A FRENCHMAN'S THOUGHTS ON THE WAR.
ACOUNTRY when it is in love is apt to be a little sensitive and self-conscious. We wonder rather too much and too often what our former sweet enemy thinks of us. We make ourselves unhappy when we suspect that she is critical, and ars transported when she will speak kind words. In A Frenchman'. Thoughts on the War (T. Fisher Unwin, 48. 6d. net) M. Sabatiee says a great deal to delight us and make us forget our self- conscious anxieties. France returns our love, he thus touchingly assures us. " Henceforth, when you travel through the French countryside, you must not be surprised if you notice that the eyes of our schoolchildren linger when they fall upon you. Perhaps you will feel in them—and you will not be mistake's if you do—the naive caress of respect and admiration with which they greet those whom they most love. Aged men, who will regret that they no longer have young eyes to see you with, will raise their shabby Phrygian bonnets ; and then, perhaps, you will understand what your country has meant to mine." England, he declares, " has become one with us and follows the same ideal." France can never forget. our material aid, the splendid equipment, " the good humour, the robust health," of our soldiers. But it was the moral value of our action which won her heart. " It gave us back our joie de vivre." M. Sabatier has always been in sympathy with England. What he calls our " transparency of mind and heart " delights him ; but be is not fulsome in his praise. He slyly suggests that these qualities have made us poor diplomatists, no match, he fears, for the Little Turk at Constantinople and the Great Turk at Berlin. France, he declares, was as little ready for war as we were. The real France believed in peaee. But in saying this he does not speak for Paris. He is, he says, one of the few Frenchmen who are in no sense Parisian. By the French people he means the people in the fields and the factories all over the land, and in a strange way he belittles and sets aside the great city which foreigners regard as only another name for France. He thinks that "the capacity for judicious discernment is rarer in Paris than in the depths of the Provinces." They regret their want of prevision, " these millions of Frenchmen who had lived in a generous humanitarian dream " ; but IL Sabatier thinks they do wrong to regret it. Their unreadiness was a source of material weakness but of moral strength. It 18 they who lead with .a clear conscience the revolt of Europe against the " counter-civilization and anti-morality " which make up Germanism. Germany can never understand this attitude, can never know that these Frenchmen are fighting, " not from a savage desire to kill all the Germans in order to take their place at a gigantic banquet, but, on the contrary, from our terror lest we should resemble them or be tempted to render to our country the kind of worship which they render to theirs." These Frenchmen who dreamed have been startled by a fearful cataclysm. " What was it that had crumbled and crashed to earth before their eyes I Not their ideal, but Germany."
There is a certain amount of sentimentalism in all this. On the other hand, the enthusiasm which shows through it is very noble, and M. Sabatier does not hide his opinion that, little as France desired war and fearfully as she is suffering in its throes, it has possibly saved her from a worse catastrophe. " The national state of mind, a few months before the war, was nothing to be proud of." Class enmity, he hints, had risen to a greater height than the stranger knew. Agriculture was suffering from the desertion of the country districts. The birth-rate was decreasing in a lamentable manner. Alcoholism was becoming a national danger. Only in Normandy, he thinks, had the evil touched the backbone of the people ; but alcoholic interests were con- trolling the elections as completely as ever the village priests controlled them in the past. This spectre has been laid, but will never, M. Sabatier thinks, be completely done away with till civic office is refused to men whose income depends upon the sale of intoxicants. M. Sabatier apologizes for confessing the awful temptations against which France has not been proof. Such frankness is a proof of affection. All these evils have been scotched, at any rate, by the new preoccupation, the new religion, which he thinks is awakening in France.
As all readers of M. Sabatier's books are well aware, be has declared for years that a religious revival has been taking place in the heart of the French people. It is, however, he admits, a very difficult movement to analyse. The evidence, so far as the period of the war is concerned, is almost ridiculously conflicting. Men write from the front declaring that never was religion more dead, while others in the same regiment, in the same trench even, declare it to have been never more alive. At home in France, in the villages, a like conflict of evidence makes a conclusion impossible unless we go hack behind the present great emotional crisis. At the moment all religion seems merged in patriotism —so M. Sabatier tells us—but in that merging patriotism itself has undergone a change, and the history of this war will once more be describable in the mediaeval sentence, fiesta Dei per Frances.
But what about religious, education, and clericalism and anti- clericalism ? These questions, so our passionate optimist declares, are upon the eve of a settlement In a few years there will be no clericalism or anti-clericalism so far as the schools are concerned. It the Church• has hitherto violated historic truth, so have the secularists. The history of religion, which is the most valuable part of history, has not been written or taught. When it is taught and studied as a new France will study it, with heart and mind and soul and strength, there wilt be neither dogmatists nor materialists. It is certainly a consummation devoutly to he wished. But is not our prophet falling back into the old 'Roman Catholic error 1 True religion belongs to the present.
it is Rome who would base it upon history. The record of ' religious experience is only effectual as a confirmation. We ',cannot see by the history of a light, therefore learning calls a' truce to clericalism and secularism.
One of M. Sabatier's most interesting chapters deals with Alsace. In speaking of the lost provinces M. Sabatier's enthusiasm becomes a little too emotional. He does not tell us the plain statistical facts, or answer the plain questions we, should all like to ask. But he does assure us that, with rare
if conspicuous exceptions, the Alsatians are passionately loyal' to France. He puts this undoubted fact in a manner so heroio and emotional that his English reader has now and then a little difficulty in following his arguments, and he seems to come—in a region of pure poetry—to the contradictory conclusion that
it was. Alsace who desired war. No one who has read the rest of
the book could imagine that this conclusion is other than rhetorical—but we will let him speak for himself. Alsace, he- ;tells us, has made no petty rebellions, no noisy complaints. She has reserved her strength. The vice in which she has been held has but braced her spirit, strengthened her endurance, confirmed.
her determination, and in the end " Germany was drawn into war by Alsace." The sentence, he admits, sounds like a paradox when wo consider the years during which Prussia has lived for war alone :-
"Assuredly the picture which Europe presents at the present moment is terribly sad with so many millions of men scattered over the battlefields for the purpose of killing one another ; but have you ever thought of the spectacle it would present if Alsace, after wearing: mourning for her mother country, had bowed her head and arrayed her relics of the French days in her museums and returned to her business and her pleasures 7 Peace no doubt would have fallen upon Europe : the German peace for a generation or two, peace in the fear of Germany. . . . It is truly Alsace which has thus pre- vented Europe from sinking- into the slumber of the German peace. What do we not owe her in the first place, we Frenchmen, and secondly you also, our friends and brothers of England 7 Is not our debt the debt of all nations 7 The chief interest of M. Sabatier's book may be said to be of a personal nature. He is speaking to England in the name of
France, and he often speaks sentimentally. On the other hand, there are moments of emotion when words cannot be judged by cold reason, and we must remember that they are often momenta of deep insight. Is this the beginning of an everlasting friend- ship ? No one knows how long love may last. Occasionally it would seem endless, and the omens are propitious.
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