Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France | Page 2

other nations has a tendency to clothe its patrimonial ardour of defence in beautiful terms and gallant attitudes. This is one of the points on which the British race, with its scrupulous reserve, often almost its affectation of self-depreciating shyness, differs most widely from the French, and is most in need of sympathetic imagination in dealing with a noble ally whose methods are not necessarily the same as ours. It is difficult to fancy a young English lieutenant quoting with rapturous approval, as Pierre de Rozi��res and Henri Lagrange did in August 1914, the counsels which were given more than a hundred years ago by the Prince de Ligne: "Let your brain swim with enthusiasm! Let honour electrify your heart! Let the holy flame of victory shine in your eyes! as you hoist the glorious ensigns of renown let your souls be in like measure uplifted!" A perpetual delirium or intoxication is the state of mind which is recommended by this "heart of fire," as the only one becoming in a French officer who has taken up arms to defend his country.
For the young men who consciously adopted the maxims of the Prince de Ligne as their guide at the opening of this war, M. Maurice Barr��s has found the name of "Traditionalists." They are those who followed the tradition of the soldierly spirit of France in its three main lines, in its individualism, in its intelligence, in its enthusiasm. They endeavoured, in those first months of agony and hope, to model their conduct on the formulas which their ancestors, the great moralists of the past, had laid down for them. Henri Lagrange, who fell at Montereau in October 1915, at the age of twenty, was a type of hundreds of others. This is how his temper of mind, as a soldier, is described by his friend Maxime Brienne:--
"The confidence of Lagrange was no less extraordinary than was his spirit of sacrifice. He possessed the superhuman severity which comes from being wholly consecrated to duty.... With a magnificent combination of logic and of violence, with a resolution to which his unusually lucid intelligence added a sort of methodical vehemence, he expressed his conviction that resolute sacrifice was necessary if the result was to be a definite success.... He declared that a soldier who, by force of mind and a sentiment of honour and patriotism, was able to conquer the instinct of fear, should not merely "fulfil" his military duty with firmness, but should hurl himself on death, because it was only at that price that success could be obtained over a numerical majority."
This is a revelation of that individualism which is characteristic of the trained French character, a quality which, though partly obscured by the turn the great struggle has taken, will undoubtedly survive and ultimately reappear. It is derived from the admonitions of a series of moral teachers, and in the wonderful letters which M. Maurice Barr��s has brought together with no less tact than passion in his series of volumes issued under the general title of "L'Ame Fran?aise et la Guerre," we have an opportunity of studying it in a great variety of situations. This is but a portion, and it may be but a small portion, of the multiform energy of France, and it is capable, of course, of being subjected to criticism. That, in fact, it has had to endure, but it is no part of my business here, nor, if I may venture to say so, is it the business of any Englishman to criticise at any time, except in pathetic admiration, an attitude so beautiful, and marked in its self-sacrifice by so delicate an effusion of scrupulous good taste. We are in presence of a field of those fluttering tricolor flags which fill the eyes of a wanderer over the battle-centres of the Marne with a passion of tears. We are in presence of the memorials of a chivalry that did not count the price, but died "joyfully" for France.[1]
[Footnote 1: The poet L��on Guillot, in dying, bid his comrades describe him to his father and mother as "tomb�� au champ d'honneur et mort joyeusement pour son pays."--"Les Diverses Familles Spirituelles de la France," pp. 178, 179.]
There is not much advantage in searching for the germs of all this exalted sentiment earlier than the middle of the seventeenth century. The malady of the Fronde was serious precisely because it revealed the complete absence, in the nobles, in the clergy, in the common people, of patriotic conviction of any kind. Cardinal's men and anti-cardinalists, Mazarin and Monsieur, Cond�� and Plessis-Praslin,--we follow the bewildering turns of their fortune and the senseless evolution of their mercenaries, without being able to trace any moral line of conduct, any ethical aim on the part of the one or the