Part 4

Je reprends ma route, et je le retrouve cet “il le faut” du sergent, ce “puisqu’il faut çà” de l’hôtelière, comme écrit dans tous les aspects de cet horizon. C’est le moment de la moisson. Des femmes y travaillent, des garçonnets, des petites filles. La suppléance du mari, du père, du frère absents, s’est faite simplement, sans qu’il y ait eu besoin d’aucun appel, d’aucun décret. Sur deux charrettes que je croise, une est menée par une femme. Des femmes conduisent les troupeaux. Des femmes étaient derrière les guichets de la Banque où je suis descendu chercher de la monnaie, dans la petite ville. Un de mes amis, qui a de gros intérêts dans le midi, me racontait que son homme d’affaires est aux Dardanelles: “Sa femme gère mes propriétés à sa place. Elle est étonnante d’intelligence et de bravoure.” Oui, c’est toujours ce même tranquille stoïcisme, cette totale absence de plainte. Un bataillon de territoriaux défile. Ils ne sont plus jeunes. Leur existence était établie. Elle est bouleversée. Ils subissent l’épreuve sans un murmure et marquent le pas sur la route brûlée de soleil avec une énergie qui révèle, chez eux aussi, le sentiment de la nécessité. C’est, pour moi, le caractère pathétique de cette guerre. Elle a la grandeur auguste des actions vitales de la nature. Elle est le geste d’un pays qui ne veut pas mourir, et qui ne mourra pas, ni lui ni cette noble Belgique, dont parlait le sous-officier, et qui, elle, a prononcé avec autant de fermeté résolue son “il le faut,” quand l’Allemand l’a provoquée, et plus pathétiquement encore. Ce n’était pas pour la vie qu’elle allait se battre, c’était pour l’honneur, pour la probité. Il n’est pas un Français qui ne le sente, et qui ne confonde sa propre cause avec celle des admirables sujets de l’admirable Roi Albert.

PAUL BOURGET _de l’Académie Française_

ONE YEAR LATER

[TRANSLATION]

During the first days of August, 1915, I found myself motoring in one of the central provinces of France. I had crossed the same region in the same way just a year before, when the beginning of mobilization was crowding the roads with waggons, with artillery and with marching troops. Only one year! How many men are dead since! But the high resolve of the nation is as firm as it was then, when all through the land there was only one impulse--to go forward. The willingness to fight and to endure has not grown less.

I went into an hotel for luncheon. I know the woman who keeps it, because I always stop there when I go through the little town. I found her dressed in black: she had lost her brother in Alsace. Her husband was waiting to be sent to the front. I asked her if she were doing any business. “Not much,” she answered. “Nobody is travelling, and all the mobilized men are gone. The barracks are empty; why, only this morning--” “It seems a long time,” I said, to draw her on. “Yes,” she said, “but since we must ...” and she went back without complaint to the task of writing her bills of fare. There were two maids in the dining-room, one of them also in black. I questioned her and learnt that her husband had been killed on the Yser. Her face was full of sorrow, but like her mistress she blamed no one, and accepted her loss because it “must” be so.

Soon a non-commissioned officer came in, followed by a woman in deep mourning, a little boy, and an elderly man; I learnt afterwards that they were the sergeant’s wife, his son, and his father. I saw his profile, and noticed that he seemed to stare fixedly. He declined a place at the back of the room, and came toward the window. “I need plenty of light now,” he said in an odd voice. He and his family had just seated themselves when one of the guests at the long _table d’hôte_ rose with an exclamation of surprise and came over to him, saying: “Why, are you out again? How well you look!” “Yes,” said the sergeant; “but all the same this one is glass,” pointing to his right eye, and in a few words he told how it had been knocked out by a bullet in the Argonne. “It was such a pity,” he said, “for we were all so glad when the fighting began, and we got out of the mud and water in the trenches.” “You are all just like that in the army!” said his friend, “all so plucky and so simple! We old fellows were only amateurs compared to you! What was the war of 1870 to this one? This time there will be a different ending.” “There must be,” said the sergeant, “not only for us but for the Belgians, who gained us so much time.” And he repeated, laying his hand on his boy’s head, “Yes, for these little chaps also it must be so.”

Presently I found a chance to ask the maid what she knew about the soldier who had been speaking. “That sergeant? He is a Paris shopkeeper. His wife’s brother has been killed.” I watched these people at table, so serious, so sorely tried, but so full of dignity, and the words which the half-blinded man had pronounced seemed to make even his ordinary gestures impressive.

All along the road, for the rest of that journey the “it must be” of the hotel-keeper and the sergeant seemed to be written over the whole country-side. It was harvest-time, and women, lads and little girls were working in the fields, replacing absent husbands, fathers and brothers. They were doing it quite simply, not drawn by any appeal, nor compelled by any order. Every other cart I met was driven by a woman. Women were herding the cattle. There was a woman at the cashier’s desk of the bank in the town where I went to get some money changed.

One of my friends, who has large interests in the south of France, told me that his man of business was at the Dardanelles. “His wife looks after my property in his place. She is astonishingly intelligent and capable.” Everywhere the same tranquil stoicism, the same entire absence of complaint.

A battalion of territorials marched past. They were not young men. All of them had had fixed duties and habits which were now broken up. Yet they submitted without a murmur, marching along the hot and dusty road with an energy which revealed in them also the same sense of compelling necessity. That, to my mind, gives to this war its pathetic side. It has all the imposing grandeur of the vital forces of nature; it is the heroic movement of a country which defies death, which is not meant to die. Nor will she allow Belgium to die--the Belgium to whom the sergeant paid his tribute, and whose “we must” rang out with such poignant firmness under the German menace. It was not for life alone that Belgium fought, but for honour and for justice. No Frenchman lives who does not feel this, and who does not merge his own cause in that of the indomitable subjects of Belgium’s indomitable King.

PAUL BOURGET _de l’Académie Française_

_JOSEPH CONRAD_

POLAND REVISITED

I

I have never believed in political assassination as a means to an end, and least of all if the assassination is of the dynastic order. I don’t know how far murder can ever approach the efficiency of a fine art, but looked upon with the cold eye of reason it seems but a crude expedient either of impatient hope or hurried despair. There are few men whose premature death could influence human affairs more than on the surface. The deeper stream of causes depends not on individualities which, like the mass of mankind, are carried on by the destiny which no murder had ever been able to placate, divert or arrest.

In July of [1914] I was a stranger in a strange city and particularly out of touch with the world’s politics. Never a very diligent reader of newspapers, there were at that time reasons of a private order which caused me to be even less informed than usual on public affairs as presented from day to day in that particular atmosphere-less, perspective-lessness of the daily papers which somehow for a man with some historic sense robs them of all real interest. I don’t think I had looked at a daily for a month past.

But though a stranger in a strange city I was not lonely, thanks to a friend who had travelled there with me out of pure kindness, to bear me company in a conjuncture which, in a most private sense, was somewhat trying.

It was this friend who one morning at breakfast informed me of the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand.

The impression was mediocre. I was barely aware that such a man existed. I remembered only that not long before he had visited London, but that memory was lost in a cloud of insignificant printed words his presence in this country provoked. Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance had been archducal, dynastic, purely accidental. Can there be in the world of real men anything more shadowy than an archduke? And now he was no more, and with a certain atrocity of circumstance which made one more sensible of his humanity than when he was in life. I knew nothing of his journey. I did not connect that crime with Balkanic plots and aspirations. I asked where it had happened. My friend told me it was in Serajevo, and wondered what would be the consequences of that grave event. He asked me what I thought would happen next.

It was with perfect sincerity that I said “Nothing,” and I dismissed the subject, having a great repugnance to consider murder as an engine of politics. It fitted with my ethical sense that an act cruel and absurd should be also useless. I had also the vision of a crowd of shadowy archdukes in the background out of which one would step forward to take the place of that dead man in the sun of European politics. And then, to speak the whole truth, there was no man capable of forming a judgement who attended so little to the march of events as I did at that time. What for want of a more definite term I must call my mind was fixed on my own affairs, not because they were in a bad posture, but because of their fascinating, holiday promising aspect. I obtained my information as to Europe at second hand, from friends good enough to come down now and then to see us with their pockets full of crumpled papers, and who imparted it to me casually with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my interest. And yet I was not indifferent; but the tension in the Balkans had become chronic after the acute crisis, and one could not help being less conscious of it. It had wearied out one’s attention. Who could have guessed that on that wild stage we had just been looking at a miniature rehearsal of the great world drama, the reduced model of the very passions and violences of what the future held in store for the powers of the Old World? Here and there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of that possibility while watching the collective Europe stage managing a little contemptuously in a feeling of conscious superiority, by means of notes and conferences, the prophetic reproduction of its awaiting fate. It was wonderfully exact in the spirit, same roar of guns, same protestations of superiority, same words in the air: race, liberation, justice, and the same mood of trivial demonstration. You could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg, however roundabout the route. “You mean Petrograd,” would say the booking-clerk. Shortly after the fall of Adrianople a friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some “café turc” at the end of his lunch.

--“Monsieur veut dire café balkanique,” the patriotic waiter corrected him austerely.

I will not say that I had not seen something of that instructive aspect in the war of the Balkans, both in its first and even in its second phase. But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to see in it the evidence of an alarmist cynicism. As to alarm I pointed out that fear is natural to man and even salutary. It has done as much as courage for the preservation of races and institutions. But from a charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. It is like a charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of disgraceful calamity that must be carried off by a jaunty bearing--a sort of thing I am not capable of. Rather than be thought to be a mere jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the usual arguments. It had been pointed out to me that those were nations not far removed from a savage state. Their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the earth and feeding pigs. The complex material civilization of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by war. The industry and the finance could not allow themselves to be disorganised by the ambitions of the idle class or even the aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses.

Very plausible all this sounded. War does not pay. There had been even a book written on that theme--an attempt to put pacifism on a material basis. Nothing more solid could have been imagined on this trading and manufacturing globe. War was bad business! This was final.

But truth to say on this fateful July I reflected but little on the condition of the civilised world. Whatever sinister passions were heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated by a simple and innocent desire to notice the signs, or to interpret them correctly. The most innocent of passions takes the edge off one’s judgement. The desire which obsessed me was simply the desire of travel. And that being so, it would have taken something very plain in the way of symptoms to shake my simple trust in the stability of things on the continent. My sentiment and not my reason was engaged there. My eyes were turned to the past, not to the future--the past that one cannot suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession, the darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.

In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to spend some weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighbourhood of Cracow but on the other side of the Russian frontier. The enterprise at first seemed to be considerable. Since leaving the sea to which I have been faithful for so many years, I have discovered that there is in my composition very little stuff from which travellers are made. I confess it with shame, my first idea about a projected journey is to leave it alone.

But that invitation, received at first with a sort of uneasiness, awoke the dormant energies in my feelings. Cracow is the town where I spent with my father the last eighteen months of his life. It was in that old royal and academical city that I ceased to be a child, became a boy, knew the friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignation of that age. It was between those historic walls that I began to understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund of sensations with which I was to break violently by throwing myself into an unrelated life which permitted me but seldom to look back that way. The wings of time were spread over all this, and I feared at first that if I ventured bodily in there I would find that I who have evoked so many imaginary lives had been embracing mere shadows in my youth. I feared. But fear in itself may become a fascination. Men have gone alone, trembling, into graveyards at midnight--just to see what would happen. And this adventure was to be pursued in sunshine. Neither would it be pursued alone. The invitation was extended to us all. This journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a tribe. My present, all that gave solidity and value to it at any rate, would stand by me in this test of the reality of my past. I was pleased to show my companions what Polish country life was like and the town where I was at school, before my boys got too old, and gaining an individual past of their own should lose the fresh sympathies of their age. It is only in this short understanding of youth that perhaps we have the faculty of coming out of ourselves to see dimly the visions and share the trouble of another soul. For youth all is reality, and with justice; since they can apprehend so vividly its images behind which a longer life makes one doubt whether there is any substance. I trusted to the fresh receptivity of these young beings in whom, unless heredity is merely a phantasy, there should have been fibre which would quicken at the sight, the atmosphere, the memories, of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood received its first independent impressions.

The first of the third week in July, while the telegraph wires hummed with the words of enormous import which were to fill blue-books, yellow-books, white-books and rouse the wonder of the world, was taken up with light-hearted preparation for the journey. What was it but just a rush through Germany to get over as quickly as possible?

It is the part of the earth’s solid surface of which I know the least. In my life I had been across it only twice. I may well say of it, “Vidi tantum,” and that very little I saw through the window of a railway carriage at express speed. Those journeys were more like pilgrimages when one hurries on towards the goal without looking to the right or left for the satisfaction of deeper need than curiosity. In this last instance, too, I was so uncurious that I would have liked to fall asleep on the shores of England and open my eyes only, if it were possible, on the other side of the Silesian frontier.

Yet in truth, as many others have done, I had “sensed it,” that promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that race planted in the middle of Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of Europeans amongst effete Asiatics or mere niggers, and with a feeling of superiority freeing their hands of all moral bonds and anxious to take up, if I may express myself so, the “perfect man’s burden.” Meantime in a clearing of the Teutonic forest their sages were rearing a Tree of cynical wisdom, a sort of Upas tree, whose shade may be seen lying now over the prostrate body of Belgium. It must be said that they laboured open enough, watering it from the most authentic sources of all evil, and watching with bespectacled eyes the slow ripening of the glorious blood-red fruit. The sincerest words of peace, words of menace, and I verily believe, words of abasement even, if there had been a voice vile enough to utter them, would have been wasted on their ecstasy. For when a fruit ripens on a branch, it must fall. There is nothing on earth that can prevent it.

II

For reasons which at first seemed to me somewhat obscure, that one of my companions whose wishes are law decided that our travels should begin in an unusual way by the crossing of the North Sea. We should proceed from Harwich to Hamburg. Besides being thirty-six times longer than the usual Dover-Calais passage this rather unusual route had an air of adventure in better keeping with the romantic feeling of this Polish journey, which for so many years had been before us in a state of a project full of colour and promise, but always retreating, elusive, like an enticing mirage.

And, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage. No wonder they were excited. It’s no mean experience to lay your hands on a mirage. The day of departure had come, the very hour had struck. The luggage was coming downstairs. It was most convincing. Poland then, if erased from the map, yet existed in reality; it was not a mere “pays du rêve,” where you can travel only in imagination. For no man, they argued, not even father, an habitual pursuer of dreams, would push the love of the novelist’s art of make-believe to the point of burdening himself with real trunks for a voyage “au pays du rêve.”

As we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, the most peaceful nook in Kent, the sky, after weeks of perfectly brazen serenity, veiled its blue depths and started to weep fine tears for the refreshment of the parched fields. A pearly blurr settled over them; a light sifted of all glare, of everything unkindly and searching that dwells in the splendour of unveiled skies. All unconscious of going towards the very scenes of war, I carried off in my eye this tiny fragment of Great Britain: a few fields, a wooded rise, a clump of trees or two, with a short stretch of road, and here and there a gleam of red wall and tiled roof above the darkening hedges wrapped up in soft mist and peace. And I felt that all this had a very strong hold on me as the embodiment of a beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was dear to me not as an inheritance, but as an acquisition, as a conquest in the sense in which a woman is conquered--by love, which is a sort of surrender.

Those were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts to the matter in hand, which was the simplest sort of a Continental holiday. And I am certain that my companions, near as they are to me, felt no other trouble but the suppressed excitement of pleasurable anticipation. The forms and the spirit of the land before their eyes were their inheritance, not their conquest--which is a thing precarious, and, therefore, the more precious, possessing you if only by the fear of unworthiness, rather than possessed by you. Moreover, as we sat together in the same railway carriage, they were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas I felt more and more plainly that what I had started on was a journey in time, into the past; a fearful enough prospect for the most consistent, but to him who had not known how to preserve against his impulses the order and continuity of his life--so that at times it presented itself to his conscience as a series of betrayals--still more dreadful.

I confess here my thoughts so exclusively personal to explain why there was no room in my consciousness for the apprehension of a European war. I don’t mean to say I ignored the possibility. I simply did not think of it. And it made no difference; for, if I had thought of it, it could only have been in the lame and inconclusive way of the common uninitiated mortals; and I am sure that nothing short of intellectual certitude--obviously unattainable by the man in the street--could have stayed me on that journey which now that I had started on it seemed an irrevocable thing, a necessity of my self-respect.

London--the London of before the war, flaunting its enormous glare as of a monstrous conflagration up into the black sky--received us with its best Venice-like aspect of rainy evenings, the wet, asphalted streets lying with the sheen of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of the city towering all dark like empty palaces above the reflected lights of the glistening roadway.

Everything in the subdued incomplete night life around the Mansion House went on normally, with its fascinating air of a dead commercial city of sombre walls through which the inextinguishable night life of millions streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles.