French life in town and country

by Hannah Lynch

CHAPTER IV
THE ARMY AND THE NATION

The question of the hour in France is militarism and anti-militarism. The emotions roused by this fierce duel between these two parties of the nation are poignant and absorbing, and threaten us ever with civil war. It is impossible to blink away all the perils and grievances and wrong-doing in which the final triumph of militarism could involve France; and still less possible to deny the sad fact that a large proportion of the country are in favour of military triumph. This fact is mainly due to the infamous campaign of a Press with little instinct of honour or truth, which persuades the unthinking multitude that the salvation of France lies in the hands of a group of unscrupulous and incompetent generals who, since Sedan, have not done anything to justify the extraordinary confidence reposed in them by their credulous and easily fooled countrymen.

A REVIEW AT LONGCHAMP

Thanks to Napoleon, the French are unable to bear defeat. The race is a nervous, excitable one, susceptible to great moments of dejection, and easily plunged into terror under the influence of anxiety. They have not recovered from the effects of ’70, and their souls are still stamped with the horrors of that terrible year. They wince at the memory of Sedan, and have only been able to check the depressing work of remembrance by a buoyant conviction in the near hour of vengeance. For years they have fed upon the hope of the revanche. Only a general can give them this desired satisfaction, they believe, and hence their absurd worship of their army, and their still more absurd readiness to fling themselves under the feet of any soldier who will fool them with tall talk, and intimidate them with the discovery of traitors. Their apprehension of treason in their own midst is one of the most significant symptoms of demoralisation. According to the modern French, every man seems to have his price, and every Frenchman is only longing for an opportunity to sell his country. Not even the Chinese have an intenser distrust of the foreigner. In the lamentable Affaire Dreyfus, the immense majority were honestly convinced that the nations of the world (Spain excepted) were banded together to work the ruin of France, and cast shame upon her army. They knew the figures paid to the Czar, their ally, to the Emperor of Germany, and to the King of Italy by the Jews. England as a rich country was supposed to be one of the paymasters of Europe in its unequal struggle against the honour of France. It was the Affaire Dreyfus that revealed to the amazed world the sudden passion of the French people for its army. The army saw its opportunity, seized it, and may now be said to be in revolt against the nation. Let us be in no doubt of the fact that France does not desire a military dictator, and that such a dictatorship would be the very worst calamity that could happen to her. It is easy enough to detect the wire-pullers behind a parcel of mischievous journalists; discontented shopkeepers, whose suffrages are obtained by the promise of brisker commerce under a new condition of things; the large middle class always in terror of socialism, which might rob them of their cherished luxuries. There are two great powers diminished under republican government—the aristocracy and the Church. These are working together to overthrow what they regard as a common enemy, and any means are welcome to them, whether foul or fair. Hence we see a marquis who has denied his order, an atheist and blasphemer who has shocked every religious and aristocratic conviction, and wounded every decent French susceptibility by pen and speech, M. Henri Rochefort, the leading light of the present agitation, a man who has heaped obloquy and contempt on French generals in days gone by, now the honoured mouthpiece of the army, fighting, with his usual weapons, the battle of the Church and the aristocracy. Devout Catholics will say to-day of the man whose name some years ago they could not bring themselves to mention: C’est un bien brave homme (“Such an honest fellow!”) and well-born ladies of unimpeachable morals and manners will spend their halfpennies on the Intransigeant, in which this amiable gentleman exhales his patriotic wrath. A more singular union has never been celebrated even in France, land of incongruous contracts and odd proximities, than that between M. Henri Rochefort and the army of France, the Church, and the aristocracy.

The attitude of the army to-day may be traced to the two parties in the land already mentioned, through its commanders and officers, who naturally belong to either or both. The officers who are not well born—and they are many—would fain conceal the circumstance in a snobbish democracy, and, as a consequence, adopt with exaggerated fervour the prejudices of the class to which they desire to be admitted. For there are no partisans of aristocratic privilege so impassioned and so silly, as the middle class, who ape their ways and espouse their cause through snobbishness. It is upon the weakness of this class that the nobles of France are playing so recklessly. Every second officer calls himself a count, or viscount, and is accepted as such with joy in provincial circles and by wealthy parvenus. I should be sorry to deny the respectability of honest religious convictions, but Catholicism at the present hour in France is too much a question of fashion and politics to inspire respect. Men who, to my knowledge, believe in nothing, make a point of ostentatiously attending religious services and simulating attitudes of advanced piety, because they think it “good form,” and that it will give them tone in the eyes of their neighbours. They are well aware that they cannot hope to place Philip of Orleans on an unstable throne, being too cognisant of the fact that that singular pretender is held in light esteem even by his followers and would be far from welcome to the large majority of his intelligent compatriots, still less to the working classes, and so they pin their faith to the military dictator.

The popularity of the French army to-day, the outcome, be it said, of a well-worked political campaign, in which credulous French officers have been shamelessly used as mere tools, is hard for us to understand, if it were for nothing else but the heavy mortgage on man’s freshest and most ardent years which it implies. How, one asks one’s self, can independent citizens accept such a tax when combined resistance to it ought to be so easy? For, after all, in a democracy it should be the voice of the people that rules, and not the law of a dead tyrant. Militarism to the outsider appears to be not only a demoralising force, but a monstrous expense; and it passes imagination how so thrifty a race as the French can go on complacently squandering millions on the support of an army that has stood still for thirty years and may not move for thirty more. It would be compensation enough if one could only believe what, in the face of facts, experience teaches us to be false, that military life hardens and solidifies a man and gives him an ideal of honour higher than any he would learn in any trade or profession that might assist him to a fortune. The proof that it does not solidify the citizen may be accepted when we remember the coarsening influences of the barracks. How general is the complaint that the three years spent in the army have unfitted a country lad for farm service, a town youth for the shop; and when you dwell on the rapid downward careers of retired officers, of men dismissed from service, of their inability, once out of regiment lines, to stand alone and cope with the difficulties of individual strife, it is impossible to agree to the theory that intelligence and force of character are acquired in the army. I once heard that bête comme un militaire is an accepted conclusion in diplomatic circles; and I think the conclusion a just one. An intelligent soldier over thirty is very rare to find, however bright and pleasant young officers may sometimes be. As for the military ideal of honour, that is hardly a thing to speak of with patience.

Recent events in France have proved how fatal it is to allow the army of a country to dabble in politics. The military code of honour is good enough for the battle-field, where all we need of men is the courage to fight well and the capacity to provoke and profit by the enemy’s blunders. When the battle is won, it would be a churlish people who would ask to peer too closely into the method of winning it. For this reason a licence is permitted to soldiers that could never be tolerated in civilians. But bring those same morals into civil existence, and you may judge of the results by an impartial study of the Affaire Dreyfus. Where the civilian, bred to allow the individual some rights, would hesitate, the spurred and sabred hero knows no fear. He is accustomed to the effacement of the individual, to the suppression of all personal rights, to an unmitigated harshness of rule, to the dictator’s unquestioned authority. The law has no terrors for him, for he possesses his own law, which is summary and implacable. All means which lead to the end he has in view are alike serviceable and honest, since he is bound to win, and, as a soldier, must make short work of all obstacles in his path. And so, when he drifts into politics, liberty, life, honour, justice are words he recognises not. He is apt to treat his opponents as the enemy, to be circumvented at all costs, and into politics he carries the nefarious theory that all is fair in war. Unhappily, France for the tristful hour shares his belief. If militarism were not the execrable plague it is, such a lamentable state of things could never have been brought about amongst a fairly sane and intelligent people. Nowhere will you find a higher ideal of justice, of honour, of delicate and noble sentiment, than in France among the elect. This fact alone proves the French capable of every generous feeling, which we may be sure militarism will tend to destroy.

One of the worst things about the French army is, undoubtedly, conscription. Who is to measure the amount of evil done to the country by taking young men of twenty-one away from the work which is to make them independent citizens—to the commerce, the tillage, the liberal professions of a land where everything must stand still while its youth learns enough of soldiering to detest it, as a rule, without any serious profit to the army? I have gathered many impressions of barrack-life from Frenchmen and have never found that they were imbued with an excessive admiration of it. The good-humoured and indifferent make a joke of their trials; but it is plain to the simplest intelligence that their time, for themselves and their country, would have been better employed at home than dodging and ducking from the furies of corporals or captains. Here are some impressions culled from a young soldier’s notes, sent to me by a scientific student, whose time was lamentably squandered in his year of futile service.