Part 6

'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 hyaenas 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 Coeurs_ 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 metre long by sixty centimetres 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 Coeurs_. 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 lache; 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 Forces, 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 Caesar 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.

'What is discipline except fear? The soldier is reared to dread what is behind him more than what he is forced to face; he must be more afraid of the fellow-trooper who will be told off to shoot him in the back, than of the adversary whom he is ordered to attack. The army is the incarnation of fear. The soldier must dread his commanders as a burnt child dreads the fire. He must never laugh at their absurdities, nor raise a voice against their injustice or their tyrannies. He must never speak. He must not even think. His superiors do both for him. If he laugh, or resent, or speak, or think, if he be neither a coward nor a dolt, he is a mutineer: he must be tamed, beaten, broken _a Biribi_.'

And when the dreamer, Queslier, says that it will not be long before the people will become awake to this abuse of them, and will see that the military caste is established on prejudices and interests hostile to them, and will arise and destroy it, Darien replies, with equal truth:--

'There will flow much water under all the bridges of the world before the people will have ceased to adore their vain idols bathed in blood and tears.'

Vain idols, indeed! For thousands of years the Juggernaut of military despotism has rolled over the living pavement of the prostrate multitudes, and there is no sign as yet that those multitudes will arise and shiver the blood-stained car to atoms. Darien has but little hope in the resistance of the people. He fears that the majority of them will always continue to be daunted, dazzled, made dumb and helpless by the powers which ruin and slay them. William of Germany makes his insolent and inhuman declaration that the soldier must slaughter his own progenitors if his 'war-lord' bid him do so; and yet William of Germany is allowed to continue his reign.

What are we to look for from nations which lie down to be stamped on thus? which lick the spurred boots of those who outrage them?

_Biribi_, and what _Biribi_ represents, has its prototype in every country of Europe; and wherever Europe introduces her 'civilisation' there she introduces also her quick-firing cannon, her numbered battalions of slaves, her organised butchery, her pulverisation of virility and of volition, her destruction of initiative and of liberty.

England considers that such arguments as those contained in this book do not concern her because she has no conscription. But how long will she be able, or be allowed, to be free from enforced service? The present field-marshal, commanding-in-chief, Lord Wolesley, desires conscription. It may well be that events, in the not far distant future, may strengthen his hands and enable him to enforce it.[4]

[Footnote 4: This was written by me in 1897; England has not waited long to confirm the truth of it.]

'Ah, Mascarille! who wished to put history into madrigals!' cries Darien. 'History has given us Chauvinism (Jingoism), that epidemic which makes a nation run headlong like the Gadarene swine, to fall into the pit of absolutism! The army incarnates the nation, you say? No. It diminishes it. It incarnates nothing but force, brutal and blind, which lies at the service of whoever most pleases it; or--sad to say--whoever pays it highest. The army is the social cancer; is the octopus of which the tentacles drain the blood of the nations; the hundred arms and feelers which the people should sever with blows of their hatchets if they desire themselves to live.'

Such language is very strong, and will rouse strong opposition in those who have long been cradled in conventional opinions, and believe that the established order of society, now existing, is admirable, and intangible, because it has had the force and the cunning to so establish itself. It is language which may, of course, be challenged by adverse argument, which may at anyrate be met by counter-statements deserving to be weighed against it; but it is language which is more needed than any other in the present state of Europe, with every nation armed to the teeth and every country an arsenal.

III

THE ITALIAN NOVELS OF MARION CRAWFORD

I believe that the novels of Mr Crawford of which the scene and the characters are Italian are not among those of his works which are the most generally popular. This fact, if it be a fact, must be due to the general inability of his English and American public to appreciate their accuracy of observation and lineation. Nearly all of them have qualities which cannot be gauged by those to whom the nationality of his personages in these works is unknown. In my own works, of which the scene is in Italy, I have dealt almost exclusively with the Italian peasantry. Mr Crawford has devoted his attention to the middle and the higher classes. I do not think his portraiture of the Italian aristocracy always redolent of the soil, but that of the lower and middle classes is faithful to a wonderful degree. That side of Italian life which is given in _Marzio's Crucifix_, for instance, is drawn with an accuracy not to be surpassed. The whole of this story indeed is admirable in its construction and execution. There is not a page one would wish cancelled, and nothing could be added which would increase its excellence. It is to my taste the _capo d'opera_ of all which he has hitherto done.

I think in his studies of the Italian aristocracy he has given them less charm and more backbone than they possess. He has drawn their passions more visible and furious than they are, and their wills less mutable and less feeble than they are in general. He seems to have mistaken their obstinacy for strength, while, if he have perceived it, he has not rendered that captivating courtesy and graceful animation which are so lovable in them, and which render so many of their men and women so irresistibly seductive. According to him they are a savage set of _berserkers_, always cutting each other's throats, and he does not in any way render that extreme politeness which so effectually conceals the real thoughts of the Italian gentleman, and which never deserts him except in rare moments of irresistible fury. No one remembers so constantly as the Italian of all classes that language is given us to conceal our thoughts, and no one lives so completely as the Italian does from the cradle to the grave in strict concealment of his thoughts even from his nearest and his dearest.

But in his Italian _genre_ pictures, and in portraiture of the people whom we meet every day in society, Mr Crawford has a delightful pencil; little side studies also of more humble persons, which many writers would neglect, are charming in his treatment; take, for instance, the old priest of Aquila in _Saracinesca_; with how few touches he is made to live for us. We only see him once, but he will always remain in our memory; in his whitewashed room with its sweet smell from the pot of pinks, and his touching regret that he has never seen Rome, and at his age cannot hope to do so.

His priests, by the way, are always excellently drawn, from the humble village vicar to the learned and imposing cardinal. He has penetrated alike their interiors and their characters with that skill which is only born of sympathy, and it is therefore perhaps only natural that he has not the faintest conception of the motives and views of the socialist and republican whom he dreads and hates.

All these charming little details, like the pot of pinks, can only be thoroughly appreciated by those who know intimately Italian character and habits; but they abound, and show so much of fine observation and delicate discernment in the author that one cannot forgive him for ever beating the big drum of florid sensation.

Let me not be understood to mean that crime, or the impulse of crime, is not a perfectly legitimate subject for the novelist; both can be made so, but they are only so when treated as Mr Crawford himself treats them in _Marzio's Crucifix_. When treated as he treats them in _To Leeward_ and _Greifenstein_ and _Casa Braccio_ they are merely coarse and inartistic. He has a leaning towards melodrama which is chiefly to be regretted because it mars and strains the style most natural to him, and does not accord with his way of looking at life, which is not either poetic or passionate, but slightly sad, and slightly humorous, modern and instinctively superficial, superficial in that sense in which modern society itself is so.

In _Marzio's Crucifix_ he is perfectly natural, and one cannot but wish that he had never left that manner of treatment. Every motive therein is natural, every character consistent with itself. This naturalness in his characters is Mr Crawford's greatest attraction, and when he departs from it, as he does in such detestable melodramas as the _Witch of Prague_ and _Greifenstein_, he is no longer himself. It is hard to understand that the same author can create the most delicate of aquarelles and the most glaring of posters, or why one who can draw so well and finely in silver-point can descend to daub with brooms in such gross distemper. If this be the price of versatility, it were best not to be versatile. But it is not versatility, because true versatility consists in possessing a many-sided power which flashes like a jewel of which all the facets are equally well cut. True versatility, moreover, does not consist in the mere change of subject, but in the change of style, of treatment of thought, in fact, the mutation of the entire mind of an author, such as brings it into entire harmony with its fresh field and its new atmosphere. There is no such change in these novels. Mr Crawford is Mr Crawford always. As he never loses himself in his creations, so he is always present in them to the reader; and his style never varies, whether he treats of horrible psychological mysteries in Prague or of pleasant carnival seasons in Rome.

He is not strong or forcible in tragedy. When it is incidental in his stories like the murder of Montevarchi, or the attempted assassination of Ser Tommaso, it is admirably sketched in; but when it forms the structure and essence of a romance he fails entirely to give it sublimity; it becomes in his hands a mere scarecrow, which makes us only smile as its wooden hands beat the empty air. One feels that it is not his natural element, that he does not like it or feel at home in it, and has merely lent himself to it from some wrong impression that the public requires it; due, perhaps, to the suggestion of some unwise publisher or friend. The coarse melodrama with which some of his novels ends is not in unison with the characters or the scope of his work. It is quite true that, as murder is, in some circumstances, justified in actual life, so in some circumstances it may be used as a _denouement_ in fiction with perfect accuracy; yet it is always a violent ending which fully accords with romance of wild life or peasant life, but always jars, unless introduced with the most perfect skill, in stories of men and women of the world; because the evil passions of this latter class of persons are of a different quality, and find different modes of relief, from the primitive and barbarous satisfaction of killing enemies or rivals. All the influences and habits of society make it almost impossible for men and women of society to become assassins.

Now Mr Crawford can draw men and women of the world so well that it is a pity he so often goes out of his way to spoil his portraits of them with the bowl and dagger taken from a different phase of life from that in which they move.