Читать книгу Letters of a Soldier, 1914-1915 - Eugène Emmanuel Lemercier - Страница 6

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The letters that follow are those of a young painter who was at the front from September [1914] till the beginning of April [1915]; at the latter date he was missing in one of the battles of the Argonne. Are we to speak of him in the present tense or in the past? We know not: since the day when the last mud-stained paper reached them, announcing the attack in which he was to vanish, what a close weight of silence for those who during eight months lived upon these almost daily letters! But for how many women, how many mothers, is a grief like this to-day a common lot!

In the studio and amid the canvases upon which the young man had traced the forms of his dreams, I have seen, piously placed in order on a table, all the little papers written by his hand. A silent presence—I was not then aware what manner of mind had there expressed itself—revisiting this hearth: a mind surely made to travel far abroad and cast its lights upon multitudes of men.

It was the mind of a complete artist, but of a poet as well, that had lurked under the timid reserves of a youth who at thirteen years of age had left school for the studio, and who had taught himself, without help from any other, to translate the thoughts that moved him into such words as the reader will judge of. Here are tenderness of heart, a fervent love of Nature, a mystical sense of her changing moods and of her eternal language: all those things of which the Germans, professing themselves heirs of Goethe and of Beethoven, imagine they have the monopoly, but of which we Frenchmen have the true perception, and which move us in the words written by our young countryman for his most dearly beloved and for himself.

It is singularly touching to find in the spiritual, grave, and religious temper of these letters an affinity to the spirit of many others written from the front. During those weeks, those endless months of winter in the mud or the frost of the trenches, in the daily sight of death, in the thought of that death coming upon them also, closing upon them to seal their eyes for ever, these boys seem to have faced the things of eternity with a deeper insight and a keener feeling, as each one, in the full strength of life and youth, dwelt upon the thought of beholding the world for the last time:

'Et le monde allait donc mourir

Avec mes yeux, miroir du monde.'

Solemn thought for the man who has watched through a long night in some advance-post, and who, beyond the grey and silent plain where lurks the enemy, sees a red sun rise yet once more upon the world! 'O splendid sun, I wish I could see you again!' wrote once, on the evening of his advance upon French ground, a young Silesian soldier who fell upon the battlefield of the Marne, and whose Journal has been published. Suddenly breaks in this mysterious cry in the course of methodical German notes on food and drink, stages of the march, blistered feet, the number of villages set on fire. And in how many French letters too have we found it—that abrupt intuition! It is always the same, in many and various words: in those of the agriculturist of the Seine-et-Marne, whom I could name, and who for perhaps the first time in his life takes an interest in the sunset; in those of the young middle-class Parisian who had seemed incapable of speech save in terms of unbelief and burlesque; in those of the artist who utters his emotion in poetry and lifts it up to the heights of stoical philosophy. Through all unlikenesses, in the hearts of all—peasant, citizen, soldier, German schoolmaster—one prevailing thought is revealed; the living man, passing away, feels, at the approach of eternal night, an exaltation of his sense of the splendour of the world. O miracle of things! O divine peace of this plain, of these trees, of these hillsides! And how keenly does the ear listen for this infinite silence! Or we hear of the immensities of night where nothing remains except light and flame: far off, the smouldering of fires; far up, the sparkle of stars, the shapes of constellations, the august order of the universe. Very soon the rattle of machine-guns, the thunder of explosives, the clamour of attack will begin anew; there will again be killing and dying. What a contrast of human fury and eternal serenity! More or less vaguely, and for a brief moment, there comes into passing life a glimpse of the profound relation of the simple things of heaven and earth with the mind of him who contemplates them. Does man then guess that all these things are indeed himself, that his little life and the life of the tree yonder, thrilling in the shiver of dawn, and beckoning to him, are bound together in the flood of universal life?

For the artist of whom we are now reading, such intuitions and such visions were the delight of long months in the trenches. Under the free sky, in contact with the earth, in face of the peril and the sight of death, life seemed to him to take a sudden and strange expansion. 'From our life in the open air we have gained a freedom of conception, an amplitude of thought, which will for ever make cities horrible to those who survive the war.' Death itself had become a more beautiful and a more simple thing; the death of soldiers on whose dumb shapes he looked with pious eyes, as Nature took them back into her maternal care and mingled them with her earth. Day by day he lived in the thought of eternity. True, he kept a feeling heart for all the horror, and compassion for all the pain; as to his duty, the reader will know how he did that. But, suffering 'all the same,' he took refuge in 'the higher consolations.' 'We must,' he writes to those who love him and whom he labours—with what constant solicitude!—to prepare for the worst, 'we must attain to this—that no catastrophe whatsoever shall have power to cripple our lives, to interrupt them, to set them out of tune. … Be happy in this great assurance that I give you—that up till now I have raised my soul to a height where events have had no empire over it.' These are heights upon which, beyond the differences of their teachings and their creeds, all great religious intuitions meet together; upon which illusions are no more, and the soul rejects the pretensions of self, in order to accept what is. 'Our sufferings come from our small human patience taking the same direction as our desires, noble though they may be. … Do not dwell upon the personality of those who pass away and of those who are left; such things are weighed only in the scales of men. We should gauge in ourselves the enormous value of what is better and greater than humanity.' In truth, death is impotent because it too is illusory, and 'nothing is ever lost.' So this young Frenchman, who has yet never forgone the language of his Christianity, rediscovers amid the terrors of war the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius—that virtue which is 'neither patience nor too great confidence, but a certain faith in the order of all things, a certain power of saying of each trial, "It is well."' And, even beyond stoicism, it is the sublime and antique thought of India that he makes his own, the thought that denies appearances and differences, that reveals to man his separate self and the universe, and teaches him to say of the one, 'I am not this,' and of the other, 'that, I am.' Wonderful encounter of thoughts across the distance of ages and the distance of races! The meditation of this young French soldier, in face of the enemy who is to attack on the morrow, resumes the strange ecstasy in which was rapt the warrior of the Bhagavad Gita between two armies coming to the grapple. He, too, sees the turbulence of mankind as a dream that seems to veil the higher order and the Divine unity. He, too, puts his faith in that 'which knows neither birth nor death,' which is 'not born, is indestructible, is not slain when this body is slain.' This is the perpetual life that moves across all the shapes it calls up, striving in each one to rise nearer to light, to knowledge, and to peace. And that aim is a law and a command to every thinking being that he should give himself wholly for the general and final good. Thence comes the grave satisfaction of those who devote themselves, of those who die, in the cause of life, in the thought of a sacrifice not useless. 'Tell—— that if fate strikes down the best, there is no injustice; those who survive will be the better men. You do not know the things that are taught by him who falls. I do know.' And even more complete is the sacrifice when the relinquishment of life, when the renunciation of self, means the sacrifice of what was dearer than self, and would have been a life's joy to serve. There was the 'flag of art, the flag of science,' that the boy loved and had begun to carry—with what a thrill of pride and faith! Let him learn to fall without regrets. 'It is enough for him to know that the flag will yet be carried.'

A simple, a common obedience to the duty at hand is the practical conclusion of that high Indian wisdom when illusions are past. Not to retreat into the solitude, not to retire into the inaction, that he has known and prized; to fight at the side of his brothers, in his own rank, in his own place, with open eyes, without hope of glory or of gain, and because such is the law: this is the commandment of the god to the warrior Arjuna, who had doubted whether he were right in turning away from the Absolute to take part in the evil dream of war. 'The law for each is that he should fulfil the functions determined by his own state and being. Let every man accept action, since he shares in that nature the methods of which make action necessary.' Plainly, it is for Arjuna to bend his bow among the other Kshettryas. The young Frenchman had not doubted. But it will be seen by his letters how, in the horror of carnage, as in the tedious and patient duties of the mine and the trench, he too had kept his eyes upon eternal things.

I would not insist unduly upon this union of thought. He had hardly gained, through a few extracts from the Ramayana, a glimpse of the august thought of ancient Asia. Yet, with all the modern shades of ideas, with all the very French precision of form, the soul that is revealed in these letters, like that of Amiel, of Michelet, of Tolstoi, of Shelley, shows certain profound analogies with the tender and mystical genius of the Indies. Strange is that affinity, bearing witness as it does not only to his profound need of the Universal and the Absolute, but to his intuitive sympathy with the whole of life, to his impulses of love for the general soul of fruitfulness and for all its single and multitudinous forms. 'Love'—this is one of the words most often recurring in these letters. Love of the country of battle; love of the plain over which the mornings and the evenings come and go as the emotions come and go over a sensitive face; love of the trees with their almost human gesture—of one tree, steadfast and patient in its wounds, 'like a soldier'; love of the beautiful little living creatures of the fields which, in the silence of earliest morning, play on the edges of the trench; love of all things in heaven and earth—of that tender sky, of that French soil with its clear and severe outlines; love, above all, of those whom he sees in sufferings and in death at his side; love of the good peasants, the mothers who have given their sons, and who hold their peace, dry their tears, and fulfil the tasks of the vineyard and the field; love of those comrades whose misery 'never silenced laughter and song'—'good men who would have found my fine artistic robes a bad encumbrance in the way of their plain duty'; love of all those simple ones who make up France, and among whom it is good to lose oneself; love of all men living, for it is surely not possible to hate the enemy, human flesh and blood bound to this earth and suffering as we too suffer; love of the dead upon whom he looks, in the impassive beauty, silence, and mystery revealed beneath his meditative eyes.

It is by his close attention to the interior and spiritual significance of things that this painter is proved to be a poet, a religious poet who has sight, in this world, of the essence of being, in ineffable varieties: painter, and poet, and musician also, for in the trenches he lives with Beethoven, Handel, Schumann, Berlioz, carrying in his mind their imaginings and their rhythms, and conceiving also within himself 'the loveliest symphonies fully orchestrated.' Secret riches, intimate powers of consolation and of joy, able, in the gloomiest hours, in the dark and the mud of long nights on guard, to speak closely to the soul, or snatch it suddenly and swiftly to distances and heights. Schumann, Beethoven: between those two immortal spirits that made music for all human ears, and the harsh pedants, the angry protagonists of Germanism, who have succeeded in transforming a people into a war-machine, what likeness is there? Have we not made the genius of those two ours by understanding them as we understand them, and by so taking them into our hearts? Are they not friends of ours? Do they not walk with us in those blessed solitudes wherein our truest self awakens, and where our thoughts flow free?

It is the greatest of all whom a certain group of our soldiers invoke in those days before the expected battle in which some of them are to fall. They are in the depths of a dug-out. 'There, in complete darkness, night was awaited for the chance to get out. But once my fellow non-commissioned officers and I began humming the nine symphonies of Beethoven. I cannot tell what great thrill woke those notes within us.'

That almost sacred song, those heroic inspirations at such a moment—how do they not give the lie to German theories as to the limitations of French sensibility! And what poet of any other race than ours has ever looked upon Nature with more intimate eyes, with a heart more deeply moved, than his whose inner soul is here expressed?

These letters, despatched day by day from the trench or the billet, follow each other progressively as a poem does, or a song. A whole life unfolds, the life of a soul which we may watch through the monotony of its experiences, overcoming them all, or, again, rapt at the coming of supreme trials (as in February and in April) into perfect peace. It is well that we should trace the spiritual progress of such a dauntless will. No history of an interior life was ever more touching. That will is set to endurance, and terrible at times is the effort to endure; we divine this beneath the simple everyday words of the narrative. Here is an artist and a poet; he had chosen his life, he had planned it, by no means as a life of action. His whole culture, his whole self-discipline, had been directed to the further refining of a keen natural sensibility. Necessarily and intentionally he had turned towards solitude and contemplation. He had known himself to be purely a mirror for the world, tarnishable under the breath of the crowd. But now it was for him to lead a life opposed to his former law, contrary to his plan; and this not of necessity but by a completely voluntary act. That ego he had so jealously sheltered, in face of the world yet out of the world, he was now to yield up, to cast without hesitation or regret into the thick of human wars; he was no longer to spend his days apart from the jostling and the shouldering and the breath of troops; he was to bear his part in the mechanism that serves the terrible ends of war. And the close of a life which he would have pronounced, from his former point of view, to be slavery—the close might be speedy death. He had to bring himself to look upon his old life—the life that was lighted by his visions and his hopes, the life that fulfilled his sense of universal existence—as a mere dream, perhaps never to be dreamed again.

That is what he calls 'adapting himself.' And how the word recurs in his letters! It is a word that teaches him where duty lies, a duty of which the difficulty is to be gauged by the difference of the present from the past, of the bygone hope from the present effort. 'In the fulness of productiveness,' he confesses, 'at the hour when life is flowering, a young creature is snatched away, and cast upon a barren soil where all he has cherished fails him. Well, after the first wrench he finds that life has not forsaken him, and sets to work upon the new ungrateful ground. The effort calls for such a concentration of energy as leaves no time for either hopes or fears. And I manage it, except only in moments of rebellion (quickly suppressed) of the thoughts and wishes of the past. But I need my whole strength at times for keeping down the pangs of memory and accepting what is.'

Indeed, strength was called for day by day. This 'adaptation' was no transformation. But by a continuous act of vital energy he assimilated all that he drew from his surroundings. Thus he fed his heart, and kept his own ideals. This was a way to renounce all things, and by renunciation to keep the one thing needful, to remain himself, to live, and not only to live but to flourish; to have a part in that universal life which produces flowers in nature, art and poetry in man. To gain so much, all that was needed was to treasure, unaltered by the terrors of war, a heart eager for all shapes of beauty. For this most religious poet, beauty was that divine spirit which shines more or less clearly in all things, and which raises him who perceives it higher than the accidents of individual existence. And he receives its full influence, and is rid of all anxiety, who is able to bid adieu to the present and the past, to regret nothing, to desire nothing, to receive from the passing moment that influence in its plenitude. 'I accept all from the hands of fate, and I have captured every delight that lurks under cover of every moment.' In this state of simplicity, which is almost a state of grace, he enters into communion with the living reality of the world. 'Let us eat and drink to all that is eternal, for to-morrow we die to all that is of earth.'

That emancipation of the soul is not achieved in a day. The earlier letters are beautiful, but what they teach is learnt by nearly all our soldiers. In these he tells of the spirit of the men, their fire of enthusiasm, their imperious sense of duty, their resolve to carry 'an undefiled conscience as far as their feet may lead.' Yet already he is seeking to maintain control of his own private self amid all the excitement of numbers. And he succeeds. He guards himself, he separates himself, 'as much as possible,' in the midst of his comrades, he keeps his intellectual life intact. Meanwhile he is within barrack walls, or else he is jotting down his letters at a railway station, or else he is in the stages of an interminable journey, 'forty men to a truck.' But to know him completely, wait until you see him within the zone of war, in billets, in the front line, on guard, when he has returned to contact with the very earth. As soon as he breathes open air, his instincts are awake again, the instinct 'to draw all the beauty out,' and—in the shadow where the future hides—'to draw out the utmost beauty as quickly as may be.' 'I picked flowers in the mud; keep them in remembrance of me,' he will write in a day of foreboding. A most significant trait is this—in the tedium of trench days, or when imminent peril silences the idle tongues, he gathers the greatest number of these magical flowers. In those moments when speech fails, his soul is serene, it has free play, and we hear its own fine sounds. Hitherto we had heard the repetition of the word of courage and of brotherhood uttered by all our gathering armies. But here, in battle, face to face with the eternities, that spirit of his sounds like the chord of an instrument heard for the first time in its originality and its infinite sensibility. Nor are these random notes; they soon make one harmonious sound and acquire a most touching significance, until by daily practice he learns how to abstract himself altogether from the most wretched surroundings. A quite impersonal ego seems then to detach itself from the particular ego that suffers and is in peril; it looks impartially upon all things, and sees its other self as a passing wave in the tide that a mysterious Intelligence controls. Strange faculty of double existence and of vision! He possesses it in the midst of the very battle in which his active valour gained him the congratulations of his commanding officer. In the furnace in which his flesh may be consumed he looks about him, and next morning he writes, 'Well, it was interesting.' And he adds, 'what I had kept about me of my own individuality was a certain visual perceptiveness that caused me to register the setting of things—a setting that dramatised itself as artistically as in any stage-management. During all these minutes I never relaxed in my resolve to see how it was.' He then, too, became aware of the meaning of violence. His tender and meditative nature had always held it in horror. And, perhaps for that very reason, he sought its explanation. It is by violence that an imperfect and provisional state of things is shattered, and what was lax is put into action again. Life is resumed, and a better order becomes possible. Here again we find his acceptance, his submission to the Reason that directs the universe; confidence in what takes place—that is his conclusion.

Such times for him are times of observation properly so called, of purer thought in which the impulses of the painter and the poet have no share. That kind of observation is not infrequent with him, when he is dealing with the world and with human action. It awakes at a war-spectacle, at a trait of manners, at the reading of a book, at a recollection of history or art; it is often to the Bible that he turns, and, amid the worst clamours, to the beautiful plastic images of Greece. Admirable is such serene energy of a spirit able to live purely as a spirit. It is admirable, but it is not unique; great intellectual activity is not uncommon with the French; others of our soldiers are philosophers among the shells. What does set these letters in a place apart is something more profound and more organic than thought, and that is sentiment; sentiment in its infinite and indefinite degrees, its relation to the aspects of nature—in a word, that poetic faculty which is akin to the musical, proceeding as they both do from the primitive ground-work of our being, and uniting in the inflexions of rhythm and of song. I have already named Shelley in connexion with the poet we are considering. And it is a Shelleyan union with the most intimate, the most inexpressible things in nature that is revealed in such a note as the following: 'A nameless day, a day without form, yet a day in which the Spring most mysteriously begins to stir. Warm air in the lengthening days; a sudden softening, a weakening of nature.' In describing this atmosphere, this too sudden softness, he uses a word frequent in the vocabulary of Shelley—'fainting.' In truth, like the great English poet, whom he seems not to have known, he seeks from the beauty of things a faculty of self-forgetfulness in lyrical poetry, an inexpressible and blissful passing of the poet's being into the thing he contemplates. What he makes his own in the course of those weeks, what he remembers afterwards, and what he would recall, never to lose it again, is the culminating moment in which he has achieved self-forgetfulness and reached the ineffable. The simplest of natural objects is able to yield him such a moment; see, for instance, this abrupt intuition: 'I had lapsed from my former sense of the benediction of God, when suddenly the beauty—all the beauty—of a certain tree spoke to my inmost heart; and then I understood that an instant of such contemplation is the whole of life.' And still more continuous, still more vibrant, is at times his emotion, as when the bow draws out to the utmost a long ecstatic tone from a sensitive violin. 'What joy is this perpetual thrill in the heart of Nature! That same horizon of which I had watched the awakening, I saw last night bathe itself in rosy light; and then the full moon went up into a tender sky, fretted by coral and saffron trees.' It is very nearly ecstasy with him in that astonishing Christmas night which no one then at the front can ever forget—a solemn night, a blue night, full of stars and of music, when the order and the divine unity of the universe stood revealed to the eyes of men who, free for a moment from the dream of hatred and of blood, raised one chant along six miles, 'hymns, hymns, from end to end.'

Of the carnage in February there are a few precise notes, sufficient to suggest the increasing horror. The narrative grows quicker; the reader is aware of the pulse and the impetus of action, the imperious summons of duty; the young sergeant is in charge of men, and has to execute terrible tasks. But ever across the tumult and the slaughter, there are moments of recollection and of compassion; and, in the evening of a day of battle, what infinite tranquillity among the dead! At this period there are no more notes of landscape effects; the description is of the war, technical; otherwise the writer's thought is not of earth at all. Once only, towards the end, we find a sorrowful recollection of himself, a profound lamentation at the remembrance of bygone hopes, of bygone work, of the immensity of the sacrifice. 'This war is long, too long for those who had something else to do in the world! Why am I so sacrificed, when so many others, not my equals, are spared? Yet I had something worth doing to do in the world!' Most touching is that sigh, even more touching than the signs of greatness in his soul, for it suddenly breathes an anguish long controlled. It is a human weakness—our own weakness—that is at last confessed, on the eve of a Passion, as in the Divine example. At rare times such a question, in the constant sight of death, in fatigue and weariness, in the long distress of rain and mud, checks in him the impulse of life and of spiritual desire. He was himself the young plant of which he writes, growing, creating fragrance and breaking into flower, sure of God, feeling Him alive within itself. But all at once it knows frost is coming and the threat of unpitying things. What if the universe were void, what if in the infinity of the exterior world there were nothing, across the splendid vision, but an insensate fatality? What if sacrifice itself were also a delusion? 'Dark days have come upon me, and nothingness seems the end of all, whereas all that is in my being had assured me of the plenitude of the universe.' And he asks himself the anxious question, 'Is it even sure that moral effort bears any fruit?' It is something like abandonment by God. But that darkening of his lights passes quickly away. He comes again to the regions of tranquil thought, and leaves them thenceforward only for the work in hand. 'I hope,' he writes, 'that when you think of me you will have in mind all those who have left everything behind, and how their nearest and dearest think of them only in the past, and say of them, "We had once a brother, who, many years ago, withdrew from this world."' How strange is the serenity of these lofty thoughts, how entirely detached from self and from all human things is this spirit of contemplation. Two slight traits give us signs: One night, on a battlefield 'scattered with fragments of men' and with burning dwellings, under a starry sky, he makes his bed in an excavation, and lies there watching the crescent moon, and waits for dawn; now and again a shell bursts, earth falls about him, and then silence returns to the frozen soil: 'I have paid the price, but I have had moments of solitude full of God.' Again, one evening, after five days of horror ('we have no officers left—they all died as brave men'), he suddenly comes upon the body of a friend; 'a white body, splendid under the moon. I lay down near him.' In the quietness, by the side of the dead man, nothing remains but beauty and peace.

These letters are to be anonymous, at least so long as any hope remains that he who was lost may return. It is enough to know that they were written by a Frenchman who, in love and faith, bore his part in the general effort, the common peril, glad to renounce himself in the pain and the devotion of his countrymen. By a happy fortune that he did not foresee when he left his clean solitude for the sweat, the servitude, and the throng, he no doubt produced the best of himself in these letters; and it may be doubted whether, in the course of a successful artist's life, it would have been given to him to express himself with so much completeness. This is a thought that may strengthen those who love him to accept whatever has come to pass. His soul is here, a more essential soul perhaps, and a more beautiful, than they had known. It was in war that Marcus Aurelius also wrote his thoughts. Possibly the worst is needful for the manifestation of the whole of human greatness. We marvel how the soul can so discover in itself the means to oppose suffering and death. Thus have many of our sons revealed themselves in the day of trial, to the wonder of France, until then unaware of all that she really was. That is how these pages touch us so closely. He who wrote them had attuned himself with his countrymen. Through the more mystical acts of his mind we perceive the sublime message sent to us from the front, more or less explicitly, by others of our brothers and our sons—the high music that goes up still from the whole of France at war. In all his comrades assembled for the great task, he too had recognised the best and the deepest things that his own heart held, and so he speaks of them constantly—especially of the simplest of the men—with so great respect and love. Far from ordinary ambitions and cares, the things that this rough life among the eternities brings into all hearts with a heretofore unknown amplitude are serenity of conscience and a freshness of feeling in perpetual touch with the harmonies of nature. These men do but reflect nature. Since they have renounced themselves and given themselves, all things have become simple for them. They have the transparence of soul and the lights of childhood. 'We spend childish days. We are children.' …

This new youthfulness of heart under the contemned menace of death, this innocence in the daily fulfilment of heroic duty, is assured by a spiritual state akin to sanctity.