*
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I have thought well to efface myself behind these students. Were I to substitute my thought for theirs, I should lay myself open to the reproach which I so often address to my generation. I have let them speak for themselves. Any commentary would detract from the beauty of the sight of these enthusiastic and serious young people, in this most tragical hour of history, discussing their duties ardently and at great length, taking stock of their faith, and solemnly affirming that faith in a sort of oath of the tennis court.[35] We see them affirming their faith in liberty; in the solidarity of the peoples; in their moral mission; in their duty to destroy the hydra of imperialism, both militarist and capitalist, whether at home or abroad; in their duty to construct a juster and more humane society.
I give them fraternal greetings. They do not speak alone. Everywhere the echoes answer. Everywhere I see young people resembling them, and stretching forth friendly hands to their fellows in Switzerland. The vicissitudes of this war—a war which, endeavouring to crush free spirits, has but succeeded in making them feel the need for seeking one another out and for cementing unity—has brought me into close relationships with the young of all countries, in Europe, in America, and even in the east and the far east. Everywhere I have found the same communion of sufferings and hopes, the same aspirations, the same revolts, the same determination to break with the past whose malevolence and stupidity have been so plainly proved. I have found them all animated with the same ambition to rebuild human society upon new foundations, wider and more firmly laid than those which sustain the quaking edifice of this old world of rapine and fanaticism, of savage nationalities scorched by the war, rearing heavenward frames blackened by the fire.
June, 1917.
"demain," Geneva, July, 1917.
XV
UNDER FIRE
By Henri Barbusse[36]
HERE we have a pitiless mirror of the war. In that mirror the war is reflected day by day for sixteen months. It is a mirror of two eyes; they are clear, shrewd, perspicacious, and bold; they are the eyes of a Frenchman. The author, Henri Barbusse, dedicates his book: "To the memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119," during December, 1915. In Paris Le Feu was honoured with the Goncourt prize.
By what miracle has so truth-telling a work been able to appear unmutilated, at a time when so many free words, infinitely less free, have been censored? I shall not attempt to explain the fact, but I shall profit by it. The voice of this witness drives back into the shadow all the interested falsehoods which during the last three years have served to idealise the European slaughter-house.
*
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The work is of the first rank, and is so full of matter that more than one article would be requisite to present its whole scope. All that I shall attempt to deal with here will be the chief aspects—its artistry and its thought.
The dominant impression it conveys is one of extreme objectivity. Save in the last chapter, wherein Barbusse expounds his ideas on social questions, we do not make the author's acquaintance. He is there among his obscure companions; he struggles and suffers with them, and from one moment to another his disappearance seems imminent; but he has the spiritual strength which enables him to withdraw himself from the picture and to veil his ego. He contemplates the moving spectacle, he listens, he feels, he touches; he seizes it, with all his senses on the stretch. Marvellous is the assured grasp displayed by this French spirit, for no emotion affects the sharpness of the outline or the precision of the technique. We discern here manifold touches, lively, vibrant, crude, well fitted to reproduce the shocks and starts of the poor human machines as they pass from a weary torpor to the hyperaesthesia of hallucination—but these juxtaposed touches are placed and combined by an intelligence that is ever master of itself. The style is impressionist. The author is prone, unduly prone in my opinion, to make use of visual word-plays after the manner of Jules Renard. He is fond of "artistic writing," a typically Parisian product, a style which in ordinary times seems to "powder puff" the emotions, but which, amid the convulsions of the war, exhibits a certain heroic elegance. The narrative is terse, gloomy, stifling; but there come episodes of repose, which break its unity, and by these the tension is relieved for a moment. Few readers will fail to appreciate the charm, the discreet emotion, of these episodes, as for instance in the chapter "On Leave." But three-fourths of the book deal with the trenches of Picardy, under the "muddy skies," under fire and under water—visions now of hell, now of the flood.
There the armies remain buried for years, at the bottom of an eternal battlefield, closely packed, "chained shoulder to shoulder," huddling together "against the rain which descends from the skies, against the mud which oozes from the ground, against the cold, an emanation from the infinite which is all-pervading." The soldiers uncouthly rigged out in skins, rolls of blanket, ... cardigans, and more cardigans, squares of oilcloth, fur caps, ... hoods of tarpaulin, rubber, weatherproof cloth ... look like cave men, gorillas, troglodytes. One of them, while digging, has turned up an axe made by quaternary man, a piece of pointed stone with a bone handle, and he is using it. Others, like savages, are making rough ornaments. Three generations side by side; all the races, but not all the classes. Sons of the soil and artisans for the most part. Small farmers, agricultural labourers, carters, porters and messengers, factory foremen, saloon keepers, newspaper sellers, ironmongers' assistants, miners—very few liberal professions are represented. This amalgam has a common speech, "made up of workshop and barrack slang and of rural dialects seasoned with a few neologisms." Each one is shown to us as a silhouette, a sharp and admirable likeness; once we have seen them we shall always know them apart. But the method of depiction is very different from that of Tolstoi. The Russian cannot meet with a soul without plumbing it to the depths. Here we look and pass on. The individual soul hardly exists; it is a mere shell. Beneath that shell, the collective soul, suffering, overwhelmed with fatigue, brutalised by the noise, poisoned by the smoke, endures infinite boredom, drowses, waits, waits unendingly. It is a "waiting-machine." It no longer tries to think; "it has given up the attempt to understand, it has renounced being itself." These are not soldiers, they don't wish to be soldiers, they are men. "They are men, good fellows of all kinds, rudely torn away from life; they are ignorant, not easily carried away, men of narrow outlook, but full of common sense which sometimes gets out of gear. They are inclined to go where they are led and to do as they are bid. They are tough, and able to bear a great deal. Simple men who have been artificially simplified yet more, and in whom, by the force of circumstances, the primitive instincts have become accentuated: the instinct of self-preservation, egoism, the dogged hope of living through, the lust of eating, drinking, and sleeping." Even amid the dangers of an artillery attack, within a few hours they get bored, yawn, play cards, talk nonsense, "snatch forty winks"—in a word, they are bored. "The overwhelming vastness of these great bombardments wearies the mind." They pass through a hell of suffering and forget all about it. "We've seen too much, and everything we saw was too much. We are not built to take all that in. It escapes from us in every direction; we are too small. We are forgetting-machines. Men are beings which think little; above all, they forget." In Napoleon's day every soldier had a marshal's baton in his knapsack, and every soldier had in his brain the ambitious image of the little Corsican officer. There are no longer any individuals now, there is a human mass which is itself lost amid elemental forces. "More than six thousand miles of French trenches, more than six thousand miles of such miseries or of worse; and the French front is only one-eighth of the whole." Instinctively the narrator is compelled to borrow his images from the rough mythology of primitive peoples, or from cosmic convulsions. He speaks of "rivers of wounded torn from the bowels of the earth which bleeds and rots unendingly"—"glaciers of corpses"—"gloomy immensities of Styx"—"Valley of Jehoshaphat"—prehistoric spectacles. What does the individual man amount to in all this? What does his suffering mean? "What's the use of complaining?" says one wounded man to another. "That's what war is, not the battles, but the terrible unnatural weariness; water up to the middle, mud, filth, infinite monotony of wretchedness, interrupted by acute tragedies."—At intervals, human groans, profound shudders, issue from the silence and the night.
Here and there, in the course of this long narration, peaks emerge from the grey and bloody uniformity: the attack ("under fire"); "the field hospital"; "the dawn." I wish I had space to quote the admirable picture of the men awaiting the order to attack; they are motionless; an assumed calm masks such dreams, such fears, such farewell thoughts! Without any illusions, without enthusiasm, without excitement, "despite the busy propaganda of the authorities, without intoxication either material or moral," fully aware of what they are doing, they await the signal to hurl themselves "once more into this madman's role imposed on each of them by the madness of mankind." Then comes the "headlong rush to the abyss," where blindly, amid shell-splinters hissing like red-hot iron plunged into water, amid the stench of sulphur, they race forward. Next comes the butchery in the trenches, where "at first the men do not know what to do," but where a frenzy soon seizes them, so that "they hardly recognise those whom they know best, and it seems as if all their previous life had suddenly retreated to a vast distance...." Then the exultation passes, and "nothing remains but infinite fatigue and infinite waiting."
*
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But I must cut these descriptions short, for I have to consider the leading content of the work, its thought.
In War and Peace the profound sense of the destiny which guides mankind is ardently sought, and is found from time to time by the light of some flash of suffering or of genius, found by those few who, through breed or individual sensibility, have exceptional insight: for instance Prince Andrew, Peter Besuhov. But a great roller seems to have passed over the peoples of to-day, reducing all to a level. The most that can happen is that for a moment, now and again, there may rise from the huge flock the isolated bleating of one of the beasts about to die. Thus we have the ethereal figure of Corporal Bertrand, "with his thoughtful smile"—the merest sketch—"a man of few words, never talking of himself"; a man who could once only deliver up the secret of his anguished thoughts—in the twilight hour which follows the killing, just before he himself is killed. He thinks of those whom he has slain in the frenzy of the hand-to-hand fighting:
"It had to be done," he said. "It had to be done, for the sake of the future."
He folded his arms and threw up his head.
"The future!" he cried, all of a sudden. "Those who live after us—what will they think of these killings, ... these exploits, concerning which we who do them do not even know if they are to be compared with those of the heroes of Plutarch and Corneille or with the deeds of apaches!... For all that, mind you, there is one figure that has risen above the war, a figure which will shine with the beauty and the greatness of its courage."
I listened, writes Barbusse, bending towards him, leaning on a stick. I drank in the words that came, in the twilit silence, from lips which rarely broke silence. His voice rang out as he said:
"Liebknecht!"
The same evening, Marthereau, a humble territorial, whose face, bristling with hair, recalled that of a water-spaniel, is listening to a comrade who says: "William is a foul beast, but Napoleon is a great man." This same soldier, after groaning about the war, goes on to speak with delight of the martial ardour displayed by the only son left to him, a boy of five. Marthereau shakes his weary head, his fine eyes shining like those of a puzzled and thoughtful hound. He sighs, saying: "Oh, we're none of us so bad, but we're unlucky, poor devils all of us. But we're too stupid, we're too stupid!"
As a rule, however, the human cry from these lowly fellows is anonymous. We hardly know who has been speaking, for, often enough, all share in a common thought. Born out of common trials, this thought brings them much closer to the other unfortunates in the enemy trenches than to the rest of the world away there in the rear. For visitors from the rear, "trench tourists," for people in the rear, journalists "who exploit the public misery," bellicose intellectuals, the soldiers unite in showing a contempt which is free from violence but knows no bounds. To them has come "the revelation of the great reality": a difference between human beings, a difference far profounder and with far more impassable barriers than those of race: the sharp, glaring, and inalterable distinction, in the population of every country, between those who profit and those who suffer, those who have been compelled to sacrifice everything, those who give to the uttermost of their numbers, of their strength, and of their martyrdom, those over whom the others march forward smiling and successful.
One to whom this revelation has come, says bitterly: "That sort of thing does not encourage one to die!"
But none the less this man meets his death bravely, meekly, like the others.
*
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The climax of the work is the last chapter, "The Dawn." It is like an epilogue, the thought in which returns to join the thought in the prologue, "The Vision," but enlarges upon that opening thought, just as in a symphony the promise of the outset is fulfilled at the close.
"The Vision" describes the coming of the declaration of war, shows how the tidings reached a sanatorium in Savoy, facing Mont Blanc. There, these sick men, drawn thither from all the ends of the earth, "detached from the affairs of the world and almost from life itself, ... as remote from their fellow-men as if they already belonged to a future age, look away into the distance, towards the incomprehensible land of the living and the mad." They contemplate the flood below; they watch the shipwrecked nations, grasping at straws. "These thirty millions of slaves, hurled against one another by guilt and by mistake, hurled into war and mud, uplift their human faces whose expression reveals at last a nascent will. The future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is plain that the old world will be transformed by the alliance one day to be made between those whose numbers and whose miseries are infinite."
The concluding chapter, "The Dawn," is a picture of the "flood below," of the lowland inundated by the rain, a picture of the crumbling trenches. The spectacle resembles a scene from the book of Genesis. Germans and French are fleeing together from the scourge of the elements, or are sinking pell-mell into a common grave. Some of these castaways, taking refuge on ridges of mud that stand up amid the waters, begin to awaken from their passivity, and a striking dialogue ensues between the sufferers, like the strophe and antistrophe in a Greek chorus. They are overwhelmed by excess of suffering. Even more are they overwhelmed, "as if by a yet greater disaster," by the thought that in days to come the survivors will be able to forget these ills.
"If only people would remember! If they would only remember, there would be no more wars."
Suddenly, from all sides, rises the cry: "There must never be another war."
Each in turn heaps insults upon war.
"Two armies fighting each other—that's like one great army committing suicide."
One suggests, "It's all right if you win." But the others make answer: "That's no good.—To win settles nothing.—What we need is to kill war."
"Then we shall have to go on fighting after the war?"—"Praps we shall."—"But praps it won't be foreigners we shall be fighting?"—"May be so. The peoples are fighting to-day to get rid of their masters."—"Then one works for the Prussians too?"—"Oh well, we may hope...."—"But we oughtn't to interfere with other folks' business."—"Yes, yes, we ought to, for what you call other folks' business is our own."
"What do people fight for?"—"No one knows what they fight for, but we know whom they fight for. They fight for the pleasure of the few."
The soldiers reckon up these few: "the fighters, those born to power"; those who say, "the races hate one another"; those who say, "I grow fat on the war"; those who say, "there always has been war and there always will be"; those who say, "bow your head, and trust in God"; the sabre-rattlers, the profiteers, the ghouls who batten on the spoils; "the slaves of the past, the traditionalists, for whom an abuse has the force of law because it is of old date."
"Such as these are your enemies quite as much as any of the German soldiers who now share your wretchedness. The German soldiers are no more than poor dupes odiously betrayed and brutalised, domesticated beasts.... But the others are your enemies wherever they were born, whatever the fashion in which they utter their names, and whatever the language in which they lie. Look at them in the heavens above and on the earth beneath! Look at them everywhere! Look well, till you know them, that you may never forget their faces!"
Such is the wail of these armies. But the book closes with a note of hope, with the unspoken oath of international brotherhood, what time a rift forms in the black skies and a calm ray of light falls upon the flooded plain.
*
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One ray of sunlight does not make the sky clear, nor is the voice of one soldier the voice of an army. The armies of to-day are nations; and in such armies, as in every nation, there must doubtless conflict and mingle many different currents. Barbusse's story is that of a single squad, almost entirely composed of workers and peasants. But the fact that among these humble folk, among those who, like the third estate in '89, are nothing and shall be all,—that in this proletariat of the armies there is obscurely forming an awareness of universal humanity,—that so bold a voice can be raised from France,—that those who are actually fighting can make a heroic effort to ignore environing wretchedness and imminent death, to dream of the fraternal union of the warring peoples,—I find in this a greatness which surpasses that of all the victories, I find something whose poignant splendour will survive the splendour of battle. I find something which will, I hope, put an end to war.
February, 1917.
"Journal de Genève," March 19, 1917.
XVI
AVE, CÆSAR, MORITURI TE SALUTANT
Dedicated to the Heroic Onlookers in Safe Places.
IN one of the scenes of his terrible and admirable book, Under Fire, a record of experiences in the trenches of Picardy, dedicated "To the memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119," Henri Barbusse depicts two privates going on leave to the neighbouring town. They quit the hell of mud and blood; for months they have been suffering unnamable tortures of body and mind; they now find themselves among comfortable bourgeois who, being at a safe distance from the front, are, of course, bursting with warlike enthusiasm. These carpet-heroes welcome the two men as if they had just returned from a wedding feast. No questions are asked concerning what goes on at the front. The soldiers are told all about it. "It must be splendid, an attack! These masses of men marching forward as to a revel; there's no holding them; they die laughing!" All that our poilus can do is to hold their tongues. One of them says resignedly to his companion: "They know more than you do about war and all that goes on at the front. When you get back, if you ever do, with your little bit of truth you will be quite out of it amid that crowd of chatterers."
I do not believe that when the war is over, when all the soldiers have returned home, they will so readily submit to being put in their places by these braggarts of the rear. Already the real fighters are beginning to speak in a singularly bitter and vengeful tone. Barbusse's book bears powerful witness to the fact.
We have other testimonies from the front, less known but no less moving. All of those to which I shall refer have been published. It is my rule, as long as the war lasts, to make no use of personal confidences, oral or written. Things I have been told by friends, known or unknown, are a sacred trust. I shall not use them without special permission, nor until the conditions make it safe. The testimonies I reproduce here have been published in Paris, under a censorship which is extremely strict in the case of the few newspapers that have remained independent. This proves that they describe things that are widely known, things which it is useless or impossible to conceal.
I leave the authors to speak for themselves. Comment is superfluous. The tones are sufficiently clear.
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Paul Husson, L'Holocauste (a collection entitled Vers et Prose, published by F. Lacroix, 19 rue de Tournon, Paris, January 10, 1917).—This is the note book of a soldier from the Ile de France. The author "went to the front without enthusiasm, detesting war and devoid of martial ardour. As a soldier he did what all the others did."
p. 19. "In the name of what superior moral principle are these struggles imposed on us? Is it for the triumph of a race? What remains of the glory of Alexander's soldiers or of Cæsar's? To fight, one must have faith. A man must have faith that he is fighting in God's cause, in the cause of some great justice; or else he must love war for its own sake. But we have no faith; we do not love war and we know nothing about it. Yet men fight and die believing neither in the cause of God nor in the great justice; men who do not love war, and who die none the less with their faces to the enemy.... Many, unawakened, go to their deaths without thinking; but others die with anguish in their hearts, anguish at the futile sacrifice and at their realisation of the madness of men."
p. 20. In the trenches. "Everyone was cursing the war, everyone hated it. Some were saying: 'Frenchmen or Germans, they are men like ourselves, they suffer as we do in body and in mind. Do not they, too, dream of the home-coming?' Passing through a village and seeing a man unfit for service because he had lost two fingers, the soldiers had said to him: 'You lucky devil; you needn't go to the war!'"
p. 21. "I am not one of those who believe in the coming of Beauty, Goodness, and Justice.... Nor am I one of those who regild the idols of the past, symbols of obscure forces which it behoves us to worship in silence. I am neither submissive nor a believer.—I love Pity, for we are unfortunates, and it does us good to be solaced, even if we be executioners and butchers. If we do not need consolation for the ills we are suffering, we need consolation for the ills we have done or shall do. We need solace because we have to make others suffer, to kill and be killed."
p. 22. "Lying prone, while the shells whistle overhead, I think. Die! Why should we die on this battlefield?... Die for civilisation, for the freedom of the nations? Words, words, words. We are dying because men are wild beasts killing one another. We are dying for bales of merchandise; we are dying for squabbles about money.—Art, civilisation, and culture are equally beautiful, be they Romance, Teutonic, or Slav. We should love them all!"
p. 59. "With Baudelaire, we detest the weapons of warriors.... The great epoch was the one in which we were living before the war. The flapping of the banners, the long files of soldiers, the roaring of the guns, and the blare of the bugles—these things cannot inspire us with admiration for collective murder and for the monstrous enslavement of the peoples.... Young men lying to-day in your graves, they strew flowers on your tombs and proclaim you immortal. What to you are empty words? They will pass even more quickly than you have passed! It is true that, in any case, within a few years you would have ceased to be. But these few years of life would have been your universe and your strength."
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André Delemer, Waiting (leading article in the fourth issue, dated March, 1917, of the review "Vivre," edited by André Delemer and Marcel Millet, 68 boulevard Rochechouart, Paris).
"If the patriarch of Yasnaya Polyana had been granted a few additional years, superadded to a life already long and full of grief, he would have shuddered before the tragedy of the younger generations. Tolstoi was a man of infinite compassion, and his heart would have been torn with suffering as he contemplated our fate, the fate of those who were suddenly thrust into this colossal war, those who had proclaimed their love for life, those whose faith in the future had seemed an infallible talisman, those who had fervently uttered this great cry of vital affirmation:
"'To live out our youth'—how poignant is the irony of these words; what vistas do they suddenly evoke! All the happiness we have failed to secure, the joys of which we have been deprived, because one evening the order came to us to shoulder our rifles! In twenty years' time people will write about what we have suffered, a suffering which may be compared with the Passion; but we die daily. One galling privilege is ours, that we have lived through a convulsion, that we have been the ransom of past errors and a pledge for the tranquillity of the future. This mission is at once splendid and cruel; simultaneously it exalts and revolts; for the spasm through which we are passing wounds us and immolates us!... To-day the poor quivering refuse raked from the furnace knows all the bitterness of the laurels. Such pride as we retain makes it impossible for us to accept an illusory and transient glory. We know the falsity of attitudinising, and we have probed the emptiness of certain dreams. The fire has licked up the scenery, has reduced the tinsel to ashes. We are now face to face with ourselves, perhaps more fully awakened, certainly more sincere and more disillusioned, for we have secret wounds to heal and great sufferings to lull in the shade! The passing of the days is like wormwood in the mouth.... How painful will be the transition, and how numerous will be the waifs! Already a fresh anguish oppresses our minds; it is this that will afflict when the day comes for the return of those who are still fighting. Terrible will be the anguish as we gaze upon the ruins and the dead encumbering the battlefields! How it will cramp the young wills and annihilate the fine courage of their souls! Troubled and confused epoch, wherein men will be doggedly seeking safer roads and less cruel idols!...
"Young man of my generation, it is you of whom I think as I write these lines, you whom I do not know, though I know that you are still fighting or that you have returned broken from the trenches. I have met you in the street, wearing an almost shamefaced air, doing your best to conceal some infirmity; but in your eyes I have read the intensity of your inward agony. I know the terrible hours through which you have lived, and I know that those who have endured like trials end by having like souls.... I know your doubts; I share your uneasiness. I know how you are obsessed with the question, 'What next?' You, too, are asking what can be seen from the heights, and what is going to happen. I understand your 'What next?'—'To live!' You sing this straight to the hearts of all of us. 'To live!' You embody the cry of our cruel epoch. I have heard this cry, simple yet tremendous, from the lips of the wounded who were aware of the oncoming footsteps of victorious death. I have heard it in the trenches, murmured low like a prayer.—Young man, this is a grievous hour. You are a survivor from the ghastly war; your vitality must affirm itself; you must live. Stripped of all falsehoods, freed from every mirage, you find yourself alone in your nakedness; before you stretches the great white road. Onward, the distance beckons. Leave behind you the old world, and the idols of yesterday. March forward without turning to listen to the outworn voices of the past!"
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In the name of these young men and their brothers who have been sacrificed in all the lands of the world engaged in mutual slaughter, I throw these cries of pain in the faces of the sacrificers. May the blood sting their faces!
"Revue mensuelle," Geneva, May, 1917.
XVII
AVE, CÆSAR ...
THOSE WHO WISH TO LIVE SALUTE THEE
IN an earlier article I referred to the writings of certain French soldiers. After Under Fire, by Henri Barbusse, L'Holocauste by Paul Husson and the poignant meditations of André Delemer gave expression to their touching and profoundly human cry. In place of the scandalous idealisations of the war, manufactured far from the front—crude Epinal images, grotesque and false—they give us the stern face of truth, they show us the martyrdom of young men slaughtering one another to gratify the frenzy of criminal elders.
I wish to-day to make known another of these voices, more acerb, more virile, more vengeful, than the stoical bitterness of Husson and the despairing tenderness of Delemer. It is that of our friend Maurice Wullens, editor of "Les Humbles, the literary review of the primary school teachers."
He was severely wounded, and has just been given the war cross with the following honourable mention:
"Wullens (Maurice), soldier of the second class in the eighth company of the seventy-third infantry regiment, a good soldier to whom fear was unknown, dangerously wounded during the defence, against a superior force, of a post which had been entrusted to him."
In "demain," for August, 1917, we find the wonderful story of the fight in which this man was wounded and was then given brotherly help by the German soldiers. As he lay gasping, in expectation of the death-blow, a lad leaned over him smiling, holding out a hand, and saying in German, "Comrade, how do you feel?" And when the wounded man doubted his enemy's sincerity, the latter went on: "Oh, it's all right, comrade! We'll be good comrades! Yes, yes, good comrades." The tale is dedicated:
"To my brother, the anonymous Würtemberg soldier who, in Grurie Wood, on December 30, 1914, withheld his hand when about to slay me, generously saved my life;
"To the (enemy) friend who, in Darmstadt hospital, cared for me like a father;
"And to the comrades E., K., and B., who spoke to me as man to man."
*
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This soldier without fear and without reproach, returning to France, discovered there the braggart army of the scribblers at the rear. Their venom and their stupidity infuriated him. But instead of taking refuge, like many of his comrades, in disdainful silence, he did what he had always done, and turned bravely to the attack upon "a superior force." In May, 1916, he became editor of a small magazine, entitled "Les Humbles," but which somewhat belies its name by the ruggedness of its accents and by its refusal to allow its voice to be stifled. He boldly declares:
"Emerged from the whirlwind of the war, but still struggling in its eddies, we do not propose to resign ourselves to the environing mediocrity, to content ourselves with the servile utterance of official platitudes.... We are weary of the daily and systematic stuffing of people's heads with official pabulum.... We have not abdicated any of our rights, not even our hopes."[37]
Each issue of the magazine was a fresh proof of his independence. At this juncture, reviews edited by young thinkers were springing up everywhere from among the ruins. That of Wullens took the leading place, owing to his force of character and his indomitable frankness.
He found a great friend in Han Ryner, who amid the European barbarians, amid the prevailing chaos, exhibits the calm of an exiled Socrates. Gabriel Belot, the engraver, another sage, who, knowing nothing of mental discord or ill-will, dwells on the Ile St. Louis as if the two beautiful arms of the Seine sheltered him from the troubles of the world, lights up the most sombre of articles with the peace of his radiant designs.[38] Other friends, younger men, soldiers like Wullens, rallied to support him in the struggle for the truth. For instance, Marcel Lebarbier, poet and critic.
The most recent issue of "Les Humbles" contains excellent work. Wullens begins with a tribute to the rare French writers who have shown themselves during the last three years to be free-spirited humanists: to Henri Guilbeaux and his periodical "demain";[39] to P. J. Jouve, author of Vous êtes des hommes and of Poème contre le grand crime, whose sympathetic spirit vibrates and trembles like a tree to the wind of all the pains and all the angers of mankind; to Marcel Martinet, one of the greatest lyricists whom the war (the horror of the war) has brought forth, the writer of Temps maudits, a poem which will for ever bear witness to the suffering and the revolt of a free spirit; to Delemer, that moving writer; and to a few recently founded magazines. The editor of "Les Humbles" goes on to clear the ground of what he terms "the false literary vanguard," telling the chauvinist writers what he thinks of them. This lettered poilu, a blunt fellow, does not mince matters:
"I have come from this war whose praises you are singing—I who write.... I have my honourable mention, my war cross: I never wear it. I spent seven months as a war prisoner, before being sent home incapacitated by my wound. I could flood you with war anecdotes. I have no desire to do anything of the kind. Nevertheless I am writing a book on the war. I compress into it all that my heart has felt, all that one man has suffered during these months of unspeakable horror, and likewise all the joy he experienced when he came to perceive, by rare flashes of light, that humanity still lives, that kindliness still exists, on both sides of the Rhine, the world over. You, M. B., sing 'The war in which it is beautiful and sweet to die for our country!' All those who have faced this death will tell you that while it may have been necessary, it was neither beautiful nor sweet.—You glorify the sublime and tattered tricolour: blue is the blouse of our workmen; white is the cornette of our splendid sisters of charity.... You will excuse me for cutting you short before coming to the red, for my unaided memory here suffices me: the red blood of my wounds flowing and clotting on the frozen mud of Argonne that terrible morning in December, 1914; the red mud of pestilential slaughter-houses; the shattered heads of dead comrades; mangled stumps irrigated with peroxide solution so that the living corruption was half hidden by bloodstained foam; red visions glimpsed everywhere in these ghastly and tragical days, you chase one another through the mind tumultuous and hateful. Like the poet, I would fain say, 'A very little more and my heart would break!'"
To bring his philippic to a close he quotes another soldier-author, G. Thuriot-Franchi, who, in the same fighting style, with no pretty phrases and with no concealments, compels these Hectors of the study to swallow their boasts:[40]
"Men who are too young or too old, poets in pyjamas, jealous doubtless of the strategists in slippers, regard it as their duty to be lavish in patriotic song. The trumpets of rhetoric blare; invective has become the chosen method of argument; a thousand blue-stockings, under cover of the Red Cross, when one chats with them out strolling, make a parade of spartan sentiments, amazonian impulses. Whence the plethora of sonnets, odes, stanzas, etc., in which, to speak the jargon of the ordinary critic 'the most exquisite sensibility is happily wedded to the purest patriotism.'—For God's sake leave us alone; you know nothing about it; shut up!"
Thus does a soldier from the front imperiously impose silence upon the false warriors of the rear. If they are fond of the "poilu" style, they will find plenty of it here. Those who have just been looking death in the face have certainly earned the right to speak the plain truth to these "amateurs" of death—the death of others.
"Revue mensuelle," Geneva, October, 1917.
XVIII
MEN IN BATTLE[41]
[THE MAN OF SORROWS]
ART is stained with blood. French blood, German blood, it is always the Man of Sorrows. Yesterday we were listening to the sublime and gloomy plaint which breathes from Barbusse's Under Fire. To-day come the yet more heartrending accents of Menschen im Krieg (Men in Battle). Although they hail from the other camp, I will wager that most of our bellicose readers in France and Navarre will flee from them with stopped ears. For these tones would be a shock to their sensibilities.
Under Fire is more tolerable to these carpet-warriors. There reigns over Barbusse's book a specious impersonality. Despite the multitude and the sharp outline of the figures on his stage, not one of them has a commanding role. We see no hero of romance. Consequently, the reader feels less intimately associated with the hardships recounted on every page; and these hardships, like their causes, have an elemental character. The immensity of the fate which crushes, lessens the agony of those who are crushed. This war fresco resembles the vision of a universal deluge. The human masses execrate the scourge, but accept it passively. Under Fire growls forth a threat for the future, but has no menace for the present. Settling-day is postponed until after peace has been signed.
In Men in Battle, the court is sitting; mankind is in the witness-box, giving testimony against the butchers. Mankind? Not so. A few men, a few chance victims, whose sufferings, since they are individual, appeal to us more strongly than those of the crowd. We follow the ravages these sufferings make in tortured body and lacerated heart; we wed these sufferings; they become our own. Nor does the witness strain after objectivity. He is the impassioned pleader who, just delivered panting from the rack, cries for vengeance. The writer of the book now under review is newly come from hell; he gasps for breath; his visions chase him; pain's claws have left their mark upon him. Andreas Latzko[42] will, in future days, keep his place in the first rank among the witnesses who have left a truthful record of Man's Passion during 1914, the year of shame.
*
* *
The work is written in the form of six separate stories, united only by a common sentiment of suffering and revolt. There is no logical plan in the arrangement of the six war episodes. The first is entitled "Off to War"; the last, "Home Again." Between, we have "Baptism of Fire," a picture of wounded men; and "A Hero's Death." The centre piece is devoted to "The Victor," the great general, the master of the feast, the responsible and beflattered chief. In the last three stories, physical pain exposes its hideous countenance like that of Medusa mutilated. The two opening stories deal with mental pain. The hero of the centre piece sees neither the one nor the other; his glory is throned on both; he finds life good, and war even better. From the first page to the last, revolt mutters. But on the last page revolt culminates in a murder; a soldier, back from the front, kills a war profiteer.
I give an analysis of the six stories.
"Off to War" (Der Abmarsch) has for its scene the garden of a war hospital in a quiet little Austrian town thirty miles from the front. It is an evening late in autumn. The tattoo has just sounded. All is quiet. From afar comes the sound of heavy guns, as if huge dogs were baying underground. Some young wounded officers are enjoying the peace of the evening. Three of them are talking gaily with two ladies. The fourth, a Landsturm lieutenant, in civil life a well-known composer, sits gloomily apart. He has had a severe nervous shock, and is utterly prostrated, so that not even the arrival of his fair young wife enables him to pull himself together. When she speaks to him, he is unmoved. When she tries to touch him, he draws irritably away. She suffers, and cannot understand his enmity. The other woman takes the lead in the conversation. She is a Frau Major, a major's wife, who spends all her time at the hospital and has acquired there "a peculiar, garrulous cold-bloodedness." She is surfeited with horrors; her endless curiosity gives the impression of hardness and hysterical cruelty. The men are discussing, what is "the finest thing" in the war. According to one of them the finest thing is to find oneself, as this evening, in women's company.
". . . . For five months to see nothing but men—and then all of a sudden to hear a dear woman's clear voice! That's the finest thing of all. It's worth going to war for."
One of the others rejoins that the finest thing is to have a bath, a clean bandage, to get into a nice white bed, to know that for a few weeks you are going to have a rest. Number three says:
"The finest thing of all, I think, is the quiet—when you've been lying up there in the mountains where every shot is echoed five times, and all of a sudden it turns absolutely quiet, no whistling, no howling, no thundering—nothing but a glorious quiet that you can listen to as to a piece of music! The first few nights I sat up the whole time and kept my ears cocked for the quiet, the way you try to catch a tune at a distance. I believe I even shed a tear or two—it was so delightful to listen to no sound."
The three young men tease the last speaker good-naturedly, and they all laugh together. Every one of them is intoxicated by the peace of the sleeping town and the autumn garden. Every one of them wants to make the most of his time, to lose nothing, "to take everything easily with his eyes tight shut, like a child before it enters a dark room."
Now the Frau Major breaks in, breathing more quickly as she speaks:
". . . But, tell me, what was the most awful thing you went through out there?"
The men purse up their lips. This theme does not enter into their program. Suddenly a strident voice speaks out of the darkness:
"Awful? The only awful thing is the going off. You go off to war—and they let you go. That's the awful thing."
A glacial silence follows. The Frau Major makes a bolt for it, to escape hearing the sequel. On the pretext that she has got to get back into the town, and that the last tram is just leaving, she takes with her the unhappy little wife, to whom the husband's words have come as a veiled reproach. The officers are left alone, and one of them, hoping to change the current of thought in the sick man's mind, passes a friendly compliment upon the wife's appearance. The other springs to his feet and says in a fury: "Chic wife? Oh, yes. Very dashing!... She didn't shed a tear when I left on the train. Oh, they were all very dashing when we went off. Poor Dill's wife was, too. Very plucky. She threw roses at him in the train, and she'd been his wife for only two months.... Roses! He, he! 'See you soon again!' They were all so patriotic!..."
He goes on to recount what happened to Dill. Poor Dill was showing to his comrades the new photograph his wife had sent him, when an exploding shell sent a boot flying against his head. In the boot was the leg of a cavalryman who had been blown to pieces many yards away. On the boot was a great spur which stuck into Dill's brain. It took four of them to pull the boot out, and a piece of brain came away with the spur, looking "just like a grey jellyfish." One of the officers, horrified by the tale, rushed away for the doctor. The latter, on arrival, tried to coax the sick man to go in:
"You must go to bed now, Lieutenant...."
"Must go, of course," repeated the lieutenant emphatically, heaving a profound sigh. "We must all go. The man who doesn't go is a coward, and they have no use for a coward. That's how it is. Don't you understand? Heroes are in fashion now. The chic Madame Dill wanted a hero to match her new hat. Ha, ha! That's why poor Dill had to have his brains spilled. I must go; you must go; we must all go to die.... The women look on, plucky, because that's the fashion now...."
He gazed round questioningly.
"Isn't it sad?" he asked softly. Then, in a fury once more, he cried:
"Weren't they humbugging us?... Was I an assassin? Was I a swashbuckler? Didn't I suit her when I sat at the piano playing? We were expected to be gentle and considerate! Considerate! And all at once, because the fashion changed, they wanted us to be murderers. Do you understand? Murderers!"
Speaking now in a lower tone, he went on plaintively:
"My wife was in the fashion too, of course. Not a tear! I kept waiting, waiting for her to begin to weep, to beg me to get out of the train, not to go with the others—beg me to be a coward for her sake. But none of them had the pluck to do that. They all wanted to be in the fashion. Mine too! Mine too! She waved her handkerchief, just like the others."
His twitching arms writhed upwards, as though he were calling the heavens to witness.
"You want to know what was the most awful thing? The disillusionment was the most awful thing—the going off. The war wasn't. The war is what it has to be. Did it surprise you to find out that war is horrible? The only surprising thing was the going off. To find out that women are cruel—that was the surprising thing. That they can smile and throw roses; that they can give up their husbands, their children, the little boys they have put to bed a thousand times, tucked up a thousand times, have fondled, have created from their own flesh and blood. That was the surprise. That they gave us up—that they sent us—actually sent us. For every one of them would have been ashamed to stand there without a hero. That was the great disillusionment.... Do you think we should have gone if they had not sent us? Do you think so?... No general could have done anything if the women hadn't allowed us to be packed into the trains, if they had screamed out that they would never look at us again if we became murderers. Not a man would have gone if they had sworn never to give themselves to one who had split open other men's skulls or shot and bayoneted his fellows. Not one man, I tell you, would have gone. I didn't want to believe that they could stand it like that. 'They're only pretending,' I thought. 'They're just holding themselves in. But when the whistle blows they'll begin to scream, and tear us out of the train, and rescue us.' That one time they had the chance to protect us. But all they cared about was to be in the fashion!..."
He broke down, and collapsed once more on to the bench. He began to weep. A little circle of people had formed round him. The doctor said gently:
"Come, come, Lieutenant, let's get along to bed. Women are like that, you know, and we can't help it."
The sick man leapt to his feet in a rage.
"Women are like that? Women are like that? Since when? Since when? Have you never heard of the suffragettes who boxed the ears of ministers of state, who set museums on fire, who chained themselves to lamp-posts, all for the sake of the vote? For the sake of the vote, do you hear? But for the sake of their men? Nothing!"
He paused to take breath, overwhelmed with a throttling despair. Then, fighting with sobs, like a hunted beast, he cried out:
"Have you heard of one woman throwing herself in front of the train for the sake of her husband? Has a single one of them slapped a statesman's face, or tied herself to the railway lines, for our sake? Not one has had to be saved from such desperate courses.... The whole world over, not one of them has moved a finger for us. They drove us forth! They gagged us! They gave us the spur, like poor Dill. They sent us to murder, they sent us to die—for their vanity. Are you going to defend them? No! They must be plucked out. Like weeds, they must be torn up by the roots! You must pull four at a time, as we had to do with Dill. Four of you together, then you'll get her up. Are you the doctor? There! Do it to my head! I don't want a wife! Pull—pull her out!"
He struck himself on the head with his fist. He was dragged into the house, howling at the top of his voice. Soon the garden was empty. By degrees the lights were extinguished and the noise was stilled, except for the distant artillery fire. The patrol which had helped to take the madman back into the hospital repassed, with the old corporal in the rear, hanging his head. From afar off came the flash of an explosion, followed by a prolonged rumbling. The old man stood still, listened, shook his fist, spat disgustedly, and muttered:
"Oh, Hell!"
I have given lengthy extracts from this story, for I wished to convey a notion of the author's pulsating, vibrant, and impassioned style. There is more of the drama here than of the novel, and an elemental fierceness like that of Shakespearean drama. It would be well if these pages, so profound in the bitterness of their injustice, were to become widely known. It would be well if the poor women who, in all love as a rule, adopt a superhuman pose, could be made to realise, by means of this madman's outpourings, the secret thoughts which no man will dare to tell them, to understand the mute and almost shamefaced appeal to their poor human kindliness, to their simple and motherly compassion.
*
* *
I shall deal more briefly with the other episodes.
The second, "Baptism of Fire" (Feuertaufe), is long, perhaps too long, but full of pity and of pain. Almost the whole scene is played within the soul of Captain Marschner, a man of fifty, who is leading his company to the front-line trench under the enemy's fire. He is not a professional soldier. As a young man he had been an officer, but at the age of thirty he had gone to school again, wishing to quit the trade of war and to become a civil engineer. Now the war had brought him back to the army. He had been in Vienna only the day before yesterday. His men were fathers of families, stonemasons, peasants, factory hands, and so on. None of them had any patriotic enthusiasm. He read their minds, and felt ashamed of himself because he was leading to certain death these poor fellows who trusted him. Beside him marched Weixler, a young lieutenant, cold, ruthless, inhuman—as one so often is at twenty years of age "when one has had no time yet to learn the value of life." The hardness of this man (an irreproachable officer) arouses in Marschner mingled anger and suffering. By degrees a fierce but unspoken feud arises between them. At the very end, just when open war is about to break out between the two, a huge shell bursts in their trench and both are buried under the wreckage. The captain comes to himself with a shattered skull. At a few paces' distance lies the implacable lieutenant, his entrails trailing on the ground beside him. They exchange a last look. Marschner sees a face that is almost strange to him, pale and sad, with timid eyes. The whole expression is gentle and plaintive; there is an unforgettable air of tender, anxious resignation.
"He is suffering!" flashed through the captain's mind. "He is suffering!" Marschner is transported with joy. And therewith he dies.
"My Comrade" (Der Kamarad) is the diary of a soldier in hospital. This man has been driven mad by the terrible sights at the front, and above all by the vision of a wounded man in the death agony, a poor wretch whose face had been torn away by a grapnel. The sight was seared upon his brain. The image never left him by day or by night. It sat down beside him at meals; went to bed with him; got up with him in the morning. It had become "My Comrade." The description is positively hallucinating, and this story contains some of the most forceful passages in the book, directed against the warmongers and against the humbugs of the press.
"A Hero's Death" (Heldentod) describes the death in hospital of First Lieutenant Otto Kadar. He has a fractured skull. While the regimental officers were listening to a gramophone playing the Rakoczy march, a bomb exploded among them. The dying man never stops talking of the Rakoczy march. He imagines that he is looking at the corpse of a young officer whose head has been carried away, and in place of the head, screwed into the neck, is the gramophone disc. In his growing delirium, he fancies that the same thing has happened to all the common soldiers, to all the officers, to himself; that in each one the head has been replaced by a gramophone disc. That is why it is so easy to lead them to the slaughter. The dying man makes a frantic effort to tear away the disc from his own neck, and as he does so all is over. The old major looking on says in a voice vibrating with respect: "He died like a true Hungarian—singing the Rakoczy march."
"Home Again" (Heimkehr) tells of the homecoming of Johann Bogdan, who had been the handsomest man in his native village. He returns from the war hopelessly disfigured. In hospital his face has been remade for him by means of a number of plastic operations. But when he looks at himself in the glass he is horror-stricken. No one in the village recognises him. The only exception is a hunchback whom he had looked on with contempt, and who now greets him familiarly. The countryside has been transformed by the building of a munition factory. Marcsa, Bogdan's betrothed, works there, and has become the factory owner's mistress. Bogdan sees red, and stabs the man, to be struck down dead himself a moment later.—In this story the growth of the revolutionary spirit is manifest. Bogdan, a dull conservative by nature, is inspired with it against his will. We have a threatening vision of the return of the soldiers from all the armies, and of how they will take vengeance upon those who sent others to death while remaining at home to enjoy life and to grow rich by speculation.
I have kept the third story to the last, for it contrasts with the others by the sobriety of its emotion. It is entitled "The Victor" (Der Sieger). In the other episodes, the tragic element is nude and bleeding. Here tragedy is veiled with irony, and is all the more formidable. Revolt simmers beneath the calm words; the butchers are pilloried by the bitter satire.
The victor is His Excellency the Commander-in-Chief, the renowned Generalissimo X., universally known in the press as "The Victor of * * *." He is there in all his glory, in the principal square of the town which is now the military headquarters. Here he is absolute master. Here there is nothing which he cannot do or undo at his will. The band is playing, on a fine autumn afternoon. His Excellency sits out of doors in front of a café, amid smart officers and elegantly dressed ladies. It is nearly forty miles from the front. Strict orders have been given that no wounded or convalescent soldier, or any man whose appearance might have a depressing effect on the general war enthusiasm or might trouble the comfort of those who are at ease, shall be allowed out of hospital. We are told how much His Excellency is enjoying himself. He finds the war splendid. People have never had a jollier time. "Did you notice the young fellows back from the front? Sunburnt, healthy, happy!... I assure you the world has never been so healthy as it is now." The whole company chimes in to celebrate the beneficial effects of the war. His Excellency meditates upon his good luck, his titles, his decorations, harvested in a single year of war, after he had vegetated for nine-and-thirty years in peace and mediocrity. It has been a perfect miracle. He is now a national hero. He has his motor, his country mansion, his chef, delicate fare, a lordly retinue of servants—and he has not to pay a penny for it. Only one thing troubles his reflections, the thought that the whole fairy tale may vanish as suddenly as it came, and that he may relapse into obscurity. What if the enemy were to break through? But he reassures himself. All is going well. The great enemy offensive, which has been expected for the last three months, and which actually began twenty-four hours ago, hurls itself vainly against a wall of iron. "The human reservoir is full to overflowing. Two hundred thousand young stalwarts of exactly the right age are ready to be caught up in the whirl of the dance, until they sink in a marish of blood and bones." His Excellency's agreeable reverie is interrupted by an aide-de-camp, who informs him that the correspondent of an influential foreign newspaper has requested an interview. This scene is brilliantly described. The general does not allow the journalist to get a word in. He has his speech ready:
"He delivered it now, speaking with emphasis, and pausing occasionally to recall what came next. First of all, he referred to his gallant soldiers, lauding their courage, their contempt for death, their doings glorious beyond description. He went on to express regret that it was impossible to reward all these heroes according to their deserts. Raising his voice, he invoked the fatherland's eternal gratitude for such loyalty and self-renunciation even unto death. Pointing to the heavy crop of medals on his chest, he explained that the distinctions conferred on him were really a tribute to his men. Finally he interwove a few well-chosen remarks anent the military calibre of the enemy and the skilled generalship displayed by the other side. His last words conveyed his inviolable confidence in ultimate victory."
When the oration was finished, the general became the man of the world.
"You are going to the front now?" he asked with a courteous smile, and responded to the journalist's enthusiastic "yes" with a melancholy sigh.
"Lucky man! I envy you. You see, the tragedy in the life of the modern general is that he cannot lead his men personally into the fray. He spends his whole life making ready for war; he is a soldier in body and mind, and yet he knows the excitement of battle only from hearsay."
Of course the correspondent is delighted that he will be able to depict this all-powerful warrior in the sympathetic role of renunciation.
The agreeable scene is disturbed by the intrusion of an infantry captain who is out of his mind and has escaped from hospital. His Excellency, though in a towering rage, controls his temper for the sake of appearances, and has the inconvenient visitor sent back in his own car. He turns the incident to account by uttering a few touching phrases concerning the impossibility for a general to do his duty if he had to witness all the misery at the front. He evades the correspondent's final question, "When does Your Excellency hope for peace?" by pointing across the square to the old cathedral, saying, "The only advice I can give you is to go over there and ask our Heavenly Father. No one else can answer that question."—Then His Excellency descends upon the hospital like a whirlwind, blusters at the old staff-surgeon, and reiterates the order to keep all the patients safely under lock and key. His wrath by now is slightly assuaged, but it is revived by a message from the front. A brigadier-general reports terrible losses, and declares that he cannot hold the line without reinforcements. It was part of His Excellency's plan that this brigade should be wiped out, after resisting the attack as long as possible. But he is angry that his victims should have any advice to offer, and sends curt orders, "The sector is to be held."—At length, the day's work being over, the great man drives home in his motor, still fiercely excogitating the correspondent's idiotic question, "When does Your Excellency hope for peace?"
"Hope!... How tactless!... Hope for peace! What good has a general to expect from peace? Could not this civilian understand that a commander-in-chief is only a commander-in-chief in war-time, and that in peace-time he is nothing more than a professor with a collar of gold braid?"
The general is annoyed once more when the car pulls up because it is necessary to close the hood on account of the rain. But during the pause His Excellency hears the sound of distant firing. His eyes brighten.—Thank God, there was still war.
*
* *
My quotations have been enough to show the emotional force and the trenchant irony of Latzko's book. It scorches. It is a torch of suffering and revolt. Both its merits and its defects are sib to this frenzy. The author is master of the writer's art, but he is not always master of his own feelings. His memories are still open wounds. He is possessed by his visions. His nerves vibrate like violin strings. Almost without exception, his analyses of emotion are tremulous monologues. His shattered spirit cannot find repose.
Doubtless he will be criticised for the preponderant place assumed in his book by physical pain. The work is full of it. Pain monopolises the reader's mind and wearies his eyes. Not until we have read Men in Battle do we fully appreciate Barbusse's chariness in the use of material effects. If Latzko is persistent in their employment, this is not merely because he is haunted by memories of pain. He wishes, deliberately wishes, to communicate these impressions to others, for he has suffered greatly from others' insensibility.
In very truth, such insensibility has been the saddest of all our experiences during this war. We knew man to be stupid, mediocre, selfish: we knew that on occasions man could be extremely cruel. But though we had few illusions, we had never believed that man could remain so monstrously indifferent to the cries of millions of victims. We had never believed that there could be a smile such as we have witnessed upon the lips of the young fanatics and of the old demoniacs who, from their safe seats, are never weary of looking on at the mutual slaughter of the nations, of those who kill one another for the pleasure, the pride, the ideas, and the interests of the onlookers. All the rest, all the crimes, we can tolerate; but this aridity of soul is the worst of all, and we feel that Latzko has been overwhelmed by it. Like one of his own characters, who is regarded as a sick man because he cannot forget the sufferings he has witnessed, Latzko cries to the apathetic public:
"Sick!... No! It is the others that are sick. They are sick who gloat over news of victories and see conquered miles of territory arise resplendent above mountains of corpses. They are sick who stretch a barrier of many-coloured bunting between themselves and their better feelings, lest they should see what crimes are being committed against their brothers in the beyond that they call 'the front.' Every man is sick who can still think, talk, argue, sleep, knowing that other men, holding their own entrails in their hands, are crawling like half-crushed worms across the furrows in the fields, and are dying like animals before they can reach the ambulance station, while somewhere, far away, a woman with longing in her heart is dreaming beside an empty bed. All those are sick who fail to hear the moaning, the gnashing of teeth, the howling, the crashing and bursting, the wailing and cursing and agonising in death, because their ears are filled with the murmur of everyday affairs. These blind and deaf ones are sick, not I. Sick are those dumb beings whose soul can give voice neither to compassion nor to anger...." ("My Comrade").
The author's aim is to arouse these sick beings from their torpor, to treat them with the actual cautery of pain. This aim is portrayed in the person of Captain Marschner ("Baptism of Fire"), who, when his company is in the thick of the slaughter, suffers from nothing so intensely as from the harsh impassivity of his lieutenant, but who, himself at the point of death, finds it a positive solace to see on Weixler's stern face a shadow of pain, brotherly pain.
"Thank God," he thinks. "At last he knows what suffering is!"
"Through sympathy to knowledge," sings the mystical chorus of Parsifal.
This "suffering with others" (sympathy, Mitleid), this "pain which unites," overflows from the work of Andreas Latzko.
November 15, 1917.
"Les Tablettes," Geneva, December, 1917.
XIX
VOX CLAMANTIS....[43]
AFTER the glacial torpor of the early days of the war, mutilated art begins to bloom anew. The irrepressible song of the soul wells up out of suffering. Man is not merely, as he is apt to boast, a reasoning animal (he might, with better ground, term himself an unreasoning one); he is a singing animal; he can no more get on without singing than without bread. We learn it amid the very trials through which we are passing to-day. Although the general suppression of liberty in Europe has doubtless deprived us of the deeper music, of the most intimate confessions, we nevertheless hear great voices rising from every land. Some of these, coming from the armies, sing in sad and epic strains. See, for example, Under Fire by Henri Barbusse, and the heart-rending tales issued by Andreas Latzko under the collective title of Men in Battle. Others express the pain and horror of those who, remaining at home, look on at the butchery without taking part in it, and who, being inactive, suffer all the more from the torments of thought. To this category belong the impassioned poems of Marcel Martinet[44] and P. J. Jouve.[45] Paying less attention to suffering and more concerned with understanding, the English novelists, H. G. Wells[46] and Douglas Goldring,[47] give a faithful analysis of the distressing errors amid which they move and which they themselves by no means escape. Yet others, finally, taking refuge in the contemplation of the past, rediscover there the same circle of misfortunes and of hopes—rediscover the "eternal cycle." They cloak their grief in the fashions of other days, thus ennobling it and despoiling it of its poisoned dart. From the lofty eyrie of the ages, set free by art, the soul contemplates suffering as in a vision, no longer aware whether that suffering belongs to the present or to the past. Stefan Zweig's Jeremias is the finest contemporary specimen known to me of this august melancholy which, looking beyond the bloody drama of to-day, is able to see in it the eternal tragedy of mankind.
Not without struggle can such serene regions be attained. A friend of Zweig before the war, his friend to-day, I have witnessed all that was endured by this free European spirit whom the war robbed of that which he had held most dear; robbed him of his artistic and humanist faith, thereby depriving him of any reason for existence. The letters he wrote me during the first year of the war reveal his agonising torments in all their tragical beauty. By degrees, however, the immensity of the catastrophe, communion with the universal sorrow, restored to him the calm which resigns itself to destiny; for he came to see that destiny leads to God, who is the union of souls. Of the Hebrew race, he has drawn his inspiration from the Bible. It was easy to find there analogous instances of national madness, of the fall of empires, and of heroic patience. One figure, above all, attracted him, that of the great forerunner, Jeremiah the persecuted prophet, foretelling the woeful peace which was to flourish upon the ruins.
Zweig devotes to Jeremiah a dramatic poem, which I propose to analyse, making extensive quotations. The work consists of nine scenes. It is written in prose mingled with verse, sometimes free, sometimes rhymed, the transition from prose to verse occurring when emotion breaks from control. The form is ample and rhetorical. There is a majestic balance in the exposition of the thought; but the poem would perhaps have been better for condensation, for this would have left more to the reader's imagination. The common people play a leading part in the action. Their sallies and counter-sallies jostle one another; but at the close their voices unite in measured choruses, breathing the thoughts of the prophet, the guardian of Israel. Zweig has steered his course skilfully between the dangers of archaism and anachronism. We rediscover our preoccupations of the moment in this epic of the fall of Jerusalem; but we find them as the faithful of recent centuries found day by day in their Bible the light which lightened their road in hours of difficulty—sub specie aeternitatis.
"Jeremiah is our prophet," Stefan Zweig said to me. "He has spoken for us, for our Europe. The other prophets came at their due time. Moses spoke and acted. Jesus died and acted. Jeremiah spoke in vain. His people failed to understand him. The times were not ripe. He could only prophesy, and bewail the approaching doom. He could do nothing to prevent what was to happen. Ours is a like fate."
But there are defeats more fruitful than victories; there are griefs more illuminating than joys. Zweig's poem shows this magnificently. At the end of the drama, Israel has been crushed. The Jews, leaving their ruined city, going into exile, pass towards the future filled with an inward radiance never known to them before, strong by reason of the sacrifices which have revealed to them their mission.
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SCENE ONE
The Prophet's Awakening.
A night in early spring. All is quiet. Jeremiah, awakened with a start by a vision of Jerusalem in flames, goes up to the terrace which overlooks his dwelling and the town. He is "poisoned" by dreams, obsessed by the oncoming storm, although peace still broods over the scene. He does not understand the fierce energy which surges up in him; but he knows that it comes from God and he awaits his orders, uneasy and under the spell of hallucination. His mother calls to him, and at first he imagines her voice to be the voice of God. To the terrified woman he foretells the ruin of Jerusalem. She implores him to be silent; his words seem to her sacrilegious and arouse her anger; to close his mouth, she tells him he will have her curse if he makes his sinister dreams known to others. But Jeremiah is no longer his own man. He follows the unseen Master.
SCENE TWO
The Warning.
In the great square of Jerusalem, in front of the temple and the king's palace, the people acclaim the Egyptian envoys who have brought with them a daughter of the Pharaoh to wed King Zedekiah, and who are to cement an alliance against the Chaldeans. Abimelech the general, Pashur the high priest, Hananiah the official prophet who prophesies falsely in order to inflame the passion of the people, incite the crowd to frenzy. Young Baruch is one of the most violent among those who clamour for war. Jeremiah resists the stream of fury. He condemns the war. He is immediately charged with having been bought by Chaldean gold. Hananiah, the false prophet, sings the praises of "the holy war, the war of God."