Rivers of blood, the old, rich Gallic blood that mingled Roman experience and Mediterranean fire with the peasant vigour of the North, tempered through centuries of labour and exaltation. The best must needs suffer most; and France, historic guardian of ancient treasuries, standard-bearer of European civilisation, must suffer in chief for the weaknesses of the Western world. To those who knew her, there was ever something of worship in their love, as in our regard for the fullest type of womanhood. The earth thrilled with anger to see her so foully stricken, and breathed freely only when her sons had shown the pure nobility of their response. No frenzies of meliorism, no Carmagnoles of murderous ambition, no Danton or Robespierre, no La Vendée and no Buonaparte have marred the story of the defence of the Third Republic. Democracy, Reason, slow-growing Law, are justified of their children.
Men raised by such achievement into an immortality of human gratitude, the young limbs and hearts so swiftly girded up, so soon loosed upon eternity, should evoke no common mourning.
“Knows he who tills this lonely field,
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield?”
Not their own soil only, they enriched with their blood, but the universal mind. In saving the best in dream and reality that France means to the world, they saved the whole future, as short reflection upon the alternative will show. The victory of the Marne sealed the brotherhood of France and England, and did much toward bringing America and the Dominions into the comity of nations. It was the basis of the completer victory to follow, and of the only possibilities of future peace and liberal progress. For ever, this example will call to youth everywhere—“that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have lived in vain.” May there not again be need to pass through such a Gehenna; but it is surer that the world will only be made “safe for democracy,” or even for elementary order, by the vigilance and chivalry of each oncoming generation. For these, for ever, ghostly bugles will blow through the woods and hamlets of the Marne.
“Ames des chevaliers, revenez-vous encor?
Est-ce vous qui parlez avec la voix du cor?
Roncevaux! Roncevaux! dans ta sombre vallée
L’ombre du grand Roland, n’est-elle pas consolée?”
NOTES AND REFERENCES
[1] Many volumes of soldiers’ notes and recollections have been published, and some of them have high literary merit. One of these is Ma Pièce, Souvenirs d’un Canonnier (Paris: Plon-Nourrit), by Sergeant Paul Lintier, of the 44th Artillery, who shared in the defeat of Ruffey’s Army near Virton, in the south-eastern corner of Belgium, 35 miles north of Verdun. It was almost his first sight of bloodshed, and with an artist’s truthfulness he records all the confusion of his mind.
“The battle is lost,” he writes on August 23, “I know not how or why. I have seen nothing. It is a sheer nightmare. We shall be massacred.... Anguish chokes me.... This boiling mass of animality and thought that is my life is about to cease. My bleeding body will be stretched upon the field. I see it. Across the sunny perspective of the future a great curtain falls. I am only twenty-one years old.... What are we waiting for? Why do not our guns fire? I perspire, I am afraid ... afraid.”