Letters of a Soldier

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Letters of a Soldier

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Title: Letters of a Soldier 1914-1915
Author: Anonymous
Commentator: A. Clutton-Brock André Chevrillon
Translator: V.M.
Release Date: December 15, 2005 [EBook #17316]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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OF A SOLDIER ***

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LETTERS OF A SOLDIER
You do not know the things that are taught by him who falls. I do
know.
(_Letter of October 15, 1914._)

LETTERS OF A SOLDIER
1914-1915
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A. CLUTTON-BROCK
AND A PREFACE BY ANDRÉ CHEVRILLON
AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY V.M.
LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD 1917

Printed in Great Britain

CONTENTS
PAGE INTRODUCTION vii
PREFACE BY ANDRÉ CHEVRILLON 3
LETTERS 33

INTRODUCTION

I have been asked to write an Introduction to these letters; and I do so,
in spite of the fact that M. Chevrillon has already written one, because
they are stranger to me, an Englishman, than they could be to him a
Frenchman; and it seems worth while to warn other English readers of
this strangeness. But I would warn them of it only by way of a
recommendation. We all hope that after the war there will be a growing
intimacy between France and England, that the two countries will be
closer to each other than any two countries have ever been before. But
if this is to happen we must not be content with admiring each other.
Mere admiration will die away; indeed, some part of our present
admiration of the French has come from our failure to understand them.
There is a surprise in it which they cannot think flattering, and which
ought never to have been. Perhaps they also have been surprised by us;
for it is certain that we have not known each other, and have been
content with those loose general opinions about each other which are
the common result of ignorance and indifference.
What we need then is understanding; and these letters will help us to it.
They are, as we should have said before the war, very French, that is to
say, very unlike what an Englishman would write to his mother, or
indeed to any one. Many Englishmen, if they could have read them
before the war, would have thought them almost unmanly; yet the
writer distinguished himself even in the French army. But perhaps
unmanly is too strong a word to be put in the mouth even of an
imaginary and stupid Englishman. No one, however stupid, could
possibly have supposed that the writer was a coward; but it might have
been thought that he was utterly unfitted for war. So the Germans
thought that the whole French nation, and indeed every nation but
themselves, was unfitted for war, because they alone willed it, and
rejoiced in the thought of it. And certainly the French had a greater
abhorrence of war even than ourselves; how great one can see in these
letters. The writer of them never for a moment tries or pretends to take
any pleasure in war. His chief aim in writing is to forget it, to speak of
the consolations which he can still draw from the memories of his past
peaceful life, and from the peace of the sky and the earth, where it is
still unravaged. He is, or was, a painter (one cannot say which, for he is
missing), and the moment he has time to write, he thinks of his art

again. It would hardly be possible for any Englishman to ignore the war
so resolutely, to refuse any kind of consent to it; or, if an Englishman
were capable of such refusal, he would probably be a conscientious
objector. We must romanticise things to some extent if we are to
endure them; we must at least make jokes about them; and that is where
the French fail to understand us, like the Germans. If a thing is bad to a
Frenchman, it is altogether bad; and he will have no dealings with it.
He may have to endure it; but he endures gravely and tensely with a sad
Latin dignity, and so it is that this Frenchman endures the war from
first to last. For that reason the Germans, after their