Letters of a Soldier | Page 9

in horror. And, perhaps
for that very reason, he sought its explanation. It is by violence that an
imperfect and provisional state of things is shattered, and what was lax
is put into action again. Life is resumed, and a better order becomes
possible. Here again we find his acceptance, his submission to the
Reason that directs the universe; confidence in what _takes place_--that
is his conclusion.
Such times for him are times of observation properly so called, of purer
thought in which the impulses of the painter and the poet have no share.
That kind of observation is not infrequent with him, when he is dealing
with the world and with human action. It awakes at a war-spectacle, at
a trait of manners, at the reading of a book, at a recollection of history
or art; it is often to the Bible that he turns, and, amid the worst
clamours, to the beautiful plastic images of Greece. Admirable is such
serene energy of a spirit able to live purely as a spirit. It is admirable,
but it is not unique; great intellectual activity is not uncommon with the
French; others of our soldiers are philosophers among the shells. What
does set these letters in a place apart is something more profound and
more organic than thought, and that is sentiment; sentiment in its
infinite and indefinite degrees, its relation to the aspects of nature--in a
word, that poetic faculty which is akin to the musical, proceeding as
they both do from the primitive ground-work of our being, and uniting
in the inflexions of rhythm and of song. I have already named Shelley
in connexion with the poet we are considering. And it is a Shelleyan
union with the most intimate, the most inexpressible things in nature
that is revealed in such a note as the following: 'A nameless day, a day
without form, yet a day in which the Spring most mysteriously begins
to stir. Warm air in the lengthening days; a sudden softening, a
weakening of nature.' In describing this atmosphere, this too sudden
softness, he uses a word frequent in the vocabulary of
Shelley--'fainting.' In truth, like the great English poet, whom he seems
not to have known, he seeks from the beauty of things a faculty of
self-forgetfulness in lyrical poetry, an inexpressible and blissful passing
of the poet's being into the thing he contemplates. What he makes his

own in the course of those weeks, what he remembers afterwards, and
what he would recall, never to lose it again, is the culminating moment
in which he has achieved self-forgetfulness and reached the ineffable.
The simplest of natural objects is able to yield him such a moment; see,
for instance, this abrupt intuition: 'I had lapsed from my former sense
of the benediction of God, when suddenly the beauty--all the beauty--of
a certain tree spoke to my inmost heart; and then I understood that an
instant of such contemplation is the whole of life.' And still more
continuous, still more vibrant, is at times his emotion, as when the bow
draws out to the utmost a long ecstatic tone from a sensitive violin.
'What joy is this perpetual thrill in the heart of Nature! That same
horizon of which I had watched the awakening, I saw last night bathe
itself in rosy light; and then the full moon went up into a tender sky,
fretted by coral and saffron trees.' It is very nearly ecstasy with him in
that astonishing Christmas night which no one then at the front can ever
forget--a solemn night, a blue night, full of stars and of music, when the
order and the divine unity of the universe stood revealed to the eyes of
men who, free for a moment from the dream of hatred and of blood,
raised one chant along six miles, 'hymns, hymns, from end to end.'
Of the carnage in February there are a few precise notes, sufficient to
suggest the increasing horror. The narrative grows quicker; the reader is
aware of the pulse and the impetus of action, the imperious summons
of duty; the young sergeant is in charge of men, and has to execute
terrible tasks. But ever across the tumult and the slaughter, there are
moments of recollection and of compassion; and, in the evening of a
day of battle, what infinite tranquillity among the dead! At this period
there are no more notes of landscape effects; the description is of the
war, technical; otherwise the writer's thought is not of earth at all. Once
only, towards the end, we find a sorrowful recollection of himself, a
profound lamentation at the remembrance of bygone hopes, of bygone
work, of the immensity of the sacrifice. 'This war is long, too long for
those who had something