Letters of a Soldier | Page 5

all--peasant, citizen, soldier,
German schoolmaster--one prevailing thought is revealed; the living
man, passing away, feels, at the approach of eternal night, an exaltation
of his sense of the splendour of the world. O miracle of things! O
divine peace of this plain, of these trees, of these hillsides! And how

keenly does the ear listen for this infinite silence! Or we hear of the
immensities of night where nothing remains except light and flame: far
off, the smouldering of fires; far up, the sparkle of stars, the shapes of
constellations, the august order of the universe. Very soon the rattle of
machine-guns, the thunder of explosives, the clamour of attack will
begin anew; there will again be killing and dying. What a contrast of
human fury and eternal serenity! More or less vaguely, and for a brief
moment, there comes into passing life a glimpse of the profound
relation of the simple things of heaven and earth with the mind of him
who contemplates them. Does man then guess that all these things are
indeed himself, that his little life and the life of the tree yonder,
thrilling in the shiver of dawn, and beckoning to him, are bound
together in the flood of universal life?
* * * * *
For the artist of whom we are now reading, such intuitions and such
visions were the delight of long months in the trenches. Under the free
sky, in contact with the earth, in face of the peril and the sight of death,
life seemed to him to take a sudden and strange expansion. 'From our
life in the open air we have gained a freedom of conception, an
amplitude of thought, which will for ever make cities horrible to those
who survive the war.' Death itself had become a more beautiful and a
more simple thing; the death of soldiers on whose dumb shapes he
looked with pious eyes, as Nature took them back into her maternal
care and mingled them with her earth. Day by day he lived in the
thought of eternity. True, he kept a feeling heart for all the horror, and
compassion for all the pain; as to his duty, the reader will know how he
did that. But, suffering 'all the same,' he took refuge in 'the higher
consolations.' 'We must,' he writes to those who love him and whom he
labours--with what constant solicitude!--to prepare for the worst, 'we
must attain to this--that no catastrophe whatsoever shall have power to
cripple our lives, to interrupt them, to set them out of tune. . . . Be
happy in this great assurance that I give you--that up till now I have
raised my soul to a height where events have had no empire over it.'
These are heights upon which, beyond the differences of their teachings
and their creeds, all great religious intuitions meet together; upon

which illusions are no more, and the soul rejects the pretensions of self,
in order to accept what is. 'Our sufferings come from our small human
patience taking the same direction as our desires, noble though they
may be. . . . Do not dwell upon the personality of those who pass away
and of those who are left; such things are weighed only in the scales of
men. We should gauge in ourselves the enormous value of what is
better and greater than humanity.' In truth, death is impotent because it
too is illusory, and 'nothing is ever lost.' So this young Frenchman, who
has yet never forgone the language of his Christianity, rediscovers amid
the terrors of war the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius--that virtue which is
'neither patience nor too great confidence, but a certain faith in the
order of all things, a certain power of saying of each trial, "It is well."'
And, even beyond stoicism, it is the sublime and antique thought of
India that he makes his own, the thought that denies appearances and
differences, that reveals to man his separate self and the universe, and
teaches him to say of the one, 'I am not this,' and of the other, 'that, I
am.' Wonderful encounter of thoughts across the distance of ages and
the distance of races! The meditation of this young French soldier, in
face of the enemy who is to attack on the morrow, resumes the strange
ecstasy in which was rapt the warrior of the Bhagavad Gita between
two armies coming to the grapple. He, too, sees the turbulence of
mankind as a dream that seems to veil the higher order and the Divine
unity. He, too, puts his faith in that 'which knows neither birth nor
death,' which is 'not born, is indestructible, is not slain when this body
is slain.' This is the perpetual life that moves across all