At staff headquarters in a more contained, reserved way there is the same air of vital confidence. "Have you seen the new pump?" the general asked me. "We are pumping good water all over this sector into the front trenches, too…. Oh, we are bien installé! … It may be another year, two, perhaps more, but the end is certain. There is one man in the trenches, another just behind in reserve, still another resting somewhere in the woods for his week off, and more, all the men we want back in the dépôts!" And he turns the talk to the good health of his men, their fine spirit. For one of the human, lovable qualities of the officers whom I met is that they prefer to talk about the comfort, the morale, the esprit, of their men to discussing "operations."
Just here I see where the French have risen above the machine idea of the German lesson. There is a something plus, over and above "preparation," "organization," "efficiency," which the Latin has and on which his confidence in ultimate victory largely rests. That is his belief in the individual, his reliance on the strength of the individual's spirit. To the French officer this seems the all-important factor in the army: military force depends ultimately upon the esprit of the individual which creates the morale of the whole. Of course, the army must be equipped in the modern way and fought in the modern way with all the resources of science, with aeroplanes, bombs, motor transport, and heavy artillery. But without the full devotion of the individual, without the coöperation of his esprit, the army would be a dead machine, especially in this nerve-rending endurance contest of the trenches. Here is the Latin idea, which is absolutely opposed to the German machine theory of war.
The German staff has done marvels with its machine. It hurls armies over the map of Europe of initiative and devotion in the common soldier, who in the Latin conception of the word remains a human being with a soul. An officer remarked to me, "We cannot have our men come from the trenches glum and downcast—a Frenchman must laugh and joke or something is wrong with him. So we started these vaudevilles behind the lines, and sports." Instead of more drill they give their men "shows," so that they may laugh and forget the horrors of the trench. Good psychology!
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The civilian shines through every French soldier—the civilian who is a human being like you or me, with the same human needs. The officers chat and joke familiarly with their men. Comradeship is substituted for tyranny. France, one comprehends, is a real democracy, and still takes the ideal of equality seriously. When I asked an officer at Rheims why he had not had a day's leave in ten months while English officers went home on leave, he said, with a shrug,—"France is a republic: our men must get their leaves first."
The machine system gives startling results—in a short campaign. But when it comes to an endurance contest, to the long, long strains of trench warfare, something other than drill and organization is necessary, something that will rouse the human being to the last atom of effort that he has in him. When men must stand up to their waists in icy water, live in the inferno of constant bombardment, not for hours and days, but for weeks and months, something other than discipline is needed to keep them sufficiently alive to be of use. Doctors tell how willingly, unquestioningly, the wounded go back to the hell they have escaped,—not once, but twice, three times. To evoke the capacity for heroism in the individual soldier has been the triumph of the Latin system.
The faith of the French rests justly on their heroic resolution, their ability to endure as individuals, more than on the lesson learned of preparation and organization.
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Faith is a belief in the evidence of things unseen. French faith is of many kinds, not purely material, not military. They believe so profoundly in the perfect justice and high importance of their cause that it would seem as if they counted upon the cause alone to win the victory. No nation, they say, ever spent itself in a better cause. Victims of an unprovoked attack, unprepared, which is the best evidence of peaceable will, witnesses of the outrage of a neighbor people, bleeding from the wounds of their own country,—what better cause for war could men have? And the Latin intelligence of the French enables them from the humblest to the highest to perceive the universality of the principles for which they are called upon to die. It is no selfish, not even a merely national, cause—it is the cause of nothing less than humanity in which they fight.
The philosopher Bergson expressed this sublime confidence in the cause thus (I give the substance of his words from memory): "Not all wars can be avoided—perhaps nine out of ten can. But this one, no! For it is a war of principles. It will be a long war because the enemy is strong and we were unprepared. But we can wait the end confident in the result. The Germans have created a false belief, a wrong idea, and have carried that idea into action with extraordinary thoroughness. But the belief rests upon error. When the day comes that they meet reverses, when their idol of force no longer works miracles for them, then they will collapse, from within. There will be a general breakdown of personality from realizing the falsity of their idea. There lies our victory."