r n ,^OF-CALIF0/?^> ^^^OFCAll < , • \' j« "Ji )U3. iliiiV, r-i i 1 ■Jj <\'^ ..OFCAIIFO/?^', .4;0: 1 ! If. i> il JIIVJJO ^g aofcaii, OF-rAl!FOP<'. <>5 I ,^WE•yNIVER5•/A II c> £^ ro § 1 ir^ irl !/; Av|<:i :^i/:.<' PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA xX) t<2 >i- ^ n r-f Great heart of France which has withstood so well The blasts of battle and the gates of hell Our love is thine. . . . Edmund Vance Cooke. Oui, mon coq glorieux, C'est toi qui fais lever I'aurore! Rostand, Chantecleib. FOREWORD The output of French war literature has been very great. This may not seem surprising when one thinks of the importance of the crisis through which France has just passed, but it is so when one realizes how that country had to exert all its strength to keep itself from being submerged ; literature in such circumstances, is more than ever a luxury. How shall we define the scope of this study? In one sense, w^e have been very broad in our selection of material. Apart from works deal- ing technically with the history of the war, and which we have left out, we have surveyed all kinds of books; for literature has no domain of its own. According to time and circumstances, it may include almost anything. With Ronsard and Victor Hugo, it is poetry; with Comeille and Racine it is drama ; but it is philosophy with Descartes, Malebranche and Renan; ethics with La Bruyere and Marmontel ; theology with Bos- suet and Joseph de Maistre; medicine with Claude Bernard and Pasteur; psychology with Montaigne, IMarivaux and Le Sage ; history with Voltaire, Michelet and Taine ; politics and politi- cal economy with Fenelon, Montesquieu, Rous- vii FOREWORD seau and Fustel de Coulanges ; etc., etc. War, — and especially the Great War, — stirs up thoughts along all these lines, and it would be very ar- bitrary to decide which writings must be re- garded as literature, and which must not. In another sense, it has been necessary for us to narrow our field by imposing upon ourselves considerable restrictions. It has often been very difficult to resist the temptation of including, — for the sake of full treatment, and in order to do justice to all, — many excellent works. Too bulky a volume would have defeated the end which we have in view. The following course seemed the best one in the circumstances: To make a first selection according to a general cri- terion of excellence and originality. This was, in many cases, an easy matter because excel- lence and originality went together in the same books, as, for instance, in Benjamin's Gaspard; Barbusse's Le Feu; in the anonymous Lettres d'un Soldat; in Erlande's En Campagne avec la Legion Etrangere, Duhamel's Vie des Mar- tyrs, Jaques Blanche's Cahiers d'un Artiste; Y 's Odyssee d'un Transport Torpille; or, on the stage, in Bernstein's Elevation; or, in poe- try, in Verhaeren's Ailes Rouges, in Mercier's Prieres de la Tranchee, and in Marc Leclerc 's La Passion de Notre Frere le Poilu. Very often, however, there were several ex- viii FOREWORD cellent books representing the same important trend of inspiration. In these cases we had to eliminate with a view to avoiding monotony. The writer believes that he has succeeded in bringing in a new note with the treatment of each new volume, but he frankly acknowledges that the choice between works of a similar nature has been determined at times by causes imponderable. The determining factor may have been the verdict of the French reading public, or it may have been subjective preference. For instance, the author would not care to be called upon to account with scientific thorough- ness for his selection of Thomas' Les Diables Bleus and Pericard's Ceux de Verdun, in prefer- ence to Belmont's Lettres d'un Officier de Cliasseurs Alpins, Marcel Dupont's En Cam- pagne 1914-15, and later, L'AUente,^ or Dieter- len's Le Bois le Pretre, Dubarle's Lettres de Guerre, Jubert's Verdun, etc. Again some may think that Lieut. E. R. (Tuffrau's) Garnet d'un Gomhattant, Roujon's Garnet de Boute, Paul- han's La Guerre Appliquee, Julia's 3Iort du Soldat, or many others, deserved just as much 1 Perhaps the reason why Dupont was not chosen is because he is so good that no comment can be made which is not superfluous. The sixty editions through which his first volume ran before the close of the war are a very just measure of the value of that remarkable work. FOREWORD to be analyzed as Redier's Meditations dans la Tranchee or Genevoix's SoVrS Verdun or Del- vert's Histoire d'une Compagnie. The same problem confronted us in dealing with poetry, the stage, and the novel, although it was rather easier to come to a decision in those cases than when dealing with war recollections or analyses of the psychology of the soldier. Many readers are guided in the selection of their books by the fame of the authors. At no time is the name of an author a certain guarantee of the excellence of the work, and in the special case of war literature, it offers none whatever. Indeed, none of the well known pre-war writers have produced during the war anything that commands attention as a masterpiece ; and this is quite natural, for veterans in the field of literature do not belong to the war generation and can therefore hardly be its spokesmen. Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Maeterlinck, Bour- get, and Bazin have added nothing new to what they had been saying for many years previously ; Rostand's fame would suffer heavily if he was judged by his writings since 1914; fortunately for him his two best war-poems Cyrano de Ber- gerac and L'Aiglon had been written long before the war. Such men as Porto-Riche, Bataille, FOREWORD Abel Hermant have fallen below the mark they themselves had set in the past. Some, like Henri de Regnier, the war seems to have entirely paralyzed. The only two cases in which one may be tempted to take exception to our statement — that writers whose reputation was established before the war have rarely done any original work since 1914 — are that of Bernstein in his drama L'Mevation,^ and that of Verhaeren, stirred up to really powerful satire by the wrong done to Belgium, his own country, in his Ailes Rouges de la Guerre. So the reader must expect to come across new names chiefly. Indeed, one of the most interest- ing features of the war literature is that it acquaints us with many hitherto unknown but admirable writers. One more remark. As everywhere else, war has created extraor- dinary circumstances in the domain of literature ; this is true not only as regards the contents of the war books, but also as regards the forms in which the writers presented their thoughts. War literature created its own style. Quite 1 This play, however, has been severely judged by several French critics. xi FOREWORD naturally the traditional distinctions of de- scriptive, dramatic, lyric, and epic styles were disregarded. In most cases the form adopted was that of War Recollections. By far the greatest part of war literature is written in un- conventional style and will be described in the first part of the following work. At the same time, in some cases, especially in that of lyrism, and to some extent in that of the stage, but less in that of prose fiction, the con- ventional literary genres continued to obtain with good writers. We will deal with these products in a second part. The reader will find at the end of the volume additional data on the following points : I. Indications where to find more detailed bibliographical information than we could offer in the text, concerning the literature of the war. II. Documents relative to the war, not coming within the domain of literature, but comple- mentary' to it ; history of the pre-war period ; chronicles ; discussions and comments relating to special phases of the war; appreciations by military critics; descriptions of great battles by non-combatants; life in the trenches; the part played by various branches of the service; psy- chology of the soldier; military vocabulary and xii FOREWORD slang; illustrated war-books, and war-news- papers. III. A catalogue — not a full one indeed, but as carefully drawn up as seemed possible — of the best French war-diaries and volumes of war- recollections. This book would not have been completed, at least so soon, had it not been for the kind as- sistance — which sometimes was almost a collabo- ration — given by Professor Osmond T. Robert, our colleague in the French Department at Smith College. To him we owe most hearty thanks. Towards another of my colleagues, iNIiss Helen Maxwell King, we feel greatly indebted for the expert help which she gave in the ungrateful task of drawing up the Index. "We express our gratitude also to Professor E. P. Dargan, of the University of Chicago, who very kindly went over our manuscript, offering valuable suggestions. We wish further to acknowledge the courtesy of the editors of various periodicals which al- lowed us to make use again of material which had appeared, above our signature, in their columns: The Jonrnal of Philosophij, Psy- chology and Scientific Methods; The American xiii FOREWORD Journal of Psychology ; Medicine and Surgery; Modern Philology; Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. And per- haps we ought to mention also the New Inter- national Year-Book where we had recorded be- fore — although in much briefer form — the out- put of the French Literature of the Great War. Albert Schinz. XIV CONTENTS PART I PAGE T. Period of Emotional Reaction — Immedi- ately After the Outbreak of the War . 5 II. Period of Documentation — Commencing ABOUt the Spring of 1915 27 III. Period of Philosophical and Political Considerations Suggested by the War (More Especially Since the Beginning OF 1917) 230 PART II I. Poetry of the War 293 II. The Stage and the War 338 III. War-Time Fiction 363 Epilogue 381 APPENDICES I. Bibliography 391 II. Documents Relative to the War .... 397 III. Catalogue, in Alphabetical Order, of Some OF THE Best War Diaries and Recollec- tions 405 INTRODUCTORY It is possible to distinguish three periods in the war literature of France between 1914 and 1918, The first was one of spontaneous, sudden and strongly emotional reaction, following im- mediately the first bewildering shock ; the second, one of documentation on the causes of the war and on the war itself; and the third, a period of calm philosophical consideration of all that was involved in the gigantic struggle, characterized by a reconsideration of the past, a weighing of the present, and especially an effort to prepare for the future. It needs scareelv to be said that although, — a«! indeed wa'^ nnite natural, — the lyric and sa- tirical notp nrednvninated in the first period, memoir literature in the second, and philosophi- cal es<;avs aiirl treatises in the third, no period produced one tvDe of literature to the exclusion of all others. A few philosophical writings be- gan to appear very early in the war, and the publication of documents of historical and psy- chological interest by no means came to an end when the theorists became more numerous; neither, indeed, did thev cease to appear before 1 INTRODUCTORY the end of the war and even after; and at all stages of the conflict, there has been abundant reason for emotional inspiration. But, while fully conscious of those facts, we have adopted the above classification, first be- cause it does actually correspond, in a general way, to what happened, and also for the sake of clearness in discussing the subject. PART I FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR CHAPTER I . PERIOD OF EMOTIONAL REACTION— IMMEDI- ATELY AFTER THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR The war took almost every one by surprise. The first expression of thought, after the imme- diate danger was passed, that is, after the first battle of the Mame, was an outburst of indigna- tion at the treacherous attack which had been made by the Central Powers, and also at the blindness of the French people who had allowed themselves to be lured into a fatal, sentimental quietude by the stupendous hypocrisy of their neighbors on the Eastern frontier. To this in- dignation were soon added the anger, disgust and horror caused by the atrocious application by the German armj^ in Belgium and Northern France, of the barbarian policy of terrorization. These manifestations of burning patriotism 5 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR appeared in the few newspapers which did not stop publication, or which did so only for a very- short time : Le Temps, Les Detats, Le Figaro, L'EcJio de Paris, Le Journal, Le Matin, L' Homme Lihre, and then L'Homme Enchaine, and the still less numerous periodicals like the Eevue des Deux Mondes, Revue de Paris, V Illus- tration, la Bevue Hehdomadaire, la Eevue, les Amiales. Towards the end of the spring of 1915, as France began to return to more normal conditions, the articles referred to above began to appear in book form. But the young men had dropped the pen to grasp the sword, and the men who wrote were, for the most part, well advanced in years. Many of them, it is true, were men of high stand- ing, whom France had learned to regard as the intellectual leaders of the day; but the fact re- mains that their books, in spite of their beauty and stirring eloquence, are not directly repre- sentative of that young France which was at grips with the enemy ; and, as time passes, the glory of those first productions will fade before that of the more authentic works of the actual fighters. Nevertheless, those early books recorded the pulse of France during the first weeks of the 6 EMOTIONAL REACTION world-tragedy, and for that reason, some of them, at least, deserve to be recalled here. From the very beginning;, Henri Lavedan suc- ceeded in giving a very lofty tone to his weekly articles in I' Illustration. The re-issue of those articles in book form under the title of Les Grandes Heures, will remain the best expres- sion of that rousing and cementing of the na- tional spirit which every one now calls VTJnion Sacree. In most other articles, one hears much more often the harsh strains of intense an- ger and of satire directed against Germanj^ than the harmony of the epic song of France's heroism. The titles of the following books give a very clear idea of the nature of their contents. Pierre Loti, La Grande Barharie (1915), La Hyene Enragee (1916), Quelques Aspects du Vertige Mondial (1917), and L'Horreur Alle- mande (1918) ; Paul Margueritte (author of Une Epoque), Contre les Barhares (1915), and later, L'Immense Effort (1915-16) ; Jean Aic- ard, Des Oris dans la Melee (1915) ; Jean Riche- pin. Prose de Guerre (1915) ; Mme. Juliette Adam (the famous editor of the Nouvelle Revue, who boasts that she has never accepted the treaty of Frankfort), L'Heure Vengeresse des Crimes 7 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR Bismarkiens (1915). Paul Adam, Da7is I'Air qui tremble (1915), and later. La Terre qui tonne (1917) ; to which may be added Peladan's L'Allemagne devant I'Humanite and Le Devoir des Civilises (1915), with its, at times, brilliantly eloquent anathemas ; and also two more objective works which tell the story of the German atroci- ties in the previous war: General Canonge's His- toire de I'lnvasion Allemande en 1870-71, and Gabriel Langlois's L'Allemagne Barhare. This latter book contains a remarkable chapter relat- ing how the anthropologist, Quatrefages, had re- fused to believe the reports of German barbari- ties, until he saw the enemy stupidly attempting to destroy the magnificent scientific collections of the Museum in Paris. Even philosophical minds could not remain calm in that hour of exaltation. In a lecture be- fore the Academic des Sciences Morales et Pol- itiques on September 14th, 1914, Bergson de- nounces the philosophers of Germany as aiders and abettors in the development of the ferocious war organization of that country. Germany's philosophy he regards as "only the transposi- tion in terms of the intellect, of her brutality, her greed, and vices." Neither is Anatple France quite free from passion, although his 8 EMOTIONAL REACTION style makes acceptable every page of his Sur la Voie Glorieuse, and Ce que disent nos Moris. Another French "sage," Remy de Gourraont, calls his volume of essays Pendant I'Orage, and a second volume, published after his death in 1915, bears the title of Datis la Tourmente. Among the books irf which the impeachment of Germany plays so great a part, there are some which are particularly moving because we know that their authors have suffered more than others. We refer to the books of Belgian and Alsatian writers, such as Maeterlinck's Debris de la Guerre, and Verhaeren's La Belgique Sang- lanie and Parmi les Cendres. To this class also belong Pierre Nothomb's Les Barhares en Bel- gique (first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes), and the works of I'Abbe Wetterle, the distinguished and courageous representative of Alsace-Lorraine in the Reichstag in pre-war days. We commend to the reader's attention his Propos de Guerre, — the second volume of which is in- spired by stinging satire, — his VAllemagne qu'on voyait et celle qu'on ne voyait pas, and, of course, his Ce qu'etait V Alsace-Lorraine et ce qu'elle sera (1915). It is not our intention to dwell at length on this emotional literature although it was fully 9 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR justified by the circumstances. We wish, how- ever, to assign it an honorable, though small place in the literature of the war; this, we can- not do better than by quoting a very short ex- tract from the Preface of Maeterlinck's Debris de la Guerre. The few sentences express the spirit of all the books above mentioned ; they do so in the words of one, who, more than any other, has a right to speak, not only because he is a Belgian, but also because, — as he himself re- marks, — he had been until then conspicuously free from any harshness or ill-feeling towards his fellow men: "The reader will find, for the first time in the work of one who has hitherto abused no man, words of hatred and of maledic- tion. I would gladly have left those words un- said ... I have been forced to utter them, and I am as much surprised as I am maddened at what I have been constrained to say by the force of events and of truth. . . . There are crimes which obliterate the past and close the future. In eschewing hatred, I would have shown myself a traitor to love. I tried to lift myself above the fray; but the higher I rose, the more clearly did I see the madness and the horror of it, the justice of our cause and the infamy of the others'. 7* is possible that some 10 EMOTIONAL REACTION day, when time has dulled the memory and re- stored the ruins, wise men will tell us that we are mistaken, that our standpoint was not lofty enough, that everything can be explained and forgiven and that we must make an effort to understand; hut they will say so only because what ive know has been forgotten, and what we behold has not been seen." Two other writers who have also echoed the emotions of the war, deserve special mention, because, being younger than those whom we have already discussed, they can be considered as actually speaking for the war generation, and also because, for quite a number of years, they had been regarded as "leaders" of young France. The first is Maurice Barres, a mem- ber of the French Academy and of the Chamber of Deputies, and the President of the Ligiie des Patriotes. His almost dailj^ articles in the Echo de Paris were, during the first weeks of the war, a magnificent inspiration to the French people, and fully justify the general title under which they were re-issued in a series of volumes : L'Ame Frangaise et la Guerre. The first vol- ume of the series, L'TJnion Sacree, takes us from July 12th to October 31st, 1914, describes the 11 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR political situation on the eve of the war, the great retreat, and the battle of the Marne; the second volume, Les Saints de la France, takes us to the end of the year 1914, and tells the story of the battles in Flanders and of the descent into the trenches. The other volumes are: La Croix de Guerre, Amities des Tranchees, Voy- ages de Lorraine et d'Artois, Pour les Mutiles, Le Suffrage des Morts. One of the finest utter- ances of Barres is the lecture {Les Traits eternels de la France) which he delivered in London, on July 12th, 1916, to the members of the British Academy, and in which he drew some very strik- ing parallels between the French Knights of the Middle Ages who fought for Christendom and for the Church, and the modem heroes who are fighting, in the same spirit of self-sacrifice, to save a civilization in which love, and not vio- lence, is triumphant.^ During the third year of the war, Barres wrote, in addition to his chronicle of the war, one of the most moving books imaginable on the religion of the Soldier: Les Families Spirit- 1 An American edition, with excellent notes, was pre- pared by F. Baldensperger and issued by the Yale Press at the end of 1918. There is also an English translation by Miss C'orwin ( Yale Press ) . The original title of the lecture was: Le Blason de la France, ou ses Traits eter- nels dans cette Chierre et les vieilles Epopees. 12 EMOTIONAL REACTION uelles de la France (this work will be referred to again later) ; and, in the fourth year a smaller one, De la Sympathie a la Fraternite des Amies, Les Etats-Unis dans la Guerre (Bibl. Franee- Amerique). The second of those younger authors is Andre Suares: a man possessed of a genius akin to that of Charles Peguy. AVhile Peguy was pour- ing out his soul in fiery prose in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, Suares was, since 1909, the lead- ing spirit of the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise; his stirring, vigorous, mystic style, full of striking, at time,s apocalj^ptic, images, was a perfect instru- ment with which to arouse not only the intel- lectual youth, but the whole of France. His ar- ticles have been collected under the general title of Commeniaires sur la Guerre des Boches. In the first volume, Nous et Eux, he shows in clear definite formulas, how fundamentally', how "ra- cially" different are the French and the Ger- man minds. In the second volume, C'est la Guerre, he returns to his assertion of a real dif- ference of "race," and describes the war as a "zoological" contest. He can admit of no neu- trals in this struggle between the powers of darkness and those of light. One of the best of his books is Ceux de Verdun (1916, 138 pp.), in 13 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR which he pauses, for a moment, in his virulent attacks upon Germany to proclaim the glory of the heroes of France. He relates the great epic of Verdun in a terse, lapidary style, reminiscent of the noblest passages in the ancient Hebrew Prophets. The power of his beautiful rhythmi- cal prose is irresistible. But the intense patriotism of Snares does not prevent him from being at the same time a thinker of remarkable independence of judg- ment. He reminds us at times of the late Remy de Gourmont. He has published, from time to time, in the elegant issues of the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, pamphlets which are stimulating to an extraordinary degree. And Suares has the courage of his convictions. A man must be bold indeed, who dares to publish, while France is at war with Germany, sentiments like those which we quote below, and to which he gave expression in the course of a discussion on the advisability of discontinuing the study of Kant. His asser- tion that Kant is Cartesian, that he has devel- oped to their fullest extent the principles of Des- cartes, we must leave to the judgment of meta- phj'sicians; but the ethics of Kant, and his pol- itics are of very general interest to-day. In Re- marques IX, (December, 1918) Suares says in 14 EMOTIONAL REACTION that connection: "To represent that great inde- pendent mind as the type of Prussianism, to make of him the philosopher of the German State, is an act of deliberate bad faith ; or, to put it more plainly, it is a lie. "I find the answer to that lie in the first of the Articles, where Kant has written : 'The political constitution of each state must be republican.' What a very Prussian trait that is, to be sure! And here is another: Kant is blaming the gov- ernment of kings for the barbarities of war and he writes : 'the Sovereign glories in his power to dispose according to his fancy, and without tak- ing any great personal risks, of the lives of sev- eral thousands of men who are ever ready to sac- rifice themselves for a cause which is no concern of theirs. ' " And then Snares, turning on one of his own countr\Tnen, continues: "I know a Prussian who is also a Roman Catholic ; a feudal- istic Prussian ; a Prussian as to his ethics ; a Prussian by his royalist and absolutist politics; a Prussian in his views of peace and of war; whose thoughts are Prussianly antagonistic to the Republic, to the rights of men and to the freedom of thought ; and who expresses those thoughts in the very terms of Moltke and of the German General Headquarters. That man is 15 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR Joseph de Maistre. Kant is the very antithesis of de Maistre. Kant represents the spirit of eighteenth century France and of the Revolu- tion. De Maistre is already dead 'up to his throat.' The ax is poised above his head as above the thick nape of Berlin ; but the spirit of Kant still lives. ' ' * * * Before bringing this chapter to a close, we wish to speak of two men upon whom the war has produced verj^ contrary effects: Gustave Herve and Remain Rolland. Before the war, Herve had preached with so much vehemence the doctrines of socialism, internationalism and anti- militarism, that he had been arrested on a charge of treason, tried and condemned to prison.^ Very soon, however, after the outbreak of the war, he acknowledged with a candor which does him honor, that he had been mistaken. Herve is a politician, but he is nevertheless upright and sincere, and a stranger to the subtleties of polit- ical arrivistes. He has turned with burning in- dignation against the German socialists who have 2 It was Herve who, in lOl.^, wrote that famous book Leur Patrie which assailed the idea of love for one coun- try only, and which called forth Pe^y's beautiful Notre Patrie. — A good article on Herve will be found in Andre Maurel's Six Ecrivains de la Guerre (Paris, 1917), pp. 73-96. 16 EMOTIONAL REACTION shown themselves to be false brethren. Since the beginning of the war he has published three books, — all of them reprints of his articles, — un- der the titles of Apres la Marne,^ La Patrie en Danger, and La MuraiUe. In this last book, he preaches the gospel of "France" with all the conviction and eloquence which formally charac- terized his preaching of the gospel of "Human- ity." His newspaper which, before the war, was called La Guerre Sociale, has, since 1914, been known as La Victoire^ As for Remain Holland, he has moved in a direction opposed to that of Herve. In Jean Christ ophe he had judged with some severity the materialism, lack of taste, and industrialism of 3 In this first book, composed of articles which ap- peared between November, 1914, and February, 1915, the contrast with his former writings already comes out very strikinjily. See especially the articles Jiisqu'au iout (pp. 44-^7), A Sudekxim, Socialiste du Kaiser (pp. 294-297), and Le Pot aux Roses (pp. 310-315). The titles of those articles indicate the spirit in which they were written. 4 Herve had also written, some years before, a very original Histoire de France pour les Grands (1904) in wliich he avoided as much as possible mentioning the names of kings and of battles, because civilization has DO greater interest in kings than in any other people, and because wars, far from furthering the progress of civ- ilization, usually set it back. A number of teachers with socialist leanings adopted the book in their classes, but the government quickly took action, forbidding the use of it in any school within tlie jurisdiction of the French Republic. 17 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR Germany; Jean Christophe was obliged to come to France to find an atmosphere congenial to his artistic temperament. It is true that he had not found in the conventional artistic milieus of Paris, any response to genuine art ; but his hopes were with the people of France, the people who had produced Joan of Arc . . . people of such sterling moral qualities were to be found only west of the Rhine. When the war broke out, Rolland was shocked by the passionate outcry against Germany which spontaneously arose in every quarter of the civilized world. He tried to retain his self-possession, but his too great anxiety to remain impartial led him to make such great concessions to the German point of view, that he soon appeared to many of his coun- trymen as a traitor to their cause. Even the Manifesto of the ninety-three German intellec- tuals, in which, deliberately or unintentionally, many facts damaging to Germany were passed over in silence, did not induce him to change his attitude; nor was he affected by the failure of the appeal which he addressed through Gerhard Hauptmann to the German men of letters; he stiU continued, after that, to sit in judgment upon the contending parties. So convinced was he of the correctness of his attitude, that in his 18 EMOTIONAL REACTION Au-dessus de la Melee (1915-16) he asks men of unprejudiced minds to pronounce between him and his opponents. Few publications have stirred up more resent- ment in France, or created more misunderstand- ing, than that book. The French people cannot understand how it is that Rolland fails to under- stand. And, indeed, it is strange that so intelli- gent a man should remain impervious to all ar- guments and explanations; for he pays not the slightest attention to them; he simply ignores them and continues to re-state, — eloquently enough, it must be admitted, — the views which he has held since the beginning of the war. It seems as if the enormous success of Jean Chris- tophe had to some extent impaired his judgment, and as if he accepted in all seriousness the flat- tering assurance of some of his disciples, that he needs only to speak and the whole world will ac- cept his words as gospel. He did not or would not realize that it lay as little in the power of the French people, as in that of the Christian socialists or of the intellec- tual elite or of any one else, to put a stop to the fighting ; unless, indeed, France was willing to yield, body and soul, to Germany. After the first battle of the ]\Iarne, from Geneva (where he 19 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR has lived all through the war) Rolland took it for granted that everything was over. On Sep- tember 15th, in the article which gives the vol- ume its title, and which has so endeared him to the pacifists, he exclaimed in terms astonish- ingly naive : "TJn grand peuple ne se venge pas, il retablit le droit": a great nation does not seek revenge, it reestablishes Right — as if that was not exactly what France was trying to do in keeping up the fight ; as if France, and England, and, later, America, had not accepted the long, wretched struggle which lasted four miserable years, precisely in order to make possible that "Haute Cour Morale," for which the heart of Romain Rolland was yearning . . . away from his country! One cannot deny, of course, the lofty inspira- tion of the author of Au-dessus de la Melee, but neither can one close one's eyes to his remark- able stubbornness. More than any of his oppon- ents whom he constantly upbraids for their lack of openmindedness, he deserves the reproach of being prejudiced. He frequently commences his articles with abuse of Germany, superabundant sympathy for the French and very high praise of their splendid courage and noble behavior; and then continues : ' ' But . . . ' ' — that exasper- 20 EMOTIONAL REACTION ating hut, which means: "Now that I have patted you tn the back, listen to me who am able to dispense words of supreme wnsdom." His insistence on his point of view becomes, at times, intolerable, and creeps into the very titles of his articles: Inter Arma Caritas; Au Peuple qvH sou f re pour la Justice; Notre Prochain, I'En- nemi; etc. Among the answers to Holland, two of the most striking are Verhaeren's which appeared in the Revue de Paris and which can be summar- ized in his own words: "One must not try to hold a scale when the enemy is brandishing a sword"; and the forceful article by Benda in V Opinion ^ in which this writer says : ' ' But you exaggerate, Sir, when you say that Justice must be free from passion. Passion for the just cause, she must have." The sentiments of the Catholics were expressed by H. Massis in his pamphlet Rolland contre. la France. See also Paul Hyacinthe-Loyson's Etes-vous Neutre de- vant le Crime? If one wishes to have also a poet's reaction, one will find it in the Sonate oon- tre Romain Rolland, by Jean Fontaine-Vive, in the volume Jeunesse ardente, quoted below. 5 Benda's article is to be found in his Sentiments de Critias (1917), to •which we shall refer again later. 21 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR But the most representative comments on Rol- land's book are found in G. A. Henches' A * I'Ecole de la Guerre (1918). Commandant Henches kept one of the best diaries of the war: Few soldiers have felt more keenly than he the horrors of the great tragedy; few have kept themselves so completely under control. And yet, this man who is generally so moderate even when referring to the Germans, is very severe toward Rolland. He denies him any right to speak. Rolland may be right, but Rolland has no voice in the matter, because, even if he is right, he has not reached his conclusions by means of valid premisses : Rolland has not seen the war. He is like a man who, firing a rifle for the first time, would happen, hy some chance, to make a bull 's eye. That success would not make a shooter of him ; and his claim to dogmatize on matters of shooting would not be admissible. The following are a few quotations from Henches: "Rolland seems to me to be giving himself airs of moral superiority and of de- tachment which are distinctly out of place in present circumstances. . . . After the war, more than half the Germans, — if they are definitely beaten, — will assert that they had nothing what- ever to do with the crimes ; but, if by any chance, 22 EMOTIONAL REACTION they had been victorious, how many, think you, would have protested ? . . . The thoughts of Ro- main Rolland, even if they be true, carry no more weight than a ribbon or a trinket. You must risk your life in times like these, to have a right to uphold an idea, and those who have risked only their position, or their fortune, or who strive after notoriety, we regard as noxious. . . . Hatred we must have : hatred of self-seekers, ha- tred of liars, hatred of profiteers of every kind. It is eas}', from a safe retreat, to utter words of kindness. But if Romain Rolland had witnessed the exodus of women and children on certain September evenings in 1914; if he lived, as we do, among graves, he would be ashamed that he had dared to open his mouth. It may be that his ideas do not differ from our own, he is none the less guilty. We have a right to speak, he has not. Only those have a right to forgive who have suffered." Commandant Henches was killed in action. After some time the public had ceased to pay any attention whatsoever to Rolland. The attitude of Rolland was shared by an extremely small minority in France during the war, and since the cessation of hostilities things have not changed 23 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR much. There is, however, a manifesto of the "intel- lectuels combattants frangais aux intellectuels com- hattants du monde" which appeared in Le Cri du Midi and was reproduced without comment in the Mercure de France, in April, 1919, and from which we quote the following extracts: "Our hands which in spite of us were steeped in blood, are to-day eager to take up, in hearty cooperation with you the task of world reconstruction. . . . The din of battle has never robbed our minds of their serenity. . . . Fight- ing intellectuals of those countries which yesterday were at war, we are impatient to renew with you intellectual and friendly relations. Intellectuals of the world, we know that those of you who share our sentiments are numberless; we know that for fifty months you have dragged out, behind the appear- ance of serene wisdom, existences as miserable as those of guilty souls. It behooves us to set to you the solemn and good example of wise conduct. . . . We alone in the clash of fire and steel have had the courage to retain our faith in the illuminating and civilizing power of reason." Rolland, who had distinctly not been a "combat- tant," co.uld. not sign this document ; the chief name at the bottom of it is that of Barbusse, the author of Le Feu, of which we shall speak presently. The other eleven are men of much lesser note. In July, however, Rolland wrote a manifesto himself, in the very same spirit, and in which he seems as far as ever from realizing the concrete problems which the world has to face. He speaks of the "alliances hu- miUantes de I'esprit/' of the duty of the intellectuals 24 EMOTIONAL REACTION to "point to the polar star in the turmoil of dark passions," "montrer Vetoile polaire au milieu du tourbillon des passions dans la nuit," and then hails the People of the future "one, universal, suffer- . ing, stumbling but rising again," "unique, universel, qui suujfre, qui tombe el se releve." . . . This piece of -oratory has elicited a counter-manifesto which was published in the Figaro of July 19 by a group of patriotic writers, among whom was H. Massis (see our chapter III, below, on Philosophy during the ■ Great War). They called it "Pour le Parti de Vln- telligence" — distinguishing thus between themselves and the "intellectuels" whose leanuags are towards in- ternationalism and perhaps even towards Pnissian- isra. They want to build the future on distinctly na- tional ideas, counting among these a return to the leadership of the Catholic Church. This reply was signed not only by nationalistic and catholic writers, as Massis, Bourget and Francis Jammes, but also by men like Henri Gheon and Binet-Valmer. All these discussions when so much action is needed are some- what disconcerting. It may be interesting to recall here another mani- festo, that written by Gerhard Hauptniann, in Ger- many, who had refused ruthlessly to take the olive branch extended to him by Romain Rolland in 1914. In 1918, shortly after the armistice, his tone had changed; "A terrible experience," he says, "has proved to us that hatred does not pay. . . . Relent- lessly and awfully, God's designs have triumphed over those of men. . . . For a thousand years, the FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR German nation has lived through no experience com- parable to that of these latter days." . . . For further data relative to the Rolland contro- versy, cf. Vic, Litterature de la Guerre, i. 349-351. CHAPTER II PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION— COMMENCING ABOUT THE SPRING OF 1915 Some Soldier Types in "War No\tls We now come to those books which relate much more objectively than those referred to previously, the facts connected directly or indi- rectly with the prosecution of the war. As the conflict progressed and assumed for- midable proportions, changing its character from that of a war of nations in which national and political aims strove for mastery, to that of a world war in which great human principles were involved, it was both inevitable and imperative that the Ij^ric and epic notes should die down. In the spring of 1915, the more intelligent had already realized how helpless are strong emo- tions to solve great problems; that the old ''cliches" had served their purpose and that it was time to discard them ; what the seriousness of the hour demanded then was a deep, clear, practical, sober apprehension of the realities of the hour. 27 FRENCH LITELATURE OF THE GREAT WAR The most immediate interest, of course, was foeussed on the soldiers who were waging the war. Some men of letters soon began to make use of what had been for many years the most common medium of art, the novel. "We must, however, beg leave to draw here a sharp dis- tinction between two kinds of novels dealing with the war. The one we will call War-Novel proper, in which the authors work up documents or per- sonal experiences in order to make us see more deeply the significance of war itself ; they apply the realistic theory of art which has been so well defined in Maupassant's Preface to Pierre et Jean; their aim is to rearrange facts in a manner which is more exact perhaps than reality but more indicative of the internal order of things, and with a view to bringing out more convinc- ingly than mere contingencies have done, some aspects of the war which seem to them worth emphasizing. The other we will call War-Time-Novel; it is the novel in which the war has been used merely as a background for some storj^ not necessarily connected with it. And of course it cannot be denied that war offers wonderfully dramatic and romanesque situations ; but there is probably 28 PERIOD OF DOCmiENTATION no love story, no tragedy, no idyll, or intrigue of any sort which absolutely requires war as a back- ground ; the separation of lovers, jealousies, even the Enoch Arden theme, or the marriage with a man who has become a cripple, have no organic connection with war. We are not concerned for the present with such War-Time-Novels, however great their ar- tistic value may be (they will be dealt with at the end of Part II) but only with War-No veLs proper. In order to estimate rightly the value of war- fiction as a contribution to our knowledge of the war, two facts should be borne in mind : the first is that no account of any event can ever be alto- gether objective; even the most matter of fact war-diary has required selection (and consequent rejection) of material, in its composition, and moreover presents that material from the stand- point peculiar to some one author; that selection and that standpoint constitute the subjective or fictional element in the work. The second fact is that in a work which purports to represent and to explain the war, the element of fiction must be reduced to a minimum. The distinc- tion between the two genres — War-novels and 29 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR War-diaries — thus tends to disappear, and what- ever actual fiction there is in war-novels may be legitimately disregarded in estimating their value. Indeed the reading public makes so lit- tle of that distinction that it very easily regards war-novels as war-recollections ; and very rightly so when the authors have had personal experi- ence of the facts which they relate either on the firing line, or elsewhere. At the same time, since the authors are aim- ing at giving to war novels as much aesthetic force and unity as possible — which they accom- plish by developing or condensing, or at any rate re-focussing such episodes as they have espe- cially selected — they must, if they are successful, produce something which from an artistic stand- point is superior to the mere chronological rec- ord of war episodes in memoirs and recollections. * * * Three War-novels stand out as the best at- tempts to depict soldier types of the Great War. All three have been widely read. The first is Rene Benjamin's Gaspard (1915).^ ^ As a literary product, this book will hold its own, not only against the other more recent war books, but long after the war. Gaspard will re- 1 It was awarded the Prix Goncourt for 1915, and the Grand Prix du roman, by the French Academy in 1916. 30 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION main a type in French literature, like Moliere's Scapin, Daudet's Tartarin, Hugo's Gavroche, or Aicard's Maurin des Maures. Indeed, the name "Gaspard" has already passed into the language to designate the intelligent, alert man of the peo- ple of France, or rather of Paris, the man of perfectly unsophisticated mind, who has a genius for acting kindly, is always ready to help, is do- ing, without any trace of self-consciousness, the most beautiful things; he is picturesque in speech, droll in manner, sound in mind as a red apple, transparent as glass, true as steel. This is the French soldier which the general public, especiallj^ abroad, likes to imagine — and per- fectly legit imatelj^; Gaspards are more likely to be found in the French army than elsewhere, al- though nobody would think that all French sol- diers are Gaspards." The second book is Bourru, soldat de Vau- ^ quois^ (1916) by Jean des Yignes Rouges. It 2 In 1916, Benjamin published another book, Sous le Ciel de France, and more recently a third: Le Major Pipe et son Pere which is discussed further on in this same chapter, and since the war still another. Grand- goujon (1919). 3 Vauquois, a promontory, like a sentry between Ver- d\in and the Forest of the Argonne, the only sector where the French, in spite of the most vicious attacks of the Germans, never withdrew one inch. The book was crowned bv the French Academy. 31 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR corresponds to the second period of the war, when the hell of the trenches rendered the life of the soldier much harder and stripped war of much of the hero'i-romanesque which would oth- erwise, to some extent, extenuate its horrors. Of course, in Gaspard we had not really much of war itself; we had the mobilization period, and just two episodes on the front; after the first, the wounding, nursing, and convalescence of Gaspard ; after the second, his return home as a cripple. Gaspard was still a civilian, accident- ally drawn into the war, but who had kept in the service his attitude of everyday life. For Bourru, civilian life is a dear memory only, he has become a soldier through and through, and very few pages of the book are not pictures of war, and of war of the fiercest kind in one of the worst sectors on the whole battle line. Bourru, unlike Gaspard, the quick-witted shop- keeper of Montmartre, is a peasant from Bur- gundy. He possesses all the intelligence, energy and quietness of disposition of his race, but lacks the cheerfulness of Gaspard; he is bourru ("a grumbler"), but as a soldier he is just as brave and good as Gaspard; and perhaps because he has not that cheerfulness to help him out in his trials he is the more admirable in his behavior. 32 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION Although not as entertaining as Gaspard, he rep- resents probably more truly the average fine sol- dier of France.* The third book is Barbusse's Le Feu? It pic- tures the soldiers in the trenches when the third year of war was in sight. If the soldier could still be courageous in facing grim reality, no- body could expect of him, nobody, indeed, would accept as genuine, the everlasting cheerfulness of Gaspard; to expect even the good-natured grumbling of Bourru would be a great deal. And indeed Le Feu is most depressing in tone and in its presentation of what people call the most realistic descriptions of trench warfare. Le Feu is by far the most-discussed book of the war. What aroused so much comment — praise on the one hand and criticism on the 4 Some very interesting: information is given in the book about tlie underground warfare carried on by the sappers and miners (for which topic see also ha. Guerre souterraine by Captain Danrit). Two other books were published in 1917 by J. des Vignes Rouges: L'Ame des chefs, and a novel : Andr^ Rieu, offider de France, a psy- chological study of a young "sous-lieutenant"' of 20, a man of refinement, a poet, who knows how to remain above the ugly realities of the war while in the war. Jean des Vignes Rouges is the nom de plume of Cap- tain Taboureaii. ^ Le Feu was awarded the Prix Goncourt for 1916. When the war ended, in November, 1918, that is two years after the publication of the book, 230,000 copies of it had been sold. 33 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR other — is the tone of the book, which appears to many to be not only realistic (which would be legitimate) but in part plainly cynical. There are those who see in so brutal a picture a sane, even a necessary reaction against the silly opti- mism prevailing in many quarters. The stupid representation of the French soldier as thor- oughly enjoying life in the trenches — as eager for nothing save to die for his country, as charg- ing the enemy always in a state of sublime exal- tation, or, when lying wounded in the hospital, as burning with impatience to return as soon as possible to sacrifice whatever limb was left to him — seemed to them absurd, unjust, and immoral. Thus Barbusse, they would argue, was fully jus- tified even in overdrawing the picture in order to counteract such misconceptions. But there are those on the other hand who lay stress on another aspect of the problem. The book -came out, they remark, just at the darkest period of the war, when France was finding it very difficult to keep up the spirits of her chil- dren in the terrific struggle. It was therefore very wrong, in such an hour, to speak words of discouragement. It is not right to tell the truth to a sick man when the truth may kill him, while 34 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION mere abstention from saying anything may allow him to pull through. Moreover, Barbusse has been charged with producing a book which was realistic only in the sense of "shocking," but not in the sense of "true." An army composed of men such as are described in Le Feu could never have achieved what the French army did achieve. Further- more, the squad which Barbusse presents in his book is composed entirely of unthinking men, not one of whom is capable of grasping the meaning of the struggle.'' French officers and soldiers have repeatedly protested against what they con- sider Barbusse 's misrepresentations of the French soldier; and they surely speak with au- thority. They have sometimes characterized the book as "criminal." A vigorous protest by Major L. C. Elkenfelder, an Alsatian, appeared in the Chicago Tribune and was reproduced on May 19th, 1918, in the Sunday edition of the New York Times.'' c On tliis point the reader should consult Mauclair'a several articles in the Hetnaine Litteraire of Geneva, in the years 1916 and 11)17. T Here are the words of a man who has won great es- teem among American scholars, Lucien Foulet: "Tlie book contains some good, some bad; without entering into any detail I will tell you that as far as the life of 35 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR Our readers will of course recall the part played by minister E,ichelieu, in the famous lit- erary ' ' querelle du Cid ' ' ; the historian of the fu- ture may have to examine the part of another minister in the querelle du Feu. No secret is made, especially in the last pages of the book under consideration, of the author's disbelief in the idea of patrie. The question then arose: How was it that books much less outspoken on much less paramount issues should have been pitilessly censored while Le Feu was not ? And how was it that this book belittling patriotism should have been allowed to come out just at the time when those very ideas were used by German propaganda in a desperate attempt to create a demand for peace in France? A plausible an- swer was made repeatedly and openly: because the minister of the interior was then Malvy, who was later charged with treason; Malvy al- lowed the book to pass (see the article in the New York Times already mentioned).® A care- the trenches is concerned, it is in no way a faithful ren- dering. I have passed twenty-one months in the trenches and I know wiiat it is. As for the language of the 'poilu,' he idealizes it from certain points of view, and renders it extraordinarily vulgar at times." ( From a private letter.) 8 Louis J. Malvy, Minister of the Interior in the Vivi- ani, Briand and Ribot cabinets, was reckoned one of the most astute political figures in France. It was in 36 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION ful reading of the book may, to some extent, ab- solve Barbusse of any active intention to aid the enemy. While, theoretically, he is opposed to purely national pursuits and advocates human ideals (he has again said so since the war is over. See above, end of chapter I, pages 23-24), yet in this concrete case of the Great "War he believes that France is waging a just fight. In other words, unless new arguments are brought for- ward, one can only make this statement, that German propagandists may have used the book of Barbusse in a way of which he himself may have disapproved. As far as the writer knows, Barbusse never took the trouble to answer the critics. This may be due to pride.** July, 1917, that his position was first assailed. At that time M. Clcmenceaii, later French Premier, charged that M. Malvy was spreading "defeatist" propaganda among the troops, and Malvy's resignation of his post as Min- ister of the Interior was announced early in August. In November, 1917, Malvy introduced in the Chamber of Deputies a bill demanding that he be tried before the high court, and the Chamber appointed a committee of thirty-three to inquire into the merits of the case. This committee submitted its report calling for Malvy's im- peachment. On August 6, 1918, Malvy was found guilty of holding communication with the enemy and sentenced to five years' banishment. The sentence, however, did not carry with it civic degradation. 9 Concerning the success of the book in America the situation is about the same as in France, namely, that it is quite possible that German agents helped in ad- vertising Le Feu; but Under Fire was published by a 37 i 2070 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR The literary historian of the future will have to take into account another fact when he comes to discuss the case of Barbusse. It is that the attitude which he assumes toward the soldier is an effect of his morbid temperament. It was Barbusse, it must be remembered, who a few years before Le Feu, wrote L'Enfer (1908), which is surely as morbid and impure a book as any man might care to handle. There are many ways of expressing views of life which bespeak despair and disgust. Examples of this are afforded by the literatures of all ages, from Buddha and Omar-Khajyam to Leopardi, Schopenhauer, and Baudelaire. But why should Barbusse choose the most repulsive? It seems natural enough that a man of his tempera- ment should write about the heroes of the trenches whom the war had thrust upon his at- tention, in the same abnormal manner which he had adopted in describing the repulsive, though perhaps real, creatures of his former work." firm (Button) which has shown strong pro- Ally tend- encies and could therefore be blamed only for lack of due caution. It was unfortunate that the translation came out just at the time when American public opinion had to decide whether or not America should enter the war; it did not, however, affect the issue. 10 It is regrettable that, on strength of the success of Le Feu, an American firm should have recently brought out a translation of L'Enfer (under the title Inferno). 38 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION The writer would go even farther. Surely a large part of the responsibility for the regret- table popularity of Le Feu, in France as in this countiy, rests with the public. It is partly an effect of the modern craze for the sensational, the abnormal, and the morbid. One thinks nat- urally of a woman as a charming, graceful, kind creature, and one considers it the duty of "real," "true," "original" art, to represent her as willful, masculine, and cruel. The normal idea of a clergj^man is that of a conventional, sincere, and honest man, but he becomes "artis- tically" interesting only when he is represented as unconventional, shrewd, satanic. Likewise, the picture of a soldier which comes first to mind is that of a vigorous, high-minded, heroic fellow, but a book which represents him as shock- It is still more regrettable that in a somewhat bombastic preface, an American critic should have spoken of Bar- busse as one of "the most distinguished contemporary French writers" ("notorious" would have been better), and of L'Enfer as of a "spiritual" book, one through which "a cleansing wind is running." Naivete has its limits; such judgments would certainly cause French critics to smile. What is more serious, however, in this matter is that the morbid scatology of the work is likely to produce a very false impression, on the American mind, of the type of novel which is welcome by the French public, "it is a well known fact that many repul- sive novels which have passed as French works, were of German origin, and in the spirit of an insidious prop- aganda, were intended to dishonor the name of France. 39 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR ingly non-heroic, homesick, and shirking hard- ships, is regarded as the work of the "original, superior artist " ; it would be terribly bourgeois not to accept that distressing picture, and the opportunity is good for one who feels within him the soul of a Philistine to make himself appear a person of superior judgment. The reader who looks for strong sensations in war literature because he thinks that the terrible and the sickening are inseparable from that kind of literature, need not read Barbusse's Le Feu which leaves so distinctly unpleasant an after- taste.^^ There are many others which one might suggest in preference. Let him take up at ran- 11 At the beginning of 1919, Barbusse published an- other war-novel entitled Clarte (Flammarion) , which shows conclusively that he lias not paid the slightest attention to all that had been said of his first war book. Indeed, in many ways, it seems to be only a new edition of Le Feu. The hero of the book is one Simon Pavilin, a small clerk and a perfect Philistine, who takes life as it comes, allowing himself to be led by society as at pres- ent organized without protest or conscious reaction. The war breaks out; he is called to the colors, and an- swers the call ; he then sees and goes through all the horrors pictured in Le Feu and repictured once more in Clarte. As he lies wounded and delirious on the field of battle, the thought comes to him that the people hav.e always been led like cattle. That passivity of the peo- ple, — not only in his own country, but in all nations in- cluding Germany, — irritates him, and he dreams there- fore, of destroying all national emblems and of working towards the establishment of a Republic of the United States of the World. 40 1 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION dom an}' of the war diaries which we mention below, and he will not be disappointed. But he will soon notice that although no writers who have had experience of the war, can consistently refrain from speating of its horrors, — and this is true even of those who like Commandant Henches and the author of Lettres d'lin Soldat take up their pen with the deliberate purpose of getting away from the atmosphere of war into that of serene and quieting meditation, — yet there is not one who has systematically taught that war has no redeeming features; not one who has failed to acknowledge that the war has brought out beautiful traits in human nature, and that even the humblest soldier participates in that moral uplifting which human suffering brings to every man, however lowly his station in life. Barbusse, apparently, would have us believe that his language is that of an unprejudiced philosopher. Let us now examine the work of a man who might put forth a similar claim and with better reason ; a man who is just as anxious as Barbusse to avoid jingoistic talk. "We shall see then what the attitude of an ante-war "in- 41 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR tellectual" can be when he has not the peculiar bent of a Barbusse. Adrien Bertrand's novel L'Appel du Sol (1916) ^^ will never appeal much to the general public because in addition to magnificent battle scenes — some of which would not suffer by com- parison with even such classics as Merimee's Prise de la Redoute, — it contains long chapters devoted entirely to philosophical discussions. But the reader who is interested in ideas will pronounce L'Appel du Sol superior to any of the three books we have already mentioned. In some respects it reminds one of Le Feu. It is composed with marked artistic care; we mean that its scenes are not mere photographic or gramophonic reproductions of picturesque or telling episodes, but are minutely and exquis- itely worked out. The characters, too, are not merely real, they are composed of traits care- fully selected and skillfully worked up into con- sistent unities ; and the whole work, like Le Feu, answers thus perfectly to our definition of war- fiction, as an artistic rearrangement of facts with a view to bringing out, more vividly than real- ity, some aspect or other of the war. Like Bar- 12 It was awarded a Prix Goncourt in 1916, — for 1914 when none had been awarded. 42 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION busse again, Bertraiid maintains philosophical unity by grouping a few men who present not so much ditrerent points of view as different as- pects of the same general point of view. But here we have reached the parting of the ways. Barbusse has rather narrow socialist or anar- chist inclinations, while Bertrand is an intellec- tual of a much broader type. He does not, un- der pretext of doing away with all sophistry or hyprocrisy, pick out as sole representatives of the soldiers men of no education whose words are mainly expressions of distress at their material privations or of revolt at the appalling slaughter which arrests in them all thought, and reduces them to the state of passive instruments of war. Bertrand also reproduces the thoughts of the common soldiers, but the words which he quotes, even when the speaker is uneducated, do not sug- gest an utterly ignoble philosophy. "When, for instance, Angielli grumblingly remarks after a fierce battle: "Ce n'est rien de mourir, mais c'est dur de ne pas manger," his philosophy (and there is a world of it in that short sentence) is by no means of a sordidly materialistic kind, nor is his attitude one of surly revolt against the government which demands of him military serv- ice. And, as we have elsewhere remarked, one 43 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR can give any coloring to the war philosophy of the common soldiers by the selection which one makes of their reported utterances. But Bertrand introduces men of culture. They are the officers who are allowed to con- tribute a large part to the discussion of the prob- lems which the war has raised. And, indeed, why should they not ? Why should only the ig- norant have a right to speak, as in Barbusse? There is an interesting parallel drawn between the two chief figures among those officers, Lucien Fabre, a very young " Saint-Cyrien, " soldier by profession who becomes philosopher by the accident of the war, and Vaissette, ''agrege de Philosophic, ancien normalien et Professeur de lycee, ' ' philosopher by profession and soldier by the accident of war. This Vaissette who repre- sents the ''intellectual" in the war, Bertrand has portrayed in a masterly way.^^ And then, there is another clever parallel between Nicolai who has learned warfare in colonial service, and the young man (Fabre) who has acquired his knowl- edge through courses at Saint-Cyr. These offi- cers discuss of course chiefly topics related to the 13 Since Bertrand's book, that type has appeared often, either in novels like Marcel Berger's (see below), or, es- pecially, in war-recollections: RMier, Genevoix, Fri- bourg, Malherbe, Delvert, etc. 44 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION war; they discuss the soldiers of Marathon, of Cannae, of the First French Republic, of Mari- gnan, or the courage of the Christian martyrs. Their symposiums take place after or before, and sometimes even during, an encounter. After one of the great battles, our group of philos- ophers walk to a cemetery, some distance away, to talk over the slaughter that had just taken place. Vaissette especially "was thirsting to exchange ideas with some one in order to make his own ideas clearer to himself" (p. 70). It is interesting to notice how, all through the book, Bertrand (who, before the war, had writ- ten in a cynical vein Le Jardin de Priape, and a play, La Premiere Berenice) endeavors to main- tain an attitude of detachment, and eagerly seizes upon incidents calculated to convince the reader that he is not cheaply j-ielding to the ever present dramatic note ; e. g., as the squad is about to take part in a dangerous attack in which many men are bound to die, Vaissette, in the course of a discussion why the men are willing to lay down their lives, remarks that they are all "sound asleep"; the inference being that the determin- ing factor in the momentous decision which they take, is not the moral struggle within them, not the sense of duty to the country which demands 45 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR the supreme sacrifice, but their physical fitness or exhaustion at that time. Elsewhere, the dis- cussion brings to light how easily the best and most carefully laid plans may be rendered in- effectual by the accidental interference of some unthought of, and in itself unimportant event, and seems to point to the conclusion that chance is, after all, the ultimate cause of success or of defeat in battle . . . Yoltaire's " pyrrhonisme de rhistoire." The soldiers do not willingly accept the idea that their readiness to die is not attrib- utable to some purpose clearly realized by them ; but when they try, each in his own way, to define that "cause" of their devotion, one feels uneasy in observing that they do 7iot seem to know why they sacrifice their lives ; some say that they are fighting because they were attacked, others that it is to win back Alsace-Lorraine, others again that it is to put an end to war itself, or not to be worried again by the Germans, or because France cannot be wrong. Again, it is evidently not by an oversight that Bertrand left with- out definite conclusion the following discussion between two officers : ''My Voltairian soul has long doubted the ex- istence of God," said Vaissette, "but this war 46 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION has helped me to pass from doubt to the cer- tainty of his non-existence." " — You would not say, I imagine, that this war is a proof of the triumph of reason in the world . . . ?" This was from Captain le Gueri, who had just joined the group ; and the conversation contin- ued under the serene sky as the Captain added : "You see in the war a condemnation of my creed [belief in God], and I see in it a condemna- tion of yours. This war means the bankruptcy of reason! . . . The one thing that is certain is that religion and reason have both proved themselves unequal to the task of preventing this gigantic folly of men, I mean this mad slaugh- ter" (p. 250-1). Bertrand goes no further with his argumenta- tion, but the skeptic within him is compelled to yield at last. In the magnificent chapter Pa- roles avant la Bataille, we notice the first conces- sion of the "intellect" to the moral beauty of the great wave of sacrifice which the world-ca- tastrophe had favored. Although he finds no rational explanation of what he sees, his admira- tion wrings from him the admission "qu'on pent tout obtenir de I'etre humain" (p. 183) ; and 47 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR that ''tout" means heroism and sacrifice. And before we reach the end of the book, we find Bertrand adopting the metaphysical formula, "Ce qui les dirigeait tons, c'etait I'appel de la terre frangaise" (p. 245) ; this is as far as he allows himself to go. After the last battle described in the book, we see Vaissette dying of his wounds. The philos- opher in him is still on his guard lest his intel- lect be deceived by sentimentality, emotionalism, the hypocrisy of politics, or what not. When, at that supreme hour, he asks the stretcher-bearers for news of his fellow soldiers and officers, and receives in reply to each inquiry the same mo- notonous and tragic: "killed! . . . killed! . . . killed!" his only answer at first is: "And so am I ! " But soon his body is shaken by a con- vulsion, and then, opening his eyes with great effort, he murmurs as he closes them again for- ever: "But France lives on." # * * A few words ought to be devoted at this point to two belated war novels — of 1919 — which are of the same order as the two just discussed. Barbusse had few disciples ; he had some, how- ever, probably the most original of them being 48 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION Leon Werth, who in his Clavel Soldat shows with much brilliancy the same spirit of anni- hilation as regards principles of patriotism, and other bourgeois conceptions of life; moreover, having done all his duty as a soldier, he feels a right to speak and he does not hesitate to say that war is as ugly as anything can be and that there is no need to try and lie about it by telling of the heroisms of all sorts which it en- genders. Clavel, who thus wages war on war, has found a volume of Rousseau's Confessions in the trenches, and he reads about the idyll of the Charmettes; he thinks: "this is life in- deed"; . . . but he fails to reflect that the war was fought by the Allies to bring about the pos- sibility of- such a life. The second of those novels is Jean de Gran- villier's Le Prix de V Homme. But both the content and the form would rather class it with Bertrand 's Appel du Sol. The hero— really the author as well — Lieutenant Miguel de Larreguy, is a young man full of ardor who has been long- ing for something that would make life worth living: he finds the something in the trenches. That is to say, he comes to the conclusion that there is no condition in this world like war, to 49 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR call forth the best that is in a man. The ac- counts of actual war experiences are equal to many of the best in the best war books. The same spirit of enthusiasm for the oppor- tunities of war, with almost a mystic note added to it, is found in Ch. Briand's novel, Le Sang (1919). * * * There is in Marcel Berger's Le Miracle dii Feu a delicate love affair interwoven with the ac- count of the first weeks of the war ; but the main interest of the work lies in the author's very keen psychological analysis of a soldier's mind. While Gaspard, Bourru de Vauquois, and the men of the squad in Le Feu, are all uneducated men who have sprung from the common people of France, Berger's hero, a sergeant named Michel, like Bertrand's, belongs to the class of the intellectuals. But A^aissette, it will be re- membered, had always studied life in the dis- interested spirit of a philosopher and theor- ist; Michel, who is also an educated man, had used his knowledge and refinement for the at- tainment of purely selfish ends. His attitude when the war breaks out is frankly that of a cynic. He has a good position which affords him plenty of leisure, and he leads a comfortable, un- 50 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATIOM eventful, sel:&-eentered life^ Emotion he has banished as a disturbing factor ; he has remained a bachelor because marriage imposes responsibil- ities which he does not wish to assume. When he is called to the colors, he joins his regiment with some reluctance ; not, indeed, through any sense of duty, but because by not doing so he would bring trouble upon himself. Once in the army, he is very anxious to avoid all unneces- sary work ; he is friendly toward his soldiers not by natural inclination, but because it is the best way to avoid trouble; he strongly resists any temptation to be carried away by patri- otic sentiments ; the first daring deed which he witnesses on the battlefield he explains away: "a man who has no nerves." He watches over himself, is ever mindful of the safe principle: "each for himself in a fray like this"; he even commits ungentlemanly acts, as, for instance, when he stealthily exchanges his leaking can- teen for a sound one which he takes from one of his fellow soldiers. But, very gradually, and very slowly, the sight of human suffering around him, the courage displayed by the men, and the genuine kind-heartedness of his humble compan- ions, make him change his attitude; he deeply realizes the tragedies caused by the death of 51 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR heads of families and of recently married men; he is affected by the help that religion will bring to some poor dying fellow ; and although he still likes to think of himself as of a superior intel- lectual being, he is already a changed man. His beha\dor in the heroic days of the Mame (sector of Ourcq) , shows how great has been the change. He is wounded ; loses one leg ; and for some time, in the hospital where he lies helpless, his old self takes hold of him again; he revolts against life. But the gentle consolation of a loving woman dis- pels the threatening cloud, and his better self triumphs in the end. This is certainly one of the most painstaking and thorough products of literature of the war in the form of a conventional novel. It is the best presentation of that theme, moral regen- eration through suffering, which has so often been treated since (in novels and in soldiers' diaries, and on the stage) that it has become not only commonplace but almost exasperat- ing at times. This recurrence, however, can certainly be taken as an indication that the war has actually rescued many, — especially among the intellectuals and the artists, — from a life of discontent and gloom; that it has shattered the dreams of some who had set themselves an unat- 52 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION tamable goal, has inspired others who were liv- ing aimlessly, and, to all, has offered a definite and beautiful task.^* One of the most refreshing of the war novels, — and one which the public received with evi- dent pleasure, — ^is Marcel Nadaud's Chignole'^^ (1917). Chignole is a yomig Parisian, and, — what is more significant — a child of Montmartre ; Le Goffic called him appropriately enough, "Gavroche avec des ailes. " He is intelligent and witty ; and, conscious that his versatility wull stand him in good stead in all circumstances, he never worries. His philosophy can be expressed in a very few words: '^Ne pas s'en faire." From early boyhood he had had a vague interest in mechanics ; he therefore went to work in a bi- cycle shop ; later, following the movement of the 1* Berger's book was heavily censored, but two remark- able passages wliicli were allowed to remain deserve to be pointed out. Tlie first is Berger's definition of the skeptic's attitude towards the war, in a speech which he puts in the mouth of Fortin, one of Michel's fellow sol- ders (pp. 87-94); the other showing the "miracle du feu," in Michel's own words, just before a striking de- scription of the offensive of the Marne (pp. 391-395). 15 A chignole is a special tj-pe of brace which aviators frequently have occasion to use in all kinds of adjust- ments of their machines. In Xadaud's book the word is applied, as a nickname, to a picturesque young aviator on account of his wonderful resourcefulness. 53 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR times, he obtained employment successively in an automobile, and in an aeroplane factory. He was just twenty when the war came with all its splendid opportunities for a youth of his type. The pilote who is supposed to be writing the book has just raised Chignole from the rank of a me- chanic (mecano) to that of observer. That means, of course, that Chignole is going to fly; and his enthusiasm, his energy, his taste for all the most extraordinary and foolhardy adven- tures, make him a figure worthy of the pen of the writer of The Three Musketeers. Chignole is at once wonderfully clever, magnificently he- roic, profoundly touching and picturesquely ab- surd, and retains withal a delightful childlike simplicity. Chignole could best be described as the Gas- pard of aviation. Although the work was pub- lished as late as 1917, — that is the same year as the gloomy Le Feu, — Chignole has the same spirit, the same irrepressible cheerfulness as Benjamin's hero. The explanation lies in the fact that the extraordinary vitality and alert- ness needed for aviation work kept the men in those units from experiencing the depression to which the men in the trenches fell victims. Every day they played with death, and there- 54 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION fore had no fear of it. Indeed, their foolhardi- ness won for them the reputation of being, one and all, crazy fellows;^*^ * * # It is not to be wondered at that, after the war had lasted three years, and its men and arms had been celebrated in many books, the reading pub- lic should feel that the theme of the hour, though inexhaustible in itself, might, perhaps, be re- newed with advantage by some fresh method of treatment, or by laying stress on some aspects of the war which had hitherto been neglected. Several writers attempted that renewal. They left the main stream of warlike events in which the real fighting soldiers are winning glory, suf- fering, conquering and dying, to explore what may be called the backwaters of the war: the very necessary, but much less glorious activities behind the lines. 16 Chignole was not Nadaud's first work. Before the war he' had written Coups de (Iriffe. . . . Pattes de Velours, and Tendresses. . . . Tristesses. He has also recorded his experiences in the Aviation Service in En plein Vol, Slouvemrs de Guerre Aerienne, 1017, a book which has had enormous success. More recently still, he has published Les derniers Mousquctaircs, and Frangi- pane et Cie — tolling the death of Chignole; and a biog- raphy of Guynemer which, however, is much less elabo- rate than the one written by Henri Bordeaux. Of the same order as Chignole, is Badigeon, aviateiir, by Lieut. G , pilote (loii)). 55 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR Of the two novels we are going to take up here, one deals with a half soldier, an " auxiliaire, " the other with a man even farther remote from military activities, a war-reporter — whose very slight connection with military matters per- mitted of his being smuggled into a war-novel. The first is Marcel Berger's Jean Darhoise, Aiixiliaire^'' (1918). It is a very long novel. As we have already had occasion to notice in studying Le Miracle du Feu, J\I. Berger has not the gift of brevity. But the work is nevertheless interesting, were it only as a document. Dar- boise is a soldier who after being wounded at Verdun, has recovered but is not well enough to be sent back to the front ; he must therefore join an auxiliary corps. In civil life he was an artist, a designer, and he suffers greatlj^ at being kept at tasks which might just as well be done by the most unskilled laborers. He is sent to Dunkirk, an industrial city and sea port in the North of France : a place absoluteh^ devoid of interest for a man of his mentality, and which, during the war was frequently visited by German raiding aeroplanes. His life there is minutely described 1" Auxiliary troops are composed of men who are phy- sically unlit for duty on the firing line, but who are valid enough for all kinds of fatigue work. 56 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION in all its wretchedness. The barracks are unat- tractive; he therefore takes some poor lodgings in town ; and from morning till evening, for the glory of France, he unloads ships, helps in the making of bread for the army, or does occasional work in some factor^' or other. It is all dirty, brainless, purely manual work. There is not among his fellow soldiers a single congenial man. They are the dregs of the armj^, ''rien que des faces d'abrutis ou de brutes, les deux grandes categories," and the officers who command them are not much better than the men. To a soldier who has known Verdun wnth all its horrors and perils, but with its tragic beauty too ; for a man who has enjoyed the companionship of the splen- did troops of Verdun, the situation is well nigh intolerable. After 150 pages, however, the pic- ture is pretty well completed, and we enter then into a regular psychological novel, or we should say rather into two novels. The first one is the romance of his love for his family. One day, it is true, he becomes un- faithful to his wife as a consequence of the de- moralizing etfect upon him of that deadly dull locality. His wife cannot understand, and they are, for a time, estranged from each other. 57 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR The second is the story of the intense suffer- ing of Darboise's soul. So great indeed are those sufferings, that he can bear them no more and he rebels against his lot and against the mil- itary authorities. He is cast into prison from which he is delivered by an attack of pneumonia. In the hospital to which he is taken, he meets a good and kind non-commissioned officer (whose little romance also appears in the book) who saves him from despair and reconciles him with his lot and, later, with his wife. All things considered, Jean Darhoise is a novel of the same type as Le Miracle du Feu. It is the story of the conversion of a snob to a man of courage and worth. But since the conditions under which an "auxiliaire" lives are less in- spiring than those of a soldier of the Marne, the final moral victory of Darboise is even greater than that of Michel, the hero of Le Miracle du Feu. Nevertheless the fact remains that Dar- boise will never inspire the reader with the same interest as Michel. In that respect, he remains the victim of his surroundings; for the descrip- tion of a dismal manufacturing town in war time can never have the fascination of the relation of battles and of other experiences of a soldier of the first line. Even Jean Darboise of Dunkirk 58 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION compares unfavorably with Jeau Darboise of Verdun/^ In spite of what has been said, — and even if one takes into account the fact that a war cor- respondent has necessarily a lesser claim to in- terest than a soldier on active service — Rene Benjamin's Le Major Pipe et son Pere (1918) is distinctly inferior to Gaspard. A young jour- nalist has shown a little more than contempt for England's part in the war. One day, his duties as war correspondent take him to the British front, and later to England. He is received with cordiality, nay more, he is treated with con- sideration, and very soon he is won over by the solid, comfortable organization of the English 18 If the whole truth is to be told, it must be said that although the "will to live" and to suffer for one's coun- try is the note with which the book closes, the disquiet- ing thought thrusts itself upon one tliat the author has inserted his conclusion rather as a matter of duty than of conviction. One cannot help noticing tliat on page 203 he makes one of his characters say in reference to Barbusse's Le Feu: "It is the sincere cry of a man of genius, to which the heart of all France eagerly re- sponded" (un genial cri de sincerite, accueilli dans toute la France avec un immense soulagement) . P. Coutras has also written a novel of the same gloomy inspiration, Les Tribulations d'un Auxiliaire (1916). The bitterness in the tone of Coutras's book has been traced by some to personal experiences of the author as a "soldat auxiliaire." 59 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR Army and Navy, by the generous British way of doing things, and by the simple, sincere, hearty hospitality which is offered him. When he returns to his own country, not only is he a sincere Anglophile, but he is convinced that he has "discovered" England. More than that, he develops something which savors of a certain contempt for the treatment which the French government metes out to its soldiers. Those thoughts he communicates privately to his wife. It must be confessed that Benjamin has yielded a little too readily, in this work, to his taste for satire. It was not necessary that the representative of the French press should be represented as so vain and provincial. A more delicate satire would have been quite as effec- tive — even more so. At the same time, it was a good idea to use that scheme to familiarize the French public — who was even in 1918 in need of enlightenment upon that subject — with some aspects of the organization of the British army as compared with that of the French." The same criticism would apply to Grand- goujon, a novel published by Benjamin after the close of the war (1919). The adventures and 19 Cf. M. J. Aulneau, Au Front Britanmque, Tableaux et recits d'un Observateur (Payot, 1919). 60 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION experiences of that Frenchman of forty, who does not know very well whether he is in or out of the army, is more the caricature of a type than a real type. # «: # We would go far beyond the limits we have set ourselves if we were to deal at any length with the numerous volumes of short stories in which types of soldiers are sketched — most of the time by soldiers themselves. But we ought to men- tion, by title at least, some of the best collections, as Claude Farrere: Histoires de Quatorze Sol- dats; H. Bordeaux: Jeimesse Nouvelle; Conies Veridiques des tranchees,' par un groupe de Poilus; Nouveaux Conies Veridiques, by the same, and a third collection, Sous I'Ohus; Les As peinis par eux-memes; since the war (1919), the remarkable volume by Vignaud, Les Sauveurs du Monde "contes suggeres par d 'horribles vi- sions"; A. Arnoux, Le Cdbarei. One special word about Pawlowski's Signaux a VEnnemi (1918).2« Cleverly illustrated by Gus Bofa, this little volume of 225 pages has an originalitj' all its own. It is a collection of very simple stories, the 20 For Pawlowski's other works, see chapter III, sec- tion 3. ^ 61 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR atmosphere of which has every appearance of being more genuinely ''poilu" than that of any other book that has come under our notice. The pictures which the stories present are certainly most "plausible," and, if one may be allowed to use once more that much abused word, thor- oughly "human." The principal story (which gives its title to the collection) is an amusing account of the excitement caused in a canton- ment on the firing line, by the strong suspicion that a spy signals to the enemy whenever one of the men go up into an observation tower. Who is the spy? Finally, but not before one of the men has been arrested as a suspect, it turns out that each time that some one goes up into the tower, a number of frightened crows take their flight from the roof into the open sky, and the Germans have need of no other signal to inform them that it is time to make a target of the tower. War Recollections and Diaries Introductory If Bacon's definition ars homo naturae additus be accepted, the war diary must be admitted to rank much lower as a literary genre than the war novel. Its artistic inferiority, however, 62 PEHIOD OF DOCUMENTATION does not deprive the war diary of its title to 'be regarded as the most characteristic li.erary product of the war, and the most trustworthy- source of information regarding certain aspects of it. War literature, as we have already .said, like the war itself which gave it birth, is something exceptional, abnormal ; and as Balzac has pointed out in his preface to La Comedie Ilumaine, nature, especially in times of great crises, is vastly more prolific of what we regard as ex- traordinary situations, than the most vivid im- agination of any man could ever be. The soldiers who saw some part of the war, and who were able to handle a pen, realized that truth and acted accordingly. Their man- ner of recording their experiences is not, of course, uniform, but the very large number of volumes of war recollections is evidence enough to show that the natural tendency of writers was to "record" their war experiences rather than to "re-create" them in the interests of art. Moreover, writers took it for granted not only that they might, but that they should speak in the first person ; it was indeed important that the "ego" of the soldier of 1914 should be re- vealed with as little artistic draping as possible ; 63 PREl CH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR far f:*om marking any lack of modesty, that simple self-revelation betrays rather a genuine desire to be as truthful as possible; again most of those recollections are less those of individuals than of groups of individuals; they are, as it were, impersonal recollections. As to the reader, the times were too serious, the subject too im- portant for him to be satisfied with anything less than the whole truth ; he would have resented as an act of bad faith any partial concealment of the soldier's "reactions" whether good or bad, whether heroic or disheartened. And now if the picture which we obtain from a perusal of those war recollections is on the whole a bright one, that brightness must be attributed to the inspiration which the men received from their intense patriotism and from the consciousness of the justice of their cause. France produced during the war an ample and beautiful harvest of war recollections. In this she was faithful to her ancient traditions, for it was from France that, at the dawn of Modern Civilization, came those first and fairest of epic poems which bore as their motta: Gesta t>ei per Francos; and in subsequent centuries, France has counted among her most famous cap- 64 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION tains men who also took rank among her most famous Avriters; the old classic Brantome, Agrippa d'Anbigne, La Rochefoucauld, de Retz, Marbot, Stendhal and others, to say nothing of men like Ronsard, Honore d'Urfe, and Descartes, who, although they did not write on military matters, had wielded the sword before they took up the pen. * * * Among the military writers of the past, there is one who has appealed particularly to the soldiers of the present war, and whose works, we are told, have been read more than those of any others in the trenches (for the French soldiers did a great deal of reading in the trenches) — Alfred de Vigu}-. This popularity of Vigny was due not only to the fact that he was a shining light during one of the brilliant periods of French literature, but because in his classic Servitude et Grandeur Militaires (1836), he had approached in a remarkably modern spirit all the great problems which the war has again thrust upon the attention of thinking men ; such, for instance, as the questions whether the idea of a citizen army as opposed to a mer- cenary army is Utopian ; whether war is to last 65 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR forever or whether peace can be made to do so ; and questions relative to the nature of patriot- ism, of military honor, etc. * * * The first of these topics, — citizen armies, — had been foremost in the minds of French officers for several years before the war. The first time since Vigny's days that the subject had been presented to the French reading public in such a manner as to create a deep impression, was in Pingot et moi (1893), a very remarkable work by Art Roe.^^ Pingot et moi immediately established the author's reputation as an authoritative writer on military topics. And Art Roe himself attrib- utes his military writings to the inspiration of Vigny's little book. He reminds us how clearly Vigny had stated the great problem which con- fronts all governments in this democratic age, when he wrote on the morrow of the French Revolution: "On ne peut trop hater I'epoque ou les armees seront identifiees a la nation, si elle doit acheminer au temps ou les armees ne seront plus, et ou le globe ne portera plus qu'une 21 Art Roe (pseudonym for Patrice Malion) was born at Lons-le-Saulnier, Jura, in 1865; he was a lieutenant in the French army when Pingot et moi appeared. 66 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION nation unanime enfin sur les formes sociales"; and, after inquiring Avhat has been done since 1870 to re-form and re-create the army, he con- cludes: "Le voeu d 'Alfred de Vigny est accom- pli; notre armee n'est plus que la nation en armes. " Indeed it would be difficult for any one truly to understand the modem French army, the army that fought the Great War, without read- ing Art Roe. The admirable spirit of coopera- tion of chiefs and soldiers, which has been so often and apparently so justly praised since 1914, finds its explanation in Art Roe's works. It is that cooperation which differentiates the French army not only from the German in which the human rights of the individual soldier seem so much neglected, but, to a very large extent from the British army also, if the reports of many Americans who have had opportunities of observing conditions during the war are to be trusted. And this achievement is the result of much arduous, consistent and sustained thought and effort. The title Pingot et moi is a program in itself. Pingot is the orderly of the lieutenant who relates the story; he is a good fellow "aux bons grands yeux honnetes, aux levres volontiers souriantes"; he is moreover an excellent soldier. 67 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR Pingot is well treated by his superior who under- stands that he is not a professional soldier and not a "mercenary," but a man who has been torn away from civilian life. In return for that human sympathy, Pingot shows himself a de- voted servant, ever ready to do anj'thing that his chief desires him to do. He enjoys nothing more than to be allowed to carry out an order in his own way, and thus he develops a very good spirit of initiative. The book does honor to the great heart of the man who wrote it. Art Roe takes up the same problem in his second book: Mon Regiment Russe (1899). He is sent on a mission to study the Eussian army, and is in- terested to find how the famous general Drago- mirov has solved the problem of developing the soldier without suppressing the man. "Ou trouver un systeme d 'education militaire respec- tueux de la personne humaine et qui tende a accroitre I'homme en I'homme?" (p. 166). It will be seen from this that the problem, as under- stood by our author, is not merely that of not harming the man during the process of making a soldier of him; he wants the officers to handle the training in such a manner that it will actu- ally have been of advantage to the man later on when he returns to civilian life. There are in- 68 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION tensely interesting passages in Roe's second book; that, for instance, in which he says that Dragomirov's work in the Russian barracks brought back to his mind a certain passage of the Gospel : '' Je me suis souvenu de cette parole du Christ: qui donne son dme pour I'amour de m&i, la retrouvera" (p. 181).-- « * * The importance of Art Roe's work cannot be exaggerated. Fingot ct moi is the common an- cestor of those officers' diaries which, together with the diaries of the private soldiers, are our most important sources of documentation on the army's part in the war. During the twenty-one years that elapsed between the publication of Pingot et moi and 1914, quite a number of offi- cers had succeeded in interesting the public in their recollections and in their years of service in the colonies. Baratier's Epopees Africaines (author killed at Verdun) and Capitaine Cor- 22 The problem of the Russian officers is very different from that of the French. Art Roe has expressed that difference in the following manner: The Russian officer has to develop the personality of the soldier by drawing it out of the Russian mass, while our problem in France consists in the making of a compact, tightly knit, homo- geneous mass out of elements which are distinct and strongly individualistic (p. 362). In both countries the end in view is the same: that, namely, of forming an army. 69 •. FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR net's La Conquete du Maroc are two of the best known publications of that kind. * * * Two other works, written by much younger officers, and dealing with the psychology and philosophy of military life, were attracting a great deal of attention on the eve of the war. The first is Psichari's L'Appel des Armes (1913) which, although it is presented in the form of a novel, is nevertheless full of personal recollec- tions. The mystic note of those pages, in which the author exalts the profession of the soldier to the point of saying ' ' War is divine, ' ' is very striking.^^ The other is Nolly 's Gens de Guerre du Maroc (1913) ^* which is, all told, a more sober, and also a more solid work ; and one which will probably replace Psichari's Appel des Armes in the memory of men. Nolly is the more direct continuator of the work of Art Roe. His sympathetic study of the French soldier is remarkably relevant, objective and keen. There was absolute certainty in his mind after 1911, that war could not be averted, but his confidence 23 This mystic note is even stronger in a posthumous novel of Psichari's, La Teillee du Centurion, published at the end of 1914. 24 Nolly is Capitaine d'Etanger's nom de plume. 70 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION in the sterling qualities of the army in which he was serving was no less absolute. "To those who know not the worth of the sword of France because they have not seen it thrust and slash ; to those who timidly waver, we say: We have seen it, and we know. Take heart ! We have tried the force which you en- trusted to our care, and we vouch for its high excellence. Some day it will work wonders in order that the home of beauty and of good may abide forever. . . . Lift up your heads ! ' ' No prophecies concerning the war have re- ceived such astonishing confirmation from the events as those of Nolly's Gens de Guerre du Maroc.^^. I. Philosophical Type — First Phase The three men whom we have just mentioned died very early in the war: Patrice Mahon (Art Roe), who was then a lieutenant colonel, fell at Sainte-]\Iarie-des-Mines, in the Vosges, on August 22nd, 1914 ; Psichari was killed the same 25 For a detailed study of Psichari's and Nolly's pre- war writings, and other pre war literature dealinor with the war, the reader is referred to our study of "Le Roman Militaire en France de 1S70 j\ 1914" {Publica- tions of the Modem Language Association of America, March 1919). 71 FKENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR day during the great retreat to the Marne, and Nolly after being first wounded on August 10, and again on the 31st of the same month, died on September 3rd. They wrote nothing, there- fore, regarding the war itself; but there were many others who, at that time, were ready to continue their work with pen as well as with sword. One of the first of the diaries to appear was Paul Lintier's Avec une hatterie de 75, Ma Piece. Souvenirs d'un Cannonier de 1914 (1915). This work was at once recognized as one of excep- tional and lasting value, as may be judged by the fact that it ran through 53 editions before the end of the war. Its author was promptly awarded the Prix Monthyon by the French Academy. Paul Lintier was born in 1893. He was there- fore only 21 when he wrote Ma Piece. After being trained for a business career, he decided to take up law, and while still in his teens began to write. In 1912, he was enrolled in the 44th regiment of Artillery and was made a quarter- master in 1914. He was severely wounded on September 22nd, 1914, but recovered and re- turned to the front as lieutenant in July, 1915. He was killed at Jeandelincourt, in March, 1916. 72 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION The freshness of impressions is what dis- tinguishes his book from all others of the same kind, for it was written before the intense emo- tions of the first hours of the war had had time to subside. It is indeed remarkable how, in later writers, a familiarity of even a very few weeks with the events of the war sufficed to dull the keen edge of their sensibility, so that impressions were received and registered with less conscious- ness of horror, admiration or enthusiasm.^® But in Ma Piece we still have the full vibration of a young soldier's whole being; and because that "being" is a noble instrument, we are abso- lutely thrilled as he describes that first battle (pp. 75-88) with its first dead; those first cries and moans of the first wounded ; the tragic sud- denness of the adjustment which the men had to make to new conditions when they passed with- out transition on that first morning, from the enjoj'ment of the peaceful countryside and quiet villages through which they had marched, to the roaring of guns right ahead of them, and to the sight of burning houses and long trains of dis- tressed fugitives. . . . And, the next day, when 26 That remark is true even of Lintier's second book which is a sequel to Ma Piece: viz., Le Tube 12S3, Sou- venirs d'un Chef de Pidce, published after his death by Plon, 1915-1916. 73 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR the men were running their "75" into position, they heard the forlorn cry of a little girl, alone and lost in that hell: cries of "Maman! maman!" and they were distraught with grief because they had to go by, and might not stop to comfort the child (pp. 168-169) . . . Then it was the retreat day after day, that long retreat in which they were never beaten but never al- lowed to make a stand; and it was the physical exhaustion, and the need of sleep, and the de- moralization due to days of incessant rain, and the ghastly sight of long trains of wounded, and the fixed idea, in the minds of some of the men, that they were betrayed by their chiefs. . . . And then, at last, it was the order to stop on the Marne, and the wave of superhuman strength that came upon the men (p. 209) . , . But then, again, there came the vast fields of slaughter, and the harrowing tales, in the liberated villages, of the savage outrages of the Huns (how they deserved the name!) so that when some one in the battery suggested that the war might last three months, he was greeted by an angry; "Three months! but long before that we shall all be creves de misere." And nevertheless the "misery" lasted for four years and a half ! 74 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION • Let us quote this one passage (p. 166) : "Ah! if I survive this hecatomb, how well I shall know how to live ! I had never thought that there was joy in the mere facts of breathing, of opening one's eyes to the morning light, of absorbing it, of feeling warm or cold, or even of suffering. I thought that only certain hours in life were worth living, and I let the others go by. If I should see the end of this war, I shall know how to detain each passing hour; I shall make it a point to get out of each second of life every sensation that it can yield; and it will be to me like the feeling of delightfully cool water passing through my fingers. "It seems to me that I shall stop then at any time, interrupt a sentence, stay a gesture, just to repeat to myself : ' I am alive ! . . . I am alive! . . .'" The voung officer who wrote that did not live ; neither did nearly two million of his countrymen who surely felt as he did, although they had not his powers of expression. * * * Maurice Genevoix's Sous Verdun, Aout 1914, with a preface by E. Lavisse, (I9I5), was pub- lished shortly after Lintier's Ma Piece.^^ Gene- 27 The reader will not, of course, expect to find in this 75 FRENCH LITERATURE OE THE GREAT WAR voix 's talent is equal to that of Lintier ; he lacks, however, Lintier 's spontaneousness ; but being a more practiced writer, he compensates by his consummate skill in working up his ma- terial, for the relative lack of the direct pres- entation of immediate reactions. Moreover, Genevoix relieves by occasional flashes of healthy humor the depressing gloom of the picture of war. He relates many episodes in which cheer- fulness gets the better of exhaustion, hunger, suffering of all kinds, when the men heroically make light of the most searching and painful tests of their endurance; and we must bear in mind that this was at a time when they were not yet hardened to their new life; when they were still keenly conscious of the horrors of the war; when lying wounded on the field they would still yield occasionally to despair, crying out for their mothers, or imploring the stretcher- bearers to remove them from the field, or to kill them at once. Genevoix gives us also the bright picture of a noble comradeship between two offi- cers, men of very different types : the Normalien Genevoix and the Saint Cyrien Porchon. The general idea which the book brings out — that book a description of the great battle of Verdun, for this began only in February, 1916. 76 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION war, with all its hardships and cruelties, calls forth manifestations of beautiful traits in human character, and leads at times to a noble moral exaltation, — is perhaps best summed up in the naive language of honest Pannechon, the author's orderly: "War is not so simple a mat- ter as one would have thought at first. There are some good things in it, and there are some bad. There are especially bad things . . . though, of course, one comes across some good ones. Only, the bad, in war is first-class bad; it is terrible, I would like to say . . .; and that is why a little bit of pleasure is enough at times to bring back to you a taste for life. One feels that one could not stand suffering all the time. One must nurse one's strength, for, after all, one hasn't so much of it that one can afford to waste it. We are only men, aren't we, Sir?" We may remark here that as the war pro- ceeded, the cheerful note grew fainter and fainter in the volumes of war recollections; humor either lost its lightness and became grim, or it disappeared altogether in the same manner as we have already noticed it gradually disap- pear as we passed from Gas par d to Bourru, and from Bourru to Le Feu. The last words of the book inform us that 77 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR Lieutenant Genevoix is about to leave for an- other sector : Les Eparges. That word is suffi- cient, for it is full of terrible associations. It was there that his friend Porchon was killed Februarj^ 20th, 1915. If the reader wishes to follow the author in his later war experiences, he should read his Ntiits de Guerre (1917), and Au Seuil des Giiitounes (1918). * * * * Another early war book which met with im- mediate success was the correspondence pub- lished anonymously -^ under the title Lettres d'un Soldat, Aout 1914 — Avril 1915, to which Andre Chevrillon contributes a preface (1915). Many of the letters had previously appeared in the Revue de Paris. They are those of a young soldier who after eight months and one day of warfare, "did not return from an attack." He was an artist in civilian life ; and all his inclina- tions, all his education, all his aims in life, were diametrically opposed to that which the war de- manded of him; and these pages which he ad- dresses to his aged mother reveal in what spirit 28 The author is said to be Eugene Emmanuel Lemer- cier, who had earned before the war an enviable reputa- tion as an artist. Cf. E. E. Lemercier, Peintures, Des- sins et Croquis, with a preface by Andr4 Michel. Chape- lot, 1919. 78 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION he accepted the task which was imposed upon him. Though evidently frail in body, he is mag- nificent in moral strength. All his energy is gathered up in an effort to resist the temptation to moral relaxation in the midst of physical fatigue. He must be very exhausted indeed to fail to send home at least a short note whenever the opportunity presents itself; and he keeps constantly in touch, by his reading, with the great minds of the world: Spinoza, Yerlaine, A. France and the Song of Roland. He re- members music with pleasure, not excepting Ger- man music. Andre Chevrillon pertinently re- marks in his preface that it was also during war- time that Marcus Aurelius wrote his immortal Meditatio7is. While Lintier moves us by the relation of striking war episodes, the anonymous author of the Letters moves us by his determined effort to get awav from the somber realities of the war whenever he is off duty, and to re-temper his soul by contact with what is neither low, nor unclean, nor terrible, " J'ai eleve mon ame a une hauteur ou les evenements n'ont pas eu prise sur elle" (p. 23). And for a long time, this artist, surrounded by what is repulsive, ugly, 79 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR revolting, triumphantly struggles : ' ' Take cour- age, " he says to himself, "this, after all, is a question of adaptation: a test of our higher nature. ... I have made resolute vows to re- main always in communion with God" (p. 27). He neglects no opportunity of admiring na- ture, which remains ever serene and beautiful. It is remarkable, indeed, how often, in the midst of the horrors which must have been harrowing to a soul so delicate and refined, the word beauty comes under his pen. He clings to beauty, and where it is not, his painter's imagination creates it for him. Once, when a severe bombardment had driven his squad underground, and kept it there for several hours, he catches sight, through the narrow opening by which the dug-out re- ceived ventilation, of a "beautiful tree" out- lined against the sky, the sight of which brings him comfort and renews his strength. . . . "Do not think that I am indifferent to the awful sad- ness of the sights which at all times surround us . . . that sadness is the very reason for which I cling to the higher consolation" [beauty] (p. 52). "The beauty of the snow was deeply moving" (p. 114) . . . " My heart was strength- ened by triumphant beauty" (p. 119). "There are hours of such beauty that those who see it, 80 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION are, for tlic time, immune to death" (p. 121) . . . "the unspeakable beauty of certain sights" (p. 122). And beauty, again, is the last word which he uses in writing to his mother on that sixth day of April, 1915, a few hours before he was reported missing, just before the launching of an attack the hazards of which he fully real- ized : "Whatever happens, life will not have been without its beauty" (p. 164). It would probably be difficult to find in any book a more convincing demonstration of how suffering brings out the noblest qualities of man. And our anonymous artist knows it and he is profoundly' grateful for the intense suffering which taught him to know his better self: "It is paradoxical, as you say, but I have just lived the most beautiful hours of my moral life. . . . Be assured that there will always be beautj- on earth, and that man will never be wicked enough to stamp it out. ... I have gathered enough experiences to fill a whole life. ^lay destiny only give me time to bring all that I have gathered to fruition. . . . There is one thing that no one can take away from us, it is the treasure of the soul which we have won" (p. 19). He expresses sentiments which, in their loftiness, are truly Christian: "Tell M that if fate strikes the 81 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR best, it is not unjust: the wicked who survive will be made better thereby" (p. 23). It seems, therefore, sad beyond expression that this noble, energetic soul, after months of intense physical suffering, should be made to feel that moral heroism has its limits after all. He man- fully refuses to acknowledge it to himself, but the iour comes when the pressure put upon him is too great, and, reading between the lines, we see that his strength is waning : ' ' Dear Mother, ' ' he writes, "after weeping tears of revolt [against the 'atrociousness of the situation'], to which I have yielded all these days, I am again able to say : Thy will be done! yes, I am regain- ing composure" (pp. 128-129); and again: "How comes it to pass that such horrors should be?" (p. 137) and yet again, after telling her, in order to give her pleasure, that he is to be promoted to the rank of sergeant, and that he has been commended for conspicuous bravery: "But, dear Mother, how long the war has lasted ! too long, indeed, for such as felt that they surely had a mission in life. . . . Will they not with- draw me from here so that I may accomplish something elsewhere? Why should I be sacri- ficed while others who have not my gifts are in safety? I had something to accomplish which 82 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION was worth while, but since it is not the will of God that the cup be withdrawn, then, His will be done!" (p. 139). No one who realizes the intense moral anguish that this sensitive nature had to endure, will blame him though he allowed himself to pen the following sentences at the close of a battle : ' ' Our losses have been fright- ful; those of the enemy, worse. You cannot imagine. Mother dear, what man is capable of doing to his fellow man. For five days, now, my boots have been greasy with human brains; when I walk, I crush in chests ; I am now looking upon scattered bowels; our men lean against corpses to eat their scanty rations. The regi- ment has behaved heroically. We have lost all our officers. They all died gallantly. Two good friends of mine are among the dead. One of them had sat for one of my last portraits. ... I discovered his body on the battlefield that night; white and magnificent under the moon- light. I sat beside him for a while. The beauty of things reawoke within me after a time. . . . At last, after five days of horror, we have been withdrawn from that scene of abominations. Duty, effort" (pp. 135-136). That man, so gentle, so refined and generous, long refrained from any reference to his feeling 83 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR with regard to the Germans. He liked some of their writers, and admired their music. But at last he is driven to admit : ' ' Unfortunately, this contact with the German race has spoiled for- ever my opinion of it" (p. 147). Early in the war, his indignation had once shown itself. Commenting on the German practice of forcing French hostages to march in front of their ad- vancing columns, he had written: "If these notes should be read by any one, may they arouse in honest hearts a feeling of horror at the foul crime of those responsible for the war. There will never be enough glory to cover all this blood and shame" (p. 16). * * # We feel that we ought here to mention, al- though very briefly, a book which in some respects may be regarded as a companion volume to Lettres d'un Soldat: Major J. S. Benches' A I'Ecole de la Guerre, Lettres d'un Artilleur, Aout WU—Odolre 1916 (1918).^^ It affords painful reading, for although Henches is a pro- fessional soldier, the war with its attendant evils 29 Major Henches was killed in the Somme sector Oc- tober 16, 1916. He had four times been commended for bravery. He had specialized in anti-aircraft gunnery and believed that the Zeppelin raids on Paris could have been prevented. 84 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION is a source of intolerable suffering to him. He declares himself incapable of grasping the im- mensity of the senselessness which precipitated the conflict. His words are not inspired by anger, but rather by poignant, crushing grief. His only hope is that the horrors of the war will open the eyes of men and will serve to bring about a permanent peace. But he is a real stoic nevertheless. His courage is equal to every trial. Very quietly, and with never a word of complaint about his lot, but with great admiration and sympathy for his men, he goes about his work. His unit is sometimes kept in action during eight long con- secutive days from four o'clock in the morning till eight in the evening, yet they never falter. "What he prizes even more than the splendid showing of the army, is that France, as a nation, has arisen in arms, and has gone forward in a fine unity of spirit. We find repeated here the experiences of the author of Lettres d'un Soldat. As the war goes on, Henches' abhorrence of the Germans in- creases : "There are cases like the one of the infantry- man whose wife has written telling him that she is big with child as the result of having been 85 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR forced by a German, and asking him what she must do: whether she should commit suicide or whether she may live. ... It is possible to for- give arson; one may account for murder by an- ger, by fatigue, by a prolongation of the frenzy of battle; but there is no absolution for rape. , , . They had hoped in their pride and coward- ice that they would meet with no resistance. . . . I shall never, so long as I live, be able to suffer ' a German in my presence: they are all guilty! That is the worst of war: it scatters seeds of hatred" (p. 40). "Are the Germans still to be regarded as human beings?" Benches himself has ceased to do so ; but he hardly knows what his feelings towards them should be: "What seems to me stranger still, is that I remember distinctly that in the inferno of battle, I felt no hatred toward the adversary. It seemed to me as a struggle against a blind, brutal force in the reducing of which that war machine, the gun, could alone be of use, there seemed to be no call whatever for any kind of sentiment" (p. 49). This idea oc- curs in several war-diaries. How one can remain "neutral" is more than he can understand: "The sinking of the Liisi- tania has filled me with horror. I am wondering 86 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION what is the matter, mentally and morally, with those nations which do not rise up to destroy a power capable of such atrocities" (p. 70). And this Aristides, this just man, places on record his appreciation of the attitude of the Pope: "I have read that the Pope, in the in- terests of religion, has refused to make any pro- nouncement upon the justice of the cause of the belligerents. As if religion had anj^thing to gain by courting immoral beings. "What cowardice ! What an insult to Christ!" (p. 46). ^^ * * # The next book which deserves to arrest atten- tion is Lieutenant A. Redier's Meditations dans la Tranches (1916).^^ It was written by a young philosopher during the long drearj^ hours in the trenches. There was no lack of time, then, for thinking, for classifying one's thoughts, for deepening them. Redier is a man endowed with the loftiest qualities of soul, and with a mind Avhich predisposed him to draw from the war the highest teaching that it can yield. He is, of all the writers upon the war, the most direct successor of Alfred de Vigny. The title 30 Henclies' remarks upon Romain Rolland are quoted elsewhere (end of Chapter I). 31 Crowned by the French Academy. 87 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR which he gave to his work is significant. The Meditations in the Trenches are upon such topics as Duty, Freedom, Glory, Power, the God of Battles, Courage, Honor, Patriotism. , . . His chief interest is the discovery of what moral good F'rance can derive from the war, to compensate in some degree for its abominations. He finds that all is not loss; that the war has served already to remind the French of their indebted- ness to the founders of their present civilization ; "In reviving former hatreds, the enemy has forced us to think more of our dead and to get into touch again with our past as far back as the days of Joan of Arc and of Saint Louis." Then the war has taught the French the better to ap- preciate their own people : the brilliant educated classes, and also the so-called lower classes, those morally magnificent men who form the bulk of the army. He protests against the term "poilu" as uncomplimentary, because wit, alert- ness, fine understanding are the distinguish- ing qualities of the soldiers of the Great War. Further, Redier emphasizes, as manj^ others have done, of course, the remarkable fraternity of feeling existing between officers and men : they are really "Brothers in Arms." (In this he shows himself a follower of Art Roe and of 88 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION Nolly rather than of Alfred do Vi^y.) In his meditation upon Power, he develops the idea which he states at the beginning of the chapter: "that the war reminds us that Power is a virtue." One thought preoccupies him more than any other; it is the thought of death, and avc find it expressed on the very first page of the volume. "I wanted to-night during my watch, to keep my mind awake. I therefore meditated upon death, and hence upon duty. I could have meditated upon glory, but I wished not to be dazzled by words. We are exposed here every minute to a death which is glorious, it is true, but which is nevertheless death." What is the meaning of ' ' dying on the field of honor ' ' ? The answer is offered him by a soldier who lies dy- ing in great pain, his mind filled with thoughts of wife and children: "The heroism of that soldier consisted in the acceptance with resigna- tion of his destiny" (i.e. death). This is all that we need say. The slacker who hides in some office at the rear is "harassed by the fear of death," while the men who seek a glorious death, — and there are many such, — are after all merely satisfying a personal aspiration. That kind of death is not the noblest. The death that 89 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR counts is that which is suffered ''for duty's sake." The soldier must discipline himself to serve some higher purpose.^- To accept this moral discipline is of paramount importance: "The first fruits of this slaughter will be a knowledge of, and a taste for, our duties, ..." "We used to seek for what life had to offer us in the way of pleasure; and we consumed our strength in the quest for comfort and well- being" (p. 8). There is nothing nohle in that. Returning to the same subject in another chapter, he tries to be even more explicit : "To what purpose shall we turn this discipline ? To the acquiring of more freedom ? — No, for we had too much freedom already ; we were cursed with freedom. We were free to make what use we thought fit of our lives, but we were slaves to our comfort and to our habits.^^ We ought never to have forgotten that all men are dependent upon other men, or laws, or circumstances of all sorts." "It is not a question of freedom but of order" (p. 53). "We should not, however, go to the 32 In another chapter, however, Redier pays homage to those who die for glory: "All do not fight for dis- tinctions and medals; but all admire those who do; and it is right that they should: how many there are who have less exalted aims in life!" 33 This idea will be taken up again by Duhamel who gives it much fuller development (see below). 90 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION other extreme: the choice lies between French discipline — not freedom — and German tyranny" (p. 52). "If France profits by the war, it will be through a mental uplifting, by setting its heart upon other things than its traditional pur- suits" (p. 58), That is what must be achieved. "Since 1914, nine French Department,s have been paying a heavy price, in the form of cruel slavery, because we freed ourselves of our obli- gation to cultivate order and discipline during the last forty years" (p. 59).^* The idea that the war might teach the French, who are so pieturesqueh' individualistic, a lesson on the wholesomeness of discipline, is constantly recurring in war books. And no thoughtful person was surprised to see the same theme re- peatedly taken up in America when the Amer- ican youth were subjected to army discipline. Indeed, the value of army training, apart from any use that may be made of it in actual war, lies in the mental training which it afford's. This had, moreover, been emphasized by officers long before the war, and particularly by Art Roe who in 1893, in Pingot et Moi, had made the 34 The author develops similar ideas later in his Tioyel Le Capitaine (1919). 91 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR following statement: "Militarj" discipline, once accepted, becomes the law of a nobler life, and leaves behind it that very Carthusian discipline which Pascal opposes to it" (pp. 79-80). That comparison of the part played by the Army in teaching self-control with that which is played by the Church, is not to be considered as a pass- ing fancy on the part of Roe; he is speaking with knowledge and deliberation. He fully acknowledges the importance of the influence of the Church on the life of the nation, but he thinks that it is insufficient at times. Referring to the days after 1871, when the Church had lost so much of its prestige by having cast in her lot with the Second Empire (which had led France to Sedan) he bluntl}^ asks: "What was it, then, that saved France from impending ruin ? I say that it was the army!" (p. 94). Many people have been inclined to think that the alliance of Church and Army was one of worldly interests only, but it would probably not be very hard to prove that this principle of mental discipline which is common to both institutions is the deeper reason of that alliance. It may be more than mere chance, and something altogether apart from theological beliefs, that Joffre and Foch and Castelnau and other great chiefs of 92 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION the allied annies should be faithful Catholics. It was again that consciousness of the co- operation of Church and Army which directed that perfectly independent thinker, Adrien Ber- trand, in his Appel du Sol (which we have al- ready discussed) to put in the mouth of the Catholic Captain de Gueri the following words: "I welcome this war. Our country was in need of it : for ever\i:hing at home was freedom, dis- order and anarch}'. The pursuit of the war and the government of the State show how necessary it is that we should have order, discipline and authority. The Germans had learned from our fathers the value of these things ; and therefore their country, where William II is as absolute as our Louis XIV was in his day, plays in Europe to-day, the part which France did in the seventeenth century. To wield power as it should, a state must be as orderly as the gardens of Versailles. Nothing is permanent which has not been consciously weighed. The Germans ac- cepted that limitation of their liberties, with the result that they have been marvelous organizers, as we were in the past, as were the Romans whose sons we are. . . . And if their powerful organi- zation does not bring them victory, it is because they are not yet sufficiently civilized. They are 93 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE GREAT WAR still nothing but barbarians. , . . They have not yet been sufficiently fashioned by the idea. . . . They are not really pious" (pp. 142-3). We have stated in the Preface of this work why it was necessary for us to limit our studies to a few books which must represent whole classes of similar works. We shall therefore cast only a cursory glance at two others belong- ing to this group. The first is Lieutenant Marcel Eteve's Lettres d'lin Comhattant, Aout 1914 — Juillet 1916 (1917). This very young man, a student of the Ecole Normale, started as a recruit, and died as a lieutenant in an action so brilliant that it was mentioned in army orders.^^ Eteve was one of those innumerable French- men who are gifted in all sorts of ways; his pages remind one of the Lettres d'un Soldat. Like the anonymous author of the Lettres, he addresses his mother; like him also, he finds in music and in art a relief from the long night- mare of the war ; and he too — although his style is not uniformly grave, being occasionally even quite picturesque and outspoken — finds at times 35 Three quarters of the company, including all com- missioned and non-commissioned officers, were killed. 94 PERIOD OF DOCUMENTATION that the strain is "too much for human reason" : "Blessed are those who have 'got their billet' [les zigouilles] for their troubles are at an end ! " ; and to avoid being overwhelmed with despair, he takes refuge in the army order "not to try to understand." Moreover, in his inmost soul, he knows that he is fighting to put an end to war, and he feels that if he escapes with his life, he will have a right to be a pacifist.^*' The other book that must be at least briefly referred to is Dr. Emile Francois Julia's La Mort du Soldat (Perrin, 1918). As days of warfare are added to daj's, and months to months, and years to years, the admiration of this soldier, who is also a thinker, goes less to the great gen- erals and strategists at the rear, and more and more to the men in the field, and to the officers who accompany them : to the fighting soldiers, the "soldats soldatants." Those are the ones who act; their thinking is not deep, but it is adequate: "as for us we do our duty, that's all" {Nous autres, on fait son devoir, vaila tout) . 36 Et4v