A MARSHAL OF FRANCE.
Vauban, Builder of Fortresses. By Daniel Halfvy. Trani- lated with notes by Major C. J. C. Street, O.B.E., M.C. (Geoffrey Bios. Os.) A VERY beautiful rose was called after a war minister of the Third Empire, who was not conspicuously efficient either as a soldier or as an administrator, and Niel so obtained a memorial certainly more widely known and probably more enduring than any which honours Conde and Turvenne, Ney and Soult. But Niel's pre-eminence in fame has during and since the Great War been seriously challenged. Vauban covered the coasts and the frontiers of France with memorials to his genius, which have endured till to-day. Many of them have been sorely battered by wars, but others which escaped that fate have acquired at the hand of kindly time a certain mellow beauty and something of the glamour of history. It happens that Vauban's works are most thickly scattered in those parts of France and Flanders in which the British armies fought. rhousands of Englishmen have strolled along the ramparts of Montreuil and have refreshed themselves with the pleasant
peeps which Vauban's eye for a site afforded them ; thousands more have lived in dugouts hollowed into his scarps and counterscarps, while Britain and Belgium owe him thanks for designing that very scheme for flooding the valley of the Yser, which, put into operation in November, 1914, stopped the German advance on Calais. So to-day there are amongst us more who have heard of Vauban and seen his handicraft than officers, now mostly grey-headed and round-figured, who at Woolwich and Sandhurst painfully copied the plates of his third system.
Vauban, the son of a poor country squire of Burgundy, had not the means to enable him to maintain the position of
an officer in the army of Louis XIV., so he entered the service as an engineer. It was then the privilege of a gentleman to fight, and but few who aspired to that title would condescend to soil their hands with labour or to muddle their brains
with calculations. The engineers were a useful, even indis- pensable, element of an army, but were much in the position of the sailing masters of Nelson's fleet. They did the technical work but had no claim to honour or glory. Louis XIV. and Vauban between them altered that. The grand monarque was a judge of men and had the supreme faculty of picking his men when they were young. His plans required both the attack on and the creation of fortresses, and, looking for someone who would make good the deficiencies of his marshals in those arts of war, he lighted upon young Vauban and worked him day and night. The objection of the marshals to receiving orders from so humble an individual was overcome by issuing the instructions of the engineer either through Louvois, the War Minister, or through the King himself.
So Vauban was launched on his career and proceeded to capture fortresses with a speed undreamed of and to turn them when captured into places which inspired the King's enemies with awe.
De minimis non coral lex, but then we know that the " law is a hass." Care for the little things is one of the marks of the genius and the artist, and Vauban was some- thing of both. We find him writing to Louvois
" 'I forgot to tell you, Monseigneur, that you have arranged for the provision of a mole-catcher at Dunkirk, which is a very good thing ; but the man who has been appointed is a good-for-nothing, who does not attend to his work and wastes his time poaching. f have seen a certain peasant of Rosendall, a suburb of Dunkirk, much more skilful than he is, who undertakes to Lill the field mice as well, which do almost as much damage as the moles. I recom- mend you to avail yourself of his services and to dismiss the other man.' " So Vauban worked making vast plans and superintending their execution in detail, often in the trenches himself in a workman's smock to the disgust of the gorgeously caparisoned
marshals of France, but sure of himself and of the favour of his master. He was a prodigious worker and at one period of his life did not see his home for nine years. As he travelled through France he kept his eyes open and did not hesitate to speak plainly to the King of the wrongs and abuses which he saw. He protested against the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, mainly on the ground of the economic harm which it did to his country. He proposed the abolition of the fermiers and institution of an income-tax, and in 1700 wrote to the King :-
" 'I feel myself constrained by honour and conscience to represent to His Majesty that it has seemed to me that at no time has enough regard been paid to the poorer classes, and that too little heed has been paid to them • they are nevertheless the most mined and the most miserable class in the kingdom, although the most considerable in numbers and in the real and effective- services which they render.' "
He was then a marshal of France, who had captured and built more fortresses than anyone either of his or of any other day, and could dare to speak his mind about the France he loved. He was a great servant of France, and M. Halevy's object is clearly to present him to his countrymen as such and to hint broadly that Vauban's aim and object should be the aim and object of Frenchmen to-day—" A France united, devoted, strong ; productive of corn, meat and wine, breeding large families, generous in her people,
glorious in her leaders and entrenched against her enemies by the three seas, the mountains and the Rhine." We may, perhaps, doubt whether, if Vauban had lived in 1924, he would not, as he did in his own day, have looked beyond the military problem and have seen some of the drawbacks to a French frontier established on the Rhine.
F. MAURICE.
Previous page
