Part 7

[7] The geometry of which Jacques Tournebroche speaks is decorated with designs by Sebastien Leclerc which I, on the contrary, admire for their precise elegance and delicate exactitude, but one must endure contradiction (ANATOLE FRANCE).

[8] It is a priest speaking thus (ANATOLE FRANCE).

X

THE ARMY

So, being on the Pont Neuf, we heard the roll of drums. It was the call to attention of a recruiting-sergeant, who, hand on hip, was strutting in an open space in front of a dozen soldiers, who were carrying bread and sausages spiked on the bayonets of their guns. A circle of beggars and youngsters looked on open-mouthed.

He twirled his moustache and made his proclamation.

“Do not let us listen to him,” said my good master to me. “It would be waste of time. This sergeant speaks in the king’s name. He has no talent for speaking. If it would please you to hear a clever discourse on the same subject you should go into one of those bakehouses on the Quai de la Ferraille, where the crimps cajole the lackeys and bumpkins. These crimps, being rascals, are bound to be eloquent. I remember, in my youth, in the time of the late king, having heard the most wonderful harangue from the mouth of one of these dealers in men, who kept shop in the Unhappy Valley, which you can see from here, my son. Recruiting men for the Colonies: ‘Young men who surround me,’ said he, ‘you have no doubt heard tell of the Land of Cockayne; it is to India you must go to find this land of fortune, where one is in clover. Do you wish for gold, pearls, diamonds? The roads are paved with them, one has but to stoop to pick them up. And you need not even stoop. The savages will pick them up for you. I do not even mention the coffee, the lemons, pomegranates, oranges, pineapples, and the thousand delicious fruits which grow without cultivation as in an earthly paradise. Did I speak to women and children I might extol all these dainties, but I am talking to men.’ I omit, my son, all that he said about glory, but you may believe he equalled Demosthenes in vigour and Cicero in fluency. The result of his discourse was the sending of five or six unhappy beings to die of yellow fever in the swamps, so true is it that eloquence is a dangerous weapon, and that talent for the arts exercises its irresistible force for evil as well as for good. Thank God, Tournebroche, in that, not having given you talents of any kind, He does not expose you to become one day the scourge of nations. One recognises the favourites of God by their lack of wit, and I have experienced that the fairly quick intelligence heaven has given me has been but an unceasing cause of danger to my peace in this world and in the next. What would it be if the heart and thought of a Cæsar dwelt in my head and my breast? My desires would recognise no sex and I should be untouched by pity. I should light the fire of inextinguishable war at home and abroad. And yet the great Cæsar had a delicate soul and a certain gentleness. He died decently under the dagger of his virtuous assassins. Day of the Ides of March! Ever fatal day, when sententious brutes destroyed this charming monster! I am fain to weep over the divine Julius along with Venus, his mother, and if I call him a monster it is from affection, for in his equable soul nothing was excessive save power. He had a natural feeling for rhythm and proportion. He found equal pleasure in his youth in the beauties of debauchery or those of grammar. He was an orator, and his beauty doubtless ornamented the purposed dryness of his speeches. He loved Cleopatra with that geometric exactitude that he brought to all his doings. He put in his writings and in his actions his talent for clarity. He was the friend of order and peace, even in war, sensitive to harmony, and so able a maker of laws that we still live, barbarians as we are, under the majesty of his rule, which has made the world what it is to-day. You see, my son, I am not sparing in praise or love for him. Commander, dictator, sovereign-pontiff he moulded the world with his beautiful hands. And I—I, have been professor of eloquence at the college of Beauvais, secretary to an opera-singer, librarian to my Lord Bishop of Séez, public-writer at the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, and tutor to the son of your father at the sign of the _Reine Pédauque_. I have made a beautiful catalogue of precious manuscripts, I have written some pamphlets, of which it is best not to speak, and set down on wastepaper certain maxims scornfully declined by the booksellers. Nevertheless, I would not change my existence for that of the great Cæsar. It would cost my innocence too much. And I would rather be an obscure man, poor and despised, as indeed I am, than rise to the height whence new destinies are opened to the world through paths of blood.

“This recruiting-sergeant, whom you can hear from here promising these vagabonds a halfpenny a day, with bread and meat, fills me, my son, with profound reflections on war and armies. I have worked at all trades save that of a soldier, which has always filled me with disgust and terror, by the characteristics of servitude, false glory, and cruelty, attached to it, which are in direct opposition to my peaceful temper, to my wild love of freedom, and to my turn of mind, which, judging sanely of glory, estimates at its rightful worth that attainable by a musketeer. I am not speaking at all of my incorrigible leaning to meditation which would have been exceedingly thwarted by sword and gun exercise. Not desirous of being Cæsar you will easily understand that neither do I wish to be a La Tulipe or Brin-d’Amour. And I own to you, my son, that military service seems to me to be the most terrible pest of civilised nations.

“This is the opinion of a philosopher. There is nothing to show that it will ever be shared by a large number of people. And in actual fact, kings and republics will always find as many soldiers as they want for their parades and their wars. I have read Machiavelli’s treatises at Monsieur Blaizot’s, at the sign of the _Image de Sainte Catherine_, where they are all very nicely bound in parchment. They deserve it my son, and, for my part, I hold an infinitely high opinion of the Florentine secretary, who was the first to remove from political action the legendary foundation of justice, on which they set up nothing but highly respectable villainies. This Florentine, seeing his country at the mercy of its hireling defenders, conceived the idea of a national and patriotic army. He says somewhere in his books that it is right that all citizens should unite for the safety of their country and all be soldiers. I have likewise heard this theory sustained at Monsieur Blaizot’s by Monsieur Roman, who is very zealous, as you know, for state rights. He has no care save for the general, and the universal, and will never be content until the day when every private interest is sacrificed to the public interest. Thus Machiavelli and Monsieur Roman wish us all to be soldiers, since we are all citizens. I do not say, as do they, that it is just, nor do I say that it is unjust, because justice and injustice are matter for debate, and it is a subject which only sophists can decide.”

“What! my good master,” I cried in sorrow and surprise, “you hold that justice depends on the reasoning of a sophist, and that our actions are just or unjust according to the arguments of a clever man! Such a maxim shocks me more than I can say.”

“Tournebroche, my son,” replied Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard, “you must consider that I speak of human justice, which is different from God’s justice, and generally opposed to it. Men have never upheld the idea of justice and injustice save by eloquence which is prone to embrace the for and against. Perhaps, my son, you would seat justice on sentiment, but beware lest on this petty site you merely raise some humble domestic hovel, some cabin of old Evander, or hut for a Philemon and Baucis. But the palace of law, the tower of State institutions, needs other foundations. Ingenuous nature alone could not support such weight of inequity, and these redoubtable walls rise from a foundation of most ancient falsehood, by the subtle and fierce art of law-givers, magistrates, and princes. It is folly, Tournebroche my son, to enquire if a law be just or unjust, and it is the same of military service as of other institutions of which one cannot say if they be good or bad on principle, since there is no principle saving God, from Whom all things come. You must protect yourself, my son, against this kind of slavery to words, to which men submit themselves with such docility. Know then, that the word justice has no meaning, if it be not in theology, where it is terribly expressive. Recognise that Monsieur Roman is but a sophist when he demonstrates to you that one owes service to a prince. Nevertheless, I think if the prince ever orders all citizens to become soldiers, he will be obeyed, I don’t say with docility, but light-heartedly. I have noticed that the profession most natural to man is that of a soldier; it is the one to which he is drawn the most easily by his instincts, and by his tastes, which are not always good. And beyond some rare exceptions, of which I am one, man may be defined as an animal with a musket. Give him a fine uniform with the hope of fighting, and he will be happy. Also, we make the military calling the noblest, which is true, in a sense, for it is the oldest calling, and the earliest of mankind made war. The military calling, moreover, has this appropriateness to human nature, that it never thinks, and clearly we are not made for thought.

“Thought is a malady peculiar to certain individuals which cannot propagate itself without promptly ending the race. Soldiers live in company, and man is a sociable animal. They wear blue-and-white, blue-and-red, or grey-and-blue coats, ribbons, plumes, and cockades, which give them the same advantage over women as the cock over the hen. They march to war and pillage and man is naturally thievish, libidinous, destructive, and easily touched by glory. The love of glory decides us Frenchmen, above all, to take up arms. And it is certain, that in public opinion, military glory eclipses all. To be assured of this, read history. La Tulipe may be held excused if he was no more a philosopher than Titus Livius.”

XI

THE ARMY (_continued_)

My good master continued in these terms:

“One must consider, my son, that men joined one to another in the succession of the ages by a chain of which they see but a few links, attach the notion of nobility to customs whose origin was lowly and barbarous. Their ignorance feeds their vanity. They found their glories on old, unhappy, far-off things, and the nobility of the profession of arms is due entirely to that savagery of early times of which the Bible and the poets have preserved the remembrance. And what, in fact, is this military nobility flaunted with so much pride over us, if not the debased legacy of those unfortunate hunters of the woods whom the poet Lucretius has depicted in such a way that one does not know if they be men or beasts? It is wonderful, Tournebroche, my son, that war and the chase, of which the thought alone should overwhelm us with shame and remorse when we recall the wretched needs of our nature and our inveterate wickedness, serve on the contrary, as matter for vain-glory to men, that Christian peoples should continue to honour the profession of butcher and executioner, when it is of old standing in families, and that finally one estimates among refined people the celebrity of citizens by the quantity of murders and carnage that they bear so to speak, in their veins.”

“Monsieur l’Abbé,” I said to my good master, “do you not think that the profession of arms is looked upon as noble because of the danger one runs therein and the courage that it is necessary to display?”

“Truly, my son,” answered my good master, “if the state of man is noble in proportion to the danger that he runs I do not fear to state that peasants and labourers are the noblest men in the kingdom for they risk death every day by fatigue or hunger. The perils to which soldiers and commanders expose themselves are less in number and in duration, they last but a few hours in a lifetime, and consist in facing cannon-balls and bullets which kill less surely than poverty. Men must needs be light and frivolous, my son, to give more honour to a soldier’s doings than to the work of a labourer and to place the destruction of war at a higher price than the arts of peace.”

“Monsieur l’Abbé,” I asked again, “do you not consider that soldiers are necessary to the safety of the state and that we should honour them in recognition of their usefulness?”

“It is true, my son, that war is a necessity of human nature and one cannot imagine nations who will not fight, that is to say, who are neither homicides, pillagers, nor incendiaries. Neither can you conceive a prince who is not in some measure a usurper. They would reproach him too much on that score, and they would despise him for it as one who was no lover of glory. For war is necessary to men; and is more natural to them than peace which is but war’s interval. Thus one sees princes hurling their armies on one another on the worst of pretexts, and for the most futile of reasons. They invoke their honour, which is excessively touchy. A mere breath suffices to make a stain on it which cannot be washed save in the blood of ten, twenty, thirty, or a hundred thousand men, in proportion to the population of the contending principalities. If only one thinks of it, it is inconceivable that the honour of a prince can be cleansed by the blood of these unhappy beings, or rather one realises that it is a mere form of speech, void of meaning; but for words men go willingly to their death. What is yet more wonderful, is that a prince gains much honour from the theft of a province and the outrage that would be punished by death in the case of some daring private individual becomes praiseworthy if it is carried out with the most outrageous cruelty by a sovereign with the help of his hirelings.”

My good master, having thus spoken, drew his box from his pocket and sniffed up a few remaining grains of rappee.

“Monsieur l’Abbé,” I said, “are there no wars that are just, and fought for a good cause?”

“Tournebroche, my son,” he answered me, “civilized nations have much overstrained the injustice of war and they have rendered it very iniquitous as well as very cruel. The first wars were undertaken for the establishment of tribes on fertile lands. Thus the Israelites conquered the land of Canaan. Hunger forced them to it. The advancement of civilization extended war to the conquest of colonies and foreign markets, as is seen in the example of Spain, Holland, England and France. Lastly, one has seen kings and emperors steal provinces of which they had no need, which they ruined, which they made waste, without profit to themselves and without other advantage than to raise pyramids and triumphal arches. And this abuse of war is the more odious as one must believe that nations are becoming more and more wicked by the advancement of the arts, or rather that war, being a necessity to human nature, is waged for its own sake when there is absolutely no reason for waging it.

“This reflection grieves me deeply, for I am disposed by my condition and inclination to the love of my fellow creatures. And what puts the finishing touch to my sadness, Tournebroche, my son, is that I find my snuff-box is empty, and want of snuff is where I feel my poverty the most.”

As much to distract his thoughts from this personal trouble as to instruct myself in his teaching, I asked him if civil war did not seem to him the most detestable kind of war there was?

“It is odious enough,” he replied, “but not so very inept, for members of a state when they come to blows between themselves have more chance of knowing why they fight than in the case where they go to war against a foreign people. Seditious and intestinal quarrels are usually born of the extreme wretchedness of the people. They are the result of despair, and the only issue left to the unhappy beings who may obtain thereby better conditions and sometimes even a hand in the game of ruling. But it is to be remarked, my son, that the more unhappy, and therefore excusable, are the insurgents, the less chance they have of winning the game. Starved and stupefied, armed but with their rage, they are incapable of great plans or of prudent considerations so that they are easily reduced by the prince. He has more difficulty in putting down rebellion among the great, which is to be detested, for it has not the excuse of necessity. In fine, my son, whether civil or foreign, war is execrable, and has a malignity that I detest.”

XII

THE ARMY (_concluded_)

“I will show you, my son,” said my good master, “in the condition of these poor soldiers who are going to serve their king, both man’s shame and his glory. In fact, war sets us back and drives us to our natural savagery. It is the result of the ferocity that we have in common with the beasts; not only with lions and cocks, who bring a gallant bearing to it, but with little birds, such as jays and tits, whose ways are very quarrelsome, and even with insects, such as wasps and ants, who fight with a bloodthirstiness of the like of which the Romans themselves have left no example. The principal causes of war are the same in man and animal, who struggle with one another to gain or keep their prey, to defend their nest or their lair, or to gain a mate. There is no distinction in all this, and the rape of the Sabines perfectly recalls those duels between stags which make the woods bloody of a night. We have merely succeeded in lending a certain colouring to base and natural motives by the notions of honour with which we cover them, and without great exactitude at that. If we believe that we fight for very noble motives in these days, the nobility of them dwells entirely in the vagueness of our sentiments. The less the object of war is simple, clear, and precise, the more war itself is odious and detestable. And if it be true, my son, that we have come to killing one another for honour’s sake, it is beyond all bounds. We have surpassed the cruelty of wild beasts, who do each other no injury without good reason. And it is only right to say that man is wickeder and more unnatural in his wars than are bulls or ants in theirs. But that is not all, for I detest armies less for the death they sow, than for the ignorance and stupidity that follow in their train. There is no worse enemy of the arts than a captain of mercenaries or marauders, and as a rule commanders are as unfitted for letters as are their soldiers. The habit of imposing his will by force makes your old soldier very awkward in speech, for eloquence has its source in the necessity of persuasion. Also, military men affect a disdain of speech and fine attainments. I remember having known at Séez in the days when I was librarian to the Bishop, an old captain, who had grown grey in harness and passed for a gallant man, wearing proudly a large scar across his face. He was an old ruffian, and had killed many a man and violated more than one nun quite good-humouredly. He understood his business fairly well and was very particular regarding the appearance of his regiment, which marched past better than any other. In short, a brave man and a good comrade, when it was question of draining a pot as well I saw at the inn of the _Cheval Blanc_, where many a time I held my own against him. Now it happened one night that I accompanied him (for we were good friends) while he was instructing his men how to find their way by the stars. He first let me have Monsieur de Louvois’ ordinance on the subject, and as he had repeated it by heart for the last thirty years, he made no more mistakes than in his _Pater_ or _Ave_. He started off by saying that the soldiers must begin by searching the heavens for the pole-star, which is fixed in relation to the other stars, which turn round it in the contrary direction to the hands of a watch. But he did not understand all he said. For after having repeated his sentence two or three times in a sufficiently imperious voice, he stooped and said in my ear:

‘Show me this beggar of a pole-star, Abbé. The devil take me if I can distinguish it in this mess of candle-ends with which the sky is littered!’

“I told him at once the way to find it, and pointed it out with my finger. ‘Oh! Oh!’ cried he, ‘the silly thing is perched very high! From where we are we cannot see it without straining our necks.’ And he immediately gave orders to his officers to withdraw the men fifty paces so they should more easily see the pole-star. What I am telling you, my son, I heard with my own ears, and you will agree that this wearer of a sword had a sufficiently naïve notion of the system of the universe, particularly of the stellar parallaxes. Yet he wore the king’s orders on a fine embroidered coat, and was more honoured in the state than a learned divine. It is this uncouthness that I cannot endure in the army.”

My good master having stopped to take breath at these words, I asked him if he did not think, despite this captain’s ignorance, that one must have much intelligence to win battles? He answered me in these words: