And the youth Palot dies in that appeal, and they dig a hole in the red clay under a low wall beside a Barbary fig-tree.
'Ah! poor little soldier, who breathe your last, calling on your mother; you who, with your glazing eyes, saw the vision of your home; you who are laid there, at twenty-three years of age, to be devoured by the worms of that foreign soil on which you have suffered so much, and where you have met your death alone, forsaken, without a friend to soothe your last struggle, without a hand to close your eyelids, except the brutal hand of the hospital servant, which shut on your mouth like a muzzle when your desperate cries disturbed his sleep. Ah, I know why your sickness was mortal; I know it much better than the surgeon whose steel dissected your emaciated body; and I pity you, poor victim of the State, with all my heart and soul as I pity your mother who waits for you, counting the days of your absence, and who will only receive in her solitude the dry official notice of your death!
'Ah, no! I will not pity you, young dead soldier, nor your mother who mourns your loss! I will not pity you, sons, who are killed by the drinkers of blood, mothers who conceive what they send to the shambles. Mad women who endure the pangs of childbirth only to give up the fruit of their womb to the Minotaur which devours them! Know you not that the she-wolves let themselves be slain sooner than lose their offspring; that there are beasts which die of grief when their cubs are borne away from them? Do you not understand that it would be better to tear your new-born creatures limb from limb than to bring them up for one-and-twenty years, only to throw them into the hands of those who want their flesh to feed the cannon?... And you would ask our pity when, in some dark hour, the end comes, and the bones of your children are gnawed by hyænas and whitened by the sun in some forgotten corner of the earth?'
There are many such passages in Biribi, burning with truth and with pain; and it would be well if they could be stamped into the mind and the memory of the peoples of this epoch, who go meekly and stupidly as sheep to the slaughter, under the pressure of their sovereigns and statesmen. Of course, such a teaching as this carries with it its own condemnation by what is called authority, and by all those classes of which I have spoken, to whom war is a necessity and a standing army is the ark of the Government. But it would be well if the populace of every country could read, learn, and digest it, and realise its truth and its justification. As I have said, I place Bas les Cœurs higher, in a purely literary sense, than Biribi, in the sense of construction and of concentration. For Biribi is abrupt, at times confused; is rather a series of terrible records and tragical incidents than a consecutive and harmonious narrative, although it relates the career of the same soldier from the time when he enters the ranks, to the last day in which he flings from him for ever the grey coat and kepi of the punishment-battalion. In that punishment-battalion he has been placed, let the reader remember, for no especial crime against law or decency, but for those offences against the military code (the unwritten code) which make the offender more guilty in the eyes of a court-martial than any actually criminal accusation: to have lost a regimental article, to have forgotten to salute a superior, to have stopped to drink at a brook on a march, to have omitted to put the regulation number on a clothes brush or a pewter platter, to have been out without leave, to have lost cartridges or buttons—any one of those innumerable and incessantly recurring actions or omissions which make a soldier an insoumis to his military superior, whether sergeant or general, corporal or colonel, which to the military mind constitute crimes too heinous to be named, offences which fill a punishment-book with accusations of acts in which only the semi-insanity of perverted authority could see any provocation. Read only of the punishment of the tombeau for simple sins of negligence or thoughtless mirth. The tombeau is a canvas cover, stretched on stakes, making a cage a mètre long by sixty centimètres wide, into which the soldier condemned to this torment is obliged to creep on his stomach as best he can. In this cage he spends days, weeks, months, at the caprice of his tyrants, with a litre of water as his only drink, and nothing but the canvas between him and scorching heat or icy rain, or blinding desert dust. On hot days the water in his little can evaporates rapidly; and at the will of the corporals in charge of him he may be kept thirty-six hours without other drink and without food at all. Remember, as you read these lines, that the tombeau has been the home for months of the man who describes it; a home on the scorching Algerian sand in the parching African weather; a home in which he envied the jackal its lair and the vulture its wings; a home in which his flesh rotted and his manhood swooned.
It is, perhaps, the finest compliment one can pay to an author to be so much impressed by his theme that one almost forgets to speak of his purely intellectual qualities. It is difficult to treat of either of these works in a coldly critical spirit. For they are written with tears of blood—such tears as are wrung from the heart's depths of all those by whom France is beloved.
For if militarism be her only armour, her only resource against her foes, then must we tremble for her indeed; and tremble no less for the whole of Europe, of which all the male youth is bruised and crushed under militarism as in a mortar. The charge of want of patriotism has been brought against Georges Darien for both these volumes. But it is the flaw in human nature, not in French nature only, which he exposes; the cynicism, the selfishness, the cowardice, the meanness, which are so conspicuous in all modern society, in all nations and in all grades. Were there a German invasion of Italy or of England next year, there would probably be as many Italians or English ready to succumb to, to cringe before, and to profit by, the conquerors as there are Versaillais ready to do so in the volume called Bas les Cœurs. There is a moral motor ataxy in the spinal marrow of modern nationalities; the love of money, the fear of poverty, and the continual concentration of the mind on personal interests taught by modern education and by modern commerce make up a large percentage of human beings, who are mere time-servers, always ready to hold the stirrup-leather of the strongest. It is not alone the French bourgeois of 1870 who is satirised in these pictures of Versailles under German domination; it is the whole modernity of the last quarter of the nineteenth century under the teaching of modern science, modern trade, and modern morality. All humanity has been inoculated with the serum of concentrated cowardice and egotism; some are robust enough to resist the contagion, but the majority absorb it and develop the disease. That which Darien calls not cowardice, but fear, is enormously developed by modern influences, and will probably continue to increase in the coming century. He asks himself and his reader of what elements is it composed that discipline, that blind obedience, which is enforced in military life (and which is already demanded in civil life by the scientific and medical tyrannies). He replies, and it is a subtle distinction which will escape the comprehension of many, that the soldier who thus cringes to base orders is not a coward but a craven (pas un lâche; un peureux).
'This craven would throw himself into fire or flood to-day to save a comrade's life; but he would blow his comrade's brains out to-morrow at the word of command of a non-commissioned officer. He is not base: he is frightened. His courage disappears before a watch-word: his boldness shrinks and vanishes under a regimental order. What cows him is the apprehension of punishment, the fear of the men set above him. Fear is the keystone of the ark of the temple of Janus. The army is a laundry where they throw the consciences of men into a tub of soap-suds, and where the characters of men are wrung and twisted like wet linen, and are placed, shapeless, under the wooden beater of a brutalising discipline. It is only by means of fear that the military system has been able to establish itself. It is only by such fear that it maintains its position. It is obliged to affect the imagination by terror, as it must extinguish the soul and sense of nations to prevent each from seeing farther than the stupid limit of a frontier. It is obliged to surround itself with a mysterious ceremony, with a religious pomp in which horror is united to magnificence; in which the trumpet-blast joins in the death-shrieks; in which one can see confused together the blood-stained robe of glory, the plume of generals, the handcuffs of gendarmes, the marshal's baton, and the dozen balls of the execution-volley, the golden palms of triumph and the shattered bones of the dead. It must present this spectacle to the crowds which stare and tremble before it as they stand open-mouthed before a charlatan quack doctor at a fair, whose tinsel and feathers attract them, but from whom they shrink alarmed as soon as they see a forceps or a lancet glitter ominously in his hand. It must do this in order that the people, always in ecstasy before the marvellous, which it does not attempt to analyse, shall be seized before it with awe and admiration: even as a savage who prostrates himself in terror and respect before the shooting-iron which he does not understand, but which he knows possesses the power to strike him to the earth.'
Many will protest against this figure as an insult to the general public, but like many other insults which carry an intolerable sting in them, it may claim that it is merited, and does not overpass the truth.
Darien writes with that force which can, indeed, only come from the intimate persuasion that what it tells mankind is true, and should be told.
'"It is commonly said," he continues, "that the army incarnates the nation. History puts this into our heads by means of all her subtlest lies. Ten martial anecdotes sum up a century; a boast describes a reign. History preaches hatred of the people, respect for the pillager, the sanctification of carnage, the glorification of slaughter. The weak, the sensitive, the timid succumb beneath it, and are buried in the red clay or left on the sand for the vultures and jackal. The strong (sometimes, not always) lives to have his whole future poisoned by these memories, his whole temperament warped and embittered; or he forces his tormentors to shoot him by some unpardonable breach of discipline; some blow to a superior, or some intentionally insolent reply; death is the continually recurring sentence in the military code; if the man does not bend he must be broken: broken in two with a volley which smashes his spine. The punishment-battalions, the workshops of the Travaux Forcés, are the immediate consequences of the standing armies. Society, to protect its interests, makes of a young citizen a soldier, and of the soldier a galley slave at the first effort in him to shake off the yoke of that discipline which degrades and brutalises him, requiring like all tyrants and usurpers to support its rule by terror, to make itself dreaded that its prestige may dazzle and its tottering throne be secured. What society requires is an obedience passive and blind, a total imbecility, a humiliation which has no limit or hesitation; the response of the machine to the mechanic, of the dancing dog to the stick of his teacher. Take your man, make him surrender all free will, power of choice, liberty, and conscience, and you create and possess a soldier. To-day, at the end of the nineteenth century, there is as much difference between the two words, soldier and citizen, as there was in the time of Cæsar between two similar words—Milites and Quirites. The standing army is the corner-stone of the actual social structure; it is a force which sanctions and secures the conquests of force; it is a barrier raised much less to combat foreign invasion than to resist and paralyse the just claims of nations. Soldiers, those sons of the people armed against their fathers, are nothing more or less than gendarmes in disguise."'
This is surely absolute truth—that truth which is of all others most feared by those in authority; those who, whether as sovereigns, ministers, financiers, professional men, or tradesmen, live on and by the servility and gullibility of the nations.