“Monotony is not the only thing a soldier complains of. I remember suffering many fits of indignation and of fury, principally in the beginning. A most remarkable thing about the army is that you are punished, not only for your own faults, which is quite right, but also for those of each of your comrades; and so you are responsible for the behaviour of the whole army—six hundred thousand men. Suppose you are at Brest. You will not, of course, be hanged if a soldier at Marseilles misbehaves, but if a soldier on leave a hundred leagues off comes back tipsy and obstreperous, the leave you hoped to have will perhaps not be given, and the time you might have employed in a pleasanter manner will be spent in cleaning the floor with the bottom of a bottle, without wax. These vicarious punishments occur much oftener in your own regiment, above all, in your own company; so that the nearer the sinner is to you the more threatening is he; and if you have the ill-luck to have for comrade a stupid or awkward fellow, you will be insulted and punished until that poor devil converts himself. I well remember such an idiot I suffered constantly for. The sergeant would tread on his feet when he was cold, and, consequently, more sensitive, and I have seen tears in his eyes more than once. Nobody, however, pitied him; everyone laughed at him; and such was his misery, his loneliness, his deep distress, that I have seen him weeping in bed like a child. He entered the army a good, poor creature, and will probably leave it a hardened blackguard. From military life, the school of patriotism, honour, and abnegation, he will only learn evil.... Sometimes it was so evident that our sufferings diverted our chiefs, and had no other object, that I fell into indescribable anger; though I am not bloodthirsty, I would gladly have killed some of my superior officers—this is no exaggeration; and I well remember one day weeping from impotent rage.”
Elsewhere he remarks that the only feeling a soldier comes to cherish is resignation. “He knows very well that none of his superiors will ever say a kind word to him, and that his destiny is to pay for every annoyance they undergo. If he behaves himself he will be compelled to toil all day without evening recreation, and his only reward will be to be called an idiot by his comrades, to be punished for them, and not be allowed out oftener than they, and, in the case of a clever comrade, have his work forced upon him—for in the regiment the clever fellows do nothing, the fools do everything. Oh, the things I have seen! A black-hearted sergeant, who always chose for attack weak and sickly men; a Parisian workman, one of my comrades, on the brink of manslaughter or self-murder from persecution, not ill-natured, but destined to be sent to Africa for indiscipline or rebellion. Those who can’t hold their tongues or their tempers are greatly to be pitied. I saw one strike a chief, and he was right. I sometimes scorn myself for not having done so too. It makes a great difference, of course, when you have a good captain or a good lieutenant. The beginning is the hardest time in barracks. The cavalry and artillery regiments are the worst of all. You would not believe half the dreadful things I could tell you of them. The great evil of the army comes from this. The corporal can injure you; that is all he can do. He may punish, but he cannot reward. He can prevent you from going out, but he cannot give you leave of absence before the regulated hour. But if his power to do good is small, his power to do evil is immense. The general cannot give a leave if the corporal opposes it. In the army the punishment always suppresses the reward, but the reward never suppresses the punishment; and as the number of those who can punish is at least twenty times greater than that of those who can reward, nearly everything that happens is disagreeable. In fact, rewards are unknown. To show a curious example: leave of absence is not a reward; the privation of it is a punishment. A soldier’s paradise is outside the barracks. Offer him fifteen days of prison and after that fifteen days’ furlough, and he will not hesitate. What the corporal and sergeant wish to avoid is being bored, and so, to get out of work, they punish and govern by the terror they inspire. The men do not wash their clothes because they should be washed, but from fear the sergeant should find them dirty. The idea of duty does not exist in the army; it is the kingdom of fear, into which no ray of hope or justice penetrates.”
I have left these notes of a young French soldier in their original English, with hardly an alteration. This is one of the anecdotes concerning military denseness he sends me: “In the town where my regiment was quartered there was an exhibition, and the directors of the exhibition, knowing how light a soldier’s purse is (a soldier’s purse is one of the most remarkable things I ever saw. It contains everything: thread, needles, pins, nails, white and black wax, buttons of six or seven sorts; but if you wish to dig so far as to find money, you are as likely as not to reach the ground), wrote to the colonel to say that a certain number of soldiers—sixty, I believe—could visit the exhibition free every day. In the beginning it was all right. The soldiers had as lief go to the exhibition as do exercise. They understood nothing; they were watched by a corporal, and could not go away before the regulated hour. After two weeks there were not sixty volunteers to be found, and after a month not twenty; after six weeks not even five. The colonel’s order was that each day sixty soldiers could go to the exhibition, but the corporal understood must go, and so every day sixty unfortunates were bidden to dress themselves in their best and go and be bored for two mortal hours between pictures and ploughshares, so that in the end the visit to the exhibition was used as a punishment. This surely was not the intention of the kind-hearted director.”
Something must be said of how conscription is worked in France. Military life begins at twenty-one and ends at forty-five, which means that every Frenchman is subject to the military authorities during twenty-five years, three in the Armée Active, ten in the Réserve, six in the Territoriale, and six in the Réserve de la Territoriale. A youth, when he reaches twenty-one, draws a lot in February; he enters the barracks in November and remains there until September three years later, and is then guaranteed as a proper defender of his country. After that, for ten years, he forms part of the Réserve, and twice he must return to the regiment for twenty-eight days. In the Territoriale he must serve once for fourteen days, and after that he is let alone unless war should break out, when he must shoulder his gun and knapsack, and go to the front with the rest. The drawing of lots takes place in the town hall, where the mayor sits with a big box filled with numbers written on bits of wood. Each youth draws out a number. Formerly this ceremony had a meaning, for the owner of a lucky number was exempt from military service, or only served a year. Now all must serve for three years, and the numbers count as nothing. Then comes the Revision Council, a most important thing. If a man passes he enters the barracks six months later; if not, he waits a year and begins again. If he is refused once, he serves only two years; if twice, one year; if three times, none at all. But it is exceedingly rare that a candidate is refused three times, as it is considered disgraceful not to serve as a soldier, though you should die in barracks or always be ailing. Men are passed even in advanced stages of heart disease or consumption, too weak almost to hold a gun. The chiefs argue that military service will strengthen the weak, and be very good for the strong. My scientific correspondent ironically adds: “It is, above all, very good for those who die in the middle of their three years, for, indeed, they were not hardened enough for such a difficult thing as life.” But there are so many ways of escaping from the three years’ servitude, the wonder is all do not profit by the opportunities offered. These are the lucky ones: the eldest son of seven brothers, the eldest son of a widow, of an invalid father, or of one blind or over seventy; those who have a brother “under the flag,” or students of all sorts. To quote my correspondent again: “There are, I believe, at least a hundred kinds of students, coming from you could never imagine where. I had a comrade who was a clerc de contentieux. I have never known, nor has anybody I have asked known, what on earth was a clerc de contentieux. He himself did not know, and when questioned about it he would answer, ‘Something in the way of law.’ He knew nothing more about his own profession. I am sure that he had none, but those magic words saved him two years’ service.”
One of the worst consequences of militarism has of late years been witnessed in France for the stupefaction and edification of Europe—the terrorising of all classes. In 1898, we saw how the army comported itself in the Palace of Justice, which it may be said to have carried by assault. The whole place was packed with officers in uniform and in mufti, spurred and sabred menace going through the hall. The law was laughed at with amazing cynicism by these booted warriors. They refused to reply to the questions put to them, and threatened the civilians who presumed to differ from them with the horror of “a butchery.” They held the field with unexampled effrontery, and the terrorised jury spoke at their bidding. You must go far back in the Middle Ages to find another such tale of wholesale assassinations, perjuries, forgeries, cynical traffic with justice, insolent manipulation of documents, suppressed correspondence, distorted telegrams, bribed evidence, strident vituperation and manifestation of despotism, the more extraordinary by the multiplicity of despots; and so delighted was the befooled populace by this parade of rabid defiance and booted revolt against national tribunals (had the magistrates been honest and the jury courageous, and both held out in the performance of their duty, the suffrages of the people would just as likely have been on their side, since the successfulness of success is proverbial) that Vive l’armée came to mean everything on earth, from the servant-maid’s traditional love of a uniform, the street Arab’s passion for the blare of a trumpet, the sentimental citizen’s yearning for Alsace and Lorraine, and the longing of Imperialist, Royalist, and every other form of fractious opponent of the Republic to overthrow the Government. In a word, it became the cry of sedition, admirably worked up by the Church, the Army, and Society. M. Urbain Gohier’s famous book, L’Armée contre la Nation, undoubtedly contains much exaggerated abuse of French officers and French chiefs, but it also contains many indisputable truths. When one hears French officers speaking of civilians with indescribable contempt as “pekins,” and remembers that all of these miserable pekins have served in the army and will be called upon, without reward or pay, to defend their country with their lives, it is difficult not to regard such a passionate attack as his as justified. The Nationalists to-day have the hardihood to describe themselves as the only true patriots, the only pure Frenchmen. The Temps once pertinently asked what they expected to do in war more than any other kind of Frenchman or patriot—carry two muskets instead of one? One sees MM. Coppée, Lemaître, and Barrès, the literary chiefs of the patriots, thus accoutred with an incredulous smile. After twenty-five years the patriots are still stalking the shades of Alsace and Lorraine, and hurling defiance towards the Vosges, while every honest Alsatian with them passes for a traitor.
The army owes its present unwonted prestige and popularity to the fear war breeds in the modern mind, and this fear it has evidently utilised through its mouthpiece—the militarist Press. Every event is pressed into its service; the return from Fashoda of a brave man, the procession of the École Polytechnique at the grand review, admired for its ill-treatment of an eminent professor, M. Georges Duruy, the son of Victor Duruy, because in the intervals of lecturing to them he presumed to write articles in the Figaro expressing doubts of the culpability of an unfortunate French officer, one of themselves. The sight of these young gentlemen suffices to create a delirious enthusiasm, which is fondly hoped by the authors of the frantic display will prove the death-knell of the Republic. Never has a nation worshipped stranger, more incongruous warrior-gods than France of to-day. She has embraced and wept rapturously over the military virtues and honour of an Esterhazy; she has melted in the furnace of adoration before Major Marchand; she has prostrated herself in reverence and gratitude at the feet of General Mercier, and now she is pantingly waiting for the generalissimo of her dreams—another Boulanger, plumed, handsome, and haughty, on a black charger. It used to be for the revanche she so ardently desired this deliverer, but now the hated enemy is no longer beyond the Vosges, but on the other side of the Channel. A French boy once wrote to an English comrade that he wanted to put his hand through the sleeve (the channel, in French, la manche), and shake hands cordially with him. Alas! it is her sword that bellicose France wishes to put through the sleeve, if we are to believe the Nationalists, and slay perfidious Albion.
It is, perhaps, an exaggeration to describe barracks, as M. Urbain Gohier does, as “the school of all crapulous vices: idleness, lying, debauchery, drunkenness, obscenity, and moral cowardice.” But there is much truth in his contrasting statement, that “the surprising vitality and progress in every way of the Anglo-Saxon races are due to the fact that these latter escape the corrupting and degrading influence of the barracks.” In war men may herd together and be the better for it, since they suffer and bear privation together. But in peace it is impossible that general life of this comfortless kind can have any but a disastrous action upon character. The twenty-eight days of the reservists may be an excellent farce, if the discomforts and trials are borne with high spirits and a sense of fun. From this point of view it is easy enough to laugh at such amusing plays as Champignol Malgré Lui, and the coarse and witty comedies of Courteline, whose military studies are steeped in a good-humoured but terrible realism. You must laugh at that brutal but brilliant little piece, Lidoire, capitally acted at Antoine’s, even while you are filled with an unutterable sense of sadness in contemplation of the futile suffering of barrack-life. Why should grown men, under pretext that their country may some day be attacked, be submitted to the disennobling trials of the general dormitory, to the annihilating process of inflexible and petty discipline, at the mercy of the temper and caprices of superiors? The audience at Antoine’s shout with laughter when the sober fellow is brutalised for his drunken comrade, whom he is trying to shield, but the thinking spectator is saddened by the realistic travesty of justice so peculiar to-day in militarist France. One applauds the more the magnificent outburst against the army in that remarkable play of MM. Donnay and Descaves, La Clairière, where the tortured workman shouts, “There is no such thing as an intelligent bayonet.” Think, then, what it must mean for the young fellow dragged reluctantly from his chosen work, to waste three years fretting in servitude that does his country no good, to share the common life of men more often than not repulsive to him. In the case of the poor it is far worse, for they have no means of avoiding the obligatory three years’ service; and if you would have some idea of the corrupting influence of this experience on a farmer’s son, read M. René Bazin’s charming story, La Terre qui Meurt, where the young soldier back from Africa has acquired such habits of idleness, of café loungings, of little glasses, and martial vanity that his downward career is traced out almost on the page that introduces him, and the poor fellow goes to the dogs, not from inherent viciousness, but because the barracks has spoiled him for farm-work, for steady labour.
The lucky students destined for civil professions when they leave the Polytechnique, the École Centrale, the École Forestière, have only a year’s service, and that under the most comfortable circumstances. They are officers at once, with £100 a year, a servant, and lodgings in town. This cannot be said to be much of a sacrifice upon the altar of patriotism compared with that the ordinary citizen makes in shouldering his gun and heavy knapsack, in undergoing all the weary and repugnant experiences of barrack-life. As Urbain Gohier says: “Under a Democratic Republic there is only one way of escaping from the terrible barracks—the wearing of the epaulette; there is only one means of not being a soldier—becoming an officer.” You will find in France that it is precisely the people who benefit by these means of escaping the worst consequences of militarism, and women who know nothing at all about it and could never endure five minutes of the martyrdom, who are its most violent eulogists. It is difficult to explain military arrogance in France, for it certainly is not based on the fact that officers alone go to the wars. When the battle-cry rings over the land the whole nation arms itself and goes off to fight, as well as the officers, and when the nation stays at home, so do the officers. When I asked a friend of General de Gallifet the motives of his resignation, he replied haughtily: “How could you expect Gallifet to tolerate the interference in military affairs of a miserable pekin like Waldeck-Rousseau?” In vain did I point out that when an officer mixes himself up in politics and tries, in a mischievous and underhand fashion, to injure the Government, the Prime Minister has every right to interfere, since, in his quality of “miserable pekin,” politics is his business and not a general’s. And the man who was speaking to me was but a “pekin” himself, who, like the Prime Minister, had served in the army, and yet quite approved of martial contempt for all who do not wear a sabre or a plumed kepi. Watch these generals ride through the streets of Paris, beribboned and befrogged, and note the lofty, godlike way they gaze down upon the adoring multitude. Are they back from the wars? Do all these glorious and shining medals mean battles won? Where has Zurlinden fought with conspicuous glory? Where Mercier? Billot? Gonse? And yet they all look as proud and fatuous as the marshals of Bonaparte returning from their successful raids across Europe.
I have heard in France a great deal of fine talk, which would be admirable and noble if it were true, about the soldier’s abnegation, his lack of ambition, his disinterestedness, and modest pay. A Frenchman who had just returned from a tour through America once said to me: “It is our army which maintains our superiority; through it we keep intact a high ideal. I was struck by this fact in America, where there is no army and consequently no ideal. There must be a generous part of the nation kept aside for disinterested work.” We need only glance through the military history of the world to recognise the utter bombast and falseness of this view. Officers are no more disinterested than other men, and there are, in fact, no men so splendidly paid for their services in all lands. The general who wins a battle is a hero for ever, though no better brains, no finer qualities may go to the winning of that battle than go to the making of a useful law, the winning of an election, and less than goes to a scientific discovery or the writing of a great book. He has, as well as his pay, his prestige, his popularity; probably a title and an estate. Jove himself could scarcely ask for more. Take, then, the ordinary officer. What does he work for if it is not for military advancement? Is not the title of captain, of major, of colonel, of general, dearer to him far than the millions of the millionaire? And surely our payment is measured by the price we put upon it! The man who prefers millions nowadays does not become a soldier, though in Napoleon’s days, with the sacking of all Europe in view, it was perhaps the swiftest road to fortune. But he is paid for his services in the coin he loves best; and what more can he require? Why pose as the victim of his own virtues, and prate of his disinterestedness? I was very much struck by a tragic military novel written recently by two French officers: Au Tableau, a tale of army deceptions and bitternesses in preferment. Here is the truth put nakedly, and here is a revelation of military want of judgment, of justice. The general is a dense brute and a snob, who chooses his officers by their rank and fortune, and not by their merit. The hero, of Irish extraction, is a man of culture, of delicate sentiment, of intensely active conscience and brains. He is sacrificed all along the line to the base intrigues of inferior men, comrades who spy and tittle-tattle, idiot aristocrats who look down on their untitled brother officers, and dazzle by their expensive hospitality. Defeated and discouraged, he leaves the army to find himself an outcast, a déclassé, with nothing before him but suicide. The moral of the tale, of course, is, that even in the army it is better to stay there, however hard things may go with an officer; for outside there is nothing for him but suspicion, averted glances, ill-will, and slander. But the picture it draws of the army from within is one of unspeakable sadness. This vaunted French school of abnegation is full of intrigues, perfidies, injustices, petty persecutions, petty miseries. It makes men glad to be outside it, breathing the air of liberty and personal responsibility.
An Englishman said to me one day, “There was only one honest man in the French army, and they turned him out.” This is naturally an extravagant assertion, but it expresses in wild fashion a secret feeling in the minority. “I was bred in the worship of the army, and brought up a fervent Catholic,” said an eminent French writer lately; “well, it is with difficulty now I keep myself from looking away when I see an officer or a priest.” There can be no denial that soldiers with a delicate conscience are not approved of in the French army. They are regarded as dangerous subjects, apt to create “affairs.” When a colonel exposed a scandalous abuse in a certain regiment, the President of the day sent him word that “a due regard for the honour of the army should prevent every officer from making an accusation, however justified, or creating any scandal that could diminish the prestige of the army.” The army, we see, is the one institution insusceptible to the rigours of justice, wherein ill-doers enjoy immunity (if they are not of Jewish persuasion) for the sake of that extraordinary thing called the “honour of the army.”