Letters of a Soldier | Page 2

failure on the
Marne, counted on the nervous exhaustion of the French. It was a
favourite phrase with them--one of those formulæ founded on
knowledge without understanding which so often mislead them.--Their
formula for us was that we cared for nothing but football and
marmalade.--But reading these letters one can understand how they
were deceived. The writer of them seems to be always enduring tensely.
It is part of his French sincerity never to accept any false consolation.
He will not try to believe what he knows to be false, even so that he
may endure for the sake of France. Yet he does endure, and all France
endures, in a state of mind that would mean weakness in us and utter
collapse in the Germans. The war is to him like an incessant noise that
he tries to forget while he is writing. He does not write as a matter of
duty, and so that his mother may know that he is still living; rather he
writes to her so that he may ease a little his desire to talk to her. We are
used to French sentiment about the mother; it is a commonplace of
French eloquence, and we have often smiled at it as mere sentimental
platitude; but in these letters we see a son's love for his mother no
longer insisted upon or dressed up in rhetoric, but naked and
unconscious, a habit of the mind, a need of the soul, a support even to
the weakness of the flesh. Such affection with us is apt to be, if not
shamefaced, at least a little off-hand. Often it exists, and is strong; but
it is seldom so constant an element in all joy and sorrow. The most
loving of English sons would not often rather talk to his mother than to
any one else; but one knows that this Frenchman would rather talk to
his mother than to any one else, and that he can talk to her more
intimately than to any woman or man. One can see that he has had the
long habit of talking to her thus, so that now he does it easily and

without restraint. He tells her the deepest thoughts of his mind,
knowing that she will understand them better than any one else. That
foreboding which the mother felt about her baby in Morris's poem has
never come true about him:
'Lo, here thy body beginning, O son, and thy soul and thy life, But how
will it be if thou livest and enterest into the strife, And in love we dwell
together when the man is grown in thee, When thy sweet speech I shall
hearken, and yet 'twixt thee and me Shall rise that wall of distance that
round each one doth grow, And maketh it hard and bitter each other's
thought to know?'
This son has lived and entered into the strife indeed; but the wall of
distance has not grown round him; and, as we read these letters, we
think that no French mother would fear the natural estrangement which
that English mother in the poem fears. The foreboding itself seems to
belong to a barbaric society in which there is a more animal division of
the sexes, in which the male fears to become effeminate if he does not
insist upon his masculinity even to his mother. But this Frenchman has
left barbarism so far behind that he is not afraid of effeminacy; nor does
he need to remind himself that he is a male. There is a philosophy to
which this forgetfulness of masculinity is decadence. According to that
philosophy, man must remember always that he is an animal, a proud
fighting animal like a bull or a cock; and the proudest of all fighting
animals, to be admired at a distance by all women unless he
condescends to desire them, is the officer. No one could be further from
such a philosophy than this Frenchman; he is so far from it that he does
not seem even to be aware of its existence. He hardly mentions the
Germans and never expresses anger against them. The worst he says of
them almost makes one smile at its naïve gentleness. 'Unfortunately,
contact with the German race has for ever spoilt my opinion of those
people.' They are to him merely a nation that does not know how to
behave. He reminds one of Talleyrand, who said of Napoleon after one
of his rages: 'What a pity that so great a man should have been so badly
brought up.' But there was malice in that understatement of
Talleyrand's; and there is none in the understatement of this Frenchman.
He has no desire for revenge; his only wish is that his duty were done

and that he