City of beauty, built out of the dreams of great artists and great poets, I have watched you through this time of war, walking through your silent streets in the ordeal of most dreadful days, mingling with your crowds when a multitude of cripples dragged their lopped limbs thiough the sunlight, studying your moods of depression, and hopefulness, and passionate fervour, wandering in your churches, your theatres and your hospitals, and lingering on mild nights under the star-strewn sky which made a vague glamour above your darkness; and always my heart has paid a homage to the spirit which after a thousand years of history and a thousand million crimes, still holds the fresh virtue of ardent youth, the courage of a gallant race, and a deathless faith in the fine, sweet, gentle things of art and life. The Germans, however great their army, could never have captured the soul of Paris.
Chapter IX The Soldiers Of France
1
When in the first days of the war I saw the soldiers of France on their way to the front, I had even then a conviction that the fighting qualities of the nation had not degenerated in forty-four years of peace, after the downfall in which the courage of the men had been betrayed by the corruption of a Government. Afterwards, during many months as a wanderer in this war, I came to know the French soldier with the intimacy of long conversations to the sound of guns, in the first line of trenches facing the enemy, in hospitals, where he spoke quietly while comrades snored themselves to death, in villages smashed to pieces by shell-fire, in troop trains overcrowded with wounded, in woods and fields pockmarked by the holes of marmites, and in the restaurants of Paris and provincial towns where, with an empty sleeve or one trouser-leg dangling beneath the tablecloth, he told me his experiences of war with a candour in which there was no concealment of truth; and out of all these friendships and revelations of soul the character of the soldiers of France stands before my mind in heroic colours.
Individually, of course, the qualities of these men differ as one man from another in any nation or class. I have seen the neurasthenic, quivering with agony in his distress of imaginary terrors, and the man with steady nerves, who can turn a deaf ear to the close roar of guns and eat a hunk of bread-and-cheese with an unspoilt appetite within a yard or two of death; I have seen the temperament of the aristocrat and the snob in the same carriage with the sons of the soil and the factory whose coarse speech and easy-going manners jarred upon his daintiness. War does not entirely annihilate all distinctions of caste even in France, where Equality is a good word, and it does not blend all intellectual and moral qualities into one type of character, in spite of the discipline of compulsory service and the chemical processes which mix flesh and blood together in the crucible of a battlefield. So it is impossible to write of the French soldier as a single figure, or to make large generalizations about the armies of France. The coward skulks by the side of the war. The priestly spirit in the ranks is outraged by the obscenities of the debauchee.
Yet out of those great masses of men who have fought for France there does emerge a certain definite character overwhelming the details of their individual differences, and I have seen certain qualities of temperament which belong to the majority of them, as essential elements of the national spirit of France. The quality of their patriotism, for example, shines very clear above all these millions of men who have abandoned all their small self-interests for the supreme purpose of defending France. England has her patriotism—we give a great proof of it in blood—but it is not like that of France, not so religious in its sentiment, not so passionate in its convictions, not so feminine a thing. To most of these French soldiers, indeed to all that I have talked with, the love of France is like the faith of a devout Catholic in his church. It is not to be argued about. It holds the very truth of life. It enshrines all the beauty of French ideals, all the rich colour of imagination, all the poetry and music that has thrilled through France since the beginning of our civilization, all her agonies and tears. To the commonest soldier of France, "La Patrie" is his great mother, with the tenderness of motherhood, the authority of motherhood, the sanctity of motherhood, as to a Catholic the Blessed Virgin is the mother of his soul. Perhaps as one of her children he has been hardly dealt with, has starved and struggled and received many whippings, but he does not lose his mother-love. The thought of outrageous hands plucking at her garments, of hostile feet trampling upon her, of foul attempts upon her liberty and honour, stirs him to just that madness he would feel if his individual mother, out of whose womb he came, were threatened in the same way. He does not like death—he dreads the thought of it—but without questioning his soul he springs forward to save this mother-country of his and dies upon her bosom with a cry of "Vive la France!"
2
The French soldier, whatever his coarseness or his delicacy, needs feminine consolation, and all his ideals and his yearnings and his self- pity are intimately associated with the love of women, and especially of one woman—his mother. When Napoleon, in the island of St. Helena, used to talk about the glories of his victorious years, and then brooded over the tragedy of his overthrow so that all his soul was clouded with despair, he used to rouse himself after the silence which followed those hours of self-analysis and say, "Let us talk about women—and love." Always it is the feminine spirit in which a Frenchman bathes his wounds. One small incident I saw a year or two ago gave me the clue to this quality in the French character. It was when Védrines, the famous airman, was beaten by only a few minutes in the flight round England. Capitaine Conneau—"Beaumont," as he called himself—had outraced his rival and waited, with French gallantry, to shake the hand of the adversary he had defeated on untiring wings. A great crowd of smart men and women waited also at Brooklands to cheer the second in the race, who in England is always more popular than the prize-winner. But when Védrines came to earth out of a blue sky he was savage and bitter. The loss of the prize- money was a great tragedy to this mechanic who had staked all his ambition on the flight. He shouted out harsh words to those who came to cheer him, and shook them off violently when they tried to clap him on the back. He was savagely angry. Then suddenly something seemed to break in his spirit, and his face quivered.
"Is there any woman to embrace me?" he asked. Out of the crowd came a pretty Frenchwoman and, understanding the man, though she had not met him before, she held out her arms to him and raised her face.
"Allons-donc, mon vieux!" she said. The man put his arms about her and kissed her, while tears streamed down his face, covered in sweat and dust. He was comforted, like a boy who had hurt himself, in his mother's arms. It was a queer little episode—utterly impossible in the imagination of an Englishman—but a natural thing in France.