The year 1917 was marked by a surprise German tactical withdrawal to a new defensive position, the Hindenburg Line. This was born of necessity, the German army had been badly mauled in the twin battles of the Somme and by thus withdrawing, was able to shorten the front line and free up reserves. In so doing, the Germans undertook a scorched-earth policy, leaving nothing behind that might have been of use to the advancing Allies. This left a strong and lasting impression on the French soldiers, who had become used to the sight of destroyed buildings but who were scandalized by the deliberate felling of orchards and the poisoning of wells. Men were also shocked at the pitiful state of liberated civilians, reduced to exhausted subjugation by the occupying forces. All of these factors were used to great effect by the propaganda services and helped bolster national resolve in the face of a creeping war weariness.
Once again the campaign season was afoot. Plans had been drawn up for a joint spring offensive. The new French commander-in-chief, Robert Nivelle, whose star had risen at Verdun, wanted to attack the German-held heights above the river Aisne along the Chemin des Dames. The British would attack at Arras in a diversionary role, drawing away German reserves before the French struck. The British and Empire forces met with initial success before the attack broke down into the traditional stalemate of attritional and static warfare. The French attacked a week later on 16 April 1917. It was, even given the previous failures, an unmitigated disaster. Heralded by Nivelle as the attack that would lead to a breakthrough and the end of the war, the French were massacred. Instead of calling off the attack, Nivelle decided to continue, but the men could do no more. The subsequent crisis is more often described as a mutiny, it was, however, more akin to a series of strikes. The exhausted French army saw units refuse to be wasted in such futile and costly attacks; they would die for France but not for a general desperate for some ardent glory.
The French army did what it could to stifle the events; court martials were held and over fifty of the most militant ringleaders were shot. The French military and government were terrified of a Bolshevik-type uprising which, in light of events in Russia, was a genuine source of fear to the establishment. Offensive action for the remainder of the year was off the cards, they would now wait for the Americans, who had declared war on 6 April, but who would not be ready for offensive action until well into 1918. Measures were taken to try and improve life for the front-line soldier; the system of leave was made more equitable and food was improved. The burden of continuing the war on the Western Front for the rest of the year mostly fell, in terms of offensive action, to the British and Empire divisions.
In 1918 the war, albeit in a relatively minor way, really reached Paris. They had, in the same way as British cities, suffered the odd Zeppelin raid but in 1918 the capital city was within reach of a new long-range artillery gun hidden in the St. Gobain forest. Death would fall out of nowhere and without warning, akin to the V2 rockets that fell on Britain in the Second World War. Hundreds of shells hit the city, reaching a climax on 29 March when the St. Gervais church was hit, causing the roof to collapse and killing 88 people. Gotha bombers were also increasingly a source of death and destruction. Civilians became increasingly superstitious and took to wearing two small lucky charms named Rintintin and Nenette. Morale was also rattled by a series of German offensives. The collapse and subsequent surrender of the Russians on the Eastern Front freed up a vast quantity of men and guns. The Germans knew that they had to unleash their forces in one last roll of the dice before the Americans arrived in sufficient numbers to tip the balance in the Allies’ favour. The first of these attacks was against a weakened and over-extended part of the front line held by the British. As the German tide swept forward a conference was held in Doullens and the decision was taken to name Foch as the supreme Allied commander. Further German attacks were launched against French-held sectors and at one point it looked as though Paris itself would be threatened. However, the Germans had shot their bolt and the Allies rallied, launching a series of counter-offensives in July and August that pushed the enemy back towards the border.
The end of the war brought demobilisation for millions of men and women. Those who hailed from regions through which the war had passed faced years of precarious living in temporary housing or even former dugouts. On the former battlefields they would live with the detritus of war, as they still do to some extent today. The hard-working French peasant returned to areas, such as the Somme, so vital to France’s food requirements and stolidly set to work filling in shell holes and trench lines in order that crops flourish once more. Towns and villages grew used to the sight of the mutilated, not only in body but also in spirit.
As for deserters such as Roux, the war was not over as the French Gendarmerie continued to track them down. It is highly unlikely that the civilian population would have been overly sympathetic to their plight and the returning servicemen would have been even less forgiving. A certain understanding would come later with the advent of pacifist views and literature. Only 1.5% of French men deserted upon mobilisation in August 1914 but this number increased as the war went on and young conscripts became increasingly aware of the realities of the war. Statistics show 15,600 desertions in 1916 and 25,579 the following year. The penalties were severe; prison and forced labour or death. This meant that many felt they had nothing to lose in the event of arrest – there were many cases of gendarmes being shot. Most of France shunned deserters and they had little option but to turn to banditry and robbery as a means of subsistence. Some regions of France, such as Corsica, the Ardeche and the Pyrenees, traditionally less amenable to state intervention, were less hostile and even active in helping hide deserters; indeed many crossed the border into Spain to find refuge, but the gendarmes were often waiting for them many years after the war ended. The official hunt and punishment of deserters did not cease until 1928.
Lawrence Brown
PROLOGUE
The usury of the earth has mastered the pride of the mountains. The lines of peaks incline gently toward one another and unite through the open notches of the hills. From one notch to another, over the shorn grass and the thistles, the uplands seem vainly to seek some limit in space, and every hillock reveals a circular horizon as vast as that of the sea.
Three cold springs that meet on these uncertain slopes and give way suddenly in cascades on a rocky lip of the plateau have hollowed out the valley.
From the highest zigzag of the road that leads us to the village, before entering the narrow shade of the houses, we can see it all, from the two mills of La Besséde as far as the notch of the Pas and the equal peaks of the Aire de Côte.
These mountains—in spite of their uncultivated slopes and their long stone ridges—are not inhuman, for, with a certain foresight and resigned tenacity, one can live there. But while even the highest altitudes permit of houses or villages, they restrict them to exact and limited spots and, while imposing upon them a semi-solitude, welcome them as if with a certain reservation.
The people who live here have accepted still more rigorous inner laws; they respond as scrupulous and wilful masters to the problems that life poses to them and yet their everyday occupations are so severe and so imperious that men of less heroism would gradually lose there the sense of their souls.
They cultivate vines, olives, mulberries, in the lower parts of their domain, and these are the works they delight in, but they also plough the earth for rye, in the long, undulating bands on the mid-slope of the mountain, and cut down the fir-trees and the beeches on the borders of the pastures where the custody of the flocks goes on for ever.
A destiny of security and solitude, an annual cycle of abundance and harsh struggle attaches them to their mountains. They live on olives and grapes, on ears of rye and off the forest.
They are peasants of France, but I do not wish to imply that I have collected their words and reported their acts in an attempt to determine any of the characters of this earthy race, whose spiritual unity or even its general
tendencies I only perceive in rare historic sublimations, not in the course of daily and direct experiences.
I cannot see in them anything but peasants of a certain region of France, and their deeds and their conversation do not seem to me necessarily to represent the consciousness of the vintners of the neighbouring plain, or that of the labourers in the valleys and the hills scattered along the brooks and rivers about the mountains where they dwell.
These mountaineers of the Cévennes obey moral laws that are all their own, but this circumstance does not seem to me to isolate them from the world or to diminish the value of their testimony. I believe, on the contrary, that the forces that bring them close to other men are more resistant and more lasting than those that unite in the national consciousness.
They are born from that narrow but profound experience of life, from that severe but incontestable dignity which is conferred by daily work on the land more than by any other labour; they have drawn their richness from the age-old permanence of a state of culture and equilibrium that has endured for generations, and perhaps from a heart-felt attachment to the early teachings of Christianity.
This simplicity undoubtedly unites these men to all Europe—to the spiritual unity of Europe, and perhaps even to other continents than ours. One must always feel in connection with them this long train of natural affinities which I have thought myself bound to suggest before letting them speak for themselves. …
But at the very moment when I reach the end of this research, a still more imperious obligation urges me to say that there is no country which can give them a more evident and more harmonious relationship than that which France has reserved for them: mountaineers of the Alpine, Pyrenean, and Breton valleys, Ardennais, perhaps, men of Morvan and from the valleys and high pastures of the Juras.
We had spent the night walking on the mountain.
When dawn came, cold and sudden, we had lain in hiding before the mysterious line of the fir-groves and all the morning we had beat about for wild boars in the bogs, which were full of springs. … When a beast was killed we slung it between two beech branches, and bearing the branches on our shoulders with the crucified and bleeding animal we climbed down to the village.
We slung it between two beech branches.
The women had taken advantage of the hunting day to go down to the market in the town. We were alone, masters of our pleasures and our rest.
In spite of the mildness of the autumn and especially of the afternoon that lingered on for a long time in the naked air and over the pavement of the terrace, tired from the hunt and the long hours out of doors we had lighted a fire as a symbol of fatigue and tranquillity.
ROUX THE BANDIT
I
“Roux, he is the man who has done time. In the country everybody calls him Roux the Bandit, and I can’t give him any other name now, I’m so used to it. But, just the same, if he were here, I’d be happy and proud to shake his hand.”
The listeners approved. … All these men of the mountain evidently knew the story of Roux the Bandit. … They had undoubtedly heard it many times already, but on this afternoon of rest they were all willing to hear it once more, and they even lent it the respectful and passionate attention which they could give only to symbolic events.
Their attention manifested in advance the moral value of this story; for, Cévenols of the valley or the mountain, ardently submissive to the discipline of the sacred parables, voluntarily poor in tales and local legends, occupied solely with biblical memories and with a few stories of confessors and martyrs who revived and eternised them, they were unable to be deeply interested in a simple romantic story. When they fastened upon some legend, it was always because they found in it a moral teaching, a logical continuation of the gospels, a sermon that had been lived and upon which they could meditate and argue, as they loved to do with the verses of the Bible.
There is something in this tendency that recalls the Roman custom of the gloss, and these simple keepers of goats and cattle, these thick-set labourers of the north of Gard, make me think of the subtle doctors of the Middle Ages, who carried on unceasingly a debate on the fundamentals of problems without thinking of giving them a new form.
Finiels went on: “We all know him, for he came from Sauveplane, the last farm of our valley toward the mountain. … You will find this farm on the left hand, going up to Luzette, beyond the big fields of the estate of Puéchagut. It is just on the border of the chestnut woods, beside a good spring where you will find the only three poplars of this mountain. Roux lived there, with his mother and his two sisters. He had some property of his own, and his father left him enough to see him through the winters without anxiety if he worked hard. He had this farm, a few vines and a few mulberry-trees over by the valley, and a pasture for his beasts on the mountain. But at Sauveplane the winter is hard, and during the bad season you can do nothing, so that the vines, the beasts, and the few fields of rye, were not enough work for this boy, especially since his two sisters and his mother took charge of the animals and all the work on the farm. So Roux worked most of all on the mountain, in the State woods, where he bought trees to cut down: he did his heaviest work there, and that was the best part of his trade. On the mountain he cut his wood, made up his bundles of faggots, loaded them on his cart and then, when the weather was fine, when the forest roads were firm, he carted them to the station with his pair of oxen, which before the war were worth all of a thousand francs. … In the good season, he spent every week here: my boy would whistle to him as he went by and go down with him as far as Saint-Jean. They had been to school together and taken their diplomas the same year, and it was always a pleasure to them to meet again for a little.”
This detail snatched Roux the Bandit out of his legendary setting. I had thought I divined in him some half-fabulous personage of the ancient local legends. He revealed himself, on the contrary, as a young man like the “boy” who, standing beside me, nodded in approval of his father’s words. …
Thirty-five years old, short in stature but solid, a peasant from his childhood, a product of the elementary school and of wild rambles over the countryside, used to animals—horses or cattle—accustomed to tools and accustomed to the soil. But beneath this completely peasant appearance, you divined the marks of another existence, the long habit of another service than that of the earth, the harsh experience of servitudes harder still than those of labour, of a parsimonious and always anxious life, and of the semi-solitude of the mountain.
Looking at the son of Finiels and the other mountaineers who surrounded us, I replaced Roux amid his fellows and, thanks to these men, I could imagine him clearly and form a good idea of his manner of life. … The vagabond childhood in the narrow circle of a valley between two lines of mountains: the care of the beasts, the search for mushrooms, the carting of dry wood, the gathering of chestnuts and grapes; the general gravity of this childhood, the daily spectacle of the stern peaks and sad valleys, the poverty of the landscape and of the villages and the houses; the river, the highway, the four roads, the thousand paths of the mountains; the austerity of the old people, their authority over everything, the teaching of the home, more dogmatic than that of the school; the religious traditions, the custom of sermons and prayers, the observance of the great rules of Christian morality envisaged with a cold, Protestant, and mountaineer resolution. … Then suddenly, in the midst of these customs, these traditions, this material and moral solitude, the war: and the five years of service, the fatigues and the dangers, the life of war learned as a second trade.
Finiels went on: “On Sunday he would go down to Saint-Jean with his mother and his two sisters for the afternoon service. He could not go to the morning service because of the distance, but he always arranged to have dinner early and to go and be present at the service in the great meetinghouse or at the Methodist chapel. He went more often to the chapel, by preference, having nothing in common with those pillars of the Church who seek above everything to make themselves seen and to i
nsinuate themselves everywhere. He was a straightforward boy who enjoyed hearing the word of God, and although he did not attend all the prayer meetings and all the services, he knew his Bible and respected good morals.
“I would have answered for him as for my own boy and even more so, for he had never been foolish. He paid no attention to the girls, and although he drank his wine heartily nobody ever saw him take a drop too much. …
“To sum it all up, he was a little shy, a little aloof, and I don’t think people saw him laugh very often. He also had an air of severity and a sort of natural pride that kept him from talking to people whom he did not know very well, but if he lived a good deal within himself that was because of the mountain life and the habit of his trade as a woodcutter which left him entirely alone for days at a time, and not because of ill nature or malice.
“Things were drifting along in their usual way when the war came. You know how it caught us: people had been discussing it for many days when, on Saturday, the mobilisation was announced. We all went down to Saint-Jean as if we were going to market and betook ourselves to the Town Hall. There we found the public notices. Drums were beating and the bells of the church and the Protestant chapel were pealing.
“I met Roux on the square, with all the others: the young people were singing, the women were weeping, and we old folks were concerning ourselves for the crops, the livestock, the houses, and other property of the families. … Amid this confusion the mayor passed and shouted to me:
Roux the Bandit Page 2