‘L’instituteur se récriait:—
‘“Mais certainement,” expliquait Timothée. “Qu’est-ce que la force? C’est l’intelligence, la ténacité, c’est la patience, c’est l’habileté, c’est la courage, c’est la volonté. Voilà, Vincent, les facteurs de la force. Voilà les fibres du tissu. Ne croyez-vous pas qu’avec toutes les vertus qui la composent, la force n’a pas de grandes chances d’avoir toujours le droit pour elle?”
‘Naturellement, Vincent ne comprenait pas.’
(L’Appel des Armes, p. 84.)
Alas, how soon were events to show our young neophyte that intelligence, that tenacity—that patience, ingenuity, courage, force of will—that the most indisputable military qualities may be associated with inhuman, with indeed a devilish perversity! But Ernest did not live long enough to learn all the ripe iniquity of his enemy. He fell in the very beginning of the war, at Rossignol, on the frontiers of Luxembourg, midway between Virton and Montmédy—quite close to Sedan, in fact; and the Germans thought to make another great haul there.... The fight at Rossignol was a sort of southern branch of that terrible battle of Charleroi which no living European can ever forget. The French Headquarters, perceiving the ruse and danger of the enemy’s plan, set on the low hill of Rossignol some twelve thousand men, with orders to hold the heights to the last man and shield the road beneath where the French troops were passing in one constant stream; and the men who died there were not less heroic than those of Thermopylæ. Twelve thousand, they were; and I am told that scarce one of them survived.... A few are prisoners of war in Germany. Picked men, famous regiments, the nearest thing the French possessed to our time-hardened professional soldiers, for they were the Colonial Infantry and Artillery. The batteries were set up, and then the storm began. They fought all day—thirteen hours—against more than a hundred thousand Germans, holding the passage (one cannot call it a pass, for the hills there are too low), and, towards evening, they saw on the horizon a moving gray mass, and thought for a moment that this meant reinforcements. Oh, despair! they were German reinforcements! I say, despair! for such a feeling indeed fills my breast at reading of this supreme deception; but the young officer who gave this account to Psichari’s mother, affirms that even then (feeling how useful was the part they played) not despair but a noble exhilaration was the intimate feeling of those heroes on the hill. At last the German army, creeping steadily nearer, and distant now by no more than thirty metres, prepared to take the last irreducible French batteries by assault. At this moment Lieutenant X saw Ernest Psichari lead his Captain, grievously wounded, to the poste de secours, immediately returning to face the enemy. He came on with that quick half-racing, half-dancing step which the soldiers call the ‘pas gymnastique,’ on his face a bright excited smile, and ran with this springing gait to his battery, standing there a moment, still smiling, as he watched the oncoming mass. And then he fell right across his cannon—slipped heavily to the ground; a ball in the temple had shattered that young head, so full of dreams.
‘Pourtant, dans sa grande peine, une consolation lui venait. Car il croyait que le sang des martyrs était utile. Sa conviction était que rien n’est perdu dans le monde, que tout se reporte et se retrouve au total; ainsi tous les actes sublimes des héros formaient pour lui une sorte de capital commun dont les intérêts se reversaient obscurément sur des milliers d’âmes inconnues.’
(L’Appel des Armes, pp. 295-296.)
And the blood of the martyrs is the seed of Faith.
ÉMILE NOLLY
No man had welcomed the war with greater enthusiasm than Captain Détanger: he wrote under the pseudonym of Émile Nolly. I was not in Paris on that August morning when he left for Lorraine, eager (he said) ‘to water his horse in the Rhine.’ But I had bidden him good speed a few years ago, when he set out for Morocco. Shall I ever forget the transfiguration of that moody, noble, saturnine face? or the gleam in the great light-gray eyes, so often sad, or even morose, and now lit with a wild joy? or the tall, lithe figure—striding feverishly up and down my little drawing room while, in a torrent of eloquence, the Captain tried to explain to my languid feminine imagination (which can only look on, and listen, and gasp in amazement) ‘la joie du combat!’ That campaign in Morocco brought him chiefly fatigue and disappointment, since he and his black troops had little fighting to do, and were chiefly employed in convoying from sandy desert to sandy desert the provisions and munitions needed on the front. It brought him also, however, the material for a fine book—a fine, bitter, disenchanted, weary yet energetic book, eminently characteristic of its writer—Gens de Guerre an Maroc.