Letters of a Soldier | Page 6

the shapes it
calls up, striving in each one to rise nearer to light, to knowledge, and
to peace. And that aim is a law and a command to every thinking being
that he should give himself wholly for the general and final good.
Thence comes the grave satisfaction of those who devote themselves,
of those who die, in the cause of life, in the thought of a sacrifice not
useless. 'Tell ---- that if fate strikes down the best, there is no injustice;
those who survive will be the better men. You do not know the things
that are taught by him who falls. I do know.' And even more complete
is the sacrifice when the relinquishment of life, when the renunciation
of self, means the sacrifice of what was dearer than self, and would
have been a life's joy to serve. There was the 'flag of art, the flag of
science,' that the boy loved and had begun to carry--with what a thrill

of pride and faith! Let him learn to fall without regrets. 'It is enough for
him to know that the flag will yet be carried.'
A simple, a common obedience to the duty at hand is the practical
conclusion of that high Indian wisdom when illusions are past. Not to
retreat into the solitude, not to retire into the inaction, that he has
known and prized; to fight at the side of his brothers, in his own rank,
in his own place, with open eyes, without hope of glory or of gain, and
because such is the law: this is the commandment of the god to the
warrior Arjuna, who had doubted whether he were right in turning
away from the Absolute to take part in the evil dream of war. 'The law
for each is that he should fulfil the functions determined by his own
state and being. Let every man accept action, since he shares in that
nature the methods of which make action necessary.' Plainly, it is for
Arjuna to bend his bow among the other Kshettryas. The young
Frenchman had not doubted. But it will be seen by his letters how, in
the horror of carnage, as in the tedious and patient duties of the mine
and the trench, he too had kept his eyes upon eternal things.
I would not insist unduly upon this union of thought. He had hardly
gained, through a few extracts from the Ramayana, a glimpse of the
august thought of ancient Asia. Yet, with all the modern shades of ideas,
with all the very French precision of form, the soul that is revealed in
these letters, like that of Amiel, of Michelet, of Tolstoi, of Shelley,
shows certain profound analogies with the tender and mystical genius
of the Indies. Strange is that affinity, bearing witness as it does not only
to his profound need of the Universal and the Absolute, but to his
intuitive sympathy with the whole of life, to his impulses of love for the
general soul of fruitfulness and for all its single and multitudinous
forms. 'Love'--this is one of the words most often recurring in these
letters. Love of the country of battle; love of the plain over which the
mornings and the evenings come and go as the emotions come and go
over a sensitive face; love of the trees with their almost human
gesture--of one tree, steadfast and patient in its wounds, 'like a soldier';
love of the beautiful little living creatures of the fields which, in the
silence of earliest morning, play on the edges of the trench; love of all
things in heaven and earth--of that tender sky, of that French soil with

its clear and severe outlines; love, above all, of those whom he sees in
sufferings and in death at his side; love of the good peasants, the
mothers who have given their sons, and who hold their peace, dry their
tears, and fulfil the tasks of the vineyard and the field; love of those
comrades whose misery 'never silenced laughter and song'--'good men
who would have found my fine artistic robes a bad encumbrance in the
way of their plain duty'; love of all those simple ones who make up
France, and among whom it is good to lose oneself; love of all men
living, for it is surely not possible to hate the enemy, human flesh and
blood bound to this earth and suffering as we too suffer; love of the
dead upon whom he looks, in the impassive beauty, silence, and
mystery revealed beneath his meditative eyes.
It is by his close attention to the interior and spiritual significance of
things that this painter is proved to be a poet, a religious poet who has
sight, in this world, of the essence of being,