Letters of a Soldier | Page 7

in ineffable varieties:
painter, and poet, and musician also, for in the trenches he lives with
Beethoven, Handel, Schumann, Berlioz, carrying in his mind their
imaginings and their rhythms, and conceiving also within himself 'the
loveliest symphonies fully orchestrated.' Secret riches, intimate powers
of consolation and of joy, able, in the gloomiest hours, in the dark and
the mud of long nights on guard, to speak closely to the soul, or snatch
it suddenly and swiftly to distances and heights. Schumann, Beethoven:
between those two immortal spirits that made music for all human ears,
and the harsh pedants, the angry protagonists of Germanism, who have
succeeded in transforming a people into a war-machine, what likeness
is there? Have we not made the genius of those two ours by
understanding them as we understand them, and by so taking them into
our hearts? Are they not friends of ours? Do they not walk with us in
those blessed solitudes wherein our truest self awakens, and where our
thoughts flow free?
It is the greatest of all whom a certain group of our soldiers invoke in
those days before the expected battle in which some of them are to fall.
They are in the depths of a dug-out. 'There, in complete darkness, night
was awaited for the chance to get out. But once my fellow
non-commissioned officers and I began humming the nine symphonies

of Beethoven. I cannot tell what great thrill woke those notes within us.'
That almost sacred song, those heroic inspirations at such a
moment--how do they not give the lie to German theories as to the
limitations of French sensibility! And what poet of any other race than
ours has ever looked upon Nature with more intimate eyes, with a heart
more deeply moved, than his whose inner soul is here expressed?
* * * * *
These letters, despatched day by day from the trench or the billet,
follow each other progressively as a poem does, or a song. A whole life
unfolds, the life of a soul which we may watch through the monotony
of its experiences, overcoming them all, or, again, rapt at the coming of
supreme trials (as in February and in April) into perfect peace. It is well
that we should trace the spiritual progress of such a dauntless will. No
history of an interior life was ever more touching. That will is set to
endurance, and terrible at times is the effort to endure; we divine this
beneath the simple everyday words of the narrative. Here is an artist
and a poet; he had chosen his life, he had planned it, by no means as a
life of action. His whole culture, his whole self-discipline, had been
directed to the further refining of a keen natural sensibility. Necessarily
and intentionally he had turned towards solitude and contemplation. He
had known himself to be purely a mirror for the world, tarnishable
under the breath of the crowd. But now it was for him to lead a life
opposed to his former law, contrary to his plan; and this not of
necessity but by a completely voluntary act. That ego he had so
jealously sheltered, in face of the world yet out of the world, he was
now to yield up, to cast without hesitation or regret into the thick of
human wars; he was no longer to spend his days apart from the jostling
and the shouldering and the breath of troops; he was to bear his part in
the mechanism that serves the terrible ends of war. And the close of a
life which he would have pronounced, from his former point of view, to
be slavery--the close might be speedy death. He had to bring himself to
look upon his old life--the life that was lighted by his visions and his
hopes, the life that fulfilled his sense of universal existence--as a mere
dream, perhaps never to be dreamed again.

That is what he calls 'adapting himself.' And how the word recurs in his
letters! It is a word that teaches him where duty lies, a duty of which
the difficulty is to be gauged by the difference of the present from the
past, of the bygone hope from the present effort. 'In the fulness of
productiveness,' he confesses, 'at the hour when life is flowering, a
young creature is snatched away, and cast upon a barren soil where all
he has cherished fails him. Well, after the first wrench he finds that life
has not forsaken him, and sets to work upon the new ungrateful ground.
The effort calls for such a concentration of energy as leaves no time for
either hopes or fears. And I manage it, except only in moments of
rebellion (quickly suppressed) of the thoughts and wishes of