Letters of a Soldier, 1914-1915. Eugène Emmanuel Lemercier
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 the past. But I need my whole strength at times for keeping down the pangs of memory and accepting what is.'
Indeed, strength was called for day by day. This 'adaptation' was no transformation. But by a continuous act of vital energy he assimilated all that he drew from his surroundings. Thus he fed his heart, and kept his own ideals. This was a way to renounce all things, and by renunciation to keep the one thing needful, to remain himself, to live, and not only to live but to flourish; to have a part in that universal life which produces flowers in nature, art and poetry in man. To gain so much, all that was needed was to treasure, unaltered by the terrors of war, a heart eager for all shapes of beauty. For this most religious poet, beauty was that divine spirit which shines more or less clearly in all things, and which raises him who perceives it higher than the accidents of individual existence. And he receives its full influence, and is rid of all anxiety, who is able to bid adieu to the present and the past, to regret nothing, to desire nothing, to receive from the passing moment that influence in its plenitude. 'I accept all from the hands of fate, and I have captured every delight that lurks under cover of every moment.' In this state of simplicity, which is almost a state of grace, he enters into communion with the living reality of the world. 'Let us eat and drink to all that is eternal, for to-morrow we die to all that is of earth.'
That emancipation of the soul is not achieved in a day. The earlier letters are beautiful, but what they teach is learnt by nearly all our soldiers. In these he tells of the spirit of the men, their fire of enthusiasm, their imperious sense of duty, their resolve to carry 'an undefiled conscience as far as their feet may lead.' Yet already he is seeking to maintain control of his own private self amid all the excitement of numbers. And he succeeds. He guards himself, he separates himself, 'as much as possible,' in the midst of his comrades, he keeps his intellectual life intact. Meanwhile he is within barrack walls, or else he is jotting down his letters at a railway station, or else he is in the stages of an interminable journey, 'forty men to a truck.' But to know him completely, wait until you see him within the zone of war, in billets, in the front line, on guard, when he has returned to contact with the very earth. As soon as he breathes open air, his instincts are awake again, the instinct 'to draw all the beauty out,' and—in the shadow where the future hides—'to draw out the utmost beauty as quickly as may be.' 'I picked flowers in the mud; keep them in remembrance of me,' he will write in a day of foreboding. A most significant trait is this—in the tedium of trench days, or when imminent peril silences the idle tongues, he gathers the greatest number of these magical flowers. In those moments when speech fails, his soul is serene, it has free play, and we hear its own fine sounds. Hitherto we had heard the repetition of the word of courage and of brotherhood uttered by all our gathering armies. But here, in battle, face to face with the eternities, that spirit of his sounds like the chord of an instrument heard for the first time in its originality and its infinite sensibility. Nor are these random notes; they soon make one harmonious sound and acquire a most touching significance, until by daily practice he learns how to abstract himself altogether from the most wretched surroundings. A quite impersonal ego seems then to detach itself from the particular ego that suffers and is in peril; it looks impartially upon all things, and sees its other self as a passing wave in the tide that a mysterious Intelligence controls. Strange faculty of double existence and of vision! He possesses it in the midst of the very battle in which his active valour gained him the congratulations of his commanding officer. In the furnace in which his flesh may be consumed he looks about him, and next morning he writes, 'Well, it was interesting.' And he adds, 'what I had kept about me of my own individuality was a certain visual perceptiveness that caused me to register the setting of things—a setting that dramatised itself as artistically as in any stage-management. During all these minutes I never relaxed in my resolve to see how it was.' He then, too, became aware of the meaning of violence. His tender and meditative nature had always held it 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