my heart has felt, all that one
man has suffered during these months of unspeakable horror, and likewise
all the joy he experienced when he came to perceive, by rare flashes of
light, that humanity still lives, that kindliness still exists, on both
sides of the Rhine, the world over. You, M. B., sing 'The war in which
it is beautiful and sweet to die for our country!' All those who have
faced this death will tell you that while it may have been necessary, it
was neither beautiful nor sweet.--You glorify the sublime and tattered
tricolour: blue is the blouse of our workmen; white is the cornette of
our splendid sisters of charity.... You will excuse me for cutting you
short before coming to the red, for my unaided memory here suffices me:
the red blood of my wounds flowing and clotting on the frozen mud of
Argonne that terrible morning in December, 1914; the red mud of
pestilential slaughter-houses; the shattered heads of dead comrades;
mangled stumps irrigated with peroxide solution so that the living
corruption was half hidden by bloodstained foam; red visions glimpsed
everywhere in these ghastly and tragical days, you chase one another
through the mind tumultuous and hateful. Like the poet, I would fain
say, 'A very little more and my heart would break!'"

To bring his philippic to a close he quotes another soldier-author, G.
Thuriot-Franchi, who, in the same fighting style, with no pretty phrases
and with no concealments, compels these Hectors of the study to swallow
their boasts:[40]

"Men who are too young or too old, poets in pyjamas, jealous doubtless
of the strategists in slippers, regard it as their duty to be lavish in
patriotic song. The trumpets of rhetoric blare; invective has become the
chosen method of argument; a thousand blue-stockings, under cover of the
Red Cross, when one chats with them out strolling, make a parade of
spartan sentiments, amazonian impulses. Whence the plethora of sonnets,
odes, stanzas, etc., in which, to speak the jargon of the ordinary
critic 'the most exquisite sensibility is happily wedded to the purest
patriotism.'--For God's sake leave us alone; you know nothing about it;
shut up!"

Thus does a soldier from the front imperiously impose silence upon the
false warriors of the rear. If they are fond of the "poilu" style, they
will find plenty of it here. Those who have just been looking death in
the face have certainly earned the right to speak the plain truth to
these "amate