A crusader of France

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Before the Fight 37

II. The Vosges 61

Foreword

I

A PEASANT of Savoy heard of the death of the second of his sons, killed in the Vosges, as he was setting forth to the fields for the autumn ploughing. The oxen were yoked in front of the house. The postman handed him the letter hearing the heading of the Prefecture. He went into the house to fetch his spectacles, read in the presence of his wife, who, anxious, had followed him, and in that of the neighbours, who already knew the news, and then, handing the paper to the companion of his life of labour, said simply :

"God found them ready."

He added slowly:

"My poor wife! . . ."

And he went off to his ploughing.

God found them ready. It seems indeed as though these young people were prepared. Among the already voluminous evidence which comes from them — letters, notebooks, disclosures — it is not rare to detect a sort of joyous detachment which raises them from the earth. They feel that they have received a call, and they offer themselves like the daughter of Jephthah, who ran towards her father and was in no way astonished at the sacrifice demanded of her. So, unswervingly, they go forth to war and rise on high, like those trees with smooth, slender boles which, towering in the forest in search of light, seem unattached to the soil, whereas more ancient trunks hold on desperately by multitudinous roots.

Sergeant Leo Latil, of Aix-en-Provence (1890- 1915), who was killed in the Champagne offensive,^ expresses astonishment at the state of sublime peace and often joy in which he finds himself. "Sacrifices will be light indeed," he wrote to his kindred, ''if we gain a right glorious victory and more light for souls, . . . " His will, drawn before his departure, ends with this earnest request: "Pray for France, work for France, raise her up!'*

Long before the war there was being effected in these young men, or at any rate among the flower of them, a simplification of life. Ambition did not tempt them. They were not to be turned aside by an ordinary lot, because they placed above everything else that interior discipline which utilizes contingencies by accepting them, instead of revolting against them, or trying to overcome them. Young Frenchmen who reached the age of twenty in 1890, were the too unconcerned prey of every intellectual ferment. Those of 1900 showed themselves to be more practical, to have a greater leaning toward realities. Those of 1910, like those birds which, detecting the coming storm, stretch out their wings in order to dash into it the better, hardened themselves physically and morally, exer-

iSee the Correspondent, January 25, 1916.

cised their muscles and forged, for current use, either athletic stoicism or religious acceptance.

Maurice Ernst (1889-1914), the son of the savant and enthusiastic art critic, Alfred Ernst, on reaching the age to choose a career, deliberately turned towards the provinces — he who was a deracine, born of an Alsatian father and a Savoyard mother, and educated first at Paris, then at Dijon. Paris did not attract him — that Paris which all the younger novelists represent to us as the great delusion and the cause of so many misled lives. His mother's native province retained him because there he could more easily be himself. *'I shall go and settle down at Chambery, or in another town of the same character, ' ' he wrote, ' ' because I feel attracted by the life of a provincial barrister — a life which is often not very brilliant, doubtless, but which enables one to remain in daily contact with the veritable element in which our national moral temperament is formed. It is very different to the life, in spite of everything very artificial, which people are almost fatally bound to lead at Paris, or in a very big town." He was especially anxious to live his inner, his religious life profoundly. Is not this a new tendency in quite young men? Pride and ambition, the usual levers of youth, have been transformed into inward discipline and the sense of fellowship. Maurice Ernst, after two years' military service, aspired to the life of an officer, which would enable him to command men, but first of all to govern himself; and it was in this state of mind that the war found him. At peace with himself, he set out, rejoicing that the war, provoked by the enemy, was an opportunity for serving a splendid human cause. His letters from the front to his mother are quite on a level with the great tragedy. He was calm and ready. * ' I cannot say whether we shall see each other again," he dared to write, so surrounded by death did he feel. "At all events, I am living splendid hours at the present time, even before I have fought. To have the command of sixty men for whom one is responsible unto death, and whose minds are sustained and movements guided by the clearness of an order, is a rare joy. But it is a still greater joy to feel that one may 'be called upon to die on the -first day perhaps. That gives one a feeling of solemn and gentle serenity at the same time which must, if one escapes, leave its mark on one's whole life." His presentiment did not mislead him: he was killed at Ethe, in Belgium, on the morning of August 22, 1914, by a bullet in the head, as he was triumphantly entering the village.^ From that open, luminous brain, thoughts must have flown straight on high.

The letters of Captain Belmont, which appear in the following pages, reveal, I believe, the most complete example of this jeunesse, precociously ripened long before the war, like a vine exposed to the sun, and for which the war will have been the vintage-time. They will be read for many a long year, as were read and are still the letters composing le Becit d'une smur, or as the Journal and Correspondence of Maurice and Eugenie de Guerin, for their sincerity, their familiar and provincial flavour, their profound intimacy, their feeling for

^Bulletin de VEcole Saint-Frangois de Sales de Dijon, April i, 1916.

nature, their religious fervour. But ttere is something new in their accent. Death straddles over them, as the arch of a bridge over running water. Within the curve a fragment of heaven is reflected and the water shivers.

Under the title of captain we formerly imagined a man of thirty — a man of experience, accustomed to command. Belmont was a captain of twenty-four, who, when war broke out, was a sub-lieutenant of the reserve. Lyons — ''the industrial and mystic town," as Alphonse Daudet called it — ^was his birthplace, but his family, shortly after he was bom, settled at Grenoble, where his father is manager of an important bank. The horizon of the Dauphine Alps was the horizon of his childhood, that which trained his eyes, that which he constantly evokes when seeking comparisons for some beautiful vision of autumn or spring. And yet Lyons left upon him that very particular impress with which the ancient city of two rivers marks its inhabitants. The fogs which hang over the Saone and the Rhone compel them, it seems, to live more within themselves. Silence reigns on the streets, sadness and coldness are on people's faces. But, should the bells of Fourvieres ring, their features light up, as though these bells were announcing great news. On clear evenings one can distinguish far in the distance the chain of Mont Blanc, and people do not fail to seek for that indistinct sinuous line which floats like lace knotted to the flowers of the sunset. The Lyons section of the Alpine Club is one of the most numerous and most daring. The business-men, manufacturers and clerks of the city who on six days of the week stick close to their somnolent quays and dark offices, swarm on Sunday on the slopes of the Alps, hasten to the mountains as to a lover's meeting-place. "Who has written more finely of this than an inhabitant of Lyons, Theodore Camus, in his posthumous book: De la Montague au Desert?

The mountains, in Ferdinand Belmont's letters, are faithful friends, the recollection of whom he treasures. He loves to recall the ascensions he made with his brother Jean in the Chartreuse Chain, at Belledonne, and on all his beloved summits of the Dauphine Alps. As a connoisseur, he evokes the quality of the air one breathes there, the play of light and shade which follow one on the other, and especially the solitude — the serenity of that solitude. He belonged to one of those numerous families of which one must have been an actual member to know all the joy, animation and expansion a childhood can contain, and all the majesty, equity, divine order and human tenderness a father and mother represent. He who did not wish to regret anything in the course of his moral ascension had a heavy heart when he thought of his home in the country and everybody there: his parents, sis brothers and a sister. His eldest brother, £mile, two or three years his senior, died at seventeen from the effects of an attack of scarlatina, contracted when he was eleven. The few notes which this youth left behind show him to have been a precocious emulator of Adele Kamm, who cultivated pain like a garden, in which she grew the joy of immolation. ''Suffering came from day to day,"

he wrote, when kept to his bed by illness. "I strove hard to accept it, and now I am happy to have suffered." And again: ''Of all the ways of serving God, illness is the one which allows the least consolation, but the little one is able to receive is only of greater worth." As soon as he was afflicted he succeeded in ceasing to ask for a return of health, and contented himself with the life of the soul. There can be no doubt that he enabled his brother Ferdinand — surprised to see him so resigned — to penetrate further into this life. Without knowing it, he was preparing him for future trial, and the younger brother in his turn was to experience purification through daily acceptance.

At an early date Ferdinand showed a strong liking for the medical profession. After brilliant studies, he anticipated the call to the army, and at eighteen joined the 14th Infantry Battalion, with which he did his two years service, having no inclination for duty in an army medical corps. He left his battalion a sub-lieutenant of the reserve and took up his abode at Lyons to attend the lectures on medicine. At twenty-one years of age he came out second in the competitive examination for surgical assistants. At twenty-three he was an assistant dresser. And it was from this post that the mobilization took him.

''This somewhat reserved and melancholy, but most Christian, most reflective, and kindly young man," writes to me one of his best friends, the Abbe, now Lieutenant Gonnet, "possessed a most engaging disposition. It seemed as though his gaze ever remained fixed on those who had understood its charm. As regards myself, I feel it ever bent upon me, as on the last occasion I saw him, at Gerardmer, in August, 1915, when he came (himself wounded) to look after me and bring me delicacies, as a mother would have done. He must have been somewhat like that in the case of his men — kindly in the exercise of authority, but knowing how to be master of them, knowing how to elevate their souls to the height his own had risen, at any rate on great occasions. And this will indeed be one of the established facts of this war among the thousand and one forms authority has taken — as though all materials can be used to fashion it, on condition they are supple and tractable in the hands of the Maker. . . . The change which the war seems to me to have brought about in him most clearly is a simplification of the soul and its tendencies. He had attained so great a unity of life and mental absorption that God alone could bring that unity to its natural centre, by attracting it to Him. I did not always know him thus, but inspired with a love for the ideal and great things, and striving a little in his dull life as a student to bring to it that which then seemed to him so difficult to find and which the ordeal of war placed within his reach daily, until the end. He speaks a good deal of that romanticism which attracted so many young men, to whom the war brought natural satisfaction. He hardly confessed it, but I believe that he also had very romantic tendencies. Only he accepted the ordeal with all its tribulations, whereas many others found it severe and wearisome to the flesh, and sought to lighten it."

At the present moment I am endeavouring above all to find the Ferdinand Belmont of pre-war days: the being whom the war was to bring to life again in his letters. I imagine him to have been somewhat uncommunicative, doubtless, but not sad. He was one of those taciturn people who delight in inward joys. The long illness of his eldest brother, his own disposition, a precocious perception of the seriousness of life, led, without making him gloomy, to meditative habits. More luminous are the spots made by the sun in the underwood. The laughter of rather serious young men is all the more cheerful and loud. In the refuges on the Alps and at his home in the country Ferdinand Belmont's laughter must thus have burst forth, surprising and charming. The romanticism of youth arises the more often from the difficulty of finding its balance: the restless mind is dissatisfied with everything, the unapp eased heart believes that it is misunderstood. In the case of the twenty-year-old Belmont there is hesitation between contemplation and action. He recognized his vocation at a very early date, walked straight along his path; and yet, on the other hand, was he anxious over the result? He was never so happy as when pausing on his path, regarding nature, and allowing his thoughts to wa,nder. The war was to bestow harmony upon him.

Of his younger brothers, Jean, the nearest in age to himself, was his companion when on excursions. Without ambition, modest, charitable, cheerful and frank, this tall robust youth was an enthusiastic mountaineer. A preparatory pupil at the

I

Grenoble Polyteelmic Institute, and momentarilyexcused from military service at the time of the outbreak of war, he offered his services and was incorporated on August 11 in the 22nd Infantry Regiment. A fortnight later he asked to leave for the front, on the plea that he was in fine training and on account of his physical vigour. He was killed in his first fight, on August 29, 1914, at the Pass of Anozel, near Saint-Die. The day before he had by chance met his brother Ferdinand, during the retreat. Jean Belmont was devoid of all complexity, was as ingenuous as a child, and totally indifferent to risk. On the point of departure, he said to his mother, quite calmly: "I have nothing to fear. The worst that can happen to me is to be killed, and to die for a noble cause when one is young is a great blessing. ' '

The next brother, Joseph, was more impressionable and earnest. A boarder at BoUengo, in Italy, he was unable to accustom himself to separation from his family. Then, suddenly, he got over his troubles; he had discovered his path in life. At the close of his year's study of philosophy he entered the Issy seminary. When war was declared he was devoting himself at Mens to the care of a holiday colony of little boys. Mobilized in December (1914), he was incorporated in the 55th Infantry Regiment and placed in the firing line in the month of May, with the 173rd Regiment. He went through the severe engagement of Eparges and the Bois de la Gruerie, was promoted corporal, and never ceased to sustain those surrounding him by his good humour and high spirits, although it cost him dear to lead an existence so different from the one he had desired. On July 2 he was killed by a bullet and fell without a cry.

"In one's life at the front," he wrote to his parents, "one must live the present without thinking of the future. To be nearer danger and death is to be nearer God, and therefore why pity us? Put your trust in God! everything happens according to His will, and it is ever for the -best. My only duty is to do what I ought to do, whatever it may be and to the end. This life in proximity with death has many beautiful sides to it. I hope to find tranquillity in it, as so many heroes have found, when I am absolutely convinced that death is happiness, suffering a merit, danger and trial a splendid lesson in energy, which will cast glory over my whole life if I know how to render it sufficiently fruitful."

Ferdinand survived Joseph Belmont by a few months. A captain, decorated with the Legion of Honour, and mentioned three times in army orders, he was killed on December 28, 1915, at the Hartmannsweilerkopf.

These three brothers, "God found them ready" — as the Savoyard peasant said. At each fresh blow the father of these three young heroes might have repeated those words, as beautiful and as strong as a verse of the Bible, but each time with more bitter sorrow. The first who left did it so simply. The second already belonged to God. But can such a loss as the third — ^the eldest, the most richly endowed, the most complete, the surest heir of a tradition to be transmitted, the one who inspired no more love than the others, but on whom they counted for that continuance of the family which is man's terrestrial immortality — leave sufficient courage to continue the task begun? Yes indeed, and even a fourth child, Maxime, has filled the vacant place in the army. There are also hearts which sorrow always finds ready, because divine hope inhabits them.

This long war, now violent, now less intense, has revealed and especially will reveal many writers, through the tragic scenes presented to the eyes, through the habit of meditation which long hours in the trenches have created or fortified, through the need or the desire to correspond with loved ones at home and give them an accurate idea either of the outer or the inner life. But many among them will not be witnesses of their celebrity, will never know how hearts have thrilled under their action as strings vibrate under the bow. The letters of Ferdinand Belmont reveal that gift of seeing, that art of seizing the essential features of a scene or picture, whilst neglecting or rejecting the useless and the superfluous, that colour at once warm and discreet, the perfection of which makes a Fromentin. Who can forget, having read Tin J^te dans le Sahara, the supple gait of that barefooted Arab woman whom we see coming from the remoteness of the horizon, as in biblical times, bearing an amphora on her shoulder, or that Eastern evening in front of the tent, so full of peace that the very silence can be heard ? And yet it is not that — a vision of war — ^which will be most sought for in this correspondence. No, it is not that which wiU bring Captain Belmont faithful and transmissible friendships, but indeed the work of moral chasing to which he incessantly devoted himself. There is in him both a poet and a philosopher — a poet and a philosopher in the manner of a De Vigny, whose thought was tinged with delicate penetration and sorrow — and there is in him above all a believer who succeeds in casting his actions, his strength, his soul into faith, as into a broadbosomed river which he allows to carry him away. What matter life and death, provided one believes, is the cry to which he rallies, and which he will make the subject of his reflections, not through intellectual taste but because of his desire to attain moral improvement. Is not one of Mme. de Stael's finest sayings as follows: "The object of life is not happiness but perfection"? — words, however, which hardly apply to him.

This abandonment of his will to the grace of God and the orders of his superior officers was to bring him peace of mind in warfare. Before leaving for the front, during a few days' preparation in the green mountains of Tarentaise, he experienced almost a feeling of revolt or at least surprise at the thought that people were fighting and dying when the sky was so clear and the mountains so beautiful, and he felt the need of picturing to himself what the baptism of fire must be like. A strange fear seized him : the fear that he might not be sufficiently courageous, sufficiently worthy of his command, his post, the great duty entrusted to him. But once there all anxiety disap' peared.

Soon there came the departure for the frontier. On the eve of the first engagements he heard his

20 FOREWOED

infantrymen singing "the tender and sentimental songs of their native districts," just like the sailors of Pierre Loti in Mon frere Yves, huddled one against the other in the fore of their ship. They were under the influence of the same mental distress, the same nostalgia, but the storm which awaited those young soldiers far exceeded in tragedy the violence of natural elements.

The beginning was terrible, and yet, among the worst vicissitudes, the beauty of the Vosges brought him friendly consolation. Depicting the shades of evening gathering on the devastated ground and ruined villages, he employs, on seeing the shadows creep over the land, which the sun seems "to caress as a shepherd caresses a sick sheep," expressions full of a tenderness quite after the manner of Fromentin.

Even the nearness of the enemy to the outposts does not deter him from tasting the sweetness of those Virgilian nights per arnica silentia lunce — ^which are disturbed, however, by the shriek of shells and the crash when they burst.

Then, sent still farther away, lost on the intensive plains of Artois, amidst an ocean of men, he is filled with home-sickness. Where can we find more touching terms — whether in Lamartine dreaming of Meilly, or in Fromentin 's Dominique, when he seeks comfort for his wounded heart in thoughts of his native place — than in Belmont's evocation of "the luminous twilights , amongst the great oaks?" But here his accent is more poignant; there is no desire to return to his early protected years, no love sickness, but the distress of a man abandoned far from everything he loves and in the neighbourhood of death. This distress, against which Ferdinand Belmont opposes especially his religious faith, and which he eventually conquers, continued for several weeks. It gives the letters dated the end of September and October, 1914, the pathos of interior anguish, of transitory doubt and discouragement. When he struggles against too tender recollections which assail him, he is alone, and no one save the members of his family have received his confidences. He had comrades, but no friends. He experienced the solitude of the heart. But divine help never fails the one who calls for it. We can feel that Belmont gradually cast off his depressing sadness, attained serenity and inner peace, before mounting a step still higher, the step which heroes or saints have taken, the one leading to that complete acceptance which can no longer be reached by human miseries.

"I shall not love thee lesg; nay, perhaps more, Tor yielding to thy nature ..."

said Byron's Sardanapalus. Ferdinand Belmont is not diminished in our eyes through having passed through these sloughs of sadness, and perhaps we are glad that, face to face with sacrifice, he experienced these hesitations and looked thus backwards. In this way he is nearer ordinary mortals, who feel such depression too often and turn from those who have never felt it, as one turns from a stranger. Nevertheless, he was too accustomed to observe himself not to mistrust his emotions. Gradually he began to check himself in these evocations, or turned them into a philosophic channel : meditations on the vanity of life and the pettiness of man, blown about like a leaf by the storm.

He felt the attraction and proclaimed the advantage of abandoning himself to destiny, or rather to Providence, but he had not yet reached the state of "wishing for nothing, desiring nothing, wisely accepting whatever happens" — the formula which gradually became the rule of his life and the observance of which was to bring him appeasement and confidence. This detachment was to take place progressively in his soul and by means of faith. He was coming nearer and nearer to a condition of acceptance, the true one, which indistinctly receives from such a heart both sorrow and joy, peace and war. That acceptance began to appear to him as the lever which would facilitate all his acts.

On All Saints' Day, instituted for mourning, he learnt of the death of his brother Jean, no further news of him had been received. His sorrow manifested itself by a eulogy of suffering, which, since it is one of the conditions of life, we ought to love. Have not all great souls glorified it? Can the happiness of one dear to us cause us in this way so much sorrow? Does it not look as though Grod had wished to take back his brother's pure soul "before it was soiled by the ugliness and darkness of this world?" Death, surrounding him, had begun to enter his soul. One would imagine that he was preparing to receive its visit. He was no longer not only not terrified but not even disquieted by it. Death was the vault under which he had indeed to pass and which to him was a gateway of light. From that moment he lived intimately with it. Henceforth when he speaks of it it is in friendly terms.

"When New Year's Day prompted him to look back he wished to abandon himself as best he could to the will of God, to the whirlwind which would lay him down "dead or living in some quiet spot."

After a few weeks' rest at Gerardmer, he came to the conclusion that the ''school of comfort" was no good. He felt ashamed to be in a place of safety when other battalions were fighting at the Hartmannsweilerkopf . * ' He that escheweth not small faults," says the Imitation, ''little by little shall slide into greater." And for that reason his desire was that his men, who were descending to a state of mediocrity, after he had seen them so great, should be kept in working order.

Then, in this correspondence, written without studied refinement, there suddenly appears a rhythmical quality reminding one of Chateaubriand — reflections concerning "the silent verities which slumber at the bottom of. our souls. ' ' Elsewhere he says: "What matter the most formidable shocks of this world, since this world will pass away and passes away each day?" And we call to mind the words of Bossuet on the ephemeral nature of the world.

Ferdinand Belmont soon returned to the life of danger which he preferred to the dull and mediocre life in rest-billets, not perhaps through warlike ardour, although he proved himself on all occasions to be a remarkable leader, at once prudent and bold, but because lie could breathe more freely on the elevated plateaus of the soul, where ordinary considerations no longer ruled. Already, however, he had no further need of the proximity of danger to remain on those high and salubrious plateaus. More and more was he getting rid of all worldly ambition. He was seized with the idea that humility was the virtue par excellence — the one which liberates as from all artifice, all complications, all interested motives. At bottom, he envied the simple soldiers who had not to bother their heads over the question whether they were followed ; he began to feel that he was not born to command, and was quite sure that at the end of the war he would be able to return to his former life without an effort. But the art of command springs from personal ascendancy, and how is it possible for this personal ascendancy not to shine from such superiority, from such a detachment from his own person? Men are often psychologists without knowing it. They could not tell you the reasons why they are attached to suchand-such a chief, yet they feel their strength mysteriously.

Indifferent to danger, attentive merely to his duty and his soul, Belmont saw the arrival of Easter. It was in a wood, in the rain, that he celebrated the feast of the Resurrection and Hope. And yet it brought him profound peace, as it did to those peasants who, in Tolstoi's Resurrection, came up to each other, saying: "Christ has risen," and by that news, repeated for nearly nineteen hundred years, receive physically an impression of comfort and plenitude.

FOEEWOED 25

The work of detachment went on in him more and more. What importance can a few years of life more or less have? Nature itself, whose charm he delighted in so much, whose seasons, colour and diversity he understood so well, became powerless to retain him. In vain did spring multiply its smile and graces around him. He knew the falsehood and vanity of them.