The Soul of the War by Philip Gibbs

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11

In the days that followed the Second of August I saw the whole
meaning of mobilization in France--the call of a nation to arms--from
Paris to the Eastern frontier, and the drama of it all stirs me now as I
write, though many months have passed since then and I have seen
more awful things on the harvest fields of death. More awful, but not
more pitiful. For even in the sunshine of that August, before blood
had been spilt and the brooding spectre of war had settled drearily
over Europe, there was a poignant tragedy beneath the gallantry and
the beauty of that squadron of cavalry that I had seen riding out of
their barrack gates to entrain for the front. The men and the horses
were superb--clean-limbed, finely trained, exquisite in their pride of
life. As they came out into the streets of Paris the men put on the little
touch of swagger which belongs to the Frenchman when the public
gaze is on him. Even the horses tossed their heads and seemed to
realize the homage of the populace. Hundreds of women were in the
crowd, waving handkerchiefs, springing forward out of their line to
throw bunches of flowers to those cavaliers, who caught them and
fastened them to kepi and jacket. The officers--young dandies of the
Chasseurs--carried great bouquets already and kissed the petals in
homage to all the womanhood of France whose love they symbolized.
There were no tears in that crowd, though the wives and sweethearts
of many of the young men must have stood on the kerbstone to
watch them pass.

At those moments, in the sunshine, even the sting of parting was
forgotten in the enthusiasm and pride which rose up to those splendid
ranks of cavalry who were on their way to fight foi France and to
uphold the story of their old traditions. I could see no tears then but
my own, for I confess that suddenly to my eyes there came a mist of
tears and I was seized with an emotion that made me shudder icily in
the glare of the day. For beyond the pageantry of the cavalcade I saw
the fields of war, with many of those men and horses lying mangled
under the hot sun of August. I smelt the stench of blood, for I had
been in the muck and misery of war before and had seen the death
carts coming back from the battlefield and the convoys of wounded
crawling down the rutty roads--from Adrianople--with men, who had
been strong and fine, now shattered, twisted and made hideous by
pain. The flowers carried by those cavalry officers seemed to me like
funeral wreaths upon men who were doomed to die, and the women
who sprang out of the crowds with posies for their men were offering
the garlands of death.

12

In the streets of Paris in those first days of the war I saw many
scenes of farewell. All day long one saw them, so that at last one
watched them without emotion, because the pathos of them became
monotonous. It was curious how men said good-bye, often, to their
wives and children and comrades at a street corner, or in the middle
of the boulevards. A hundred times or more I saw one of these
conscript soldiers who had put on his uniform again after years of
civilian life, turn suddenly to the woman trudging by his side or to a
group of people standing round him and say: "Alors, il faut dire Adieu
et Au revoir!" One might imagine that he was going on a week-end
visit and would be back again in Paris on Monday next. It was only by
the long-drawn kiss upon the lips of the woman who raised a dead
white face to him and by the abruptness with which the man broke
away and walked off hurriedly until he was lost in the passing crowds
that one might know that this was as likely as not the last parting
between a man and a woman who had known love together and that
each of them had seen the vision of death which would divide them
on this side of the grave. The stoicism of the Frenchwomen was
wonderful. They made no moan or plaint. They gave their men to "La
Patrie" with the resignation of religious women who offer their hearts
to God. Some spiritual fervour, which in France permeates the
sentiment of patriotism, giving a beauty to that tradition of nationality
which, without such a spirit, is the low and ignorant hatred of other
peoples, strengthened and uplifted them.

13

Sometimes when I watched these scenes I raged against the villainy
of a civilization which still permits these people to be sent like sheep
to the slaughter. Great God! These poor wretches of the working
quarters in Paris, these young peasants from the fields, these
underpaid clerks from city offices had had no voice in the declaration
of war. What could they know about international politics? Why
should they be the pawns of the political chessboard, played without
any regard for human life by diplomats and war lords and high
financiers? These poor weedy little men with the sallow faces of the
clerical class, in uniforms which hung loose round their undeveloped
frames, why should they be caught in the trap of this horrible machine
called "War" and let loose like a lot of mice against the hounds of
death? These peasants with slouching shoulders and loose limbs and
clumsy feet, who had been bringing in the harvest of France, after
their tilling and sowing and reaping, why should they be marched off
into tempests of shells which would hack off their strong arms and
drench unfertile fields with their blood? They had had to go, leaving all
the things that had given a meaning and purpose to their days, as
though God had commanded them, instead of groups of politicians
among the nations of Europe, damnably careless of human life. How
long will this fetish of international intrigue be tolerated by civilized
democracies which have no hatred against each other, until it is
inflamed by their leaders and then, in war itself, by the old savageries
of primitive nature?

14

I went down to the East frontier on the first day of mobilization. It was
in the evening when I went to take the train from the Gare de l'Est.
The station was filled with a seething crowd of civilians and soldiers,
struggling to get to the booking-offices, vainly seeking information as
to the times of departure to distant towns of France. The railway
officials were bewildered and could give no certain information. The
line was under military control. Many trains had been suppressed and
the others had no fixed time-table. I could only guess at the purpose
animating the individuals in these crowds. Many of them, perhaps,
were provincials, caught in Paris by the declaration of war and
desperately anxious to get back to their homes before the lines were
utterly choked by troop trains. Others belonged to neutral countries
and were trying to escape across the frontier before the gates were
closed. One of the "neutrals" spoke to me--in German, which was a
dangerous tongue in Paris. He was a Swiss who had come to Paris
on business for a few days, leaving his wife in a village near Basle. It
was of his wife that he kept talking.

"Ach, mein armes Weib! Sie hat Angst fur mich."

I pitied this little man in a shoddy suit and limp straw hat who had
tears in his eyes and no courage to make inquiries of station officials
because he spoke no word of French. I asked on his behalf and after
jostling for half an hour in the crowd and speaking to a dozen porters
who shrugged their shoulders and said, "Je n'en sais rien!" came
back with the certain and doleful news that the last train had left that
night for Basle. The little Swiss was standing between his packages
with his back to the wall, searching for me with anxious eyes, and
when I gave him the bad news tears trickled down his face.

"Was kann ich thun? Mein armes Weib hat Angst fur mich."

There was nothing he could do that night, however anxious his poor
wife might be, but I did not have any further conversation with him, for
my bad German had already attracted the notice of the people
standing near, and they were glowering at me suspiciously, as though
I were a spy.

15

It was an hour later that I found a train leaving for Nancy, though
even then I was assured by railway officials that there was no such
train. I had faith, however, in a young French officer who pledged his
word to me that I should get to Nancy if I took my place in the
carriage before which he stood. He was going as far as Toul himself.

I could see by the crimson velvet round his kepi that he was an army
doctor, and by the look of sadness in his eyes that he was not glad to
leave the beautiful woman by his side who clasped his arm. They
spoke to me in English.

"This war will be horrible!" said the lady. "It is so senseless and so
unnecessary. Why should Germany want to fight us? There has been
no quarrel between us and we wanted to live in peace."

The young officer made a sudden gesture of disgust.

"It is a crime against humanity--a stupid, wanton crime!"

Then he asked a question earnestly and waited for my answer with
obvious anxiety:

"Will England join in?"

I said "Yes!" with an air of absolute conviction, though on that night
England had not yet given her decision. During the last twenty-four
hours I had been asked this question a score of times. The people of
Paris were getting impatient of England's silence. Englishmen in Paris
were getting very anxious. If England did not keep her unwritten
pledge to France, it would be dangerous and a shameful thing to be
an Englishman in Paris. Some of my friends were already beginning
to feel their throats with nervous fingers.

"I think so too!" said the officer, when he heard my answer. "England
will be dishonoured otherwise!"

16

The platform was now thronged with young men, many of them being
officers in a variety of brand-new uniforms, but most of them still in
civilian clothes as they had left their workshops or their homes to
obey the mobilization orders to join their military depots. The young
medical officer who had been speaking to me withdrew himself from
his wife's arm to answer some questions addressed to him by an old
colonel in his own branch of service. The lady turned to me and
spoke in a curiously intimate way, as though we were old friends.

"Have you begun to realize what it means? I feel that I ought to weep
because my husband is leaving me. We have two little children. But
there are no tears higher than my heart. It seems as though he were
just going away for a week-end--and yet he may never come back to
us. Perhaps to-morrow I shall weep."

She did not weep even when the train was signalled to start and
when the man put his arms about her and held her in a long
embrace, whispering down to her. Nor did I see any tears in other
women's eyes as they waved farewell. It was only the pallor of their
faces which showed some hidden agony.

17

Before the train started the carriage in which I had taken my seat was
crowded with young men who, excepting one cavalry officer in the
corner, seemed to belong to the poorest classes of Paris. In the
corner opposite the dragoon was a boy of eighteen or so in the
working clothes of a terrassier or labourer. No one had come to see
him off to the war, and he was stupefied with drink. Several times he
staggered up and vomited out of the window with an awful violence of
nausea, and then fell back with his head lolling sideways on the
cushions of the first-class carriage. None of the other men--except
the cavalry officer, who drew in his legs slightly--took the slightest
interest in this poor wretch--a handsome lad with square-cut features
and fair tousled hair, who had tried to get courage out of absinthe
before leaving for the war.

18

In the corner opposite my own seat was a thin pallid young man, also
a little drunk, but with an excited brain in which a multitude of strange
and tragic thoughts chased each other. He recognized me as an
Englishman at once, and with a shout of "Camarade!" shook hands
with me not once but scores of times during the first part of our
journey.

He entered upon a monologue that seemed interminable, his voice
rising into a shrill excitement and then sinking into a hoarse whisper.
He belonged to the "apache" type, and had come out of one of those
foul lairs which lie hidden behind the white beauty of Paris--yet he
spoke with a terrible eloquence which kept me fascinated. I
remember some of his words, though I cannot give them his white
heat of passion, nor the infinite pathos of his self-pity.

"I have left a wife behind, the woman who loves me and sees
something more in me than vileness. Shall I tell you how I left her,
Monsieur? Dying--in a hospital at Charenton. I shall never see her
again. I shall never again take her thin white face in my dirty hands
and say, 'You and I have tasted the goodness of life, my little one,
while we have starved together!' For life is good, Monsieur, but in a
little while I shall be dead in one place and my woman in another. That
is certain. I left a child behind me--a little girl. What will happen to
her when I am killed? I left her with the concierge, who promised to
take care of her--not for money, you understand, because I had none
to give. My little girl will never see me again, and I shall never see her
grow into a woman. Because I am going to be killed. Perhaps in a
day or two there will be no more life for me. This hand of mine--you
see I can grasp things with it, move it this way and that, shake hands
with you--camarade!--salute the spirit of France with it--comme ca!
But tomorrow or the next day it will be quite still. A dead thing--like my
dead body. It is queer. Here I sit talking to you alive. But to-morrow or
the next day my corpse will lie out on the battlefield, like a bit of
earth. I can see that corpse of mine, with its white face and staring eyes.
Ugh! it is a dirty sight--a man's corpse. Here in my heart something
tells me that I shall be killed quite soon, perhaps at the first shot. But
do you know I shall not be sorry to die. I shall be glad, Monsieur! And
why glad, you ask? Because I love France and hate the Germans
who have put this war on to us. I am going to fight--I, a Socialist and a
syndicalist--so that we shall make an end of war, so that the little ones
of France shall sleep in peace, and the women go without fear. This
war will have to be the last war. It is a war of Justice against
Injustice. When they have finished this time the people will have no
more of it. We who go out to die shall be remembered because we
gave the world peace. That will be our reward, though we shall know
nothing of it but lie rotting in the earth--dead! It is sad that to-morrow,
or the next day, I shall be dead. I see my corpse there-----"

He saw his corpse again, and wept a little at the sight of it.

A neurotic type--a poor weed of life who had been reared in the dark
lairs of civilization. Yet I had no contempt for him as he gibbered with
self-pity. The tragedy of the future of civilization was in the soul of
that pallid, sharp-featured, ill-nourished man who had lived in misery
within the glitter of a rich city and who was now being taken to his
death--I feel sure he died in the trenches even though no bullet may
have reached him--at the command of great powers who knew
nothing of this poor ant. What did his individual life matter? ... I stared
into the soul of a soldier of France and wondered at the things I saw
in it--at the spiritual faith which made a patriot of that apache.

19

There was a change of company in the carriage, the democrats being
turned into a third-class carriage to make way for half a dozen officers
of various grades and branches. I had new types to study and was
surprised by the calmness and quietude of these men--mostly of
middle age--who had just left their homes for active service. They
showed no signs of excitement but chatted about the prospects of the
war as though it were an abstract problem. The attitude of England
was questioned and again I was called upon to speak as the
representative of my country and to assure Frenchmen of our
friendship and co-operation. They seemed satisfied with my
statements and expressed their belief that the British Fleet would
make short work of the enemy at sea.

One of the officers took no part in the conversation. He was a
handsome man of about forty years of age, in the uniform of an
infantry regiment, and he sat in the corner of the carriage, stroking his
brown moustache in a thoughtful way. He had a fine gravity of face
and once or twice when his eyes turned my way I saw an immense
sadness in them.

20

As our train passed through France on its way to Nancy, we heard
and saw the tumult of a nation arming itself for war and pouring down
to its frontiers to meet the enemy. All through the night, as we passed
through towns and villages and under railway bridges, the song of the
Marseillaise rose up to the carriage windows and then wailed away
like a sad plaint as our engine shrieked and raced on. At the sound of
the national hymn one of the officers in my carriage always opened
his eyes and lifted his head, which had been drooping forward on his
chest, and listened with a look of puzzled surprise, as though he
could not realize even yet that France was at war and that he was on
his way to the front. But the other officers slept; and the silent man,
whose quiet dignity and sadness had impressed me, smiled a little in
his sleep now and then and murmured a word or two, among which I
seemed to hear a woman's name.

In the dawn and pallid sunlight of the morning I saw the soldiers of
France assembling. They came across the bridges with glinting rifles,
and the blue coats and red trousers of the infantry made them look in
the distance like tin soldiers from a children's playbox. But there were
battalions of them close to the railway lines, waiting at level crossings,
and with stacked arms on the platforms, so that I could look into their
eyes and watch their faces. They were fine young men, with a certain
hardness and keenness of profile which promised well for France.
There was no shouting among them, no patriotic demonstrations, no
excitability. They stood waiting for their trains in a quiet, patient way,
chatting among themselves, smiling, smoking cigarettes, like soldiers
on their way to sham fights in the ordinary summer manoeuvres. The
town and village folk, who crowded about them and leaned over the
gates at the level crossings to watch our train, were more
demonstrative. They waved hands to us and cried out "Bonne
chance!" and the boys and girls chanted the Marseillaise again in
shrill voices. At every station where we halted, and we never let one
of them go by without a stop, some of the girls came along the
platform with baskets of fruit, of which they made free gifts to our
trainload of men. Sometimes they took payment in kisses, quite
simply and without any bashfulness, lifting their faces to the lips of
bronzed young men who thrust their kepis back and leaned out of the
carriage windows.

"Come back safe and sound, my little one," said a girl. "Fight well for
France!"

"I do not hope to come back," said a soldier, "but I shall die fighting."

21

The fields were swept with the golden light of the sun, and the heavy
foliage of the trees sang through every note of green. The white
roads of France stretched away straight between the fields and the
hills, with endless lines of poplars as their sentinels, and in clouds of
greyish dust rising like smoke the regiments marched with a steady
tramp. Gun carriages moved slowly down the roads in a glare of sun
which sparkled upon the steel tubes of the field artillery and made a
silver bar of every wheel-spoke. I heard the creak of the wheels and
the rattle of the limber and the shouts of the drivers to their teams;
and I thrilled a little every time we passed one of these batteries
because I knew that in a day or two these machines, which were
being carried along the highways of France, would be wreathed with
smoke denser than the dust about them now, while they vomited forth
shells at the unseen enemy whose guns would answer with the roar
of death.

Guns and men, horses and wagons, interminable convoys of
munitions, great armies on the march, trainloads of soldiers on all the
branch lines, soldiers bivouacked in the roadways and in market
places, long processions of young civilians carrying bundles to
military depots where they would change their clothes and all their
way of life--these pictures of preparation for war flashed through the
carriage windows into my brain, mile after mile, through the country of
France, until sometimes I closed my eyes to shut out the glare and
glitter of this kaleidoscope, the blood-red colour of all those French
trousers tramping through the dust, the lurid blue of all those soldiers'
overcoats, the sparkle of all those gun-wheels. What does it all mean,
this surging tide of armed men? What would it mean in a day or two,
when another tide of men had swept up against it, with a roar of
conflict, striving to overwhelm this France and to swamp over its
barriers in waves of blood? How senseless it seemed that those mild-
eyed fellows outside my carriage windows, chatting with the girls while
we waited for the signals to fall, should be on their way to kill other
mild-eyed men, who perhaps away in Germany were kissing other
girls, for gifts of fruit and flowers.

22

It was at this station near Toul that I heard the first words of hatred.
They were in a conversation between two French soldiers who had
come with us from Paris. They had heard that some Germans had
already been taken prisoners across the frontier, and they were angry
that the men were still alive.

"Prisoners? Pah! Name of a dog! I will tell you what I would do with
German prisoners!"

It was nothing nice that that man wanted to do with German
prisoners. He indulged in long and elaborate details as to the way in
which he would wreath their bowels about his bayonet and tear out
their organs with his knife. The other man had more imagination. He
devised more ingenious modes of torture so that the Germans should
not die too soon.

I watched the men as they spoke. They had the faces of murderers,
with bloodshot eyes and coarse features, swollen with drink and vice.
There was a life of cruelty in the lines about their mouths, and in their
husky laughter. Their hands twitched and their muscles gave
convulsive jerks, as they worked themselves into a fever of blood-
lust. In the French Revolution it was such men as these who leered
up at the guillotine and laughed when the heads of patrician women
fell into the basket, and who did the bloody Work of the September
massacre. The breed had not died out in France, and war had
brought it forth from its lairs again.

23

These men were not typical of the soldiers of France. In the
headquarters at Nancy, where I was kept waiting for some time in
one of the guard-rooms before being received by the commandant, I
chatted with many of the men and found them fine fellows of a good,
clean, cheery type. When they heard that I was a war correspondent,
they plied me with greetings and questions. "You are an English
journalist? You want to come with us? That is good! Every
Englishman is a comrade and we will give you some fine things to
write about!"

They showed me their rifles and their field kit, asked me to feel the
weight of their knapsacks, and laughed when I said that I should faint
with such a burden. In each black sack the French soldier carried--in
addition to the legendary baton of a field-marshal--a complete change
of underclothing, a second pair of boots, provisions for two days,
consisting of desiccated soup, chocolate and other groceries, and a
woollen night-cap. Then there were his tin water-bottle, or bidon (filled
with wine at the beginning of the war), his cartridge belt, rifle, military
overcoat strapped about his shoulders, and various other
impedimenta.

"It's not a luxury, this life of ours," said a tall fellow with a fair
moustache belonging to the famous 20th Regiment of the line, which
was the first to enter Nancy after the German occupation of the town
in 1870.

He pointed to the rows of straw beds on which some of his comrades
lay asleep, and to the entire lack of comfort in the whitewashed room.

"Some of you English gentlemen," he said, "would hardly like to lie
down here side by side with the peasants from their farms, smelling of
their barns. But in France it is different. We have aristocrats still, but
some of them have to shake down with the poorest comrades and
know no distinction of rank now that all wear the same old uniform."

It seemed to me a bad uniform for modern warfare--the red trousers
and blue coat and the little kepi made famous in many great battle
pictures--but the soldier told me they could not fight with the same
spirit if they wore any other clothes than those which belong to the
glorious traditions of France.

24

When I was taken to Colonel Duchesne, second-in-command to
General Foch, he gave me a smiling greeting, though I was a
trespasser in the war zone, and he wanted to know what I thought of
his "boys," what was my opinion of the mobilization, and what were
my impressions of the way in which France had responded to the call.
I answered with sincerity, and when I spoke of the astonishing way in
which all classes seemed to have united in defence of the nation,
Colonel Duchesne had a sudden mist of tears in his eyes which he
did not try to hide.

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