ÉMILE NOLLY
No man had welcomed the war with greater enthusiasm than Captain Détanger: he wrote under the pseudonym of Émile Nolly. I was not in Paris on that August morning when he left for Lorraine, eager (he said) ‘to water his horse in the Rhine.’ But I had bidden him good speed a few years ago, when he set out for Morocco. Shall I ever forget the transfiguration of that moody, noble, saturnine face? or the gleam in the great light-gray eyes, so often sad, or even morose, and now lit with a wild joy? or the tall, lithe figure—striding feverishly up and down my little drawing room while, in a torrent of eloquence, the Captain tried to explain to my languid feminine imagination (which can only look on, and listen, and gasp in amazement) ‘la joie du combat!’ That campaign in Morocco brought him chiefly fatigue and disappointment, since he and his black troops had little fighting to do, and were chiefly employed in convoying from sandy desert to sandy desert the provisions and munitions needed on the front. It brought him also, however, the material for a fine book—a fine, bitter, disenchanted, weary yet energetic book, eminently characteristic of its writer—Gens de Guerre an Maroc.
One of his three fine books! It was not those, however, which brought him the celebrity, almost the fame, on which he was entering when he fell in battle. The ardent soul of Détanger had thrown his talent overboard, as a wandering apostle might fling from his wallet some useless bauble and go on unencumbered save by his staff and scrip. His last two books, the famous ones—Le Chemin de la Victoire and Le Conquérant—have indeed little literary grace and no sort of style; they are like those varnished Images d’Epinal in cut-out coloured paper which bring to the humblest cottage a sort of symbol of the wars of Napoleon, of the glories of Turenne; or again, like the Stations of the Cross in some wayside church. They preach a truth so august, and in the author’s eyes so necessary to salvation, that art is of little consequence, the one thing needful being to make the meaning plain. That meaning was the same in each: the saving grace of the Army, and the glorious fact that any young ne’er-do-well, any weak dilettante creature even, so he be brave and willing to consent to discipline, may find a personal salvation there, while building a bulwark of glory round his country.
I never really ventured to tell Émile Nolly what I thought of those books, so I said nothing about them—a language which he perfectly understood and accepted with that grim, not untender smile of his. No one better than he knew the charm of art and romance. And I imagine he felt a certain fierce pleasure in flinging all that to the winds, in order, as he thought, to be more useful, reach a wider public, and influence it with the directness of a popular sermon. What use, after all, was there in his two stories of Indo-China, or in Gens de Guerre au Maroc? They were inclined, if anything, to inspire a morbid pessimism. On the whole, it is the first of his novels which I shall most often re-read—Hiên le Maboul, a book so poignant, clear and mild in its sadness, that it haunts our imagination for years after the last page is closed. No one, perhaps, has so well expressed the peculiar beauty of Tonquin.... When, after Egypt, Aden, Ceylon, the Frenchman reaches the Delta, his first instinctive expectation is of something stranger still; are we not here at the end of the world?
‘χθονὸς μεν ἐς τηλoυρὸν ἠκoμεν πέδoν,
Σκύθην ἔς oῖμoν, ἂβατον εἰς ἒρημίαν.’
But what is this gray land where the silvery winter sunshine floats veiled by an imperceptible haze? Is it Brittany? Or a misty March day in the Landes, when the sun shines? And see, that ruined tower set on the round breast of a hill, with the far-off scaurs and peaks in the background—is it Auvergne? Nor, in the character of the conquered people, does there appear at first the difference that separates the Frenchman from the solemn Arab or the barbarous Kanak; the Annamite, with his wide intelligence, his keen and quizzical wit, his love of hearth and home, his respect for tradition and his religious indifference, appears at once a man and a brother. A certain aloofness adds to his charm.... Such was the new and yet half-familiar world with which Émile Nolly made us acquainted. Hiên le Maboul is a yellow brother of Loti’s Mon frère Yves.
And yet, on reopening the charming book (so appealing in its tender hopelessness, its elegant sobriety), I find, even here, the Pragmatist apostle who wrote Nolly’s later works! For what is the nexus of the novel? It is surely the despair of the young French lieutenant when he finds himself impotent to save the native tirailleur who, in an hour of moral anguish, comes to ask his infallible superior ‘les paroles qui guérissent.’ Alas, with all his science, the ‘Ancestor with the two stripes’ does not know the words that save; his philosophy affords him nothing but idle formulas void of faith and healing. And thenceforth his whole system of civilisation seems to him wanting and inefficacious. For Hiên goes out in silence and hangs himself to a banyan-tree.
Since then Nolly had learned the words that save. He was, I think, no ardent Catholic, like Psichari or Péguy; but his faith in the destinies of human society, his conviction that the army of France is indeed a Salvation Army, not only for Frenchmen, but for his dear Senegalese, for black, red, and yellow—every shade of skin or soul—gave him the persuasiveness of the men of Napoleon’s army. And he went out into the highways and the by-ways and compelled them to come in.
And now these young men—so much younger than I, who sit by my lonely fire and remember them—these young men with a future, as it seemed, are all dead for their country and for the faith that was in them. Their bodies lie in wayside tombs, or in the middle of the fields, with a rough cross over them, and a name traced in ink that the autumn rains efface. And that name, which was beginning to shine in the literary record of their nation, that name which they looked to burnish in the course of the next thirty years, can now receive no further lustre. From the personal, individualist point of view, their fame is sacrificed, even as their lives are sacrificed. They are mulcted in their works, as in their race, for, among them all, only Péguy was a father. And, so far as they knew, their immense suffering and sacrifice was in vain. They lie, perhaps, among those dreadful heaps which the shell at once agglomerates and scatters, and from which all individual difference is wiped out. So many of them!
The saddest fate of all, I think, was Émile Nolly’s—to die so slowly and so painfully of his wounds, in hospital, while the fight in which he longed to join was raging, still undecided.