II

Often have I myself written similar things, but in me they have been considered exaggerations. They cannot be so considered in Gabriele D'Annunzio of Francavilla.

All who love Rome and loathe her modern violation must thank him from their hearts for such passages, and must mourn with him that we cannot drive out the spoilers from our desecrated temples.

This is, indeed, his greatest strength, that, whilst still a young man, he yet has the courage to resist the intellectual tendencies of his contemporaries, to refuse to worship their gods, to see and despise the falseness of those scientific pretensions which enslave the multitude in modern life. His intellect, richly stored by learning, is, in a large measure, free of prejudice. This is a great and rare distinction in a generation which more completely than any which has preceded it, is the timid slave of formula and the credulous servant of professional bigotry.

He has kept a complete mental liberty; free from the superstitions of religion, which, in this day, it is easy to be; but also free from the superstitions of science, which is far harder, and incurs far greater obloquy and opposition.

In his study on Giorgione, he says what it needs much courage to say in these days:—

'The scientific spirit has invaded the generation of the second half of our century. Struck by the surprising results of physics and calculation, men were inclined to believe for a time, that by the aid of the one or the other, they would be able to penetrate intoall mysteries and solve all problems. But to this proud exaltation has now succeeded a discouragement mingled with suspicion. They say to themselves, and not without reason: "Where is this certainty that science promised us?" If ever certainty were incomplete, deprived of solid criterion, it is that offered by natural science. As for the sciences called exact, some, like geometry, repose on a tottering base of arbitrary affirmations; others, like algebra, on mere methods of reasoning, and contain as much or as little certainty as the formula of a syllogism.'

This is emphatically true; but it is a fact which is by no means recognised by all, and which is still violently denied by those fanatics whose form of bigotry is either experimental or exact science.

The mind of D'Annunzio refuses all bondage. It is a law to itself, as the mind of the great writer should be. I imagine that the opinion of him held by others, is to him of the most absolute unimportance. His teaching is always to preserve the independence of the Ego, to live without attention to formula or usage, to be, both materially and spiritually, that which we were created to be by nature.

His morality is of the most primitive kind; or rather, he has none whatever, no more than has a South-Sea islander lying in the sun under a cocoa-nut tree whilst the surf bathes his naked limbs. It would be absurd to accuse him of immorality because the indulgence of the senses is as natural and as legitimate in his estimation, as Favetta's song amongst the golden furze, or the reapers' welcome ofthe purple wine. Yet by a not rare anomaly, this demand for perfect freedom of the passions is accompanied by a tendency to desire tyranny in political matters. He is disposed to deify force. In one or two expressions there is an echo of Carlyle which sounds oddly and jarringly amongst the amorous liberties and artistic debaucheries of the rest; and is not worthy of a writer who has so much courage in opposing scientific pharisaism and the thraldom of the schools. He is disposed to admire what is strong simply because it is strong, forgetful that such strength is sustained and nourished by the suffering of the weak. It is true that he has lived in an atmosphere in which the verities embodied in the aspirations, abortive but always noble, of the higher efforts of revolution have been received with fear and misunderstanding. The tendencies and training of theCodiniare visible through the eloquence of the poet and the conclusions of the philosopher. The entire lack in him of all altruism comes from this. Mazzini must be as unintelligible to him as Tolstoi. The mass of humanity is always to him the filthy, surging, bestial multitudes of the crowd at Casalbordino. But even this absence of benevolence is better than the pitiful sycophancy of writers who are as fulsome in their flattery to Demos as to kings; is manlier than the nauseating self-worship of a Humanity at once its own pimp and pander, its own adorer and assassin.

In his scorn of the human flocks of sheep, he forgets, I admit, too entirely the justice to which the humblest unit amongst these flocks has right, but that scorn, even when misdirected, is fresh and bracing as thedash of his own Adriatic waves, when the east wind drives them hurrying on to the shingle beach. He has no fear; and he never stoops to that base flattery of his own species which is the most nauseous feature of modern politics and of modern science.

'This alone is your office,' he cries to his contemporaries, if they would resist the debasing influences of their time, 'defend the dream which is in you. Since in this day mortals no longer bring tribute of love and honour to the choristers of the Muses, defend yourselves, O poets, with all your weapons, steep the point of your rapiers in the most biting poisons. Let your satires bear such corrosive acid in them that they shall pierce to the very pith of the spine and destroy it. Brand to the very bone the stupid forehead of those fools who would mark every soul with the same label, and make every brain like another, as the heads of nails are beaten into a common likeness by the blows of the nailmaker. Let your mordant laughter reach to heaven when you hear the stablemen of the Great Beast shouting in the parliaments of the earth.... Defend the thought which they menace, defend the beauty which they outrage, defend the antique freedom of your masters and the future freedom of your disciples, against the insane assaults of drunken slaves. Despair not, though you be few in number. You have the supreme force of the world: the written word.'

The written word is indeed in his hand a scourge, a sword, a sheaf of arrows from the quiver of the divine Python Slayer.

And in no country more than in the Italy of his generation is such a scourge, such a sword, such flame-tipped arrows, needed to slay the courtiers, the usurers, the sycophants, the knaves, the brutes, the sellers of justice who fasten like leeches on her body.

This son of Italy is a great writer; a great poet. Read his works in the original text all ye who can, men and women for whom life has no secrets and truth has no terror.

He is young; the time will come, as it comes to all, when the joys of the senses will fade for him as the roses of the summer are scattered by autumn winds.

Let us hope that there will be later a second period of his creative art, in which there will be developed an original genius free of exotic influences, and untrammelled by the search for idioms and pruriencies. Genius, like the river at its source, takes the colour of the earth it springs from. It is only when it has reached its full volume, its deepest currents, that it becomes clear and reflects the sky alone.

Let us hope that such a future awaits him, and that more and more fully will he realise what he has already said in noble words:—

'Art! Here is the one faithful passion ever youthful, nay, immortal; here is the fountain of pure joy unknown to the multitude; here is the divine food which makes men like to gods. How could he have stooped to drink at other cups when he had once tasted of this?[3]How could he have bent to taste of other joys, once having known this ecstasy?How could his senses have let themselves be weakened and debased to lowest lusts when they had once been stirred to that highest sensibility which beholds the invisible, which touches the impalpable, which divines the most hidden secrets in the heart of nature?'

With these words, which are the greatest in meaning that he has hitherto written, I will, for the present moment, take my leave of him.

Of all countries, France remains the land in which it is possible to tell the most truth. The nation of Montaigne and Molière is always the first to recognise and award the title of talent to lay bare the shoulders of her community and use the scourge upon them. If at its first appearance the strange and terrible revelations contained in the work entitledBiribiwere met by official obstruction and attempted suppression, the book has conquered them, and has been allowed to carry the light of its torches into the dark places of military administration and oppression. In Italy, as in Germany and Austria, it would have been stopped by fine, exile, and seizure. In Russia it could never have been issued at all. In England it would have been as costly to the author as were his issues of Zola to the unhappy and martyrised Vizetelly. In France alone its pictures of the most terrible facts pass unarrested, by right of that literary liberty which theesprit gauloishas always awarded, however much government and law may have been alarmed.

It has been said that the accusations contained inthe works of Georges Darien are aRétrissure à la France, and as such should never have been made public by a patriotic writer and a ci-devant soldier. But here we merely meet again the hackneyed question whether the writer of talent is bound by patriotism or any other scruple to withhold truth, or whether he is not rather bound to disclose the truth as he believes it to be at all costs, whether to himself or to others. It is not necessary for me to say with which of these opinions I agree. The little which has been done towards any true progress of the human mind has been done by the expression of free thought, and by its fearless exposure of evils protected by the crystallisation of time, usage, and prejudice. Over the modern world which chatters of liberty, but does not anywhere possess it, or even know actually what it means, there hang, in heavy and icy weight, two ever-increasing despotisms: the scientific and the military. Of the former it is not necessary to treat in these pages; of the latter the yearly increase throughout Europe, ever since the war of 1870-71, must alarm every unbiassed thinker, bringing with it, as it does, the impoverishment of the people, the curse of youth and manhood, the endless strain of a fiscal burden, so enormous that every class groans under it, and the perpetual and diseased anxiety in which every nation lives, suspecting its neighbours, and turn by turn affronting them insolently and cringing to them obsequiously, according as it is made to feel the power of its own strength or the weakness of its own inferiority. Every syllable printed which tends to show the reality of military tyranny at this moment isvaluable, and should be welcomed, however odious it may be to military authority and government; and especially valuable when it comes from one who has passed through the scenes which he depicts, and draws, not from imagination, but from memory.

Georges Darien has been the man whom he describes; treated as the worst of criminals, though wholly guiltless of breaking any criminal law. Georges Darien in using the first person, both inBiribiand inBas les Cœurs, is but writing portions of his own autobiography; he was a boy of ten, like his young hero in the latter book, and a volunteer like the gunner of the second class in the 41st battery of artillery in the former work, and to this fact there are owing that directness, simplicity, and virility which are the distinguishing characteristics of both these volumes. They are alive with life. The reader may resent them, detest them, dread them and their revelations; but he must be impressed by them; he must receive from their perusal that thrill which can only come from reality. They are saturated with the tears of blood of a strong man who feels his own impotency to rouse his generation and to change humanity; who knows that his voice is the voice of the prophet crying in the wilderness, and echoing over a desert of dead bones and drifting sand. There are few greater pangs than to see the truth and know it, and feel that the salvation of others lies in it, and to tell it in vain to deaf ears, and offer its water of life to lips closed by pride and cruelty and folly.

The nameBiribisounds too light for such a subject; it sounds like a joke; but the joke is grim indeed,grim as the dance of skeletons round a gallows-tree. In actual factBiribiis the nickname given by French and native soldiers in Algeria to the punishment-battalions of the Franco-African army; a slangypetit nomgiven in jest to one of the most awful hells that earth holds. The tortures which are suffered in every army, in the best army, and in the time of greatest peace, can scarcely ever be over-rated; and they are not the less, but the more terrible, because almost always endured in silence and ignored by authority. Now and then a voice is raised from the ranks, occasionally, very rarely, some punishment, or injustice, more brutal than usual, comes to light, and rouses public indignation.Biribiis one of those rare utterances rising from the sealed pits, in which uncared-for and unpitied lives are beaten into senseless pulp of bruised and bleeding flesh.

There is great originality in the literary talent of Georges Darien. His style is all his own. His manner of relation resembles no other. He has nothing of the modern school, except its hopelessness; he is strong, intense, virile, rough; he seeks no ornament, he strives for no effect; he writes as he feels, boldly, passionately, with that eloquence which is the offspring of simplicity and of veracity, and that potency which comes from wide knowledge of literatures and of mankind. Belonging by birth to thebourgeoisie, son of a Catholic father and a Calvinist mother, his early years were embittered by religious strife. He has later on travelled much; he has known the lowest classes and the hardest ways of life; he is still young in years, but old in the most varied experiences; andhe has, certainly, uncommon powers, which have as yet not been duly recognised, for he offends the prejudices and vested interests of his generation, and even in France prejudice and vested interests are strong and close many channels.

He disdains, moreover, to appeal to that large class of readers who require a book, cast in the form of a story, to possess a story. Like the famous knife-grinder he has none to tell, if by story we understand, as most people do, a love-tale in some one of its forms.Biribiis the stern and terrible narrative of the career of aninsoumis;Bas les Cœursis the simple, domestic record of a boy's recollections of theAnnée Terrible. In neither is there any hint or fragment of romance. This fact at once limits his public to the restricted number who appreciate the skill which can afford to dispense with the elements of romance, and to rely solely on its own power of description and analysis of character. In this respect for literary excellence and harmonious treatment I should placeBas les CœursbeforeBiribi. The relation of events at Versailles, before and after the Prussian occupation, as seen from the point of view of a family of the town, is told with such perfect naturalness that the reader follows it with the deepest interest, and remains fascinated by the admirable manner in which the most tragic and momentous events of history are reflected in the mind of a boy of ten years old.

The tranquillity and precision of his use of the etching-needle, with which he describes the daily life and street scenes in Versailles, contrasts curiously with the hot colour and broad charcoal marks with whichhe portrays the tortures of the punishment-battalions in Africa.

This testifies to the flexibility of Darien's talent, since nothing can be more different to the impetuous and turgid violence ofBiribithan the restrained and delicate irony ofBas les Cœurs: the one is a battle-piece of Vereschagin, crowded with begrimed and panting figures, in which the dumb canvas seems to shriek with war and smoke with blood; the other is a cabinet picture of Meissonier's, finished, polished, small in measurement, illimitable in suggestion, fine as the point of a needle, cruel as the fork of a snake's tongue. For, undoubtedly, Darien is cruel; but he is cruel from the impotent rage which is in him, the powerless sorrow and scorn which his country, his generation, his fellow mortals, his vision of things as they are, awaken in his memory and in his desires.

The apathy and sheepishness of the general multitude fill him with wrath; he longs to pull down on the world its temple, like Samson, regardless of the fall of the column and the roof on himself. No one who loves received doctrines, crystallised commonplaces, undisputed formulæ, should open these books. Such persons will only see in them blasphemies against their honoured gods; for this author is not suited to the smug self-complacency of Philistinism, 'sanding its sugar and praising its Lord.'

To represent war as it is done in the terrible pages ofLa Débâcle, or in the heartrending sketch of theAttaque du Moulin, is not difficult to the novelist who has power and knowledge. To represent the effects of war on entirely uninteresting and commonplacepersons, and yet keep the attention of the reader riveted to what is passing in one ordinary household during a frightful national calamity, is a far more difficult feat; especially when all the sympathies of the reader which would be easily roused by noble sentiments in the sufferers are voluntarily alienated, and the only motives and feelings depicted are sordid, egotistic, and miserable, except in the young narrator, whose childish intelligence is so slowly awakened to the baseness of those around him, but whose naturally honest and patriotic little soul burns and thrills with shame when once it becomes conscious of the meanness and cowardice of his family and of his neighbours. The highest literary faculty seems to me to show itself in the completeness with which the childlikeness of the young observer is retained, the vague apprehension, the slowly awakening comprehension, the gradually dawning horror with which the events around him impress themselves on a mind remaining instinctively loyal and just in the midst of corrupt and unworthy examples.

Take this as an example of its style:—

'Shouts are heard afar off in the woods.'"Ah, my poor child!" says my aunt, weeping, "what a hideous thing is war!"'She looks very feeble, very worn, my poor great-aunt Moreau. The sight of her thin face, her skeleton-like hands, moves me painfully. She sees this.'"At my age," she murmurs, "these events, my dear, are hard to bear."'However, she assures me the Germans are not very cruel. The Captain in command of those billeted on her, despite his rude exterior, is not uncivil.'At that moment, indeed, this officer returns with his men; his heels ring on the bricks of the ante-chamber. He opens the door of the little room where we are sitting.'"Do not be disturbed, Madame," he says, addressing my aunt, "on account of the firing you may have heard. There is nothing of any consequence. A wood-cutter, in whose hut we found arms, and whom we have shot: nothing more."'He salutes and retires. My aunt shudders. She turns white, her eyes close, her head falls back against the chair. She is faint. I call her maid, who runs to my summons, with the cook and the servant just come to fetch me. The three women try and revive her. She remains so weak when again conscious, that they carry her to her chamber. She is grieved to have fainted.'"When my dear little Jean came to see me," she murmurs! "It was the thought of that poor wood-cutter—"'She trembles like a leaf as I leave her.'Germaine, who has come from my grandfather's to fetch me, asks me to wait a moment; she has a message for the Prussian Captain from my grandfather. The officer is walking up and down, smoking, under the lime-trees. I hear his guttural voice as he answers, "Tell your master that I shall expect him here." What can this mean? When I reach my grandfather's house I rush to the dining-room toquestion the old man, but Germaine catches hold of my arm.'"You must not disturb Monsieur. He is engaged with someone."'Through the door, which I hold half-opened, I have seen that someone. He is a person dressed like a peasant, who looks not like a peasant, nevertheless. His large hat is worn too gracefully; his ragged blue blouse is too old to accord with his proud and delicate features. Is he an officer of franc-tireurs? A French spy, perhaps? Is my grandfather giving or receiving information? Is he not, as I hope, planning to surprise the Prussians? I question Germaine. She is astonished at my anxiety.'"That man? He wanted to see the Mayor, and as the Germans have put the Mayor in prison, he was brought here. Do not trouble yourself about him, Monsieur Jean."'I hear a sound of closing doors. It is, of course, the stranger going away.'My grandfather joins me.'"Well, how is your aunt?"'I tell him what happened, the story of the wood-cutter and its effect upon her.'"Ah! what a pity!—humph, humph!—I will go and see her. Germaine, my cloak."'"Shall I come with you, grandpapa?"'"No, no; not worth while. I shall be back in half an hour."'In twenty minutes' time he returns.'"You see I am as good as my word. I made haste, eh?"'"Is my aunt better?"'"Your aunt? Yes—no—that is, yes, much better."'"Jean," he says to me after dinner, "you were to go back the day after to-morrow, but as I must go on business to Versailles in the morning early, I will take you with me. Does it disappoint you, eh?"'"A little, yes."'"Bah! you shall make up for it another time. You shall come again soon for several days, and send your lessons to the deuce."'I laugh. I think I must have been mistaken. The man whom I saw must have been really a peasant. My grandsire could not be so gay if there were to be fighting at Maussy this evening. However, before going to bed I look out over the country, and when I lie down I strain my ear to catch a sound. All night long I cannot sleep; I can only listen. All at once a hand touches my elbow. I start up, screaming. Germaine laughs.'"What is the matter, Monsieur Jean? Were you dreaming?"'I stare round me in amaze. It is broad day.'"Make haste and get up; the chocolate is ready; master is waiting."'Half an hour later we leave the house. We are at the end of the street which opens on to the Versailles road, when a platoon of Prussian soldiers, with bayonets fixed, appears upon that road. My grandfather seizes me brutally and throws me down under a fence behind a hedge. I look through the branches. The Prussians pass at quick march. Amidst themmarches a man, with his hands tied behind his back. I see a broad-leafed hat, a pale proud face, an old blue blouse. It is the man of yesterday. I know him at a glance.'"Grandfather, who is that?"'"Eh! Who? who? Some vagabond a Prussian patrol has picked up out of some ditch. The Prussians are very severe for—for—for wayfarers. It is better not to be seen in these affairs—it is better not to be mixed up—I mean—"'My grandfather is lying, I am certain; I feel it. Why should he lie? Where are they taking this fettered man? Why force me to lie hidden under a hedge? From behind the village a loud volley thunders through the air.'"Grandpapa, grandpapa, did you hear that?"'The old man is livid.'"It is the Prussians who practise—who practise at firing—in the morning. It is their custom—their custom—every morning—"'His teeth chatter.'

'Shouts are heard afar off in the woods.

'"Ah, my poor child!" says my aunt, weeping, "what a hideous thing is war!"

'She looks very feeble, very worn, my poor great-aunt Moreau. The sight of her thin face, her skeleton-like hands, moves me painfully. She sees this.

'"At my age," she murmurs, "these events, my dear, are hard to bear."

'However, she assures me the Germans are not very cruel. The Captain in command of those billeted on her, despite his rude exterior, is not uncivil.

'At that moment, indeed, this officer returns with his men; his heels ring on the bricks of the ante-chamber. He opens the door of the little room where we are sitting.

'"Do not be disturbed, Madame," he says, addressing my aunt, "on account of the firing you may have heard. There is nothing of any consequence. A wood-cutter, in whose hut we found arms, and whom we have shot: nothing more."

'He salutes and retires. My aunt shudders. She turns white, her eyes close, her head falls back against the chair. She is faint. I call her maid, who runs to my summons, with the cook and the servant just come to fetch me. The three women try and revive her. She remains so weak when again conscious, that they carry her to her chamber. She is grieved to have fainted.

'"When my dear little Jean came to see me," she murmurs! "It was the thought of that poor wood-cutter—"

'She trembles like a leaf as I leave her.

'Germaine, who has come from my grandfather's to fetch me, asks me to wait a moment; she has a message for the Prussian Captain from my grandfather. The officer is walking up and down, smoking, under the lime-trees. I hear his guttural voice as he answers, "Tell your master that I shall expect him here." What can this mean? When I reach my grandfather's house I rush to the dining-room toquestion the old man, but Germaine catches hold of my arm.

'"You must not disturb Monsieur. He is engaged with someone."

'Through the door, which I hold half-opened, I have seen that someone. He is a person dressed like a peasant, who looks not like a peasant, nevertheless. His large hat is worn too gracefully; his ragged blue blouse is too old to accord with his proud and delicate features. Is he an officer of franc-tireurs? A French spy, perhaps? Is my grandfather giving or receiving information? Is he not, as I hope, planning to surprise the Prussians? I question Germaine. She is astonished at my anxiety.

'"That man? He wanted to see the Mayor, and as the Germans have put the Mayor in prison, he was brought here. Do not trouble yourself about him, Monsieur Jean."

'I hear a sound of closing doors. It is, of course, the stranger going away.

'My grandfather joins me.

'"Well, how is your aunt?"

'I tell him what happened, the story of the wood-cutter and its effect upon her.

'"Ah! what a pity!—humph, humph!—I will go and see her. Germaine, my cloak."

'"Shall I come with you, grandpapa?"

'"No, no; not worth while. I shall be back in half an hour."

'In twenty minutes' time he returns.

'"You see I am as good as my word. I made haste, eh?"

'"Is my aunt better?"

'"Your aunt? Yes—no—that is, yes, much better."

'"Jean," he says to me after dinner, "you were to go back the day after to-morrow, but as I must go on business to Versailles in the morning early, I will take you with me. Does it disappoint you, eh?"

'"A little, yes."

'"Bah! you shall make up for it another time. You shall come again soon for several days, and send your lessons to the deuce."

'I laugh. I think I must have been mistaken. The man whom I saw must have been really a peasant. My grandsire could not be so gay if there were to be fighting at Maussy this evening. However, before going to bed I look out over the country, and when I lie down I strain my ear to catch a sound. All night long I cannot sleep; I can only listen. All at once a hand touches my elbow. I start up, screaming. Germaine laughs.

'"What is the matter, Monsieur Jean? Were you dreaming?"

'I stare round me in amaze. It is broad day.

'"Make haste and get up; the chocolate is ready; master is waiting."

'Half an hour later we leave the house. We are at the end of the street which opens on to the Versailles road, when a platoon of Prussian soldiers, with bayonets fixed, appears upon that road. My grandfather seizes me brutally and throws me down under a fence behind a hedge. I look through the branches. The Prussians pass at quick march. Amidst themmarches a man, with his hands tied behind his back. I see a broad-leafed hat, a pale proud face, an old blue blouse. It is the man of yesterday. I know him at a glance.

'"Grandfather, who is that?"

'"Eh! Who? who? Some vagabond a Prussian patrol has picked up out of some ditch. The Prussians are very severe for—for—for wayfarers. It is better not to be seen in these affairs—it is better not to be mixed up—I mean—"

'My grandfather is lying, I am certain; I feel it. Why should he lie? Where are they taking this fettered man? Why force me to lie hidden under a hedge? From behind the village a loud volley thunders through the air.

'"Grandpapa, grandpapa, did you hear that?"

'The old man is livid.

'"It is the Prussians who practise—who practise at firing—in the morning. It is their custom—their custom—every morning—"

'His teeth chatter.'

Or see this description of the troops leaving for the frontier:—

'To-day the last regiment quartered here goes to the front; it is a regiment of the line.'Léon and I wait in the market-place to go with the soldiers to the railway station.'It is an epic, this departure of the troops. I have never felt what I feel now. There is a sense and scent of battle in the air; the midsummer sun shining on themusket-barrels and sparkling on the accoutrements sets fire to one's brain. The earth trembles under the passage of artillery which is about to vomit death; and one's heart dances in one's breast whilst the ponderous caissons, with their iron-circled wheels, shake the stones, and the mouths of the bronze guns display their yawning jaws. Bands play warlike tunes, men chant theMarseillaise, the gold of epaulets and the lace on uniforms glow in the light; the flags flap against the flagstaffs, on whose summits eagles spread their wings; the shoes of the chargers glitter like silver crescents; and one feels some mighty spirit of war soar above these hearts of flesh and of iron who are about to face the shock of battle. The blood steams in one's veins; the fever of the hour devours one; and one shouts louder and louder, faster and faster, not to become mad.'It is market-day. The square is filled by country people who have brought in their vegetables and fruits for sale. Their stalls are under all the trees, and, here and there, take up the pavement. We are standing between a woman selling salads and an old man who has onions, and is on all fours beside his skips, because every moment or so an onion slides off the heap and rolls towards the gutter, unless he stops it. What a funny old fellow he is to take so much trouble for an onion! Ah! there goes another one! The old man hurries to catch it, but an officer, booted and spurred, steps on it; slips, slides, tumbles down. The onion-seller takes off his cap: "Oh, sir! a thousand pardons!"'The officer gets up, takes his riding-whip by thewhip-end, and brings it with all his force on the uncovered head of the old man, who falls backward on his skull. Blood bespatters his skips of onions.'"Here comes the regiment!" screams Léon.'The band sounds at the end of the street. We run towards it.'"Did you see the poor old man?" I ask.'"Yes. He deserved what he got. Only think! The officer might have broken his legs, eh?"'I do not answer. I am absorbed in watching the soldiers whom we escort, walking on the pavement, keeping step with them.'The soldiers do not all keep step with one another; emotion, enthusiasm, the delights of going to thrash the Prussians, the natural sorrow at leaving those they love—a thousand different feelings. There is an old soldier, a decorated soldier next to me, who is very unsteady on his legs. A young officer, very young, almost beardless, puts his musket straight on the old fellow's shoulder every second. It is admirable to see the harmony which reigns between privates and officers. The Colonel, a grey-beard, salutes with his sword when the people cheer him; and a trumpeter in the front rank has stuck a great bouquet of roses to the banner of his instrument, and carries it as a priest carries the host. Other nosegays are thrust into the barrels of muskets. Bottles of wine show their corks from under the piles of knapsacks, and two or three dogs are stretched out on the haver-sacks in the baggage-waggons. The crowd cheers the dogs.'All the peasants throng to see, shouting theirapplause to the regiment. Before the chemist's shop at the corner, a knot of young men wave their caps in the air; the chemist waves his white handkerchief; behind him I see the blue blouse of the old onion-seller, who lies unnoticed on the ground.'All at once the music breaks out into theMarseillaise.'"Allons, enfans de la patrie,Le jour de gloire est arrivé!"'Oh, how beautiful it all is! The soldiers fall into line. The populace, shouting and cheering, accompanies them to the station. Through the bars of the station-gates a private passes me his drinking-cup, and asks me to get it filled at the wine-shop in front of the gates.'"Wait; here is the money."'But I do not wish for the brave fellow's money, I have a franc in my pocket. I will pay for his pint. In a moment I run back again.'"Thanks, young sir," says the soldier. "It is perhaps the last drop I shall ever drink."'"The last!" cries Léon, red as a turkey-cock; so proud is he to be able to rouse the spirit of a warrior. "The last? Ah! we shall give you floods of wine when you come back from victory."'The townspeople, who are crowding round us, cheer. The soldier shakes his head dubiously.'"Thanks all the same," he says sadly.'He does not seem very confident of success.'"Doubt that we shall be victorious?" says Léon in disgust as we go homeward. "Leave the town forthe frontier with so little confidence! I would give—oh, what wouldn't I give?—to be old enough to go and beat the Prussians. My dear Jean, that soldier has no soul!"'I am not sure. The soldier perhaps does not look on the campaign as a picnic. Perhaps he sees more clearly than we do? Perhaps? A great many things I had never thought of before crowd into my brain.'

'To-day the last regiment quartered here goes to the front; it is a regiment of the line.

'Léon and I wait in the market-place to go with the soldiers to the railway station.

'It is an epic, this departure of the troops. I have never felt what I feel now. There is a sense and scent of battle in the air; the midsummer sun shining on themusket-barrels and sparkling on the accoutrements sets fire to one's brain. The earth trembles under the passage of artillery which is about to vomit death; and one's heart dances in one's breast whilst the ponderous caissons, with their iron-circled wheels, shake the stones, and the mouths of the bronze guns display their yawning jaws. Bands play warlike tunes, men chant theMarseillaise, the gold of epaulets and the lace on uniforms glow in the light; the flags flap against the flagstaffs, on whose summits eagles spread their wings; the shoes of the chargers glitter like silver crescents; and one feels some mighty spirit of war soar above these hearts of flesh and of iron who are about to face the shock of battle. The blood steams in one's veins; the fever of the hour devours one; and one shouts louder and louder, faster and faster, not to become mad.

'It is market-day. The square is filled by country people who have brought in their vegetables and fruits for sale. Their stalls are under all the trees, and, here and there, take up the pavement. We are standing between a woman selling salads and an old man who has onions, and is on all fours beside his skips, because every moment or so an onion slides off the heap and rolls towards the gutter, unless he stops it. What a funny old fellow he is to take so much trouble for an onion! Ah! there goes another one! The old man hurries to catch it, but an officer, booted and spurred, steps on it; slips, slides, tumbles down. The onion-seller takes off his cap: "Oh, sir! a thousand pardons!"

'The officer gets up, takes his riding-whip by thewhip-end, and brings it with all his force on the uncovered head of the old man, who falls backward on his skull. Blood bespatters his skips of onions.

'"Here comes the regiment!" screams Léon.

'The band sounds at the end of the street. We run towards it.

'"Did you see the poor old man?" I ask.

'"Yes. He deserved what he got. Only think! The officer might have broken his legs, eh?"

'I do not answer. I am absorbed in watching the soldiers whom we escort, walking on the pavement, keeping step with them.

'The soldiers do not all keep step with one another; emotion, enthusiasm, the delights of going to thrash the Prussians, the natural sorrow at leaving those they love—a thousand different feelings. There is an old soldier, a decorated soldier next to me, who is very unsteady on his legs. A young officer, very young, almost beardless, puts his musket straight on the old fellow's shoulder every second. It is admirable to see the harmony which reigns between privates and officers. The Colonel, a grey-beard, salutes with his sword when the people cheer him; and a trumpeter in the front rank has stuck a great bouquet of roses to the banner of his instrument, and carries it as a priest carries the host. Other nosegays are thrust into the barrels of muskets. Bottles of wine show their corks from under the piles of knapsacks, and two or three dogs are stretched out on the haver-sacks in the baggage-waggons. The crowd cheers the dogs.

'All the peasants throng to see, shouting theirapplause to the regiment. Before the chemist's shop at the corner, a knot of young men wave their caps in the air; the chemist waves his white handkerchief; behind him I see the blue blouse of the old onion-seller, who lies unnoticed on the ground.

'All at once the music breaks out into theMarseillaise.

'"Allons, enfans de la patrie,Le jour de gloire est arrivé!"

'Oh, how beautiful it all is! The soldiers fall into line. The populace, shouting and cheering, accompanies them to the station. Through the bars of the station-gates a private passes me his drinking-cup, and asks me to get it filled at the wine-shop in front of the gates.

'"Wait; here is the money."

'But I do not wish for the brave fellow's money, I have a franc in my pocket. I will pay for his pint. In a moment I run back again.

'"Thanks, young sir," says the soldier. "It is perhaps the last drop I shall ever drink."

'"The last!" cries Léon, red as a turkey-cock; so proud is he to be able to rouse the spirit of a warrior. "The last? Ah! we shall give you floods of wine when you come back from victory."

'The townspeople, who are crowding round us, cheer. The soldier shakes his head dubiously.

'"Thanks all the same," he says sadly.

'He does not seem very confident of success.

'"Doubt that we shall be victorious?" says Léon in disgust as we go homeward. "Leave the town forthe frontier with so little confidence! I would give—oh, what wouldn't I give?—to be old enough to go and beat the Prussians. My dear Jean, that soldier has no soul!"

'I am not sure. The soldier perhaps does not look on the campaign as a picnic. Perhaps he sees more clearly than we do? Perhaps? A great many things I had never thought of before crowd into my brain.'

A few days later, after Sedan, Jean sees the Germans enter Versailles.

'"Here they are!"'It is the octroi-guards who cry out this as they come flying from the gates across the town. They brush me roughly as they pass, and their abject terror gains on me.'I follow them. But as I run I see on the other side of the boulevard five or six inquisitive persons, who have stopped in their walk, and hide themselves behind the trees. If they stay to see, why may not I? I, too, get behind the stem of a tree, and I watch with staring eyes to see what will happen. On the road, fifty yards from the gates, a dozen horsemen are coming onward at a walk. They stop a moment before the octroi-officers; then they come on into the town in two lines, almost touching the pavement.'"The Uhlans!" says someone behind me. Ah, I think with a thrill, these are the Uhlans!'They draw near us; their pistols are cocked.They pass me close, and I feel that I shall fall from fright; my nails clutch the bark of the tree which screens me. These riders are covered with blood. There is blood on the pennons of their lances, on the hocks of their horses, on the rents in their torn uniforms, and one of the foremost has a white linen band stained with red on his forehead. Ah! it is hideous! I want to run away—I want to run away; it is impossible. Before me there are these Germans, riding slowly, searching with piercing glances the streets which open out to the left and to the right. Behind them comes on a dense dark mass. One can hear the tramp of feet. One can distinguish the spikes of helmets, the barrels of muskets, the little drums no bigger than tambourines, and the fifes which are playing a march. These drummers and pipers are followed by linesmen in dark blue, shod with boots drawn up above their trousers, the musket held straight on the shoulder, the cloak rolled.'And these men, grey with dust and mud, black with powder, with their coats in rags—these men, who fought no doubt this morning, and who have just made a forced march—preserve the most marvellous exactitude, the most perfect regularity in the dressing of their ranks, and the rhythm of their steps keeps measure from the first line to the last of the whole column.'They pass—they pass—they will never end. I have almost forgotten my fear. I am partly in front of my sheltering tree. The drums and the fifes cease to sound, and music replaces it from a band marchingin front of a group of staff-officers. They play a warlike march, a battle-hymn, and all down the line of troops, from the foremost company which has reached the Chateau of Versailles, to the last which is leaving the Chesnay, shouts of triumph arise and drown the brazen voice of the cymbals. The victorious chant thunders down the wind. It is theMarseillaise—theMarseillaisewhich our own troops played as they left for the frontier, the hymn which was to render every French soldier invincible, which I had sung myself when we had been so sure of supremacy, and when I had planted my little tricolour flags on the map, all along the route from Paris to Berlin in a Via Triumphalis!'Now the artillery comes on; its black cannon on their blue gun-carriages, with their attendants on foot and in saddle, wearing helmets surmounted with brass balls. There are flowers in the mouths of the cannon, and they are garlanded with ivy and green boughs. The cavalry follow on the artillery; dragoons, cuirassiers, hussars with white facings and a death's-head on their shakoes. Then come the carriages, the waggons, the vehicles with ladders, the baggage-carts.... All at once my heart sickens and stands still. Behind the wheels of the last waggons I seem to see some red cloth. Yes, it is our red cloth—our soldiers. Between two rows of Prussians, who have their bayonets fixed, our prisoners march without arms, dirty, ragged, miserable, and ashamed. There are at least two hundred of them, and I strain my eyes after these, my countrymen, who are destined to rot in German fortresses.'

'"Here they are!"

'It is the octroi-guards who cry out this as they come flying from the gates across the town. They brush me roughly as they pass, and their abject terror gains on me.

'I follow them. But as I run I see on the other side of the boulevard five or six inquisitive persons, who have stopped in their walk, and hide themselves behind the trees. If they stay to see, why may not I? I, too, get behind the stem of a tree, and I watch with staring eyes to see what will happen. On the road, fifty yards from the gates, a dozen horsemen are coming onward at a walk. They stop a moment before the octroi-officers; then they come on into the town in two lines, almost touching the pavement.

'"The Uhlans!" says someone behind me. Ah, I think with a thrill, these are the Uhlans!

'They draw near us; their pistols are cocked.They pass me close, and I feel that I shall fall from fright; my nails clutch the bark of the tree which screens me. These riders are covered with blood. There is blood on the pennons of their lances, on the hocks of their horses, on the rents in their torn uniforms, and one of the foremost has a white linen band stained with red on his forehead. Ah! it is hideous! I want to run away—I want to run away; it is impossible. Before me there are these Germans, riding slowly, searching with piercing glances the streets which open out to the left and to the right. Behind them comes on a dense dark mass. One can hear the tramp of feet. One can distinguish the spikes of helmets, the barrels of muskets, the little drums no bigger than tambourines, and the fifes which are playing a march. These drummers and pipers are followed by linesmen in dark blue, shod with boots drawn up above their trousers, the musket held straight on the shoulder, the cloak rolled.

'And these men, grey with dust and mud, black with powder, with their coats in rags—these men, who fought no doubt this morning, and who have just made a forced march—preserve the most marvellous exactitude, the most perfect regularity in the dressing of their ranks, and the rhythm of their steps keeps measure from the first line to the last of the whole column.

'They pass—they pass—they will never end. I have almost forgotten my fear. I am partly in front of my sheltering tree. The drums and the fifes cease to sound, and music replaces it from a band marchingin front of a group of staff-officers. They play a warlike march, a battle-hymn, and all down the line of troops, from the foremost company which has reached the Chateau of Versailles, to the last which is leaving the Chesnay, shouts of triumph arise and drown the brazen voice of the cymbals. The victorious chant thunders down the wind. It is theMarseillaise—theMarseillaisewhich our own troops played as they left for the frontier, the hymn which was to render every French soldier invincible, which I had sung myself when we had been so sure of supremacy, and when I had planted my little tricolour flags on the map, all along the route from Paris to Berlin in a Via Triumphalis!

'Now the artillery comes on; its black cannon on their blue gun-carriages, with their attendants on foot and in saddle, wearing helmets surmounted with brass balls. There are flowers in the mouths of the cannon, and they are garlanded with ivy and green boughs. The cavalry follow on the artillery; dragoons, cuirassiers, hussars with white facings and a death's-head on their shakoes. Then come the carriages, the waggons, the vehicles with ladders, the baggage-carts.... All at once my heart sickens and stands still. Behind the wheels of the last waggons I seem to see some red cloth. Yes, it is our red cloth—our soldiers. Between two rows of Prussians, who have their bayonets fixed, our prisoners march without arms, dirty, ragged, miserable, and ashamed. There are at least two hundred of them, and I strain my eyes after these, my countrymen, who are destined to rot in German fortresses.'

It seems to me that in no contemporary fiction do we possess studies of spectacles, of sentiments, of street-life in a momentous hour, more accurate, more vivid, more simple in diction, more touching in suggestion, than in the above passages.

The sustained and withering irony and censure in this sketch, which yet never goes out of the selected orbit of a boy's observation and experiences, seem to me to be perfect in their kind. The incompleteness of the child's understanding gives only a keener incisiveness to the satire embodied in his narrative. The general reader will never forgive such portraits as that of the elder Barbier, who, after shouting, 'Sursum Corda! Prenons serment de défendre le sol sacré de la Patrie!' accepts the large Prussian orders, sets his steam-saws going in his timber yard, and furnishes the wood for the besiegers of Paris; or of that of the tobacconist Legros, who, after crying, 'Un soldat qui renie son drapeau? Qu'il crêve comme un chien!' stands bareheaded with bent spine to sell cigars to Bavarian officers. This is human nature: human nature as commerce and modern teaching and the cheap Press have made it; but Barbier and Legros will never pardon the limner who thus portrays them. To the reproach that such portraits are nearly always those which he selects, Darien would, no doubt, reply that it is not his fault if they are what have been in his path to the exclusion of finer and nobler figures. He is a realist in the full sense of that often-abused word, and he has the courage to represent the realities which he finds.

TheAnnée Terriblecasts its black shadows overthe childhood of this writer, and as long as his life shall last the gloom it has left will stay with him. If France herself should ever forget, which Heaven forbid, he will not do so. His soul has been dipped in the Styx.

What will, no doubt, alienate from him a large number of readers will be his almost absolute want of human sympathy, or, at least, of expressions of such sympathy. It is exceedingly rare with him to give way to any sign of any emotion of pity. He sees human nature, in all its phases, with little compassion for it. He sees (and this is, too often, either through weakness or through policy, ignored by writers and thinkers) that the great majority of men are neither the martyrs nor the heroes, neither the victims nor the tyrants of their time, but a mass considerable alone by its numbers, inconsiderable by any mental or moral worth, and chiefly absorbed in different forms of selfishness and the desire of gain. It is probably an error, though one consecrated by usage and talent, to represent the generality of human beings as worthy subjects either of blessing or of curse. But the author who says so will never be forgiven by that mass of mediocrity which forms nine-tenths of the population of the world. Darien says it, and shows it, and it is this which will always make his works appear dreary and depressing to the general reader, who cannot accept and pardon this manner of looking at life for the sake of its veracity and courage.

Of course, also, in the Press generally, the accusation of exaggeration is always brought against exposures and delineations which are unwelcome andembarrassing. But the writer's word may certainly be taken for it that nothing in his descriptions is exaggerated or invented, and many recent inquiries into the causes of deaths in the ranks, and of executions after summary, and almost secret, court-martial in Algeria, have confirmed the veracity of the statements made inBiribi. The French Government, indeed, was, as I have said, so apprehensive of the effect of these on the public mind that, although it did not suppress the book, it forbade large coloured cartoons of the events described in it to be posted up on the boulevards. In all nations the public is treated like a child by authority; and as a child who will only walk straight and submissively if its eyes be bandaged and its feet hobbled.

But in these pages we are not so much concerned with the political and military side of these works as with their literary qualities; and these are considerable and of a strong and rare originality of style.Il vous empoigne, and it is impossible to read either of his two works without recognising their courage and ability, if we feel pained by their withering scorn and rugged wrath. They are at times hard as the stones over which the sick and swooning soldier is dragged, tied to the tail of a mule. They are at times ferocious as the licensed torturer with the three stripes on the sleeve, who throws his helpless prisoner, gagged and bound, on the burning sands. Terrible they always are, with all the terror of truths which have been lived through by the person who chronicles them. It is not any betrayal of confidence to say that the author ofBiribihas experienced in his ownperson the tortures of which the dread record is made under this little playful-sounding word. After such scenes as are herein described, and such sufferings as these, the blood in a man's veins cannot be rose-water. 'La haine c'est comme les balles; en la machant on s'empoisonne.' And it is impossible that the military system can beget any other than hatred, violent, unforgiving, imperishable, in the victims of that system.

'A young soldier, a conscript, a chasseur à cheval, has lost two cartridges as the battalion is about to leave for Tunis.'The Corporal informs the Captain in command, who turns and looks in silence. The boy Loupat gazes at him with the eyes of an animal watching the descent of the club which is about to brain it, and from which it knows not how to escape.'In passing through Tunis the Corporal says to him, "We shall leave you here. That will teach you to sell your cartridges."'The boy understands. The council of war, the sentence as a thief, the indelible shame stamped on the brow of a youth because he has lost two of the cartridges of the State! The following morning the bugle sounds theréveilat four o'clock. It is still dark. At twenty minutes to five the company, with knapsacks on their backs, is drawn up in line on the road which runs through the camp. The trumpets sound the roll-call, and all down the line each man answers "Present" as his name is spoken.'"No one is missing?"'"Yes, Loupat, my Captain."'"Loupat is absent?"'"Yes, my Captain."'"The scoundrel! He has slunk off in the night to escape court-martial, but we will find him. Go on. No one else missing?"'"Look there!" A soldier points to the gymnasium. All the men look where he points. Under the portico, on the great architrave on the left, a body is swinging, black, at the end of a cord.'A lieutenant runs to the place, climbs to the body takes hold of it, lets it go, returns.'"Dead?" says the officer in command. "Is it Loupat?"'"He is already cold."'"The scoundrel!" says the Captain again. "Well! he has done justice on himself. Right flank, march!"'We are crowded pell-mell into the railway waggons which are bound for Tunis. I look through the opening in the door and see far away below me—already far away—a small dark shape which swings in the wind as on a gibbet, and which is lighted solely by the first rays of the rising sun.'Another soldier, Barnaux, has had some liqueurs given him by a comrade; Barnaux is drinking with the men of hismarabout, when a sergeant enters, espies the irregularity, takes the offender before the officer in command.'Barnaux refuses to say who the giver of the liqueur was. The Captain orders him to be put in irons. They have put himà la crapaudine, that is, with hisarms bound behind him and chained to his ankles. He is cast down thus on the sand of the camp. Because he moans with pain they gag him with a dirty rag, they tie his chin to his head with a cord. He remains all the night thus, tied up into a shapeless packet. In the morning when they change sentinels they perceive that he is dead. The gag has stifled him.'Then the horror of the hospital; those hells which these men so dread that they will tear the bandages off their wounds, or cut their veins with a bit of broken glass, rather than live to enter them.'The muleteers set us down at a great tent which serves as an infirmary; within there are planks on trestles and large pails filled with reddened water.'"You see that," says Palot, who has divined with the instinct of the dying the destination of those sinister planks. "Well, that will be my last bed."'An assistant, a filthy apron round his body, signs to us to enter.'The great tent is an unutterably miserable place; it has been battered about by wind and weather; the currents of air blow unchecked through it, and clouds of dust arise from the ground. Some twenty iron beds are there, not more; and beyond those a pile of mattresses, on which men are lying, rolled up in rough counterpanes. There are not sheets enough for all. They make a sick man rise and give up his place to Palot, whose pulse the surgeon feels.'"Done for," says the doctor, between his teeth, without heeding whether Palot hears him or not.'To the rest of us they assign the mattresses lyingon the earth; these are full of vermin; they throw on us some covering, stained with the vomit of our predecessors.'How wretched it is, this hospital! How weary are the days passed, with no other companions than the dying, whose characters are poisoned by suffering and whose cries of horror and anguish ring in one's ears! When, moved by the disgust and despair which comes over you in this fœtid hole filled with filth and misery, you drag yourself out on your trembling limbs into the sun, you feel so feeble, so exhausted, so helpless, you cannot walk a step. You sit down in the torrid heat; you are chilly, despite the high temperature; your teeth chatter, your body is drenched with sweat. And at evening you are obliged to return to the tent, where you pass such hideous nights, troubled by such frightful nightmares, by such vague sudden shapeless terrors, which seem to seize you by the throat and freeze the blood in your veins. Oh! those horrible nights when you see the dying shake off their covering with shrunken fingers and try to raise their haggard faces, lighted by the yellow-green rays of a lanthorn!'These nights in which the living, who so soon will be the dead, clutch at the rags which cover them, and shriek with rage and fear as though they saw an enemy descend on them! These nights in which one hears the childlike sobs of young Palot, who is delirious, and who in his long agony calls on his mother, "Mamma! Mamma!"'They will ring for ever in my ears those two piteous words which through three whole nights fillthat wretched place with their unpitied lament. A lament, low and tender at first, broken with choking tears, ending in screams which make one's hair stand up on one's skull with horror. The desperate screams of a perishing life which has lost all sense and measure of things or of time, of one who knows only that he will die, and in one supreme appeal protests against his severance from those he loves.'

'A young soldier, a conscript, a chasseur à cheval, has lost two cartridges as the battalion is about to leave for Tunis.

'The Corporal informs the Captain in command, who turns and looks in silence. The boy Loupat gazes at him with the eyes of an animal watching the descent of the club which is about to brain it, and from which it knows not how to escape.

'In passing through Tunis the Corporal says to him, "We shall leave you here. That will teach you to sell your cartridges."

'The boy understands. The council of war, the sentence as a thief, the indelible shame stamped on the brow of a youth because he has lost two of the cartridges of the State! The following morning the bugle sounds theréveilat four o'clock. It is still dark. At twenty minutes to five the company, with knapsacks on their backs, is drawn up in line on the road which runs through the camp. The trumpets sound the roll-call, and all down the line each man answers "Present" as his name is spoken.

'"No one is missing?"

'"Yes, Loupat, my Captain."

'"Loupat is absent?"

'"Yes, my Captain."

'"The scoundrel! He has slunk off in the night to escape court-martial, but we will find him. Go on. No one else missing?"

'"Look there!" A soldier points to the gymnasium. All the men look where he points. Under the portico, on the great architrave on the left, a body is swinging, black, at the end of a cord.

'A lieutenant runs to the place, climbs to the body takes hold of it, lets it go, returns.

'"Dead?" says the officer in command. "Is it Loupat?"

'"He is already cold."

'"The scoundrel!" says the Captain again. "Well! he has done justice on himself. Right flank, march!"

'We are crowded pell-mell into the railway waggons which are bound for Tunis. I look through the opening in the door and see far away below me—already far away—a small dark shape which swings in the wind as on a gibbet, and which is lighted solely by the first rays of the rising sun.

'Another soldier, Barnaux, has had some liqueurs given him by a comrade; Barnaux is drinking with the men of hismarabout, when a sergeant enters, espies the irregularity, takes the offender before the officer in command.

'Barnaux refuses to say who the giver of the liqueur was. The Captain orders him to be put in irons. They have put himà la crapaudine, that is, with hisarms bound behind him and chained to his ankles. He is cast down thus on the sand of the camp. Because he moans with pain they gag him with a dirty rag, they tie his chin to his head with a cord. He remains all the night thus, tied up into a shapeless packet. In the morning when they change sentinels they perceive that he is dead. The gag has stifled him.

'Then the horror of the hospital; those hells which these men so dread that they will tear the bandages off their wounds, or cut their veins with a bit of broken glass, rather than live to enter them.

'The muleteers set us down at a great tent which serves as an infirmary; within there are planks on trestles and large pails filled with reddened water.

'"You see that," says Palot, who has divined with the instinct of the dying the destination of those sinister planks. "Well, that will be my last bed."

'An assistant, a filthy apron round his body, signs to us to enter.

'The great tent is an unutterably miserable place; it has been battered about by wind and weather; the currents of air blow unchecked through it, and clouds of dust arise from the ground. Some twenty iron beds are there, not more; and beyond those a pile of mattresses, on which men are lying, rolled up in rough counterpanes. There are not sheets enough for all. They make a sick man rise and give up his place to Palot, whose pulse the surgeon feels.

'"Done for," says the doctor, between his teeth, without heeding whether Palot hears him or not.

'To the rest of us they assign the mattresses lyingon the earth; these are full of vermin; they throw on us some covering, stained with the vomit of our predecessors.

'How wretched it is, this hospital! How weary are the days passed, with no other companions than the dying, whose characters are poisoned by suffering and whose cries of horror and anguish ring in one's ears! When, moved by the disgust and despair which comes over you in this fœtid hole filled with filth and misery, you drag yourself out on your trembling limbs into the sun, you feel so feeble, so exhausted, so helpless, you cannot walk a step. You sit down in the torrid heat; you are chilly, despite the high temperature; your teeth chatter, your body is drenched with sweat. And at evening you are obliged to return to the tent, where you pass such hideous nights, troubled by such frightful nightmares, by such vague sudden shapeless terrors, which seem to seize you by the throat and freeze the blood in your veins. Oh! those horrible nights when you see the dying shake off their covering with shrunken fingers and try to raise their haggard faces, lighted by the yellow-green rays of a lanthorn!

'These nights in which the living, who so soon will be the dead, clutch at the rags which cover them, and shriek with rage and fear as though they saw an enemy descend on them! These nights in which one hears the childlike sobs of young Palot, who is delirious, and who in his long agony calls on his mother, "Mamma! Mamma!"

'They will ring for ever in my ears those two piteous words which through three whole nights fillthat wretched place with their unpitied lament. A lament, low and tender at first, broken with choking tears, ending in screams which make one's hair stand up on one's skull with horror. The desperate screams of a perishing life which has lost all sense and measure of things or of time, of one who knows only that he will die, and in one supreme appeal protests against his severance from those he loves.'

And the youth Palot dies in that appeal, and they dig a hole in the red clay under a low wall beside a Barbary fig-tree.

'Ah! poor little soldier, who breathe your last, calling on your mother; you who, with your glazing eyes, saw the vision of your home; you who are laid there, at twenty-three years of age, to be devoured by the worms of that foreign soil on which you have suffered so much, and where you have met your death alone, forsaken, without a friend to soothe your last struggle, without a hand to close your eyelids, except the brutal hand of the hospital servant, which shut on your mouth like a muzzle when your desperate cries disturbed his sleep. Ah, I know why your sickness was mortal; I know it much better than the surgeon whose steel dissected your emaciated body; and I pity you, poor victim of the State, with all my heart and soul as I pity your mother who waits for you, counting the days of your absence, and who will only receive in her solitude the dry official notice of your death!'Ah, no! I will not pity you, young dead soldier, nor your mother who mourns your loss! I will not pity you, sons, who are killed by the drinkers of blood, mothers who conceive what they send to the shambles. Mad women who endure the pangs of childbirth only to give up the fruit of their womb to the Minotaur which devours them! Know you not that the she-wolves let themselves be slain sooner than lose their offspring; that there are beasts which die of grief when their cubs are borne away from them? Do you not understand that it would be better to tear your new-born creatures limb from limb than to bring them up for one-and-twenty years, only to throw them into the hands of those who want their flesh to feed the cannon?... And you would ask our pity when, in some dark hour, the end comes, and the bones of your children are gnawed by hyænas and whitened by the sun in some forgotten corner of the earth?'

'Ah, no! I will not pity you, young dead soldier, nor your mother who mourns your loss! I will not pity you, sons, who are killed by the drinkers of blood, mothers who conceive what they send to the shambles. Mad women who endure the pangs of childbirth only to give up the fruit of their womb to the Minotaur which devours them! Know you not that the she-wolves let themselves be slain sooner than lose their offspring; that there are beasts which die of grief when their cubs are borne away from them? Do you not understand that it would be better to tear your new-born creatures limb from limb than to bring them up for one-and-twenty years, only to throw them into the hands of those who want their flesh to feed the cannon?... And you would ask our pity when, in some dark hour, the end comes, and the bones of your children are gnawed by hyænas and whitened by the sun in some forgotten corner of the earth?'

There are many such passages inBiribi, burning with truth and with pain; and it would be well if they could be stamped into the mind and the memory of the peoples of this epoch, who go meekly and stupidly as sheep to the slaughter, under the pressure of their sovereigns and statesmen. Of course, such a teaching as this carries with it its own condemnation by what is called authority, and by all those classes of which I have spoken, to whom war is a necessity and a standing army is the ark of the Government. But it would be well if the populace of every country could read, learn, and digest it, and realise its truth and its justification. As I have said, I placeBas lesCœurshigher, in a purely literary sense, thanBiribi, in the sense of construction and of concentration. ForBiribiis abrupt, at times confused; is rather a series of terrible records and tragical incidents than a consecutive and harmonious narrative, although it relates the career of the same soldier from the time when he enters the ranks, to the last day in which he flings from him for ever the grey coat andkepiof the punishment-battalion. In that punishment-battalion he has been placed, let the reader remember, for no especial crime against law or decency, but for those offences against the military code (the unwritten code) which make the offender more guilty in the eyes of a court-martial than any actually criminal accusation: to have lost a regimental article, to have forgotten to salute a superior, to have stopped to drink at a brook on a march, to have omitted to put the regulation number on a clothes brush or a pewter platter, to have been out without leave, to have lost cartridges or buttons—any one of those innumerable and incessantly recurring actions or omissions which make a soldier aninsoumisto his military superior, whether sergeant or general, corporal or colonel, which to the military mind constitute crimes too heinous to be named, offences which fill a punishment-book with accusations of acts in which only the semi-insanity of perverted authority could see any provocation. Read only of the punishment of thetombeaufor simple sins of negligence or thoughtless mirth. Thetombeauis a canvas cover, stretched on stakes, making a cage a mètre long by sixty centimètres wide, into which the soldier condemned to this torment is obliged to creepon his stomach as best he can. In this cage he spends days, weeks, months, at the caprice of his tyrants, with a litre of water as his only drink, and nothing but the canvas between him and scorching heat or icy rain, or blinding desert dust. On hot days the water in his little can evaporates rapidly; and at the will of the corporals in charge of him he may be kept thirty-six hours without other drink and without food at all. Remember, as you read these lines, that thetombeauhas been the home for months of the man who describes it; a home on the scorching Algerian sand in the parching African weather; a home in which he envied the jackal its lair and the vulture its wings; a home in which his flesh rotted and his manhood swooned.

It is, perhaps, the finest compliment one can pay to an author to be so much impressed by his theme that one almost forgets to speak of his purely intellectual qualities. It is difficult to treat of either of these works in a coldly critical spirit. For they are written with tears of blood—such tears as are wrung from the heart's depths of all those by whom France is beloved.

For if militarism be her only armour, her only resource against her foes, then must we tremble for her indeed; and tremble no less for the whole of Europe, of which all the male youth is bruised and crushed under militarism as in a mortar. The charge of want of patriotism has been brought against Georges Darien for both these volumes. But it is the flaw in human nature, not in French nature only, which he exposes; the cynicism, the selfishness, thecowardice, the meanness, which are so conspicuous in all modern society, in all nations and in all grades. Were there a German invasion of Italy or of England next year, there would probably be as many Italians or English ready to succumb to, to cringe before, and to profit by, the conquerors as there are Versaillais ready to do so in the volume calledBas les Cœurs. There is a moral motor ataxy in the spinal marrow of modern nationalities; the love of money, the fear of poverty, and the continual concentration of the mind on personal interests taught by modern education and by modern commerce make up a large percentage of human beings, who are mere time-servers, always ready to hold the stirrup-leather of the strongest. It is not alone the French bourgeois of 1870 who is satirised in these pictures of Versailles under German domination; it is the whole modernity of the last quarter of the nineteenth century under the teaching of modern science, modern trade, and modern morality. All humanity has been inoculated with the serum of concentrated cowardice and egotism; some are robust enough to resist the contagion, but the majority absorb it and develop the disease. That which Darien calls not cowardice, but fear, is enormously developed by modern influences, and will probably continue to increase in the coming century. He asks himself and his reader of what elements is it composed that discipline, that blind obedience, which is enforced in military life (and which is already demanded in civil life by the scientific and medical tyrannies). He replies, and it is a subtle distinction which will escape the comprehension of many, thatthe soldier who thus cringes to base orders is not a coward but a craven (pas un lâche; un peureux).

'This craven would throw himself into fire or flood to-day to save a comrade's life; but he would blow his comrade's brains out to-morrow at the word of command of a non-commissioned officer. He is not base: he is frightened. His courage disappears before a watch-word: his boldness shrinks and vanishes under a regimental order. What cows him is the apprehension of punishment, the fear of the men set above him. Fear is the keystone of the ark of the temple of Janus. The army is a laundry where they throw the consciences of men into a tub of soap-suds, and where the characters of men are wrung and twisted like wet linen, and are placed, shapeless, under the wooden beater of a brutalising discipline. It is only by means of fear that the military system has been able to establish itself. It is only by such fear that it maintains its position. It is obliged to affect the imagination by terror, as it must extinguish the soul and sense of nations to prevent each from seeing farther than the stupid limit of a frontier. It is obliged to surround itself with a mysterious ceremony, with a religious pomp in which horror is united to magnificence; in which the trumpet-blast joins in the death-shrieks; in which one can see confused together the blood-stained robe of glory, the plume of generals, the handcuffs of gendarmes, the marshal's baton, and the dozen balls of the execution-volley, the golden palms of triumph and the shattered bones of the dead. It must presentthis spectacle to the crowds which stare and tremble before it as they stand open-mouthed before a charlatan quack doctor at a fair, whose tinsel and feathers attract them, but from whom they shrink alarmed as soon as they see a forceps or a lancet glitter ominously in his hand. It must do this in order that the people, always in ecstasy before the marvellous, which it does not attempt to analyse, shall be seized before it with awe and admiration: even as a savage who prostrates himself in terror and respect before the shooting-iron which he does not understand, but which he knows possesses the power to strike him to the earth.'

Many will protest against this figure as an insult to the general public, but like many other insults which carry an intolerable sting in them, it may claim that it is merited, and does not overpass the truth.

Darien writes with that force which can, indeed, only come from the intimate persuasion that what it tells mankind is true, and should be told.

'"It is commonly said," he continues, "that the army incarnates the nation. History puts this into our heads by means of all her subtlest lies. Ten martial anecdotes sum up a century; a boast describes a reign. History preaches hatred of the people, respect for the pillager, the sanctification of carnage, the glorification of slaughter. The weak, the sensitive, the timid succumb beneath it, and are buried in the red clay or left on the sand for the vultures and jackal. The strong (sometimes, notalways) lives to have his whole future poisoned by these memories, his whole temperament warped and embittered; or he forces his tormentors to shoot him by some unpardonable breach of discipline; some blow to a superior, or some intentionally insolent reply; death is the continually recurring sentence in the military code; if the man does not bend he must be broken: broken in two with a volley which smashes his spine. The punishment-battalions, the workshops of the Travaux Forcés, are the immediate consequences of the standing armies. Society, to protect its interests, makes of a young citizen a soldier, and of the soldier a galley slave at the first effort in him to shake off the yoke of that discipline which degrades and brutalises him, requiring like all tyrants and usurpers to support its rule by terror, to make itself dreaded that its prestige may dazzle and its tottering throne be secured. What society requires is an obedience passive and blind, a total imbecility, a humiliation which has no limit or hesitation; the response of the machine to the mechanic, of the dancing dog to the stick of his teacher. Take your man, make him surrender all free will, power of choice, liberty, and conscience, and you create and possess a soldier. To-day, at the end of the nineteenth century, there is as much difference between the two words, soldier and citizen, as there was in the time of Cæsar between two similar words—Milites and Quirites. The standing army is the corner-stone of the actual social structure; it is a force which sanctions and secures the conquests of force; it is a barrier raised much less to combatforeign invasion than to resist and paralyse the just claims of nations. Soldiers, those sons of the people armed against their fathers, are nothing more or less than gendarmes in disguise."'

This is surely absolute truth—that truth which is of all others most feared by those in authority; those who, whether as sovereigns, ministers, financiers, professional men, or tradesmen, live on and by the servility and gullibility of the nations.

'What is discipline except fear? The soldier is reared to dread what is behind him more than what he is forced to face; he must be more afraid of the fellow-trooper who will be told off to shoot him in the back, than of the adversary whom he is ordered to attack. The army is the incarnation of fear. The soldier must dread his commanders as a burnt child dreads the fire. He must never laugh at their absurdities, nor raise a voice against their injustice or their tyrannies. He must never speak. He must not even think. His superiors do both for him. If he laugh, or resent, or speak, or think, if he be neither a coward nor a dolt, he is a mutineer: he must be tamed, beaten, brokenà Biribi.'

And when the dreamer, Queslier, says that it will not be long before the people will become awake to this abuse of them, and will see that the military caste is established on prejudices and interests hostile to them, and will arise and destroy it, Darien replies, with equal truth:—

'There will flow much water under all the bridges of the world before the people will have ceased to adore their vain idols bathed in blood and tears.'

Vain idols, indeed! For thousands of years the Juggernaut of military despotism has rolled over the living pavement of the prostrate multitudes, and there is no sign as yet that those multitudes will arise and shiver the blood-stained car to atoms. Darien has but little hope in the resistance of the people. He fears that the majority of them will always continue to be daunted, dazzled, made dumb and helpless by the powers which ruin and slay them. William of Germany makes his insolent and inhuman declaration that the soldier must slaughter his own progenitors if his 'war-lord' bid him do so; and yet William of Germany is allowed to continue his reign.

What are we to look for from nations which lie down to be stamped on thus? which lick the spurred boots of those who outrage them?

Biribi, and whatBiribirepresents, has its prototype in every country of Europe; and wherever Europe introduces her 'civilisation' there she introduces also her quick-firing cannon, her numbered battalions of slaves, her organised butchery, her pulverisation of virility and of volition, her destruction of initiative and of liberty.

England considers that such arguments as those contained in this book do not concern her because she has no conscription. But how long will she be able, or be allowed, to be free from enforced service? The present field-marshal, commanding-in-chief, LordWolesley, desires conscription. It may well be that events, in the not far distant future, may strengthen his hands and enable him to enforce it.[4]

'Ah, Mascarille! who wished to put history into madrigals!' cries Darien. 'History has given us Chauvinism (Jingoism), that epidemic which makes a nation run headlong like the Gadarene swine, to fall into the pit of absolutism! The army incarnates the nation, you say? No. It diminishes it. It incarnates nothing but force, brutal and blind, which lies at the service of whoever most pleases it; or—sad to say—whoever pays it highest. The army is the social cancer; is the octopus of which the tentacles drain the blood of the nations; the hundred arms and feelers which the people should sever with blows of their hatchets if they desire themselves to live.'

Such language is very strong, and will rouse strong opposition in those who have long been cradled in conventional opinions, and believe that the established order of society, now existing, is admirable, and intangible, because it has had the force and the cunning to so establish itself. It is language which may, of course, be challenged by adverse argument, which may at anyrate be met by counter-statements deserving to be weighed against it; but it is language which is more needed than any other in the present state of Europe, with every nation armed to the teeth and every country an arsenal.

I believe that the novels of Mr Crawford of which the scene and the characters are Italian are not among those of his works which are the most generally popular. This fact, if it be a fact, must be due to the general inability of his English and American public to appreciate their accuracy of observation and lineation. Nearly all of them have qualities which cannot be gauged by those to whom the nationality of his personages in these works is unknown. In my own works, of which the scene is in Italy, I have dealt almost exclusively with the Italian peasantry. Mr Crawford has devoted his attention to the middle and the higher classes. I do not think his portraiture of the Italian aristocracy always redolent of the soil, but that of the lower and middle classes is faithful to a wonderful degree. That side of Italian life which is given inMarzio's Crucifix, for instance, is drawn with an accuracy not to be surpassed. The whole of this story indeed is admirable in its construction and execution. There is not a page one would wishcancelled, and nothing could be added which would increase its excellence. It is to my taste thecapo d'operaof all which he has hitherto done.

I think in his studies of the Italian aristocracy he has given them less charm and more backbone than they possess. He has drawn their passions more visible and furious than they are, and their wills less mutable and less feeble than they are in general. He seems to have mistaken their obstinacy for strength, while, if he have perceived it, he has not rendered that captivating courtesy and graceful animation which are so lovable in them, and which render so many of their men and women so irresistibly seductive. According to him they are a savage set ofberserkers, always cutting each other's throats, and he does not in any way render that extreme politeness which so effectually conceals the real thoughts of the Italian gentleman, and which never deserts him except in rare moments of irresistible fury. No one remembers so constantly as the Italian of all classes that language is given us to conceal our thoughts, and no one lives so completely as the Italian does from the cradle to the grave in strict concealment of his thoughts even from his nearest and his dearest.

But in his Italiangenrepictures, and in portraiture of the people whom we meet every day in society, Mr Crawford has a delightful pencil; little side studies also of more humble persons, which many writers would neglect, are charming in his treatment; take, for instance, the old priest of Aquila inSaracinesca; with how few touches he is made to live for us. We only see him once, but hewill always remain in our memory; in his whitewashed room with its sweet smell from the pot of pinks, and his touching regret that he has never seen Rome, and at his age cannot hope to do so.

His priests, by the way, are always excellently drawn, from the humble village vicar to the learned and imposing cardinal. He has penetrated alike their interiors and their characters with that skill which is only born of sympathy, and it is therefore perhaps only natural that he has not the faintest conception of the motives and views of the socialist and republican whom he dreads and hates.

All these charming little details, like the pot of pinks, can only be thoroughly appreciated by those who know intimately Italian character and habits; but they abound, and show so much of fine observation and delicate discernment in the author that one cannot forgive him for ever beating the big drum of florid sensation.

Let me not be understood to mean that crime, or the impulse of crime, is not a perfectly legitimate subject for the novelist; both can be made so, but they are only so when treated as Mr Crawford himself treats them inMarzio's Crucifix. When treated as he treats them inTo LeewardandGreifensteinandCasa Bracciothey are merely coarse and inartistic. He has a leaning towards melodrama which is chiefly to be regretted because it mars and strains the style most natural to him, and does not accord with his way of looking at life, which is not either poetic or passionate, but slightly sad, and slightly humorous, modern and instinctivelysuperficial, superficial in that sense in which modern society itself is so.

InMarzio's Crucifixhe is perfectly natural, and one cannot but wish that he had never left that manner of treatment. Every motive therein is natural, every character consistent with itself. This naturalness in his characters is Mr Crawford's greatest attraction, and when he departs from it, as he does in such detestable melodramas as theWitch of PragueandGreifenstein, he is no longer himself. It is hard to understand that the same author can create the most delicate of aquarelles and the most glaring of posters, or why one who can draw so well and finely in silver-point can descend to daub with brooms in such gross distemper. If this be the price of versatility, it were best not to be versatile. But it is not versatility, because true versatility consists in possessing a many-sided power which flashes like a jewel of which all the facets are equally well cut. True versatility, moreover, does not consist in the mere change of subject, but in the change of style, of treatment of thought, in fact, the mutation of the entire mind of an author, such as brings it into entire harmony with its fresh field and its new atmosphere. There is no such change in these novels. Mr Crawford is Mr Crawford always. As he never loses himself in his creations, so he is always present in them to the reader; and his style never varies, whether he treats of horrible psychological mysteries in Prague or of pleasant carnival seasons in Rome.

He is not strong or forcible in tragedy. When it is incidental in his stories like the murder of Montevarchi,or the attempted assassination of Ser Tommaso, it is admirably sketched in; but when it forms the structure and essence of a romance he fails entirely to give it sublimity; it becomes in his hands a mere scarecrow, which makes us only smile as its wooden hands beat the empty air. One feels that it is not his natural element, that he does not like it or feel at home in it, and has merely lent himself to it from some wrong impression that the public requires it; due, perhaps, to the suggestion of some unwise publisher or friend. The coarse melodrama with which some of his novels ends is not in unison with the characters or the scope of his work. It is quite true that, as murder is, in some circumstances, justified in actual life, so in some circumstances it may be used as adénouementin fiction with perfect accuracy; yet it is always a violent ending which fully accords with romance of wild life or peasant life, but always jars, unless introduced with the most perfect skill, in stories of men and women of the world; because the evil passions of this latter class of persons are of a different quality, and find different modes of relief, from the primitive and barbarous satisfaction of killing enemies or rivals. All the influences and habits of society make it almost impossible for men and women of society to become assassins.

Now Mr Crawford can draw men and women of the world so well that it is a pity he so often goes out of his way to spoil his portraits of them with the bowl and dagger taken from a different phase of life from that in which they move.

He is always a gentleman, and he is at his best when writing of gentlemen in the society which he knows sowell. Duels are quite natural in good society everywhere, except in England, and no one since Charles Lever ever described them so well as Mr Crawford; but murders are not general in the world of well-bred people, indeed are not very often heard of out of the lowest strata of plebeian life.

InCasa Braccioa fine motive, that of the peasant of Subiaco's long-cherished vengeance, with its final satisfaction, both based on a mistake, is wasted, because no one can care in the least for the man who is slain, and the original sin committed by this victim (marriage with a nun), although it seems so great to Mr Crawford, appears to us no sin at all; so that his tragic end neither moves us nor satisfies in us any sense of justice. What are admirably rendered and true to life inCasa Braccioare not Griggs and Gloria, or Angus Dalrymple and Maria Addorata, but the peasants of Subiaco, Stefanone, with his long-cherished vendetta, and his wife, Sora Nanna, who wears her lost daughter's shoes because it would have been a sin to waste them. One regrets that two persons so perfectly natural and well drawn should be set on a pyre of flaring melodrama which obscures their portraits in its smoke and flame. Why could he not give us a story of Subiaco, passionate but natural, in which the action would have passed entirely in that interesting and little-known part of the Sabine mountains?

When I use the term melodrama, I mean by it that which mimics the tragic, but falls short of it; the tragic, imitated but so environed, that it loses dignity and has something of the inflated and grotesque. The melodrama inPietro Ghisleri,inTaquisara, and inThe Children of the Kingis this kind of melodrama; it does not move us for a moment; we are, on the contrary, impatient of it in a modern period and history, with neither of which it has any harmony. In the latter story the conception of Rughero, though by no means new, is fine; but the frame in which this mariner is set lacks all fitness for such a figure; and the man whom he murders is not sinner enough, nor serious enough in his actions, for the reader to be moved to pardon the act as the author himself pardons it. If violent delights have violent endings, violent endings need strong provocation and clear explanation; they should appear to the reader to be inevitable, the offspring of an unavoidable result. To the reader such a crime as this should appear to be the inexorable justice of an inevitable retribution. But in the violentdénouementofThe Children of the Kingthe cause is trivial, the act under the circumstances improbable, and the rude shock of it is not in accordance with any of the other characters and with the light, careless modernity of the setting of this story.

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