On the way to Lavandou, before Lavandou had been exploited, there stood against a belt of pines, an old black barn whose door carried a torn placard of some Government loan, which resembled a grotesque profile. This was a landmark always joyously greeted because it marked for us a stage of our great journey from Spring’s Own Meadow. That placard survived all the war — always preserving its comic appearance. It outlived all the millions of the dead and the hundreds of murdered villages.
At Rheims, which was on one of our northerly circuits, we used to buy candles to burn before Joan of Arc. “But what do you want with candles?” the sacristan would say. (The God who made all the Creeds knew, but we did not.) And, two years after our last visit together in peace time, there remained only the gutted shell of the Cathedral, but, in a corner of the void, lay a metal candleholder — I tried to believe that very one on which we had spiked our useless offerings.
Whatever the sacristan may think, I believe in the miracle that Joan of Arc wrought for France through the bad years of 1903-7, when the children born or begotten under the shadows of the ‘70 war had come to manhood and were (it will happen again in France as it will in England) full of defaitism and that costive ill-will that crawls like a snapping cur on the heels of war. Scientific observers may argue that those years also preluded the entry of young France into the arena of sports. It is incontestable that, more and more at that epoch, were the kiosques filled with little weekly papers of athletic interest; more and more did one meet on the roads young men training severely for walking, running, or cycle contests. But, pari passu, I observed in the churches that Saint Joseph was everywhere being dispossessed from his shrine in favour of Joan of Arc. It is not to the sporting journals but to Joan that I ascribe the renaissance of strength and purpose in the young of France at that hour.
With one exception — and he was a douanier fortified with brandy against the terrible rain of the Nord — I have in twenty-five years’ road-travel met nothing but kindness and prompt help from every one — even from my ancient friends, the gendarmes.
Had I space, or you patience, I could tell you of the Personal Devil of Marsillargues, and of Michel Coste, the village electrician there who saved us from him; of the Boy of Villers Bocage who will unquestionably be the second Lesseps of France; of the veteran of ‘70, on the road to Canigou, who kept bees, and who talked and looked precisely like Anatole France; of the rural postman, survivor of a Madagascar battalion of ‘83–’86 (“Eighty of us, Monsieur, returned out of eleven hundred”), who delivered the superb lecture on the late Mr. Wilson, at the bridge below Bluebeard’s Castle; and of the Lady of Bordeaux who, dressed almost entirely in one hat, also lectured the two embarrassed gendarmes (Do you know that the Bordelais can blush?) and the unembarrassed cab-driver.
At every turn of my ways I gathered a certain amount of knowledge, and, perhaps, a little understanding.
For example, only a few years ago in the Béarnaise, on a hot day — the car halted opposite the house of a big-boned farmer standing by his splendid reversible plough. Behind him, his silky plough bullocks filed in to their dark stalls for the noontide rest.
“Are Monsieur and Madame interested in beasts? Good. Come and look.”
We were presented to each darling by name. It was a thriving establishment with the usual notice of a Government loan on a barn door. Then, underneath a wall by the main road, we saw an infant of four armed with a little green-barked switch which some one had peeled into pretty patterns for him. His office was to keep a flock of baby turkeys in the shadow of that wall as the sun shifted. “Sun is bad for young turkeys”, the farmer observed. “But he knows! He knows all about it. If you took his stick away he’d cry. Wouldn’t thee?”
The babe did not answer. His eyes were on his flock as it piped and cowered beneath the menace of his sceptre. They knew all about it too.
“Your son?”
“Assuredly.” With an arm over the forequarters of an ox who stood as still as a mantelpiece, the farmer talked of “La Terre” and the obligations of those who served it to enter on their vows early.
It was good stuff — well delivered — and impressive in what it took for granted. I dare not paint the horror of an English Administration and all its paid officials if an infant were discovered to be employed in what is legally “agricultural labour”.
But the strength of France is in her soil. If you stood one hundred Frenchmen on their heads, you would find the good plough-mould on the boots of at least seventy-five. They have known in their boyhood the chill before sunrise, and the cool of the evening on the naked chest; the sight, sound, and smell of the worked earth; the hot, dry, rustling cornland before the reapers go in; and the secrets of the dark and tempting barns. They give to La Terre the reverence they deny to some other gods: and she repays their worship.
There is a Town by a great River, where they hold agricultural shows on the main boulevard, attaching electric-power wires casually to the tree-trunks, with no more protection than an occasional warning that, if you touch them, you will perish. (With us, a pensioned Civil Servant would guard every one.) They sell, under the cool shadows of the trees, fascinating farm appliances from bee-hives to wine-presses. Once I asked an agent how long a certain manure-pump would last — marche being the word I used. The answer was illuminating. “If you leave it lying out in the winters, as you English do, it will not marche more than two years. Give it shelter and it will marche for ten.” That is truth. No one can calculate how much the English farmer loses by sheer neglect of his tools, and by sloth at the careless end of the day or season.
And in this same town is a flower-market, where each morning people attend whose little carts are drawn by dogs. The first business of every dog is to assure himself that all his friends and enemies in the square are present. To each, then, the proper word. That delivered, each dog lies down under his cart in silence till market closes and all go home. I was interested in a largish, square-mouthed, black fellow, whose zeal to arrive was only equalled by his choking anxiety to get away. I would have talked to him, but he told me that he was responsible for the cart, and was devoid of social accomplishments.
Afterwards, I foregathered with an old man who carried baggage from the railway station to quiet boarding-houses. His team was a fawn-coloured lady of seven varieties, fresh from maternal duty, and a composite black-and-white pointer. They were delivering a portmanteau at the time, and with some parade; for the lady who received it was evidently friend of all three. “Yes”, said the old man when she had gone. “These two mix themselves in all my affairs. It gives them importance. As guard-dogs, of course, they are useless. They would not interfere with any one because, you see, any one may come out to take a trunk. In our business we must ingratiate ourselves with our clientèle.” (The bitch fawned and feathered round my knees for proof of it.) “Other dogs are different? That is true! You tried to talk to that black one in the Flower Market? But he was in sole charge of his cart! Monsieur, it may serve you to remember that you should never speak to a single dog on duty. Two perhaps may be polite, but one . . . not so often.”
Then he showed me how his team could pull on demand, going up hill.
“In theory why should a dog work at all?” I demanded.
“It is not a theory. It is logic. Because a dog is an animal of intelligence. He knows right and wrong — especially injustice. He loves a position of trust. It gives him his point of honour — his opportunity for devotion. Like a woman in effect. Now, she here has three little ones at home. She will feed them at déjeuner of course. But if I left her behind afterwards, she would bite him when he came back. Just like a woman again! Logically, also, dogs are too wise to be idle. It is an insult to them.”
It cannot be easy to overthrow a people whose men, women, children, and dogs look on work as a natural part of life. With this virtue goes an acceptation of thrift in all things, which makes most things easy.
Again an illustration. At a big Paris post office
a messenger entered to cash a money order and turned away from the wicket leaving one sou lying on the counter. The postal employé who had cashed him the order was serving another customer, and did not notice. But two well-dressed women in the queue instantly warned the messenger of his oversight, in that strict sudden staccato which a Frenchwoman reserves for serious affairs. It was not the amount that mattered but the principle. Call it sou-mindedness if you will. Myself, I respect it.
It makes for simplicity; the acceptance of hard living which fortifies the moral interior as small pebbles assist the digestion of fowls; and it allows its practitioner to be as extravagant as he pleases in speech and oratory. (The Englishman’s inveterate habit of waste explains his inveterate habit of understatement.)
In the course of these years it occurred to me that there existed in France a civilisation at least coeval with ours; equally complete — not to say contented with itself; as incomprehensible as ours but complementary. What of civilisation since the fall of Rome had evolved itself appeared to me to have been due to one or other of those influences; the later systems being predatory, parvenu, or imposed. Therefore, what of civilisation was to continue, lay in our united hands.
This idea precipitated itself out of talks, and experiences trivial or grave, the first part of which I have set down here.
II
FRANCE still remembers (but we have forgotten) how the shadow of war darkened over Europe from 1907 onwards when the watch word “World-Dominion or Downfall” was written, taught, prayed, preached, sculptured, set to music, and legislated for as a Gospel, an end, and a certainty. Part of my winters I then used to spend at a “sports” hotel in Switzerland frequented by German officers. On the day of their Kaiser’s birthday, they would dine — very well — and talk and sing of The Day with great clarity and many threats against all mankind. And not the officers alone. I recall, out of many, an interesting conversation with a most respectable Town Councillor of Hamburg. He laid down for me the minimum of his country’s requirements from England. They included an “order” by the “English Parliament” to our “Colonies” to abolish all tariffs against his country, etc., etc. Failing this, the English were to beware of the “Furor Teutonicus” — as it might have been Ira Normanorum. It was illuminating; it was as plain as the new railway sidings at Hamburg — plain as the Boche Press, or the way in which the German Colonies were armed and used as points of friction and blackmail all over the world. That was before Agadir. Could France or England say they had not been warned? . . .
What the French preparations were is known to us. The English argument was “Fi de manteau quand it fait beau”. Peace being one hundred years old must, they said, be in the immutable order of “Civilisation”. It followed, then, that even to teach respectable Englishmen to stand and walk without falling over each other and themselves was not only absurd but impious. Had we not an immediately effective Army of 80,000 as well as some Field Artillery? In view of the claims of “social reform” on the national purse, what more could be reasonably asked? Those were the years of nightmare!
In ‘13–’14 there was little pretence or concealment. The vital question was England’s attitude. This was put to me, baldly enough, in a little hotel in Central France by a colonel of the 29th of the Line. He said, above a map, indicating the very place, “If you do not prolong our left here, you also will perish!” An Englishman who overheard him, remarked, “That man seemed very full of something or other. What was that goshe (gauche) he was talking about?”
By chance or coincidence, it was about that time — late ‘13 or spring of ‘14 — that I met again in Paris Monsieur Gustave Le Bon. It was as though the wheel had come full circle after thirty years. So, naturally, instead of questioning the future at the pleasant meal, we talked of the past.
A little later, in the hot staleness of an alternately chained and unchained newspaper’s office, an old man said to me, “It is for now! They will obey their orders. We shall not obey even ourselves.” But Monsieur Clemenceau forgot that he had been Mayor of Montmartre during the Siege of ‘70 when, on his notification, the children of the quarter went to school through the shells.
Nor did he foresee that it would be laid upon him very soon to save his country.
. . . . .
My next visit to France was at harvest time in the autumn of ‘15. The little Algerian copy-books had borne fruit in many places. There were multitudes of trains filled with Algerians, Senegalese, and Moroccan troops, commanded by a type of officer new to me and yet indescribably familiar since it handled native troops and delivered low-voiced orders in tongues whose cadence and inflection seemed on the point of giving me their meaning. I asked if there were any difficulty as to Muhammedan food on campaign. I understood that they had not time to consider these things, but, in the case of the stricter sects, sheep and goats were killed after the orthodox Moslem fashion. Yes, so far as was known, all was quiet in North Africa. A man (Lyautey was the name) was in charge yonder, and there was also a certain quantity of wheat ready to ship to France when needed. A bearded, pale-eyed youth, older than his tortured years, told me this in the wreck of a courtyard while the remnant of a native battalion, just come out of action, cooked the evening meal over little fires, as in an Indian caravanserai.
In other places, I saw descendants of my old landlady of the Batignolles — slippered, untidy, voluble — dealing out bowls of soup to the poilus, or driving cows in ploughs not too far behind the shells. That is why I desire a colossal statue on one of the Seine bridges to that enduring woman who also stood fast and said: “Faut pas s’en faire”.
Of the men and officers of the French Army, it seemed to me that the demands of their normal national life had spared them some of the subconscious unease that weighed on our people. Accustomed by heredity and training to the food, exposure, and wasted hours at manœuvres, to lack of privacy and the impact of crowds, they were released from too much desire to dwell on the emotions of civil life. Compare the verse and prose written by combatants of the two races, and you will, I fancy, see a difference.
On the other hand, the French were in their own country and sometimes very near their own homes. In war, as in love, the divided objective leads to the Devil. There was a young soldier from Amiens where his girl also lived. His battalion came, at last, to lie within a few kilometres of the town. Twice he deserted, and twice France, who understands humanity, overlooked it. The third time he was tried and shot in a little chalk-pit within sight of the Amiens road. I had the tale from a child, who told it as savages tell — without comment.
And here is another tale, the authenticity of which I have not yet arrived at. It is ascribed to a General of the kind which is everywhere at unexpected hours. Very early one morning he came across a firing-party, etc., on their way to their duty. The condemned had been found asleep, worn out, on sentry in a front-line trench. The General, who knew his dossier, said to him, “You do not die because of any disgraceful act on your part; but because your death will save the lives of others. It takes more of courage to die thus. So, I will come with you.” His arm around the man, the General accompanied him, and, just before those eyes ceased to see, saluted. There are several Generals whom I could credit with such an act, but I should like to know who it was.
. . . . .
At last there arrived what was called — too justly, as one sees now — an Armistice; and the late President Woodrow Wilson entered to create a new world for us, with no authority whatever from his countrymen to make any arrangements in their name. (His political party was, at the moment, if I remember, in an electoral minority of 1,200,000 votes.)
His countrymen, through their representatives, repudiated, therefore, all the arrangements that he had made. These would have pledged England and the U.S.A. to assist France in event of future German attack, and would have stabilised the future. But a people whose origins, ex necessitate, must have abjured, individually and in writing, all European connections, do not readily embrace
external responsibilities. The United States cleared her skirts of the imbroglio with the alacrity of a shocked schoolmistress. Ethnologically this was inevitable; objectively it was very comic; but, in its consequences, never was so far-reaching a refusal nor confusion more incalculable.
Yet, remember, the importation of the United States into the war was due to our common faults — our common inadequate preparations; our divided counsels and our national follies.
There followed, presently, a passionate propaganda that “Civilisation” should “put Germany on her feet” because she was in economic ruin and her heart had changed. After “Civilisation” had sufficiently studied that ruin and satisfied herself, at some cost, of the worthlessness of German currency, the mark returned to parity as a machine-gun re-hoists itself over the apparently abandoned trench. The manœuvre to abolish her internal debt cost Germany no more than a few thousand old and unusable persons wiped out, perhaps by starvation. It was magnificent, and it was the first step of the real war which began at a quarter-past eleven on the 11th November 1918.
. . . . .
My duties as one of the British Imperial War Graves Commission took me for the next few years over the devastated areas — from that obliteration of all things which had been the Ypres Salient to all but obliterated Rheims, of whose fifteen thousand houses thirty-five, I think, remained intact.
At first the Commission’s great camions, equipped like ships, would push out into oceans of weeds to discover where lay the rough cemeteries of the early years. They would be guided sometimes by voices out of the earth or from beneath indistinguishable bivouacs, saying: “Monsieur, this was Flers”, or whatever might be the name of the wreckage that had once carried a name.
And one met faces that seemed as though fire had passed over them — faces that hurried from one place to another asking for news of relatives — of women and children — who had utterly disappeared during the German “occupations”. What would have been the effect on British mentality if even one hundred civilians had “disappeared” after a raid on England? And what if all the country between Canterbury and Bournemouth had been passed through a sieve for four years?
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 739