"Émile Nolly proved a magnificent soldier. He had a youthful, blithe, fervent and resolute soul; he had the soul of a hero completely prepared to sacrifice himself with joy for his country. After having served valiantly and brilliantly in Indo-China, and then in Morocco, it was with a radiant hope that he set out for the frontier of Lorraine. 'What does the life of any one of us matter?' he said to me just before he left. 'All that is essential is that France should live, that she should be victorious.'"
Marcel Drouet, who has just been mentioned, was much younger. He was a native of the invaded department of the Ardennes, and had not completed his twenty-sixth year when he was killed in the trenches of Consenvoye, in the Woëvre, when he was taking part in the outer defence of Verdun. He seems to have been distinguished by a refinement of spirit, which is referred to, in different terms, by every one who has described him. He leaves behind him a volume of poems, "L'Ombre qui tourne," and various essays and fragments. The journal of the last days of his life has been edited by M. Maurice Barrès, and is a record of singular delicacy and courage. We see him facing the dreadful circumstances of the war, made the more dreadful to him because the horrors are committed in the midst of the familiar scenes of his own home, and we find him patiently waiting for the signal to lead his men into action while he holds a volume of Chateaubriand open upon his knee. The reflections of Marcel Drouët differ in some respects from those of his most enthusiastic companions. There is a note of tenderness in them which is unusual, and which is very pathetic. At the very close of his brief and heroic life, the thoughts of Drouët reverted to the historic town in which he was born, to Sedan which still shuddered in his infancy at the recollection of the horrors of 1870. He thought of the dead who fell on that melancholy field; and then his thoughts turned to those dear faces which he had so recently left behind. The following passage, in its simplicity, in its sweetness, deserves to live in the memorial literature of the war:—
"Je pense à vous, mes chers vivants, aux mains des barbares en ce moment sans doute, mais en le coeur de qui j'ai foi, tant je connais votre dévouement aux choses sublimes.
"Mais aussi je pense à vous, mon Dieu, qui avez voulu toutes ces choses pour votre plus grand gloire et pour l'établissement de votre justice. Tous ces malheurs, ces tristesses, tout ce sang répandu sont imposés par vous, mon Dieu, en manière de rédemption. Mais votre soleil glorieux éclairera bientôt, j'en suis absolument certain, la victoire du bon droit qui attend depuis près d'un demi-siècle. J'y coopère de toutes mes forces, de toute mon âme. Et si vous me retirez de ce monde, ô Dieu de bonté, permettez que ce soit pour me joindre à ceux qui m'out précédé dans votre séjour, et dont l'affection terrestre me fut précieuse. C'est toute la prière ardente que je fais devant le soleil levant, ce jour de Toussaint que sillonnent déjà les obus semeurs de mort, en cette année 1914 qui verra rétablir la paix du monde, par l'anéantissement du peuple barbare, et la régénérescence de la nation française."
In most cases there rests an obscurity over the brief lives of these gallant young officer-authors, whose nature was little observed until the flash of battle illuminated them for one last brilliant moment. We feel a strong desire, which cannot be gratified, to follow them from their childhood to their adolescence, and to see for ourselves what impulses directed them into the path of heroism. It is rarely that we can do this, but one of these poets has left behind him two friends who have recaptured the faint and shrouded impressions of his early life. The piety of M. Henri Albert Besnard, who was his intimate companion, and of that practised narrator M. Henri Bordeaux, who is his biographer, enable us to form a clearer and fuller conception of Camille Violand than of any of his compeers. Born in 1891, he was typical of that latest generation of which we have spoken, in whom all seemed to be unconsciously preparing for the great and critical sacrifice. He was born at Lyons, but was brought up in the Quercy, that wild and tortured district just north of the Pyrenees, where nature seems to gather together all that she possesses of the grotesque and violent in landscape; but he was educated at Alençon, and trained at Vouziers, in the midst of the orchards of Normandy. Thus both sides of France, the Midi and the Manche, were equally known to him, but the ceaseless peregrinations which he underwent, so far from enlarging his horizon, seem to have plunged his soul in melancholy. At the age of twenty he struck M. Bordeaux as being the typical déraciné.
The letters of Camille Violand and the memories of his friends present to us the record of a vague and uneasy boyhood. He began quite early to exercise his mind in prose and verse, but without energy or aim. He was not fixed in any plan of life. His letters—for he wrote with abundance, and something undefined seems to have induced his family to keep his letters—are steeped in sombre and objectless melancholy. He was tormented by presentiments of misfortune; he indulged a kind of romantic valetudinarianism. In the confusion of his spirit as he passed uneasily from boyhood into manhood, the principal moral quality we perceive is a peevish irritation at the slow development of life. He was just twenty-one when the death of his mother, to whom he was passionately attached, woke him out of this paralyzed condition, and it is remarkable that, in breaking, like a moth from a chrysalis, out of his network of futile and sterile sophisms, it was immediately on the contingency of war that he fixed his thoughts. The news of his mother's death, by a strange and rapid connexion of ideas, reminded him of his future responsibility as an officer in the coming struggle. He wrote, in 1913, "Je m'effraie en pensant à cette responsabilité qui pèsera certainement un jour sur moi, car je considère la guerre comme à peu près certaine à bref délai."
Having once formed this conviction, a complete revolution affected the character of the young Violand. His melancholy ceased; his uncertainty fell from him; it seemed as though his soul threw off her fetters. From the close of 1913, when the chancelleries of Europe were still profoundly unconscious of the tremendous upheaval which was in store for them, this young man, hitherto so timorous and irresolute, is seen to be filled with a species of prophetic ecstasy:—
"The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness! The vaporous exultation not to be confined! ………the animation of delight Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light, And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind"
This remarkable change of character was encouraged by the military discipline which now regulated his life, and which he accepted with rapture and devotion. His mother's one aim had been to make of Camille a soldier and a Christian, and he became the very type of that combination.
To use a striking phrase of M. Henri Bordeaux, the war found Camille Violand in a state of preparedness. He saw it arrive, not with anxiety or trepidation, but with solemn joy. His father was placed in command of a brigade of dragoons, and he himself, at another part of the frontier line, was given the rank of second lieutenant and a command which filled him with the pride of responsibility. Three weeks later he was wounded in the head at the battle of Virton, but not until he had seen the Germans, after a hard fight, retire before the attack of his men. "Il a connu l'ivresse de la victoire: il a vu fuir l'ennemi"—so a friend announced it. He was taken back to the hospital at Limoges, but the victory of the Marne intoxicated him, and it was found impossible to hold him back. With a head still bandaged, he made his appearance once more in his beloved regiment, which was now fighting in the forest of the Argonne, but on the first occasion on which he led his men, Violand was wounded again, now in the shoulder. He was sent far back, into Brittany, to Quimper, where, a second time, by a subterfuge he contrived to escape from the hospital before his wound was properly healed. He was absolutely intractable in his determination to get back promptly to the fighting line: "il était comme ça, avec son air délicat et tranquille!" Again brought back, he was set to training men at Quimper. But he could not endure the restraint, and his nerves broke down.