"Of course, I am ready to die for France. She can demand my life as a right. I belong to her and she can do with me what she likes. It's my duty to fight in her defence, and although I tell you all the worst of war, monsieur, I do not mean that I am not glad to have done my part. In a few weeks this wound of mine will be healed and I shall go back, for the sake of France, to that Hell again. It is Hell, quand même!"
He analysed his fears with simple candour and confessed that many times he had suffered most from imaginary terrors. After the German retreat from Lunéville, he was put on a chain of outposts linked up with the main French lines. It was at night, and as he stood leaning on his rifle he saw black figures moving towards him. He raised his rifle, and his finger trembled on the trigger. At the first shot he would arouse the battalion nearest to him. They were sleeping, but as men sleep who may be suddenly attacked. They would fire without further question, and probably he would be the first to die from their bullets. Was it the enemy? They were coming at right angles to the French lines. The foremost were even within twenty yards of him now. His nerves were all trembling. He broke out into a hot sweat. His eyes straining through the darkness were shot through with pain. He had almost an irresistible desire to fire and shout out, so as to end the strain of suspense which racked his soul. At last he gave the challenge, restraining himself from firing that first shot. It was well he did so. For the advancing French troops belonged to a French regiment changing their position under cover of darkness. If my little friend had lost his nerve and fired too soon they would have been shot down by their own comrades.
"It's one's imagination that gives one most trouble," he said, and I thought of the words of an English officer, who told me one day that "No one with an imagination ought to come out to this war." It is for that reason—the possession of a highly developed imagination—that so many French soldiers have suffered more acutely than their English allies. They see the risks of war more vividly, though they take them with great valour. They are more sensitive to the sights and sounds of the fighting lines than the average English "Tommy," who has a tougher temperament and does not allow his mind to brood over blood and agony. They have the gift, also, of self-analysis and self-expression, so that they are able to translate their emotions into vivid words, whereas our own men are taciturn for the most part about their side of the business and talk objectively, looking outwards, and not inwards.
5
Some of the letters from French soldiers, scrawled in the squalor of the trenches by men caked in filth and mud, are human documents in which they reveal themselves with extraordinary intimacy, and in which they put the whole truth, not disguising their terror or their blood-lust in the savage madness of a bayonet charge, or the heartache which comes to them when they think of the woman they love, or the queer little emotions and sentiments which come to them in the grim business of war. They watch the dawn, and in a line or two put some of its beauty into their letters home. They describe with a literary skill that comes from strong emotions the gloom and horror of long nights near the enemy's trenches from which at any moment a new attack may come. And yet, though they do not hide their moments of spiritual misery or despair, there is in all these letters the splendid courage of men who are ready for the last sacrifice and eager for their chance of honour.
"I send this letter," writes a young Zouave, "as I sit huddled under an earth-heap at twenty yards from a German trench, less to be envied than a rabbit in its burrow, because when the hunter is far away it can come out and feed at pleasure. You who live through the same agonies, old friend, must learn and rejoice that I have been promoted adjutant on the night of November 13 on the banks of the Yser. There were seventy men out of 250—the rest of the company sleep for ever round that ferryman's house which the papers have made famous… What moral sufferings I have endured! We have now been brought to the south of Ypres and continue this depressing life in advanced trenches. Not a quarter of an hour's respite: shells, shrapnels, bombs and bullets fall around us continuously. How courage has changed with this modern war! The hero of olden times was of a special type, who put on a fine pose and played up to the gallery because he fought before admiring spectators. Now, apart from our night attacks, always murderous, in which courage is not to be seen, because one can hardly discern one's neighbour in the darkness, our valour consists in a perfect stoicism. Just now I had a fellow killed before a loophole. His comrades dragged him away, and with perfect quietude replaced the man who is eternally out of action. Isn't that courage? Isn't it courage to get the brains of one's comrade full in the face, and then to stand on guard in the same place while suffering the extremes of cold and dampness? … On the night of the 13th I commanded a section of corpses which a mitrailleuse had raked. I had the luck to escape, and I shouted to these poor devils to make a last assault. Then I saw what had happened and found myself with a broken rifle and a uniform in rags and tatters. My commandant spoke to me that night, and said: 'You had better change those clothes. You can put on an adjutant's stripes.'"
One passage in this young Zouave's letter reveals the full misery of the war to a Frenchman's spirit: "Our courage consists in a perfect stoicism." It is not the kind of courage which suits his temperament, and to sit in a trench for months, inactive, waiting for death under the rain of shells, is the worst ordeal to which the soul of the French soldier is asked to submit. Yet he has submitted, and held firm, along lines of trenches, 500 miles from end to end, with a patience in endurance which no critics of France would have believed possible until the proof was given. Above the parapet lie the corpses of comrades and of men who were his enemies until they became poor clay.
"The greater number of the bodies," writes a soldier, "still lie between the trenches, and we have been unable to withdraw them. We can see them always, in frightful quantity, some of them intact, others torn to bits by the shells which continue to fall upon them. The stench of this corruption floats down upon us with foul odours. Bits of their rotting carcases are flung into our faces and over our heads as new shells burst and scatter them. It is like living in a charnel house where devils are at play flinging dead men's flesh at living men, with fiendish mockery. The smell of this corruption taints our food, and taints our very souls, so that we are spiritually and physically sick. That is war!" "This horrible game of war," writes another man, "goes on passionately in our corner. In seventy-four days we have progressed about 1200 yards. That tells you everything. Ground is gained, so to speak, by the inch, and we all know now how much it costs to get back a bit of free France."
6
Along the French lines Death did not rest from his harvesting whatever the weather, and although for months there was no general advance on either side, not a day passed without new work for the surgeons, the stretcher-bearers, and the gravediggers. One incident is typical of a hospital scene near the front. It was told in a letter from a hospital nurse to a friend in Paris.