Letters of a Soldier | Page 4

but, if it were true, what creature endowed
with reason would find life worth struggling for? Certainly not the
writer of these letters. He fought, not only for his country, but to
maintain a contrary doctrine; and we see him and a thousand others
passing through the fiercest trial of faith at the moment when the mind
of man has been by its own perverse activity stripped most bare of faith.
So he cannot even express the faith for which he is ready to die; but he
is ready to die for it. A few years ago he would have been sneered at for
the vagueness of his language, but no one can sneer now. The dead will
not spoil the spring, he says No, indeed: for by their death they have
brought a new spring of faith into the world.

A. CLUTTON-BROCK.

LETTERS OF A SOLDIER
AUGUST 1914-APRIL 1915
PREFACE BY ANDRÉ CHEVRILLON

PREFACE BY ANDRÉ CHEVRILLON
The letters that follow are those of a young painter who was at the front
from September [1914] till the beginning of April [1915]; at the latter
date he was missing in one of the battles of the Argonne. Are we to
speak of him in the present tense or in the past? We know not: since the
day when the last mud-stained paper reached them, announcing the
attack in which he was to vanish, what a close weight of silence for
those who during eight months lived upon these almost daily letters!
But for how many women, how many mothers, is a grief like this
to-day a common lot!
In the studio and amid the canvases upon which the young man had
traced the forms of his dreams, I have seen, piously placed in order on a
table, all the little papers written by his hand. A silent presence--I was
not then aware what manner of mind had there expressed
itself--revisiting this hearth: a mind surely made to travel far abroad
and cast its lights upon multitudes of men.
It was the mind of a complete artist, but of a poet as well, that had
lurked under the timid reserves of a youth who at thirteen years of age
had left school for the studio, and who had taught himself, without help
from any other, to translate the thoughts that moved him into such
words as the reader will judge of. Here are tenderness of heart, a
fervent love of Nature, a mystical sense of her changing moods and of
her eternal language: all those things of which the Germans, professing
themselves heirs of Goethe and of Beethoven, imagine they have the

monopoly, but of which we Frenchmen have the true perception, and
which move us in the words written by our young countryman for his
most dearly beloved and for himself.
It is singularly touching to find in the spiritual, grave, and religious
temper of these letters an affinity to the spirit of many others written
from the front. During those weeks, those endless months of winter in
the mud or the frost of the trenches, in the daily sight of death, in the
thought of that death coming upon them also, closing upon them to seal
their eyes for ever, these boys seem to have faced the things of eternity
with a deeper insight and a keener feeling, as each one, in the full
strength of life and youth, dwelt upon the thought of beholding the
world for the last time:
'Et le monde allait donc mourir Avec mes yeux, miroir du monde.'
Solemn thought for the man who has watched through a long night in
some advance-post, and who, beyond the grey and silent plain where
lurks the enemy, sees a red sun rise yet once more upon the world! 'O
splendid sun, I wish I could see you again!' wrote once, on the evening
of his advance upon French ground, a young Silesian soldier who fell
upon the battlefield of the Marne, and whose Journal has been
published. Suddenly breaks in this mysterious cry in the course of
methodical German notes on food and drink, stages of the march,
blistered feet, the number of villages set on fire. And in how many
French letters too have we found it--that abrupt intuition! It is always
the same, in many and various words: in those of the agriculturist of the
Seine-et-Marne, whom I could name, and who for perhaps the first time
in his life takes an interest in the sunset; in those of the young
middle-class Parisian who had seemed incapable of speech save in
terms of unbelief and burlesque; in those of the artist who utters his
emotion in poetry and lifts it up to the heights of stoical philosophy.
Through all unlikenesses, in the hearts of