The tears of a son are seldom lasting. I submitted to the order of Nature, and my grief was soothed by the conscious satisfaction that I had discharged all the duties of filial piety. Few perhaps are the children who, after the expiration of some months or years, would sincerely rejoice in the resurrection of their parents; and it is a melancholy truth, that my father’s death, not unhappy for himself, was the only event that could save me from an hopeless life of obscurity and indigence.
It is a melancholy truth. Gibbon has a taste for the truth that is melancholy, for seeing life as a series of epitaphs. And yet in Reynolds’ portrait the fat little scholar with the second roll of chin, and the lips which seem set for the discharge of some destructive epigram, is not as sober as he looks. He is, in fact, cutting a dash. With the amateur soldier’s love of a splash and with a glance back at the heroic days when his Militia boldly exercised within sight of the French coast, he has put on his scarlet coat for the picture. “For in England the red ever appears the favourite and, as it were, the national colour of our military ensigns and uniforms.”
A Conscript
Conscription for military service, in peace and war, has not a long history in Europe. It dates from the French Revolution and was the basis of Napoleon’s enormous military achievement. No other general in Europe could say, as he did to Metternich: “I can afford to lose 30,000 men per month.” But many years passed before a population who had been used to the unheroic pleasures of peaceful industry and were far removed from memory of the massacres of the religious wars, became amenable to this pace of slaughter. Men fled from their houses in thousands, the Vendée rose in revolt. Nevertheless in times of revolutionary persecution and espionage, the army becomes the safest hiding-place; the glory of the Napoleonic conquests was irresistible and, with all Europe hungry, the discovery that you could pillage the conquered and live well off them, was a final factor in making for the success of the new system. One has only to look at the memoirs of such rogues as Vidocq to see what a piping time the tougher conscripts had. Their European travels turned them into foreigners. They became a race apart. This is of course true of all soldiers. In his Verdun M. Jules Romains shows that the common daydream of the men in the trenches was of somehow melting away from the front in little bands, retiring to the woods and living a kind of Robin Hood life on the tribute they exacted from civilians.
What was the life of Napoleon’s first European conscripts? Some idea can be got from that old school-book, Histoires d’un Conscrit de 1813, by Erckmann-Chatrian. (It is a pity one reads these two Alsatian authors at school, for while they are safe enough and exciting enough for schoolboys and inculcate a very sound and civilised moral repugnance to Cæsarism, they have a quality which schoolboys are not able to appreciate.) Neither Chatrian, the glassmaker who worked his way up in the world, and became a school teacher, nor Erckmann, the clever briefless lawyer, were actually Napoleonic conscripts. They were born a few years after Waterloo and they wrote of the campaigns and the revolution itself as those events still lived in the memories of their elders, picking up the old boaok and lamentations from humble and ordinary folk. They losst at the war from below, assume in their stories the point of view of some small tradesman or peasant, and view the scene from the vantage-point of a period of disillusion. This pretence of being eye-witnesses and with it the circumstantial manner at which they excel, recalls Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Tear. Both books have that modest, trim, but firm respectability, the stoicism of the small trader. The meek shall inherit the earth. Joseph, the good, lame apprentice working overtime to save up money in order to marry his innocent little Catherine whose hand he holds all the evening like a sugar stick, is an early example of the pious, non-tough hero of the nineteenth century. He does not seem a prig to us because he is good without knowing it, or perhaps one should say that really his piety lies not in his religion but in an innate belief in the goodness of his class itself. (In popular belief class is the chief God.) Sainte Beuve scornfully called this book “L’Iliade de la peur”, but if Joseph is often as frightened as any young soldier is, he is certainly no coward. He stands his ground in the French squares, terrified by the screaming, monkey faces of the Prussian Hussars as they charge down at the Battle of Leipzig, but he is savagely angry that any man on earth should try and take away his life without consulting him and in a cause to which he is indifferent. “La gloire” did not intoxicate Joseph. Before he went to his medical examinations he swallowed a bottleful of vinegar, hoping to deceive the doctors, because he had been told this drink would make him look as pale as an invalid. In fact it gave him the violent flush of an enormous health, and he regards his failure to get out of military service as a just punishment for acting a lie. Mild, one would call Joseph, very mild, yet really he has the pathos which war gives to the sensible man:
I wish those who love glory so much would go and find it themselves and not leave it to others.
To tell you the truth [said Zebedee] I think the same as you do, but as they have got us it is better to say we are fighting for glory.
One reads all books on the Napoleonic period with one eye continually jumping forward to the present. The pacifist would naturally jump at a passage like the one I have quoted; but the moral of the book is not pacific. It is patriotic denunciation of despotism, and it is based upon descriptions of what the ordinary man and woman were saying and feeling at the time. Here I think those who are conducting anecdotal propaganda in Germany against Hitler might read the Story of a Conscript with advantage. It is a book full of fruitful murmurs and suggestive ironies. Joseph joins up after the retreat from Moscow, and a wonderful public statement is issued in the town admitting and indeed almost boasting of the catastrophe and calling for more sacrifices.
I quote from R. G. Gillman’s translation in the Everyman Edition:
Harmentier, the police sergeant, came from the watch-house and stood on the top of the steps, with a large piece of paper in his hand, similar to that which was placed on the wall; some soldiers were with him. Everybody ran towards him, but the soldiers made them stand back. Harmentier began by reading the notice, which he called the 29th bulletin, in which the Emperor stated that, during the retreat from Moscow, the horses had died every night by thousands; he said nothing about the men. As the sergeant read slowly and more slowly, the listeners whispered never a word; even the old woman listened dumbly like the rest, although she could not understand French.
The silence was such that one could hear a pin drop. When the sergeant came to this passage: “Our cavalry were so utterly disorganised that it was necessary to form the officers who still had a horse left, into four companies of one hundred and fifty men each; the generals and colonels acting as regimental officers, and those of lower rank as privates”. When he read this, which spoke more than anything for the sufferings of the Grande Armée, I heard groans and cries on every side, and two or three women fell to the ground and had to be helped away.
The notice terminated with these words: “The health of his Majesty has never been better.” This was indeed one great consolation to us; unhappily, this consolation could not bring back to life the 300,000 men buried in the snow, and the people went away very, very sad.
Before the disaster in Russia became known the simple people of Alsace believed that, since Napoleon had conquered the whole of Europe, the war would be over. “You forget,” the sardonic replied, “that there is still the conquest of China.” One can imagine that being said in Germany. Erckmann-Chatrian were, it is true, writing tendenciously after the event; but after all, France had seen the revolution betrayed, and had paid a frightful price for her Fuehrer. At the summit of conquest there is always uncertainty and guilt in the minds of the conqueror’s followers. “It can’t last.” “We shall have to pay.” But Joseph found himself shouting “Vive l’Empereur” with the rest, and could not explain why he shouted with such fervour for the man who had enslaved him.
The conscripts of 1813 and the conscrip
ts today have very much the same experiences. Joseph and his friends soon found themselves standing drinks to the old soldiers, whose thirst was boundless. The veterans were patronising and the conscripts were cocky. Duels between them were common. The second lesson was the foundation of military discipline:
The corporal is always right when he speaks to the private soldier, the sergeant is right when he speaks to the corporal, the sergeant-major is right when speaking to the sergeant, the sub-lieutenant to the sergeant-major, and so on upwards to the marshall of France—even if he were to say that the moon shines in broad daylight or that two and two make five.
This is not an easy thing to get into your head, but there is one thing which is a great help to you, and that is a great noticeboard fixed up in the rooms, and which is read out from time to time, to settle your thoughts. This notice-board enumerates everything that a soldier is supposed to want to do—such as, for instance, to return to his native village, to refuse service, to contradict his superior officer, etc., and always ends by promising he shall be shot or at least have five years hard labour, with a cannon ball fastened to his leg if he does it.
You then sold your civilian clothing and stood the corporals more drinks “as it is well to be friends with them, as they drilled us morning and afternoon in the courtyard”. And the drinks were served by one Christine, an eternal figure.
She showed particular consideration for all young men of good family, as she called those who were not careful of their money. How many of us were fleeced to their last sou in order to be called “men of good family”.
Joseph has no private adventures or affairs on the way. He is the normal prig, the prudent Mr. Everyman, who keeps as far from trouble as he can. He is thinking all the time of his dear Catherine; but Catherine, you feel pretty certain, is not going to be like the rest of the Phalsbourg girls, who turn round and marry someone else the moment their young man joins up and goes away. Joseph’s day-long hope is that he won’t be in the advance guard, that he won’t have to kneel in the front rank of the square when the cavalry charge; and when he gets to billets he is worried about the state of his feet and always manages to awaken the sympathy of the household. The odd thing is that he has our sympathy too. Erckmann-Chatrian succeed in making us prefer Joseph to the rasher and more virile Zebedee who fights a duel with a veteran and kills him with his sabre. The reason for this preference is that Joseph, in his mildness, is exactly the right kind of narrator. His virtue after all is not that of the best boy in the Sunday School; it is the virtue of everyday life, the virtu of peace set against the virtu of war. Such a humble figure shows up the gaudy chaos of war in dramatic contrast. The excellence of Erckmann-Chatrian lies in their continual remembrance of the common human feelings; and in the midst of their battle pieces, as the grape-shot ploughs the ranks and the men take up positions in the upper rooms of cottages, or in the horrible scenes of surgery which occur afterwards, the authors are always exact about the feeling of the simple man. Who does not respond to Joseph’s description of his first action when he came under artillery fire?—
A tremendous cloud of smoke surrounded us and I said to myself if we remain here a quarter of an hour longer we shall be killed without a chance of defending ourselves. It seemed hard that it should be so.
Another point that occurs to me when I read either this book or L’Histoire d’un Paysan (a book which describes all the phases of the revolution as they affected a peasant), is that the modern literature of war and revolution has become too egotistical. What “I” said, what “I” did, what happened to “me”. The modern books from Blunden to Hemingway are all far more horrifying than Erckmann-Chatrian and I wonder how much this is due to their exceptional, personal point of view. For I do not think that the entire explanation is that modern war has become more horrifying. Erckmann-Chatrian can be grim. There is the moment, for example, when a soldier will not believe he has lost his arm until he sees it lying among a pile of amputated arms and recognises it by the tattoo mark. But usually the authors are sparing with this kind of particularity. Although a conscript or a peasant is writing, the predominant pronoun is “we” not “I”; he is writing of all the peasants, all his friends, all the soldiers. The private sensibility is merged with the general and we get a sensibility to the feelings of crowds, classes and masses which was to become one of the marks of nineteenth-century literature and which we have lost. When Erckmann-Chatrian were writing, this had not degenerated into the only too convenient means of melodrama and the vague picturesque. The simplicity and sincerity of the eighteenth century gave the Erckmann-Chatrian “we” a real humanity, a genuine sentiment, a moral charm. The tough, first-person-singular hero of today is rich in knowingness; he knows the ropes far better than a softie like Joseph; but the tough man is poor in feeling, for the Romantic movement has intervened to make his feelings seem both larger and more catastrophically injured than they really are…. Morbidity and insincerity are never far off. This poverty of feeling has affected the tough man’s awareness of his comrades, for he is afraid of betraying himself before them. Our impression, in fact, is that the tough man is more afraid of his friends than of his enemies—a falsification of soldierly character which the “soft school” were incapable of making.
A Swiss Novel
The difficulty, in thinking about Adolphe, is to lay the ghost of Constant. One is listening to Mozart against a disruptive mutter of music-hall which has got on to almost the same wavelength. But this happens with all the Romantics; their passionate exaltation of the first person singular aimed at the solitary cri de cœur but it leaves one with a confusing impression of duet, in which life, with its subversive pair of hands, is vamping in jaunty undertone the unofficial version. Beside the broken heart of the imagined Ellenore, healed at last by death, stands Madame de Staël, in the full real flesh of her obstreperous possessiveness with no sign of mortality on her. She is off to Germany to write a damned good book. And as Adolphe, free at last, contemplates with horror the wilderness of his liberty, up bobs Constant, explanatory about his secret marriage, still hopelessly susceptible, still with a dozen duels before him on account of ladies’ faces and with one leg out of the nuptial couch at the thought of the rather acid enticements of Madame Recamier. It is distressing that a man should obtrude so persistently on his own confessions.
One of the earliest psychological novelists, Constant is enmeshed in ambiguity. He is more than the surgeon of the heart; he is more than the poet of masochism. Adolphe is not the tragedy of unequal love created out of the comedy of his chronic amorousness: it is the tragedy of the imagination itself and rendered in words as melodiously and mathematically clear as the phrases of a Mozart quartet. One understands as one reads Adolphe why the tears streamed down Constant’s face and why his voice choked when he read the book. But he did weep rather a lot. He went weeping about the Courts of Europe with it—taking his precautions. Would Madame de Staël object to this line? Had he sufficiently toned down the money difficulties? (One would like to write the financial side of Adolphe, but that kind of thing was left to the vulgar Balzac.) Had he beaten up his literary omelette so well that none of his wives and mistresses could put out a finger and exclaim, Lo! here, or Lo! there? He was very anxious and very evasive. Never can autobiography—disguised though it was—have emerged from the facts with such a creeping and peeping. There was even a special preface for the English edition, in which, knowing his England, he declared Adolphe was a cautionary tale to warn us of the wretchedness of love which tries to live outside the necessary conventions of society. There is a sort of sincerity in this, of course; Constant had the bullied free-lover’s sneaking regard for marriage as a kind of patent medicine. The dictatorship of Napoleon and the despotism of Madame de Staël had given him a hunger for the constitutional. But for one who thought nobly of the soul he is—well, shall we say, practical?
One looks up from the music of Adolphe, from the cool dissertation of that unfaltering violin, to the noble h
ead of his portrait. At Holland House, when they watched him, aware that they were being entertained by one of the most intelligent scandals of exiled Europe, they must have noticed that he had none of the frank charlatanry of the Romantics. A dignified and even debonair forty, he was sensitive, witty and vivacious. The nose suggests firmness and probity. And yet one can understand that Constant was considered a shade tough. One detects the buried outline of the original human monkey under the half-smile of the small courtier. In the pose and in the eyes there is something of the mandrill’s mask, something of that animal’s vanity and temper. So gentle—and yet Ellenore and Madame de Staël, violent themselves, complain of the rasp of his tongue. The mouth is almost beautiful, a talker’s mouth caught with the perpetual epigram, but it lifts at the corner with an upward twist of slyness. It hints at the hard malice of the inhibited. One does not altogether trust Constant even before one has read Adolphe. One foresees the danger of a cleverness which is indecisive, the peril of an elusiveness which is captivating but never revealing.
What is lacking in the portrait is any sign of the morbid apathy of his nature. M. Gustav Rudler, the most searching editor of Adolphe, says Constant lived in a sort of apathy which “made crises of passion an essential need”. A cat-and-dog life with all those mistresses, duels with young Englishmen—he was still at it in his crippled old age, being carried to the ground to fire from his chair—a wicked senility at the gaming tables. “I leave myself to Chance,” Constant wrote, “I go where it puts me and stay there until it sweeps me away again.” Brilliant and unrevealing in conversation, he buries his serious opinions which he can contemplate only when he is alone. And then the temperature is so cool that the sensibility is still thwarted and unmelted. He lives listlessly and constrained. This is Byronism once more, the beginning of the malady of the age; but Byronism turned analytical, without the guts, without also the hocus-pocus. His world weariness has no sense of theatre; it is not so highly coloured; it is the fatigue which makes for the abstract mind and not for poetic journalism, the sickness of the âmes sèches.
In My Good Books Page 2