Joffre and His Army

by Charles Dawbarn

There was not necessarily opposition between "poilu" and "pekin" (as the civilian is amusingly called by the army), but there was, nevertheless, a gulf fixed between the two: the one had seen visions and experienced realities which were denied the other in his peaceful civilian path. It made all the difference in the world. Whatever his sympathy, the civilian brother had not suffered as had the "poilu"; he had been immune from the hourly risk, he had not endured cold and hunger; he had not lain out in the frosty moonlight, in the No Man's Land of the trenches, terribly wounded by one of the murderous engines of war; he had not known the anguish of mind in hospital, the doubt whether the limb could be saved or not, or whether he must go through life halt and maimed. No, for all his sympathy and moral suffering, the civilian had not reached the experiences of the other.

Reflections of this sort no doubt obtruded on the mind of the soldier in his hours of lonely watch. Sometimes, when echoes of the old life were wafted back to him in the trenches, or when he saw the report in newspapers of some futile discussion in the Chamber, a smile of disdain crossed his lips. Frankly, he was a little tired of this sort of thing. "If the Deputies were here, they would not talk quite so loudly," he reflected with bitterness. And then the headings of another column caught his eye: "Great scandal, a contractor charged with fraud! Huge and hidden profits." "Ah!" he exclaims, and his lips purse again. This time his comments are far severer than against the Parliamentarians. "After all," he says, "those Deputies are paid to talk; it is their business; but the blackguards who make money out of us, out of our lives and limbs——" The phrase is never finished, but the intonation leaves you in no doubt as to the fate of the offenders if they had fallen into his hands. On the following day, perhaps, he sees another scandal of the sort, and now his anger knows no bounds. "What—again? Then they are all at it!" he exclaims. In his excited imagination a considerable part of civilian France is engaged in plundering military France. Happily, there was great exaggeration in his sweeping assumptions. Certainly there were scandals in France during the Great War, as there were scandals elsewhere; but they were few and far between—so few that their rarity magnified their importance.

The soldier's sufferings in the trenches had warped a little his judgment. He was rather hard on others, disregarding their sacrifices and their griefs, none the less real because they had not been exposed to sudden death. The hard work of munition workers turning out shot and shell with ceaseless activity often escaped him, and if, as might happen, he was deceived in his most intimate affections, and a moral catastrophe awaited him at home, then his cup of bitterness was filled, and in his wrath he declared that all women were faithless and all men perjurers and conspirators against his honour or security. And these were the people for whom he was risking his life and sacrificing his professional prospects!

The close union of every day with men engaged in the strong-hearted and ruthless profession of war was bound to have a reaction upon thoughts and ways of life. In the rude existence of camps, something of the veneer of drawing-rooms disappeared and man returned to primitive directness and simplicity of thought and speech. He became impatient of subtlety and complicated ways, which seemed to him duplicity and the enemy of plain-dealing. A thing must be frank and clear to appeal to him. He had the soldier's disgust of those who whispered in secret in the warmth and shelter whilst he was exposed to the blast. A new temperament was forged in the out-of-doors born of the sun and wind and rain. And the thoughts of those who struggle with the elements and the incredible difficulties of a man-made warfare often take on the rugged character of their surroundings.

Directness of manner and speech are hardly looked for in the traditional French, but war as it is to-day, is no school of politeness, but of vigour and energy. A new naïveté accompanied the new strength of soul, and one of its manifestations was an art, which at other moments would have astonished by its crudity and garishness. It was visible in the shop-windows, where cards showed the soldier in the trench. Above him, in a luminous break in filmy clouds, appeared the vision of the wife and children gathered about the evening lamp. They were thinking obviously of the absent "papa." Maudlin and mawkish though it was, it appealed to the simple soul. Exile from the social round, from the life of affairs, from the frequentation of cafés and theatres in the small country towns, had affected the mentality of the countryman. This incredible existence of the trenches, with its hairbreadth escapes and daily incidents in which life and death played a tragic game of hide-and-seek, developed such essential manliness and such rough and hearty heroism that the mechanism of the mind reverted to the simplest expression. Before the great and serious question of to be or not to be, the minor aspects of life ceased to have importance. A man dying of hunger does not discuss ortolans or peacocks' tongues, nor do the subtleties of sauce appeal to the meatless. And the soldier of France, divorced from his usual pleasures, and being in no mind to complicate existence, turns to the readiest and simplest forms of literary or pictorial expression to satisfy his emotions: it might be the cinematograph behind the lines, it might be the feuilleton in the halfpenny paper.

No doubt the mass became infected with the peasant spirit, for peasants formed the bulk of the army, especially when the townsman became the munition-worker. The peasant's mind is both childlike and suspicious, slow to anger, secretive, inclined to deep reflection. He attaches himself slowly, and only after long proof, to those who win his reluctant confidence, and deeply tenacious are his purposes. He will defend his land to the death; he loves it as he loves liberty. He insists on his independence as he insists upon equality, and only upon that principle will he submit to discipline. Injustice arouses his intense resentment, and General Galliéni's crusade against the shirker found its deepest roots and efficacy in his tacit recognition.

The fact that it was a war to resist invasion made it a holy war, differing intrinsically from a war of aggression, which would never have gained his whole-hearted support. The Great War awakened the old vehemence of the race, which first revealed its astounding power at the battle of Valmy, where the shoeless hosts of the Revolution shook the proudest might of Prussia. That was the birth of the National Army, which, a century and a quarter later, was to come to such extraordinary development. The nation coalesced in 1792 against the foreign tyrant, but that union lacked the complete union of 1914, though it made up in intensity of spirit what it needed in numbers. The Revolution fought for liberty against a caste system; then, as now, the peasant recognised that he was defending his own ground—not the privileges of feudal Europe—and the knowledge made him strong. A man is always formidable in defending his own. In the same way, the French patriot realised that militarism had forced the German to make war upon his peaceful neighbour. In the hospitals I have seen the soldier share with the sick German prisoner dainties that had been brought to him. "Poor devil, he was forced to fight against us," he would say, showing his realisation of the intimate differences of the two. In his case it was a privilege to fight; he was defending his own fields against the hordes; in the other, a blind obedience to the State compelled him to take arm. One was a virtual volunteer in a sacred cause, the other the victim of German Imperialism. It was well to know what one was fighting for, and when one had realised the grandeur of the cause, then heat and cold, mud and rats, and even occasional shortness of rations became of small account. The issue was paramount.

The French soldier was actuated by a deep love of country. In his mortal breast beat the immortal heart of France. When the bugle sounded, as M. Charles Humbert, the Senator Editor has told us, there was a magnificent hastening to the frontier. The fighting souls of the people reappeared, the old memory of struggles was reawakened. "We dreamed of heroic encounters, of brilliant actions, of sublime gestures, of flags conquered in the sun. The reality, alas, was quite otherwise! Rapidly the war became a sad and protracted affair." It became an invisible, scientific, subterranean war of tenacity and endurance, though sometimes blazing into manoeuvre battles as at Verdun.

Life, none the less, was not altogether disagreeable behind the lines. There were compensations during the rest moments. Concerts and theatrical representations in which all the stars of the army appeared, men who had been renowned artists "in the civil," made the audience forget the dangers and discomforts of their actual life. And in these entr'actes in the villages, the subject of the war was taboo by a sort of coquetry; one talked of anything else, and occupied one's leisure in acquiring relics from the ruined houses in the devastated villages, or sought, in other ways, to import some variety into the monotony of danger. The concerts revealed the singular talent of the French for improvisation and gave occasion to a latent gaiety, which flickered and flamed into pure joyousness. From the mind in those moments was banished dull care, and badinage became the current coin. Whilst the younger and more vigorous played games, the studious and literary engaged in intellectual exercises. Impressive in their reality are some of the books that have been written at the Front. There is a suggestion of actual experience about them, of chases vécues, which one does not feel in second-hand impressions.

Poems, too, flowed from the trenches—not poems, in general, concerned with war, but love and the softer passions. Where war was treated, it was as a mistress, stern and hard to woo. The Great War inspired something of the lyricism that succeeded the Napoleonic era, when de Musset, Hugo, Lamartine, and a pleiades of poets existed. Talent certainly flourished in the trenches. An opera was a proof of it—words and music of such startling excellence that the critics, before whom the work was played, expressed a deep enthusiasm for it. It was reserved for production at the Paris Opera House until the music of the trenches should have given place to the music of peace. Like many a hero in the fight, the author will remain anonymous until the war has ceased to be anything but an ugly remembrance, and then we shall taste the quality of the composition.