Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France | Page 2

particular importance to his individual gesture. He
concentrates his energy in another kind of action.
But the French race is by nature bellicose and amorous of adventure,
and more than all 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 Rozières 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 Barrès

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 Barrès
has brought together with no less tact than passion in his series of
volumes issued under the general title of "L'Ame Française 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 Léon Guillot, in dying, bid his comrades describe
him to his father and mother as "tombé 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, Condé and Plessis-Praslin,--we follow