Complete Works of Anatole France

by Anatole France

  “Monsieur l’Abbé,” I said to my good master, “do you not think that the profession of arms is looked upon as noble because of the danger one runs therein and the courage that it is necessary to display?”

  “Truly, my son,” answered my good master, “if the state of man is noble in proportion to the danger that he runs I do not fear to state that peasants and labourers are the noblest men in the kingdom for they risk death every day by fatigue or hunger. The perils to which soldiers and commanders expose themselves are less in number and in duration, they last but a few hours in a lifetime, and consist in facing cannon-balls and bullets which kill less surely than poverty. Men must needs be light and frivolous, my son, to give more honour to a soldier’s doings than to the work of a labourer and to place the destruction of war at a higher price than the arts of peace.”

  “Monsieur l’Abbé,” I asked again, “do you not consider that soldiers are necessary to the safety of the state and that we should honour them in recognition of their usefulness?”

  “It is true, my son, that war is a necessity of human nature and one cannot imagine nations who will not fight, that is to say, who are neither homicides, pillagers, nor incendiaries. Neither can you conceive a prince who is not in some measure a usurper. They would reproach him too much on that score, and they would despise him for it as one who was no lover of glory. For war is necessary to men; and is more natural to them than peace which is but war’s interval. Thus one sees princes hurling their armies on one another on the worst of pretexts, and for the most futile of reasons. They invoke their honour, which is excessively touchy. A mere breath suffices to make a stain on it which cannot be washed save in the blood of ten, twenty, thirty, or a hundred thousand men, in proportion to the population of the contending principalities. If only one thinks of it, it is inconceivable that the honour of a prince can be cleansed by the blood of these unhappy beings, or rather one realises that it is a mere form of speech, void of meaning; but for words men go willingly to their death. What is yet more wonderful, is that a prince gains much honour from the theft of a province and the outrage that would be punished by death in the case of some daring private individual becomes praiseworthy if it is carried out with the most outrageous cruelty by a sovereign with the help of his hirelings.”

  My good master, having thus spoken, drew his box from his pocket and sniffed up a few remaining grains of rappee.

  “Monsieur l’Abbé,” I said, “are there no wars that are just, and fought for a good cause?”

  “Tournebroche, my son,” he answered me, “civilized nations have much overstrained the injustice of war and they have rendered it very iniquitous as well as very cruel. The first wars were undertaken for the establishment of tribes on fertile lands. Thus the Israelites conquered the land of Canaan. Hunger forced them to it. The advancement of civilization extended war to the conquest of colonies and foreign markets, as is seen in the example of Spain, Holland, England and France. Lastly, one has seen kings and emperors steal provinces of which they had no need, which they ruined, which they made waste, without profit to themselves and without other advantage than to raise pyramids and triumphal arches. And this abuse of war is the more odious as one must believe that nations are becoming more and more wicked by the advancement of the arts, or rather that war, being a necessity to human nature, is waged for its own sake when there is absolutely no reason for waging it.

  “This reflection grieves me deeply, for I am disposed by my condition and inclination to the love of my fellow creatures. And what puts the finishing touch to my sadness, Tournebroche, my son, is that I find my snuff-box is empty, and want of snuff is where I feel my poverty the most.”

  As much to distract his thoughts from this personal trouble as to instruct myself in his teaching, I asked him if civil war did not seem to him the most detestable kind of war there was?

  “It is odious enough,” he replied, “but not so very inept, for members of a state when they come to blows between themselves have more chance of knowing why they fight than in the case where they go to war against a foreign people. Seditious and intestinal quarrels are usually born of the extreme wretchedness of the people. They are the result of despair, and the only issue left to the unhappy beings who may obtain thereby better conditions and sometimes even a hand in the game of ruling. But it is to be remarked, my son, that the more unhappy, and therefore excusable, are the insurgents, the less chance they have of winning the game. Starved and stupefied, armed but with their rage, they are incapable of great plans or of prudent considerations so that they are easily reduced by the prince. He has more difficulty in putting down rebellion among the great, which is to be detested, for it has not the excuse of necessity. In fine, my son, whether civil or foreign, war is execrable, and has a malignity that I detest.”

  XII. THE ARMY (concluded)

  I WILL show you, my son,” said my good master, “in the condition of these poor soldiers who are going to serve their king, both man’s shame and his glory. In fact, war sets us back and drives us to our natural savagery. It is the result of the ferocity that we have in common with the beasts; not only with lions and cocks, who bring a gallant bearing to it, but with little birds, such as jays and tits, whose ways are very quarrelsome, and even with insects, such as wasps and ants, who fight with a bloodthirstiness of the like of which the Romans themselves have left no example. The principal causes of war are the same in man and animal, who struggle with one another to gain or keep their prey, to defend their nest or their lair, or to gain a mate. There is no distinction in all this, and the rape of the Sabines perfectly recalls those duels between stags which make the woods bloody of a night. We have merely succeeded in lending a certain colouring to base and natural motives by the notions of honour with which we cover them, and without great exactitude at that. If we believe that we fight for very noble motives in these days, the nobility of them dwells entirely in the vagueness of our sentiments. The less the object of war is simple, clear, and precise, the more war itself is odious and detestable. And if it be true, my son, that we have come to killing one another for honour’s sake, it is beyond all bounds. We have surpassed the cruelty of wild beasts, who do each other no injury without good reason. And it is only right to say that man is wickeder and more unnatural in his wars than are bulls or ants in theirs. But that is not all, for I detest armies less for the death they sow, than for the ignorance and stupidity that follow in their train. There is no worse enemy of the arts than a captain of mercenaries or marauders, and as a rule commanders are as unfitted for letters as are their soldiers. The habit of imposing his will by force makes your old soldier very awkward in speech, for eloquence has its source in the necessity of persuasion. Also, military men affect a disdain of speech and fine attainments. I remember having known at Séez in the days when I was librarian to the Bishop, an old captain, who had grown grey in harness and passed for a gallant man, wearing proudly a large scar across his face. He was an old ruffian, and had killed many a man and violated more than one nun quite good-humouredly. He understood his business fairly well and was very particular regarding the appearance of his regiment, which marched past better than any other. In short, a brave man and a good comrade, when it was question of draining a pot as well I saw at the inn of the Cheval Blanc, where many a time I held my own against him. Now it happened one night that I accompanied him (for we were good friends) while he was instructing his men how to find their way by the stars. He first let me have Monsieur de Louvois’ ordinance on the subject, and as he had repeated it by heart for the last thirty years, he made no more mistakes than in his Pater or Ave. He started off by saying that the soldiers must begin by searching the heavens for the pole-star, which is fixed in relation to the other stars, which turn round it in the contrary direction to the hands of a watch. But he did not understand all he said. For after having repeated his sentence two or three times in a sufficiently imperious voice, he stooped and said in my ear:

  ‘Show me this b
eggar of a pole-star, Abbé. The devil take me if I can distinguish it in this mess of candle-ends with which the sky is littered!’

  “I told him at once the way to find it, and pointed it out with my finger. ‘Oh! Oh! cried he, ‘the silly thing is perched very high! From where we are we cannot see it without straining our necks.’ And he immediately gave orders to his officers to withdraw the men fifty paces so they should more easily see the pole-star. What I am telling you, my son, I heard with my own ears, and you will agree that this wearer of a sword had a sufficiently naïve notion of the system of the universe, particularly of the stellar parallaxes. Yet he wore the king’s orders on a fine embroidered coat, and was more honoured in the state than a learned divine. It is this uncouthness that I cannot endure in the army.”

  My good master having stopped to take breath at these words, I asked him if he did not think, despite this captain’s ignorance, that one must have much intelligence to win battles? He answered me in these words:

  “Taking into consideration, Tournebroche, my son, the difficulty that there is in getting together and leading armies, the knowledge necessary in the attack or the defence of a place, and the ability demanded for a good order of battle, one easily admits that only a genius nearly super-human, such as that of a Caesar, is capable of such an undertaking, and one would be astonished that minds were to be found capable of holding all the qualities proper to a true fighting-man. A great commander does not only know the configuration of a country, but its manners and customs, and also the industries of its inhabitants. He keeps in his mind an infinity of little circumstances from which he forms in the end large and simple views. The plans which he has slowly meditated and traced out beforehand, he may change in the midst of action by a sudden inspiration, and he is at the same time, very prudent and very bold; his thoughts move, now with the dull slowness of the mole, now soar up with an eagle’s flight.

  “Nothing is truer than this. But bethink you, my son, that when two armies are in sight of one another, one of them must be conquered; from which it follows that the other will necessarily be victorious, without its chief in command having all the qualities of a great commander, or without his even having one of them. There are, I take it, clever commanders; there are also lucky ones, whose glory is no less. How, in these astounding collisions, are we to disentangle the effect of art from the result of luck? But you are leading me from my subject, Tournebroche, my son, I want to show you that war is man’s disgrace nowadays, but that in other days it was his pride. Of necessity the arbitrament of empires, war has been the great school-mistress of the human race. It is by her that men have learnt patience, firmness, disdain of danger, the glory of sacrifice. The day that the herdsmen first rolled pieces of rock to form an enclosure behind which they defended their women and cattle, the first human society was founded, and the progress of the arts assured. This great good that we enjoy, our native land, that august thing the Romans adored above all their gods, the town, ‘Urbs,’ is the daughter of war.

  “The first city was a fortified enclosure, and it was in that rough and bloody cradle that were nursed august laws, flourishing industries, science and learning. And that is why the true God wishes to be called the God of battles.

  “What I tell you on this subject, Tournebroche, my son, does not mean that you should sign your engagement to this recruiting-sergeant and be seized with the desire to become a hero as the recipient of sixty strokes of the rod on your back every day, on an average.

  “War is, moreover, in our time but an inherited evil, a prurient return to savage life, a criminal puerility. The princes of our day, and especially the late king, will for ever bear the notoriety of having made war the sport and amusement of courts. It saddens me to think that we have not yet seen the end of this preconcerted slaughter.

  “As to the future, the unfathomable future, let me, my son, dream of it as more in accord with the spirit of sweetness and equity which dwells in me. The future is a place where there is room for dreams. It is there, as in Utopia, that it pleases the wise men to build. I should like to believe that nations will one day cultivate the virtues in peace. It is in the increasing size of armaments that I flatter myself I see a far-distant presage of universal peace. Armies will augment unceasingly in strength and number. Whole nations will be swallowed up by them. Then the monster will perish from his surfeit. He will burst from too much fatness.”

  XIII. ACADEMIES

  WE learnt that day that the Bishop of Séez had just been elected a member of the Académie Française. Twenty years ago he had delivered a panegyric on St. Maclou, which was considered rather a good thing, and I am willing to believe that there were some excellent passages in it; for my good master, Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard, had put a hand to it before quitting the Bishop’s palace with Madame de la Baillive’s chambermaid. Monseigneur de Séez was descended from the best Norman aristocracy. His piety, his cellar, and his stable, were justly vaunted throughout the kingdom, and his own nephew dispensed the ecclesiastical patronage all over the country. His election surprised nobody. It was approved by all the world, save by the “grey-stockings” of the Café Procope, who are never content. They are grumblers.

  My good master blamed them gently for their contradictory temper.

  “Of what does Monsieur Duclos complain?” said he. “Since yesterday, he is the equal of Monseigneur de Séez, who has the handsomest clergy and the finest pack of hounds in the kingdom. For academicians are equal by virtue of the statutes.

  It is true that it is the insolent equality of revellers, which ceases, when, the meeting over, my lord bishop steps into his chariot, leaving Monsieur Duclos to splash his woollen stockings in the gutter. But if he does not want thus to be put on a par with my lord Bishop of Séez, why does he rub shoulders with the badge bedecked. Why does he not hie him to a tub, like Diogenes, or like me, to a stall at the Innocents? It is only in a tub, or in a stall, that one can lord it over this earthly grandeur. It is only! there that one is a real prince, and a real lord. Happy is he who has not fixed his hopes on the Academy! Happy is he who lives exempt from fears and desires, and who knows the emptiness of all things! Happy is he who knows that it is equally a vanity to be an Academician, or not to be one. Such a one leads, untroubled, a life obscure and unseen. Fair liberty follows him everywhere he goes. He celebrates in the shade the stilly offices of wisdom, and all the Muses smile on him as on one initiated into their service.”

  Thus spoke my good master, and I admired the pure enthusiasm which swelled his voice and shone in his eyes. But the restlessness of youth fermented in me. I wanted to take sides, to throw myself into the fight, to declare myself for or against the Academy.

  “Monsieur l’Abbé,” I asked. “Should not the Academy call to itself the best minds in the kingdom, rather than the uncle of the man who has the ecclesiastical patronage in his gift?” I asked my good master.

  “My son,” he answered gently, “if Monseigneur de Séez appears austere in his ordinances, great and gallant in his life, and if he is in fact, a paragon among prelates, and pronounced that panegyric on St. Maclou, the exordium of which, relative to the healing of the King’s evil by the King of France, seemed to be noble, do you want the Society to turn him out for the sole reason that he has a nephew as powerful as he is amiable? That would be showing a truly ferocious virtue, and punishing Monseigneur de Séez inhumanly for the grandeur of his family. The Academy wished to forget that. That alone, my son, is sufficiently magnanimous.”

  I was daring enough to make reply to this speech, so carried away was I by the fire of youth.

  “Monsieur l’Abbé,” said I, “allow my feelings to oppose your arguments. All the world knows that Monseigneur de Séez has only become considerable by the suppleness of his character and his manners, and what one admires in him is his skill in detaching himself from both parties.... We have seen him glide gently between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, tincting his pale prudence with the roses of Christian charity....
He thinks he has done enough when he has displeased no one, and all his care is to sustain his position. Thus it is not his great heart which has gained for him the suffrages of the King’s illustrious protégés Neither is it his great mind. For, with the exception of this panegyric on St. Maclou, which he had (as all the world knows) but the trouble of reading, this peace-loving bishop has only let us hear the depressing instructions issued to his clergy.

  “He recommends himself by the amenity of his language and the politenes of his conversation. Are these sufficient titles to immortality?”

  “Tournebroche,” answered Monsieur l’Abbé, civilly, “you reason with the simplicity given to you by Madame, your mother, at your birth, and I see that you will keep your natural candour for long enough. I congratulate you upon it. But innocence must not make you unjust; it is enough that it leaves you ignorant. The immortality that they have bestowed on Monseigneur de Séez does not call for the attainments of a Bossuet or a Belzunce; it is not graven in the heart of an astounded people — it is inscribed in a big book; and you can well understand that these paper laurels only suit the heads of such heroes.

  “If, among the Forty, there are persons of more gentility than genius, what harm do you see in it?