Letters of a Soldier | Page 3

could return home to his art and his mother. To the
philosophy I have spoken of that would seem a pitiable state of mind.
No one could be less like a Germanic hero than this French artist; and
yet the Germans were in error when they counted on an easy victory
over him and his like, when they made sure that a conscious barbarism
must prevail over an unconscious civilisation.
These letters reveal to us a new type of soldier, a new type of hero,
almost a new type of man; one who can be brave without any animal
consolations, who can endure without any romantic illusions, and, what
is more, one who can have faith without any formal revelation. For
there is nothing in the letters more interesting than the religion
constantly expressed or implied in them. The writer is not a Catholic.
Catholic fervour on its figurative side, he says, will always leave him
cold. He finds the fervour of Verlaine almost gross. He seems afraid to
give any artistic expression to his own faith, lest he should falsify it by
over-expression, lest it should seem to be more accomplished than it is.
He will not even try to take delight in it; he is almost fanatically an
intellectual ascetic; and yet again and again he affirms a faith which he
will hardly consent to specify by uttering the name of God. He is shy
about it, as if it might be refuted if it were expressed in any dogmatic
terms. So many victories seem to have been won over faith in the
modern world that his will not throw down any challenge. If it is to live,
it must escape the notice of the vulgar triumphing sceptics, and even of
the doubting habits of his own mind. Yet it does live its own humble
and hesitating life; and in its hesitations and its humility is its strength.
He could not be acclaimed by any eager bishop as a lost sheep
returning repentant to the fold; but he is not lost, nor is the universe to
him anything but a home and the dear city of God even in the trenches.
His expression of this faith is always vague, tentative, and inconclusive.
He is certain of something, but he cannot say what; yet he knows that
he is certain, although, if he were to try to express his certainty in any
old terms, he would reject it himself. He knows; but he cannot tell us or
himself what he knows. There are sentences in which, as M. Chevrillon
says, he speaks like an Indian sage; but I do not think that Indian
philosophy would have satisfied him, because it is itself satisfied. For

he is in this matter of faith a primitive, beginning to build a very small
and humble temple out of the ruins of the past. He has no science of
theology, nothing but emotions and values, and a trust in them. They
are for a reality that he can scarcely express at all; and yet he is the
more sure of its existence because of the torment through which he is
passing. He uses that word torment more than once. The war is to him a
martyrdom in which he bears witness to his love, not only for France,
but also for that larger country which is the universe. The torment
makes him more sure of it than ever before; it heightens his sense of
values; and he knows that what matters to a man is not whether he is
joyful or sorrowful, but the quality of his joy and his sorrow. There are
times when, like an Indian sage, he thinks that all life is contemplation;
but this thought is only the last refuge of the spirit against a material
storm. He is not one of those who would go into the wilderness and
lose themselves in the depths of abstract thought; he is a European, an
artist, a lover, one for whom the visible world exists, and to whom the
Christian doctrine of love is but the expression of his own experience.
For a century or more our world, confident in its strength, its reason, its
knowledge, has been undermining that doctrine with every possible
heresy. In sheer wilfulness it has tried to empty life of all its values. It
has made us ashamed of loving anything; for all love, it has told us, is
illusion produced by the will to live, or the will to power, or some other
figment of its own perverse thought. And now, as a result of that
perversity, the storm breaks upon us when we seem to have stripped
ourselves of all shelter against it. The doctrine of the struggle for life
becomes a fact in this war;