‘Si je tombe (said Péguy), ne me pleurez pas. Ce que je vais faire vaut trente ans de travail.’
But the first to fall was Ernest Psichari. I knew him root and branch—knew his parents and grandparents before him, and the earliest image that I preserve of him (since the first of all are forgotten) is of a little lad between eight and nine years of age, unaware of my presence in his grandmother’s drawing-room, as he talks to his little brother in the twilight: ‘When I am grown up (says Ernest) I shall be a great man! Et j’aurai ma statue sur tous les marchés de France!’ And the little one of seven ripples with laughter at Ernest’s having so satisfactorily ‘gone one better’: ‘Il y a du chemin à faire, mon frère! (says he). Il y a bien de chemin à faire!’ Whereat I too laughed and broke the spell, the two little boys informing me that, while waiting for their violin-lesson, ‘on s’amusait à raconter des blagues.’
Even in Ernest’s fun there was a desire of greatness; that, and an intense sensibility, a rare faculty of moral imagination, were what I chiefly noticed in the child, of whom I saw less and less as his studies absorbed him more and more: youths between twelve and twenty have little time for their mother’s friends. A quiet young man, with charming, living eyes, and in his whole aspect something ardent, firm, and grave: that is all that Ernest Psichari was to me.
And then came a bolt from the blue. It was on the morrow of the Dreyfus case when France was divided into two camps, and each faction feverishly counted its men and the great families which centralised these men on either side. As Daniel Halévy wrote, in a passage already celebrated: ‘Paris a ses familles comme Florence eut les siennes, et ses maisons, non couronnées de tours, n’en abritent pas moins des factions guerrières.’ Ernest was born into one of these houses—one of the most important to the Liberals—for those grandparents of his (both dead before that shock of schism shook France to her foundations), those grandparents of whom I have written, were Ernest Renan and his wife. And his father was Jean Psichari, a Greek philologist of most ‘advanced’ opinions. It came, therefore, almost as a defection, an apostasy, when the rumour spread in the ruffled circles of the Dreyfusards that Ernest Psichari had gone into the Army—that Renan’s grandson, at nineteen, had enlisted as a volunteer in the Colonial Artillery.
Although myself a Dreyfusard with the best of them, I could not feel hurt by this change of front, which seemed to me just the counterpart of Renan’s own conversion. Given a young man with a passion for justice, the more you treat him as a partisan, the more his mind, by some dim process of unconscious cerebration, will conjure up the arguments for the other side. Besides Renan, although he gave his casting vote to the Liberals, exhaled often an exquisite regret in his vision of the other side. He finally voted for Caliban; but few writers have set forth more nobly the arguments for the aristocratic ideal. Renan’s mind was singularly full. Imagine a pair of scales, either balance heaped high,—even the lighter of them was filled with more reasons to believe, to rule, and to conquer than many a fanatic could furnish forth; it is true the reasons for doubting turned the scale. The man who sacrificed everything to Truth and Liberty was just the man to understand the young apostle of Force and Faith; he too had felt the spell of Force and Faith! Ernest Psichari—grave, straightforward, active, patient—represented the France of to-day in its modern cult of sacrifice and duty, even as the grandsire stood for his own generation. The symbols are different, but the character is much the same—a like curiosity, an equal contempt for worldly goods and mundane honours, a conviction that life is worth living only when employed in some vast impersonal service. The wise Merlin of the Nineteenth Century would have smiled: ‘ah! cher enfant, combien vous avez raison!’
‘Le fils a pris le parti de ses pères contre son père’; so Ernest himself defined the situation in his Appel des Armes. Just as his Breton ancestors, curious of the vast world on the other side the seas, most incurious of worldly advancement, would sail the world over in the Service of the State, before the mast, seamen content with the salt air and their duty, so this grandson of theirs spent five years with his cannon in the Congo, a non-commissioned officer. When at twenty-four years of age he returned to Paris, he could scarcely understand why his friends pressed him to enter a school for officers. ‘One can serve the country as well in the ranks; one is perhaps more useful!’ But he yielded to his mother—to her, indeed, he always yielded.
How I regret that during those eighteen months which the young soldier spent at Versailles, in order to obtain his brevet of second-lieutenant, I remained unaware of his presence in France! Péguy has left an eloquent description of his friend and young alumnus, telling how he lived like a king in the palace of the École Militaire, but a step from the dome of the Invalides whither in the summer mornings, in the freshness of the dawn, he used to escort his slender little three-inch cannon—‘ses 75, ces petits jeunes gens de canons modernes, ces gringalets de canons modernes, au corps d’insecte, aux roues comme des pattes d’araignées’—filing them off under the shadow of the monstrous historic artillery of the great Pensioners’ Hospital, the cannon of Fontenoy and Malplaquet, bronze mastodons and leviathans of an earlier age. I can imagine Ernest, ‘l’homme au regard pur’ (as Péguy calls him); I can see him, a young Hippolytus of the School of War, in my mind’s eye—but I did not see him in the world of facts. Before I learned of his presence in my neighbourhood he had left—he and his battery—for the deserts of Mauritania, and there, in the desolate tropical country that lies between the burning plains of Senegal and the sands of the Sahara, he spent three happy years. He sent home a little book—Terres de soleil et de sommeil—which marked the awakening of his literary gift; but the real event of those three years, for Ernest, was his ardent conversion to the Catholic Church. Ernest was a mystic; the only life possible to his insatiable heart was the spiritual life; and in the Sacraments he sought that assurance of a world beyond our own, in constant communication with our own, which other minds may find by other means. His fervour, his faith, was henceforth a remedy for all his sins and all his sorrows; and, young as he was, he had had his sorrows—doubtless, also, his sins.
It was, I think, in the end of 1912 that Ernest left that immense and mortal splendour of the Sahara and came back to France, bringing with him a short military novel, L’Appel des Armes, which (coming after Péguy’s elaborate pæan) received, on its publication in 1913, an honourable, a more than honourable, welcome.... I was one of the welcomers. Few things are pleasanter to the hoary critic than the éclosion of a fresh young talent, and naturally all the more when that talent flowers on a dear familiar stem. On this occasion I renewed my long-interrupted friendship with the young author, and we promised ourselves a more frequent communication of our ideas. Fate however, decided otherwise. Ernest and his battery were sent to the cliffs of Cherbourg. And, a year later the great war began....
Thus it happens that Ernest Psichari’s fame must rest on three small volumes, of which the finest by far appeared after his death—that Voyage du Centurion, which is the unforgettable record of a mystic’s conversion in the blazing African desert. There is less genius and less force in this earlier, tiny volume called l’Appel des Armes, so full of inexperience, of an ardent evident parti-pris, but also of a sincerity, a living sensibility, a moral earnestness such that I would recommend it to the English reader (and I am sure there are many such) puzzled by the great spirit, the heroic steadfastness that the French have shown in this war, for which he finds little warrant in the ‘yellow-backs’ on his table. Among many others, this brief record of the mind and conscience of a young French officer is a document à l’appui of no mean value. It relates the story of a youth of twenty who turns from the Radical, humanitarian views of his father, the village schoolmaster, to find salvation (for it is, in his case, really a sort of religious conversion, a change of heart) as a soldier in Africa. And the reader will remark here—as also in the last novels of Émile Nolly—an almost mystical view of military matters recalling the recent German theories.
‘“Croyez bien,” répondait Nangès, “que la force est toujours du côté du droit.”