Part 11
One likes to image this whole task of holding the line under the image of a sentry-group. This is not to depreciate any other man or any other function. From colonel down all the world here has the same job. The sentry-group is the symbol. A figure in khaki stands on the shelf of fire-bag, his steel helmet forming a serious bulge over the parapet as he peers through the night towards the German lines. His comrade sits on the shelf beside him waiting to help, to report, to carry the gas-alarm, the alarm of an attack. Over there in front across No Man’s Land there are shell-holes and unburied men. Strange things happen there. Patrols and counter-patrols come and go. There are two sinister fences of barbed wire, on the barbs of which blood-stained strips of uniform and fragments more sinister have been known to hang uncollected for a long time. The air is shaken with diabolical reverberations; it is stabbed with malign illumination as the Véry lights shoot up, broaden to a blaze, and go out. This contrast of night and light and gloom is trying to the eyes. The rifle-grenades and trench-mortars, flung at short range, that scream through the air are trying to the ears. They may drop a traverse away, and other men not charged for the moment with his duty may seek shelter. But not he. Strange things issue from No Man’s Land, and the eyes of the army never close or flinch. And so, strained, tense and immovable he leans and looks forward into the night of menace.
But the trench has not fallen. As for him, he carried his pack for Ireland and Europe, and now pack-carrying is over.
He has held the line.
III.--RHAPSODY ON RATS
What first strikes one in a trench is, contrary to report, not the Rat but the Slat. A trench-board is a sort of ladder, laid horizontally along a ditch of ill repute, and the rungs of this ladder are the slats. It is true that if this ladder were set upright it would be impossible to climb it, for the slats are too close together. Nevertheless, it has the form and aspirations of a ladder, and yearns towards the vertical. To follow the windings of the trench, this board is of necessity made in short sections. Now, one often enters a trench in the dark. Certain short boards have been displaced by the outgoing unit. An incautious foot, with, say, fifteen stone avoirdupois behind it, is set on one end, and the perpendicular ambition of the trench-board manifests itself in a jarring wallop of the other end on one’s tin hat. The slat decidedly strikes you.
It is unpleasant to walk on, as anybody who has ever laboriously evaded coal-cellar gratings will realise. It exists in numbers that have never been counted. You can walk from the North Sea to the foot-hills of the Alps with the soles of your boots continuously beslatted, save where there is an odd broken board which there has not been time to repair. At the end of the war there will probably be slat-excursions organised by American tourist companies--they are said to have already purchased the ground--with the privilege to each pilgrim of removing one slat as a souvenir. What is to be said for them is that they stand between you and a flounder along the bottom mud. In winter, when the drainage improvisations prove false, and the fighting ditches run hip-high, the foothold is to be valued. And now as to the rats.
Ratavia, as one may designate it, resembles China in that there has never been a census of its population, but that it approximates to the mathematical infinite. They are everywhere--large rats, small rats, bushy rats, shy rats and impudent, with their malign whiskers, their obscene eyes, loathsome all the way from overlapping teeth to kangaroo tail. You see them on the parades and the shelter-roofs at night, slinking along on their pestiferous errands. You lie in your dug-out, famished, not for food (that goes without saying), but for sleep, and hear them scurrying up and down their shafts, nibbling at what they find, dragging scraps of old newspapers along, with intolerable cracklings, to bed themselves. They scurry across your blankets and your very face. Nothing suppresses their numbers. Not dogs smuggled in in breach of regulations. Not poison, which most certainly ought not to be used. Not the revolver-practice in which irritated subalterns have been known to indulge. Men die and rats increase.
I see just one defence that they can make: it was not they who invaded our kingdom, but we who invaded theirs. We descended, we even dug ourselves down to their level. It is true that in our heroic moments we may style the trenches the New Catacombs to which freedom descended for a while to return in triumph. But it is also true that they are rat-holes, rat-avenues, rat-areas. The dramatic translation of an old period was called “The Birds”; the dramatisation of this must be called “The Rats.” Strangely enough, it has been left for me to tell the decisive chapter of the inner history of the war. Kaiser Wilhelm, whose resemblance to a rat has been too little noticed--you have but to take the wax out of his moustache and allow it to droop--was seated in his ugly palace at Potsdam, considering his ultimatum to Serbia, when there suddenly appeared before him, down the chimney or out of some diplomatic orifice in the panelling, a Rat, the master and pattern of all rats. “Majesty!” said he, “I am come to offer you my aid in this war which you are planning. As you are the Emperor of all the Germans, so am I the Emperor of all the Rats. Our interests coincide.”
They conferred together very shrewdly, and struck an alliance. “Good!” said his Majesty, slapping his thigh. “It is decided. We are with-one-another-firmly-united. The war will begin forthwith.”
So the great quintessential Super-Rat, the Rattish _Ding an sich_, left to mobilise his forces, and the Kaiser drew over a sheet of paper and wrote the magical and black word that unlocks Hell. And the great rat called in his Austria, which is the louse, and his Turkey, which is the sand-flea, and his Bulgaria, which is that porter of poison, the fly. So the battle was joined between the clean and the obscene.
It must be said for the Kaiser that with this one ally he kept faith. Ratavia has increased enormously in population and prosperity. It has suffered from no menace of famine, for Wilhelm, the faith-keeper, has even sacrificed his own subjects generously in order to avert that calamity.
But the end is not yet. The Emperor of the Rats will come once again to Potsdam.
“Majesty!” he will say. “I am a student of Treitschke, who teaches that an alliance is to be kept by the stronger of two associates only as long as his profit lies that way.” And as Majesty, shrivelled, decaying with the pallor of death on him, trembles in his chair the Great Rat will add--
“I propose to annex you.”
THE NEW FRANCE
Madame Caillaux, who was formerly an actress, has achieved in real life her most remarkable dramatic success. Like Emerson’s Lexington farmer, she has certainly fired a shot heard round the world. The assassination of a great political editor by the wife of a powerful minister has recalled to us in a lurid flash the monstrous vanities and violences that raven behind the polite exterior of civilisation. It has given a good many other editors a peg on which to hang a new array of reproachful platitudes. But its effect on the immediate course of politics in France is likely to be of trivial importance. There will be a loud momentary splash, and a wide-going rush of ripples, but it will be found to have been no more than a stone flung into a river already swollen and hurrying to an ambiguous issue. Personal scandals and tragedies are not allowed to disturb that battle of ideas which is the essential life of the Republic. It will be noted that Madame Caillaux’ automatic pistol did not purchase for her husband a respite of even twenty hours. The day following, M. Barthou brought the attack into the Chamber to a head by reading the letter of M. Fabre, the Public Prosecutor; the Rochette enquiry has been not delayed, but expedited, and the electoral struggle comes on with even more headlong rapidity. Making all discount for the error of vision, characteristic of the foreign observer, we are able to say with assurance that the programmes submitted for the approaching election mark the most serious attempt made since the war of 1870 to re-establish France in her traditions.
One may aptly compare France, as a contemporary compared Parnell, to a granite rock overlaid with a shallow drift of detritus. In politics, especially in Parliament, the most distracting flurries of dust succeed and displace one another with a sort of constant inconstancy. Penetrate them, and you come upon an economic and social fabric characterised by massive stability. Nobody who bears this in mind will be blinded by whatever chances to be the latest sand-storm. _La nouvelle France_ was not abolished by the political manœuvre that placed M. Doumergue at the head of the State. It remains, and it grows stronger. This new France means the birth into the moral order of Europe of a fresh and strong reality. What had been for many years a mere vision, glimmering through banked clouds, has become a tangible and habitable fact. The election of President Poincaré, accepted on all sides as the token of a profound change of spirit, has not in its results belied the prophets. Now, beyond all doubt, deference must be paid to the tradition which regards the French as an instantaneous, and, so to say, hair-trigger people. Formulæ seem to change as rapidly as fashions; and the possibility of return to a period of Saturday-to-Monday ministers has not yet been banished to the limbo of the ridiculous. Allowance must be made for the swiftness, the genius for falling into line, the brief passions of unanimity so “temperamental” to the Republic. But at the end of the account the change has lost nothing of its impressiveness. It is a true, not a false dawn.
M. Poincaré stands for many things: it is no mere flourish of words to say that through him France heard and obeyed the call of her past. She deliberately reverted to her origins, and her traditional sources of strength. The new France put itself to school to old France. Intellect, family tradition, gracious manners, thrift, minute industry, a certain austere discipline of thought, and with all that an immense cheerfulness, able to _ça ira_ itself out of any desperate pass--such was _la douce France_ of M. René Bazin and of history. The folly must not be imputed to me of supposing that the election of President Poincaré restored, or will restore, that submerged world. But that is the atmosphere evoked by his personality. The good M. Dupont and that amiable plumpness, M. Durand, being of the earth earthy, and of Latin earth into the bargain, are in no danger of being transformed into angels of light. They will wink and chuckle as before over their dominoes and their aperitives; they will try to anticipate each other with the latest ambiguity of the comic paper and the vaudeville. But they are none the less conscious of the new orientation, and they adapt themselves to it with a purr of satisfaction. The lines on which reconstruction proceeds are in the nature of things that are inevitable. Patriotism is once more in fashion: were Hervé to revive his brilliant dream of planting the tricolour on the dunghill he would run some risk of being planted there himself. It is, no doubt, unfortunate that the national idea should in our day find expression universally in the increasing diversion of capital from productive industry to unproductive armaments. Signs are not lacking that the excess, or rather the frenzied debauch of which Europe has in this regard been guilty, has created an impossible situation. The so-called “strike of capital” even indicates that the point has been reached at which the disease must either generate its own cure, or else kill the patient. But while your ten competitors are arming more and more heavily, it is foolish to stand in your shirt chanting the praises of a millennium which obstinately refuses to arrive. France has accepted the Three Years’ Service Law; and it is certain that no ministry of the near future will dare to repeal that measure. This increase of the army by fifty per cent. is expensive: it is a defeat for the party of reason, if you will, and a triumph for that of violence. But it is an act of sacrifice rendered necessary by events. Any possibility of repeal is ruled out by the opening of old wounds in Alsace-Lorraine. And because the Army Act must stand, the Loan must go through. On that point, doubt is inadmissible: _la nouvelle France_ has made up its mind. The conditions of issue of the new Rente, its immunity or otherwise from taxation, even its amount, are questions in controversy. The discussion on them, so far as it has proceeded, has been of extreme interest as an illustration of French acumen in public finance; it may become a text-book instance in due course, and it might even be studied with profit by the financiers of the new Irish Land Act. The French Treasury has already lost by the delay, but, borrowing in its own market, it will at all events operate on better terms than any of the other borrowing nations, now clamouring for admission to it. But however details may be arranged, the fact that there must be an issue is a thing settled. The new France is, in short, possessed of the spirit of sacrifice. The patriotism that is in fashion is sincere enough to pay the piper from whom it has called the tune.
But it is in the region of ideas, rather than in that of current policy, that we must seek for the key to the future. It would be extravagant to say that the mocking hatred of Christianity has been banished, and that the vendetta against the Church is at an end. Despite M. Briand’s famous _apaisement_ speech, despite the success of M. Poincaré’s “national” programme, the State has not yet returned even to a position of neutrality. But the vivid colour of hope dominates the horizon. Combes-ism is no longer opposed as unjust, it is dismissed as vulgar. The boulevards may not have shed their scepticism, but at all events they recognise religion as one of the ideal forces that make men good citizens and gallant soldiers. As the army recovers its prestige there is a return to the spirit of that strange and burning remonstrance of Alexandre Dumas, the younger--
“Had I been Bazaine” (he wrote), “I would have set up a statue of the Virgin in the midst of my army on the Fifteenth of August--not because it was _Saint Napoleon_ but because it was _Sainte Marie_--and I would have delivered battle against the God whom King William carries about in his pocket, behind whom he speaks like a ventriloquist, and who is not the God of battles, for the very simple reason that there is no God of battles. I would have said to my soldiers: ‘My children, I place the Virgin in your midst. See in her your daughter, your betrothed, your wife, your sister, your mother. Over there is a masked “God” who menaces her with insult. Defend her! Honour her feast with a victory!’ And the Germans would have been defeated. There is, there will always be, in the French soldier something of the Frank of Clovis, something of the Crusader of Saint Louis.”
The essence of truth distilled in that last sentence will more and more impose itself. If soldiers will not fight on an empty stomach, still less will they fight on an empty soul. A shrug, a sensualism, an epigram, and the “lie of religion” is shattered beyond repair: so far, so good. But with religion there has gone the whole category of the ideal. In a world from which all values have been expelled, except the values of appetite, there remains no principle of sacrifice. The only maxim which it is capable of evolving from its own resources is that of egotism, enlightened by prudence; for that _credo_ men will do many things, but they will not die. Such a gospel may for a time be expounded, and even practised, by the noisy minorities who make laws and write books: the anonymous shoulders of the common people are strong enough to carry that and heavier burdens. But the peculiar weakness of any such philosophy is that it has only to be generally accepted in order to become impossible. Egotism and the pleasure-calculus will procure a brief, if not very respectable, ecstasy for the masters, as they loll in their carved and curtained litters, turning over with a languid hand the latest bibelot of selfishness. But let that point of view infect the bearers of the litter, and they will set it down with disturbing roughness. Morality begins where hedonism ends. In France the evolution, whether conducted in the personal consciousness of a master like Bourget, or in the general mind and being, has followed the same curve to the same issue. After Renan there was but one refinement possible: M. Anatole France appeared. But the signs of dissolution have, of late, been accumulating about this specialist in _patchouli_ and paganism. For instance, he has been translated into English. Anatomists like M. Michaut, whose book is one of the literary events of recent years, have made the tour of his philosophy from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. Through the _sociologisme_ of writers like Guyau, and the _solidarité_ of writers like Bourgeois, the new France has come back to the old sanities. The experiment of the passing generation consisted essentially in an attempt to live without a brain or a conscience. That experiment, it is curious to note, was pushed to its extreme by an English-writing, French-trained Irishman, Mr. George Moore. It has reached its Vale. A rhapsodist in the last issue of the _Sociological Review_ bewails, but at any rate confesses, the change. It is bad enough that “reactionary” illusions like patriotism should be returning to honour. But when you find University students going to Mass----Going on week-days. And Bergson and mysticism, construed as a tonic of action, setting the fashion.
In the field of politics, as such, the most interesting new fact is the attitude of the Conservatives. For a long time, in the hope of discrediting the Republic, they made it a principle to support not the best but the worst Republican. A gradual process, culminating in the shock of Casablanca and Agadir, has made manifest the hopelessness of such merely negative action, if it could be called action. They have come down into the arena. President Poincaré was their first achievement. The Three Years’ Law of the Barthou Ministry was their second. If at the following elections the ancient apathy and the modern _m’enfichisme_, as it is styled, can be overcome, they will reach the third, and that will be permanent. The five pistol-shots of Madame Caillaux may very well prove to have been the first effective dissipation of a slumber.
The alignment of parties is, at all events, clearer than ever before. On the one side, the Radicals and Radical-Socialists “unified” at Pau. The essential principle and foundation of this group is the existence of a state of war between the friends and enemies of the Republic. The point of view is that of Jacobinism, but for the guillotine of purification there has been substituted the administrative machine. It is understood that the “eating of curates” is the normal occupation of all adherents; but, of course, one appetite will exceed another. The better is the unappeasable enemy of the merely good--
_Un pur trouve toujours un plus pur qui l’épure._
On the other side the new party of appeasement of MM. Briand and Barthou. Its leaders and members have come to it, as to every central position, from different camps and by different routes. Hammered upon from the outside by German aggression, they demand domestic peace as the first condition of national security. They ask for a _république aérée et habitable_. They propose an army strengthened and increased through the sacrifices of the rich and the middle classes. It is a synthesis of Déroulède and Millerand, of militarism and social transformation.
M. Jaurès and his integral Socialists may, of course, be trusted to find their place among the “pacifists.” The late Herr Bebel led the German Social Democrats back to an acceptance of the national idea; but not so M. Jaurès. A strategist at once bold and astute, who has never known the responsibilities of office, to whom _la patrie_ is only a gunmaker’s advertisement, he will almost certainly co-operate with the reorganised _bloc_.
It is for the prophets to tell us what the elections will bring forth. For us, plain onlookers, the life of the most interesting and logical nation in Europe has come to a crisis, the solution of which may notably react not only upon civilisation and humanity--those great abstractions--but upon ourselves, and the little parts we play in each.
THE SOLDIER-PRIESTS OF FRANCE
It makes me a little proud to remember that I was one of the few writers in these countries to announce and celebrate the birth of _la nouvelle France_ long before the coming of the war. For many years the Republic has been in ill repute in the Catholic world. Men thought of her as the home of Renan and scepticism, of Gambetta and anti-clericalism, of Combes--the unspeakable Combes--and persecution, of Anatole France and refined sensualism, of a score of lesser writers and plain pornography. That interpretation of her life was never true although it had elements of truth in it. Even in the old France there were two strains: there was Rabelais as well as Pascal, Montaigne as well as Bossuet, Voltaire as well as St. Francis de Sales. There is, indeed, lodged in the very mind and temper of France a seed of perilous adventure. Her courage is a constant temptation to dally with the blasphemous and the foul: her lucidity--for vague and furtive innuendoes are like a toothache to French style--doubles the offence when she lapses.
But on the other hand there was something peculiarly obnoxious in the circumstance that these attacks on France proceeded in great part from German sources. That there were many splendid Catholics in Germany was of course true. They were strong enough in numbers and organisation to have done something finer than throw themselves into the arms of Prussianism. The failure of the Centre Party in that regard will lie as a heavy cloud on its future. But that German Catholics should have lent themselves, as they did, to a systematic denigration of France in foreign periodicals was contemptible. The truth is that every German in the modern period has become infected with the superstition that he belongs to the chosen race. Matthew Arnold--who, for the rest, did not himself believe very luminously in God--started in these countries the notion that the war of 1870 was, as he called it, the judgment of Judæa on Greece. That a Protestant God should have thus judged a country whose old title was that of “eldest daughter of the Church,” was an interpretation of events peculiarly agreeable to militant Protestants both in England and Germany. But that Catholics should have assimilated such a view was remarkable. It is true that French policy played disastrously into the hands of Bismarck. Gambetta’s error of anti-clericalism led from disintegration to disintegration. Bismarck has left on record statements of his reasons for embarking on the _Kulturkampf_, which for frigid wickedness of purpose cannot be equalled in political literature.
“The laurels of Sadowa and Sedan do not satisfy my ambitions, I have a more glorious mission, that of making myself master of Catholicism.”
“The enemy of Germany is Pontifical Rome. That is the danger which menaces the relations of Germany and France. If France identifies herself with Rome she constitutes herself by that fact alone the sworn enemy of Germany.”