, c’est la patience, c’est
l’habileté, c’est la courage, c’est la volonté. Voilà, Vincent, les
facteurs de la force. Voilà les fibres du tissu. Ne croyez-vous pas
qu’avec toutes les vertus qui la composent, la force n’a pas de
grandes chances d’avoir toujours le droit pour elle?”

‘Naturellement, Vincent ne comprenait pas.’

(_L’Appel des Armes_, p. 84.)

Alas, how soon were events to show our young neophyte that intelligence, that tenacity--that patience, ingenuity, courage, force of will--that the most indisputable military qualities may be associated with inhuman, with indeed a devilish perversity! But Ernest did not live long enough to learn all the ripe iniquity of his enemy. He fell in the very beginning of the war, at Rossignol, on the frontiers of Luxembourg, midway between Virton and Montmédy--quite close to Sedan, in fact; and the Germans thought to make another great haul there.... The fight at Rossignol was a sort of southern branch of that terrible battle of Charleroi which no living European can ever forget. The French Headquarters, perceiving the ruse and danger of the enemy’s plan, set on the low hill of Rossignol some twelve thousand men, with orders to hold the heights to the last man and shield the road beneath where the French troops were passing in one constant stream; and the men who died there were not less heroic than those of Thermopylæ. Twelve thousand, they were; and I am told that scarce one of them survived.... A few are prisoners of war in Germany. Picked men, famous regiments, the nearest thing the French possessed to our time-hardened professional soldiers, for they were the Colonial Infantry and Artillery. The batteries were set up, and then the storm began. They fought all day--thirteen hours--against more than a hundred thousand Germans, holding the passage (one cannot call it a pass, for the hills there are too low), and, towards evening, they saw on the horizon a moving gray mass, and thought for a moment that this meant reinforcements. Oh, despair! they were German reinforcements! I say, despair! for such a feeling indeed fills my breast at reading of this supreme deception; but the young officer who gave this account to Psichari’s mother, affirms that even then (feeling how useful was the part they played) not despair but a noble exhilaration was the intimate feeling of those heroes on the hill. At last the German army, creeping steadily nearer, and distant now by no more than thirty metres, prepared to take the last irreducible French batteries by assault. At this moment Lieutenant X saw Ernest Psichari lead his Captain, grievously wounded, to the _poste de secours_, immediately returning to face the enemy. He came on with that quick half-racing, half-dancing step which the soldiers call the ‘pas gymnastique,’ on his face a bright excited smile, and ran with this springing gait to his battery, standing there a moment, still smiling, as he watched the oncoming mass. And then he fell right across his cannon--slipped heavily to the ground; a ball in the temple had shattered that young head, so full of dreams.

‘Pourtant, dans sa grande peine, une consolation lui venait. Car
il croyait que le sang des martyrs était utile. Sa conviction
était que rien n’est perdu dans le monde, que tout se reporte et
se retrouve au total; ainsi tous les actes sublimes des héros
formaient pour lui une sorte de capital commun dont les intérêts se
reversaient obscurément sur des milliers d’âmes inconnues.’

(_L’Appel des Armes_, pp. 295-296.)

And the blood of the martyrs is the seed of Faith.

ÉMILE NOLLY

No man had welcomed the war with greater enthusiasm than Captain Détanger: he wrote under the pseudonym of Émile Nolly. I was not in Paris on that August morning when he left for Lorraine, eager (he said) ‘to water his horse in the Rhine.’ But I had bidden him good speed a few years ago, when he set out for Morocco. Shall I ever forget the transfiguration of that moody, noble, saturnine face? or the gleam in the great light-gray eyes, so often sad, or even morose, and now lit with a wild joy? or the tall, lithe figure--striding feverishly up and down my little drawing room while, in a torrent of eloquence, the Captain tried to explain to my languid feminine imagination (which can only look on, and listen, and gasp in amazement) ‘la joie du combat!’ That campaign in Morocco brought him chiefly fatigue and disappointment, since he and his black troops had little fighting to do, and were chiefly employed in convoying from sandy desert to sandy desert the provisions and munitions needed on the front. It brought him also, however, the material for a fine book--a fine, bitter, disenchanted, weary yet energetic book, eminently characteristic of its writer--_Gens de Guerre an Maroc_.

One of his three fine books! It was not those, however, which brought him the celebrity, almost the fame, on which he was entering when he fell in battle. The ardent soul of Détanger had thrown his talent overboard, as a wandering apostle might fling from his wallet some useless bauble and go on unencumbered save by his staff and scrip. His last two books, the famous ones--_Le Chemin de la Victoire_ and _Le Conquérant_--have indeed little literary grace and no sort of style; they are like those varnished Images d’Epinal in cut-out coloured paper which bring to the humblest cottage a sort of symbol of the wars of Napoleon, of the glories of Turenne; or again, like the Stations of the Cross in some wayside church. They preach a truth so august, and in the author’s eyes so necessary to salvation, that art is of little consequence, the one thing needful being to make the meaning plain. That meaning was the same in each: the saving grace of the Army, and the glorious fact that any young ne’er-do-well, any weak dilettante creature even, so he be brave and willing to consent to discipline, may find a personal salvation there, while building a bulwark of glory round his country.

I never really ventured to tell Émile Nolly what I thought of those books, so I said nothing about them--a language which he perfectly understood and accepted with that grim, not untender smile of his. No one better than he knew the charm of art and romance. And I imagine he felt a certain fierce pleasure in flinging all that to the winds, in order, as he thought, to be more useful, reach a wider public, and influence it with the directness of a popular sermon. What use, after all, was there in his two stories of Indo-China, or in _Gens de Guerre au Maroc_? They were inclined, if anything, to inspire a morbid pessimism. On the whole, it is the first of his novels which I shall most often re-read--_Hiên le Maboul_, a book so poignant, clear and mild in its sadness, that it haunts our imagination for years after the last page is closed. No one, perhaps, has so well expressed the peculiar beauty of Tonquin.... When, after Egypt, Aden, Ceylon, the Frenchman reaches the Delta, his first instinctive expectation is of something stranger still; are we not here at the end of the world?

‘χθονὸς μεν ἐς τηλoυρὸν ἠκoμεν πέδoν,
Σκύθην ἔς oῖμoν, ἂβατον εἰς ἒρημίαν.’

But what is this gray land where the silvery winter sunshine floats veiled by an imperceptible haze? Is it Brittany? Or a misty March day in the _Landes_, when the sun shines? And see, that ruined tower set on the round breast of a hill, with the far-off scaurs and peaks in the background--is it Auvergne? Nor, in the character of the conquered people, does there appear at first the difference that separates the Frenchman from the solemn Arab or the barbarous Kanak; the Annamite, with his wide intelligence, his keen and quizzical wit, his love of hearth and home, his respect for tradition and his religious indifference, appears at once a man and a brother. A certain aloofness adds to his charm.... Such was the new and yet half-familiar world with which Émile Nolly made us acquainted. _Hiên le Maboul_ is a yellow brother of Loti’s _Mon frère Yves_.

And yet, on reopening the charming book (so appealing in its tender hopelessness, its elegant sobriety), I find, even here, the Pragmatist apostle who wrote Nolly’s later works! For what is the nexus of the novel? It is surely the despair of the young French lieutenant when he finds himself impotent to save the native _tirailleur_ who, in an hour of moral anguish, comes to ask his infallible superior ‘les paroles qui guérissent.’ Alas, with all his science, the ‘Ancestor with the two stripes’ does not know the words that save; his philosophy affords him nothing but idle formulas void of faith and healing. And thenceforth his whole system of civilisation seems to him wanting and inefficacious. For Hiên goes out in silence and hangs himself to a banyan-tree.

Since then Nolly had learned the words that save. He was, I think, no ardent Catholic, like Psichari or Péguy; but his faith in the destinies of human society, his conviction that the army of France is indeed a Salvation Army, not only for Frenchmen, but for his dear Senegalese, for black, red, and yellow--every shade of skin or soul--gave him the persuasiveness of the men of Napoleon’s army. And he went out into the highways and the by-ways and compelled them to come in.

And now these young men--so much younger than I, who sit by my lonely fire and remember them--these young men with a future, as it seemed, are all dead for their country and for the faith that was in them. Their bodies lie in wayside tombs, or in the middle of the fields, with a rough cross over them, and a name traced in ink that the autumn rains efface. And that name, which was beginning to shine in the literary record of their nation, that name which they looked to burnish in the course of the next thirty years, can now receive no further lustre. From the personal, individualist point of view, their fame is sacrificed, even as their lives are sacrificed. They are mulcted in their works, as in their race, for, among them all, only Péguy was a father. And, so far as they knew, their immense suffering and sacrifice was in vain. They lie, perhaps, among those dreadful heaps which the shell at once agglomerates and scatters, and from which all individual difference is wiped out. So many of them!

The saddest fate of all, I think, was Émile Nolly’s--to die so slowly and so painfully of his wounds, in hospital, while the fight in which he longed to join was raging, still undecided.

HENRI BARBUSSE

Before the war, the name of Henri Barbusse was practically unknown. And now he is, of all French writers, the most widely read: he is the Prince of Best-sellers. Bourget has his tens of thousands, his scores of thousands; but _Le Feu_ is in its 250th thousand, _L’Enfer_ in its 200th thousand, and _Clarté_ (published in January, 1919) had reached its fortieth thousand by the beginning of March. And all these novels have appeared in war time, despite the endless difficulties of book-production.

What is the reason of this prodigious success? How is it that Barbusse, who was an unknown young poet in 1913, should satisfy to-day the souls of so vast a public. One may say that he has inherited the immense unsatisfied public left desolate since the death of Zola. He has most of Zola’s qualities, imagination; a tragic realism that impresses an image lastingly on the reader’s brain; and a sort of public passion, rather than public spirit, that makes him feel other men’s grievances and wrongs more keenly than his own. Moreover, he has all Zola’s faults--and they are of a kind that do not prejudice the sale of a book--he has Zola’s filth, his sexual obsession; Zola’s anarchism, and his Utopias; Zola’s abuse of horror in the evocation of physical torture.

_L’Enfer_, M. Barbusse’s first great success, is a really bad book! a far worse book, I think, than _Pot-bouille_, with which it invites comparison. Zola showed us an ordinary Paris mansion, or system of ‘flats,’ and, taking off the roof Asmodeus-wise, revealed on every floor the iniquities it contained, and by so doing the novelist sought to demonstrate the corruption of society in its actual form. His earnestness to some extent redeemed his foulness. And the same holds good of Barbusse. But how miserable is his treatment of the theme. He imagines a respectable boarding-house a kind of Maison Vauquer of a less dilapidated sort. The narrator is one of the boarders. In his wall, a cleft or crevice in a panel puts his bedroom into unsuspected communication with the chamber on the other side. He looks and listens; and what goes on under his spyhole is the unsavoury theme of the volume tersely called: Hell. Debauch, despair, adultery, death, birth; at one moment the consultation of two doctors on a case of cancer; at another, the vigil beside a corpse; such are the things discovered by the peephole of an undreamed-of witness. They are described with a luxury of nastiness which suggests some medical student afflicted with erotomania. He spies upon lust; he prys into the last spasms of pain; his mind is unbalanced. And we imagine him saying to himself, ‘Oh, I’ll make your flesh creep and your blood run cold!’ When he leaves description for theory, he is an Anarchist. Above all, he is a cad. (We are speaking, of course, of the fictitious narrator, and not of M. Henri Barbusse.) But we must admit that he is a gifted and sensitive cad. That is why, although we devote the book to the flames, we read it first....

We have heard how Gautama, brought up until adolescence amid the false enchantments of a sequestered palace, one day crossed the threshold and met, ere he had taken twenty steps, a corpse, a leper, and an old man bent double and blind in his decrepitude: Death--Disease--Old Age--and was told it was the common lot. Whereupon Gautama forsook the world and henceforth his conversation was in Heaven.

M. Barbusse also has met the three spectres, and with them their attendant spirits, Lust and Cruelty. But pity has turned in his heart, not to prayer, but to a passionate anger, a violent reaction against civilisation as it stands. On every page of this first book he shouts ‘Follow your instincts! Eat, drink, and make merry, for to-morrow you die!’ And _sotto voce_ he seems to add: ‘Destroy! lest ye be destroyed!’

The popularity of Barbusse is therefore a disquieting symptom, but all his novels are not as outrageous as _L’Enfer_. In _Le Feu_ he discovered a theme exactly suited to his genius. _Le Feu_ is perhaps the only war book which really gives a living image of the war. It is unique and unforgettable. _L’Enfer_, as I have said, is a bad book; but _Le Feu_, with all its faults, is a masterpiece.

It is the journal of a squad--fifteen or a dozen common soldiers in the trenches; their infinite pettiness, their infinite grandeur; the horrors they succumb to or surmount. The first page shows the strange moats or living wells of the trenches--and the strange creatures (huge bears, no doubt) who growl and waddle and stumble therein--‘des espèces d’ours qui pataugent et grognent. C’est nous.’

The book is a series of episodes rather than a novel. Strange how this form--which the French call the ‘Chest-of-Drawers,’ the _roman-à-tiroirs_, comprising a set of independent though sequestered events contained in a solid framework--has taken possession of French literature. M. Duhamel also employs it. _Jean-Christophe_ was a _roman-à-tiroirs_. Most popular during the Middle Ages and Renaissance (both the Divine Comedy and Don Quixote are on this model), the Nineteenth Century preferred the firm organic contexture of the novel of character. _La Cousine Bette_ or _Madame Bovary_, _The Mill on the Floss_, _Vanity Fair_, _The Old Curiosity Shop_, appeared to us of the Nineteenth Century, a finer development, an evolution. But the world goes round!