Anonymous - Letters of a Soldier
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9 LETTERS OF A SOLDIER
You do not know the things that are taught by him
who falls. I do know.
(_Letter of October 15, 1914._)
LETTERS OF A SOLDIER
1914-1915
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
A. CLUTTON-BROCK
AND A PREFACE BY
ANDRE CHEVRILLON
AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY
V.M.
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
1917
Printed in Great Britain
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
PREFACE BY ANDRE CHEVRILLON 3
LETTERS 33
INTRODUCTION
I have been asked to write an Introduction to these letters; and I do
so, in spite of the fact that M. Chevrillon has already written one,
because they are stranger to me, an Englishman, than they could be to
him a Frenchman; and it seems worth while to warn other English readers
of this strangeness. But I would warn them of it only by way of a
recommendation. We all hope that after the war there will be a growing
intimacy between France and England, that the two countries will be
closer to each other than any two countries have ever been before. But
if this is to happen we must not be content with admiring each other.
Mere admiration will die away; indeed, some part of our present
admiration of the French has come from our failure to understand them.
There is a surprise in it which they cannot think flattering, and which
ought never to have been. Perhaps they also have been surprised by us;
for it is certain that we have not known each other, and have been
content with those loose general opinions about each other which are the
common result of ignorance and indifference.
What we need then is understanding; and these letters will help us to
it. They are, as we should have said before the war, very French, that
is to say, very unlike what an Englishman would write to his mother, or
indeed to any one. Many Englishmen, if they could have read them before
the war, would have thought them almost unmanly; yet the writer
distinguished himself even in the French army. But perhaps unmanly is
too strong a word to be put in the mouth even of an imaginary and stupid
Englishman. No one, however stupid, could possibly have supposed that
the writer was a coward; but it might have been thought that he was
utterly unfitted for war. So the Germans thought that the whole French
nation, and indeed every nation but themselves, was unfitted for war,
because they alone willed it, and rejoiced in the thought of it. And
certainly the French had a greater abhorrence of war even than
ourselves; how great one can see in these letters. The writer of them
never for a moment tries or pretends to take any pleasure in war. His
chief aim in writing is to forget it, to speak of the consolations which
he can still draw from the memories of his past peaceful life, and from
the peace of the sky and the earth, where it is still unravaged. He is,
or was, a painter (one cannot say which, for he is missing), and the
moment he has time to write, he thinks of his art again. It would hardly
be possible for any Englishman to ignore the war so resolutely, to
refuse any kind of consent to it; or, if an Englishman were capable of
such refusal, he would probably be a conscientious objector. We must
romanticise things to some extent if we are to endure them; we must at
least make jokes about them; and that is where the French fail to
understand us, like the Germans. If a thing is bad to a Frenchman, it is
altogether bad; and he will have no dealings with it. He may have to
endure it; but he endures gravely and tensely with a sad Latin dignity,
and so it is that this Frenchman endures the war from first to last. For
that reason the Germans, after their failure on the Marne, counted on
the nervous exhaustion of the French. It was a favourite phrase with
them--one of those formulae founded on knowledge without understanding
which so often mislead them.--Their formula for us was that we cared for
nothing but football and marmalade.--But reading these letters one can
understand how they were deceived. The writer of them seems to be
always enduring tensely. It is part of his French sincerity never to
accept any false consolation. He will not try to believe what he knows
to be false, even so that he may endure for the sake of France. Yet he
does endure, and all France endures, in a state of mind that would mean
weakness in us and utter collapse in the Germans. The war is to him like
an incessant noise that he tries to forget while he is writing. He does
not write as a matter of duty, and so that his mother may know that he
is still living; rather he writes to her so that he may ease a little
his desire to talk to her. We are used to French sentiment about the
mother; it is a commonplace of French eloquence, and we have often
smiled at it as mere sentimental platitude; but in these letters we see
a son's love for his mother no longer insisted upon or dressed up in
rhetoric, but naked and unconscious, a habit of the mind, a need of the
soul, a support even to the weakness of the flesh. Such affection with
us is apt to be, if not shamefaced, at least a little off-hand. Often it
exists, and is strong; but it is seldom so constant an element in all
joy and sorrow. The most loving of English sons would not often rather
talk to his mother than to any one else; but one knows that this
Frenchman would rather talk to his mother than to any one else, and that
he can talk to her more intimately than to any woman or man. One can see
that he has had the long habit of talking to her thus, so that now he
does it easily and without restraint. He tells her the deepest thoughts
of his mind, knowing that she will understand them better than any one
else. That foreboding which the mother felt about her baby in Morris's
poem has never come true about him:
'Lo, here thy body beginning, O son, and thy soul and thy life,
But how will it be if thou livest and enterest into the strife,
And in love we dwell together when the man is grown in thee,
When thy sweet speech I shall hearken, and yet 'twixt thee and me
Shall rise that wall of distance that round each one doth grow,
And maketh it hard and bitter each other's thought to know?'
This son has lived and entered into the strife indeed; but the wall of
distance has not grown round him; and, as we read these letters, we
think that no French mother would fear the natural estrangement which
that English mother in the poem fears. The foreboding itself seems to
belong to a barbaric society in which there is a more animal division of
the sexes, in which the male fears to become effeminate if he does not
insist upon his masculinity even to his mother. But this Frenchman has
left barbarism so far behind that he is not afraid of effeminacy; nor
does he need to remind himself that he is a male. There is a philosophy
to which this forgetfulness of masculinity is decadence. According to
that philosophy, man must remember always that he is an animal, a proud
fighting animal like a bull or a cock; and the proudest of all fighting
animals, to be admired at a distance by all women unless he condescends
to desire them, is the officer. No one could be further from such a
philosophy than this Frenchman; he is so far from it that he does not
seem even to be aware of its existence. He hardly mentions the Germans
and never expresses anger against them. The worst he says of them almost
makes one smile at its naive gentleness. 'Unfortunately, contact with
the German race has for ever spoilt my opinion of those people.' They
are to him merely a nation that does not know how to behave. He reminds
one of Talleyrand, who said of Napoleon after one of his rages: 'What a
pity that so great a man should have been so badly brought up.' But
there was malice in that understatement of Talleyrand's; and there is
none in the understatement of this Frenchman. He has no desire for
revenge; his only wish is that his duty were done and that he could
return home to his art and his mother. To the philosophy I have spoken
of that would seem a pitiable state of mind. No one could be less like a
Germanic hero than this French artist; and yet the Germans were in error
when they counted on an easy victory over him and his like, when they
made sure that a conscious barbarism must prevail over an unconscious
civilisation.
These letters reveal to us a new type of soldier, a new type of hero,
almost a new type of man; one who can be brave without any animal
consolations, who can endure without any romantic illusions, and, what
is more, one who can have faith without any formal revelation. For there
is nothing in the letters more interesting than the religion constantly
expressed or implied in them. The writer is not a Catholic. Catholic
fervour on its figurative side, he says, will always leave him cold. He
finds the fervour of Verlaine almost gross. He seems afraid to give any
artistic expression to his own faith, lest he should falsify it by
over-expression, lest it should seem to be more accomplished than it is.
He will not even try to take delight in it; he is almost fanatically an
intellectual ascetic; and yet again and again he affirms a faith which
he will hardly consent to specify by uttering the name of God. He is shy
about it, as if it might be refuted if it were expressed in any dogmatic
terms. So many victories seem to have been won over faith in the modern
world that his will not throw down any challenge. If it is to live, it
must escape the notice of the vulgar triumphing sceptics, and even of
the doubting habits of his own mind. Yet it does live its own humble and
hesitating life; and in its hesitations and its humility is its
strength. He could not be acclaimed by any eager bishop as a lost sheep
returning repentant to the fold; but he is not lost, nor is the
universe to him anything but a home and the dear city of God even in the
trenches.
His expression of this faith is always vague, tentative, and
inconclusive. He is certain of something, but he cannot say what; yet he
knows that he is certain, although, if he were to try to express his
certainty in any old terms, he would reject it himself. He knows; but he
cannot tell us or himself what he knows. There are sentences in which,
as M. Chevrillon says, he speaks like an Indian sage; but I do not think
that Indian philosophy would have satisfied him, because it is itself
satisfied. For he is in this matter of faith a primitive, beginning to
build a very small and humble temple out of the ruins of the past. He
has no science of theology, nothing but emotions and values, and a trust
in them. They are for a reality that he can scarcely express at all; and
yet he is the more sure of its existence because of the torment through
which he is passing. He uses that word _torment_ more than once. The war
is to him a martyrdom in which he bears witness to his love, not only
for France, but also for that larger country which is the universe. The
torment makes him more sure of it than ever before; it heightens his
sense of values; and he knows that what matters to a man is not whether
he is joyful or sorrowful, but the quality of his joy and his sorrow.
There are times when, like an Indian sage, he thinks that all life is
contemplation; but this thought is only the last refuge of the spirit
against a material storm. He is not one of those who would go into the
wilderness and lose themselves in the depths of abstract thought; he is
a European, an artist, a lover, one for whom the visible world exists,
and to whom the Christian doctrine of love is but the expression of his
own experience. For a century or more our world, confident in its
strength, its reason, its knowledge, has been undermining that doctrine
with every possible heresy. In sheer wilfulness it has tried to empty
life of all its values. It has made us ashamed of loving anything; for
all love, it has told us, is illusion produced by the will to live, or
the will to power, or some other figment of its own perverse thought.
And now, as a result of that perversity, the storm breaks upon us when
we seem to have stripped ourselves of all shelter against it. The
doctrine of the struggle for life becomes a fact in this war; but, if it
were true, what creature endowed with reason would find life worth
struggling for? Certainly not the writer of these letters. He fought,
not only for his country, but to maintain a contrary doctrine; and we
see him and a thousand others passing through the fiercest trial of
faith at the moment when the mind of man has been by its own perverse
activity stripped most bare of faith. So he cannot even express the
faith for which he is ready to die; but he is ready to die for it. A
few years ago he would have been sneered at for the vagueness of his
language, but no one can sneer now. The dead will not spoil the spring,
he says No, indeed: for by their death they have brought a new spring of
faith into the world.
A. CLUTTON-BROCK.
LETTERS OF A SOLDIER
AUGUST 1914-APRIL 1915
PREFACE BY ANDRE CHEVRILLON
PREFACE BY ANDRE CHEVRILLON
The letters that follow are those of a young painter who was at the
front from September [1914] till the beginning of April [1915]; at the
latter date he was missing in one of the battles of the Argonne. Are we
to speak of him in the present tense or in the past? We know not: since
the day when the last mud-stained paper reached them, announcing the
attack in which he was to vanish, what a close weight of silence for
those who during eight months lived upon these almost daily letters! But
for how many women, how many mothers, is a grief like this to-day a
common lot!
In the studio and amid the canvases upon which the young man had traced
the forms of his dreams, I have seen, piously placed in order on a
table, all the little papers written by his hand. A silent presence--I
was not then aware what manner of mind had there expressed
itself--revisiting this hearth: a mind surely made to travel far abroad
and cast its lights upon multitudes of men.
It was the mind of a complete artist, but of a poet as well, that had
lurked under the timid reserves of a youth who at thirteen years of age
had left school for the studio, and who had taught himself, without help
from any other, to translate the thoughts that moved him into such words
as the reader will judge of. Here are tenderness of heart, a fervent
love of Nature, a mystical sense of her changing moods and of her
eternal language: all those things of which the Germans, professing
themselves heirs of Goethe and of Beethoven, imagine they have the
monopoly, but of which we Frenchmen have the true perception, and which
move us in the words written by our young countryman for his most dearly
beloved and for himself.
It is singularly touching to find in the spiritual, grave, and religious
temper of these letters an affinity to the spirit of many others written
from the front. During those weeks, those endless months of winter in
the mud or the frost of the trenches, in the daily sight of death, in
the thought of that death coming upon them also, closing upon them to
seal their eyes for ever, these boys seem to have faced the things of
eternity with a deeper insight and a keener feeling, as each one, in the
full strength of life and youth, dwelt upon the thought of beholding the
world for the last time:
'Et le monde allait donc mourir
Avec mes yeux, miroir du monde.'
Solemn thought for the man who has watched through a long night in some
advance-post, and who, beyond the grey and silent plain where lurks the
enemy, sees a red sun rise yet once more upon the world! 'O splendid
sun, I wish I could see you again!' wrote once, on the evening of his
advance upon French ground, a young Silesian soldier who fell upon the
battlefield of the Marne, and whose Journal has been published. Suddenly
breaks in this mysterious cry in the course of methodical German notes
on food and drink, stages of the march, blistered feet, the number of
villages set on fire. And in how many French letters too have we found
it--that abrupt intuition! It is always the same, in many and various
words: in those of the agriculturist of the Seine-et-Marne, whom I
could name, and who for perhaps the first time in his life takes an
interest in the sunset; in those of the young middle-class Parisian who
had seemed incapable of speech save in terms of unbelief and burlesque;
in those of the artist who utters his emotion in poetry and lifts it up
to the heights of stoical philosophy. Through all unlikenesses, in the
hearts of all--peasant, citizen, soldier, German schoolmaster--one
prevailing thought is revealed; the living man, passing away, feels, at
the approach of eternal night, an exaltation of his sense of the
splendour of the world. O miracle of things! O divine peace of this
plain, of these trees, of these hillsides! And how keenly does the ear
listen for this infinite silence! Or we hear of the immensities of night
where nothing remains except light and flame: far off, the smouldering
of fires; far up, the sparkle of stars, the shapes of constellations,
the august order of the universe. Very soon the rattle of machine-guns,
the thunder of explosives, the clamour of attack will begin anew; there
will again be killing and dying. What a contrast of human fury and
eternal serenity! More or less vaguely, and for a brief moment, there
comes into passing life a glimpse of the profound relation of the simple
things of heaven and earth with the mind of him who contemplates them.
Does man then guess that all these things are indeed himself, that his
little life and the life of the tree yonder, thrilling in the shiver of
dawn, and beckoning to him, are bound together in the flood of universal
life?
* * * * *
For the artist of whom we are now reading, such intuitions and such
visions were the delight of long months in the trenches. Under the free
sky, in contact with the earth, in face of the peril and the sight of
death, life seemed to him to take a sudden and strange expansion. 'From
our life in the open air we have gained a freedom of conception, an
amplitude of thought, which will for ever make cities horrible to those
who survive the war.' Death itself had become a more beautiful and a
more simple thing; the death of soldiers on whose dumb shapes he looked
with pious eyes, as Nature took them back into her maternal care and
mingled them with her earth. Day by day he lived in the thought of
eternity. True, he kept a feeling heart for all the horror, and
compassion for all the pain; as to his duty, the reader will know how he
did that. But, suffering 'all the same,' he took refuge in 'the higher
consolations.' 'We must,' he writes to those who love him and whom he
labours--with what constant solicitude!--to prepare for the worst, 'we
must attain to this--that no catastrophe whatsoever shall have power to
cripple our lives, to interrupt them, to set them out of tune. . . . Be
happy in this great assurance that I give you--that up till now I have
raised my soul to a height where events have had no empire over it.'
These are heights upon which, beyond the differences of their teachings
and their creeds, all great religious intuitions meet together; upon
which illusions are no more, and the soul rejects the pretensions of
self, in order to accept what _is_. 'Our sufferings come from our small
human patience taking the same direction as our desires, noble though
they may be. . . . Do not dwell upon the personality of those who pass
away and of those who are left; such things are weighed only in the
scales of men. We should gauge in ourselves the enormous value of what
is better and greater than humanity.' In truth, death is impotent
because it too is illusory, and 'nothing is ever lost.' So this young
Frenchman, who has yet never forgone the language of his Christianity,
rediscovers amid the terrors of war the stoicism of Marcus
Aurelius--that virtue which is 'neither patience nor too great
confidence, but a certain faith in the order of all things, a certain
power of saying of each trial, "It is well."' And, even beyond stoicism,
it is the sublime and antique thought of India that he makes his own,
the thought that denies appearances and differences, that reveals to man
his separate self and the universe, and teaches him to say of the one,
'I am not _this_,' and of the other, '_that_, I am.' Wonderful encounter
of thoughts across the distance of ages and the distance of races! The
meditation of this young French soldier, in face of the enemy who is to
attack on the morrow, resumes the strange ecstasy in which was rapt the
warrior of the _Bhagavad Gita_ between two armies coming to the grapple.
He, too, sees the turbulence of mankind as a dream that seems to veil
the higher order and the Divine unity. He, too, puts his faith in that
'which knows neither birth nor death,' which is 'not born, is
indestructible, is not slain when this body is slain.' This is the
perpetual life that moves across all the shapes it calls up, striving in
each one to rise nearer to light, to knowledge, and to peace. And that
aim is a law and a command to every thinking being that he should give
himself wholly for the general and final good. Thence comes the grave
satisfaction of those who devote themselves, of those who die, in the
cause of life, in the thought of a sacrifice not useless. 'Tell ----
that if fate strikes down the best, there is no injustice; those who
survive will be the better men. You do not know the things that are
taught by him who falls. I do know.' And even more complete is the
sacrifice when the relinquishment of life, when the renunciation of
self, means the sacrifice of what was dearer than self, and would have
been a life's joy to serve. There was the 'flag of art, the flag of
science,' that the boy loved and had begun to carry--with what a thrill
of pride and faith! Let him learn to fall without regrets. 'It is enough
for him to know that the flag will yet be carried.'
A simple, a common obedience to the duty at hand is the practical
conclusion of that high Indian wisdom when illusions are past. Not to
retreat into the solitude, not to retire into the inaction, that he has
known and prized; to fight at the side of his brothers, in his own rank,
in his own place, with open eyes, without hope of glory or of gain, and
because such is the law: this is the commandment of the god to the
warrior Arjuna, who had doubted whether he were right in turning away
from the Absolute to take part in the evil dream of war. 'The law for
each is that he should fulfil the functions determined by his own state
and being. Let every man accept action, since he shares in that nature
the methods of which make action necessary.' Plainly, it is for Arjuna
to bend his bow among the other Kshettryas. The young Frenchman had not
doubted. But it will be seen by his letters how, in the horror of
carnage, as in the tedious and patient duties of the mine and the
trench, he too had kept his eyes upon eternal things.
I would not insist unduly upon this union of thought. He had hardly
gained, through a few extracts from the _Ramayana_, a glimpse of the
august thought of ancient Asia. Yet, with all the modern shades of
ideas, with all the very French precision of form, the soul that is
revealed in these letters, like that of Amiel, of Michelet, of Tolstoi,
of Shelley, shows certain profound analogies with the tender and
mystical genius of the Indies. Strange is that affinity, bearing witness
as it does not only to his profound need of the Universal and the
Absolute, but to his intuitive sympathy with the whole of life, to his
impulses of love for the general soul of fruitfulness and for all its
single and multitudinous forms. 'Love'--this is one of the words most
often recurring in these letters. Love of the country of battle; love of
the plain over which the mornings and the evenings come and go as the
emotions come and go over a sensitive face; love of the trees with their
almost human gesture--of one tree, steadfast and patient in its wounds,
'like a soldier'; love of the beautiful little living creatures of the
fields which, in the silence of earliest morning, play on the edges of
the trench; love of all things in heaven and earth--of that tender sky,
of that French soil with its clear and severe outlines; love, above all,
of those whom he sees in sufferings and in death at his side; love of
the good peasants, the mothers who have given their sons, and who hold
their peace, dry their tears, and fulfil the tasks of the vineyard and
the field; love of those comrades whose misery 'never silenced laughter
and song'--'good men who would have found my fine artistic robes a bad
encumbrance in the way of their plain duty'; love of all those simple
ones who make up France, and among whom it is good to lose oneself; love
of all men living, for it is surely not possible to hate the enemy,
human flesh and blood bound to this earth and suffering as we too
suffer; love of the dead upon whom he looks, in the impassive beauty,
silence, and mystery revealed beneath his meditative eyes.
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