October 23, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
17 
France, One and Diverse 
By F. T. Eccles 
A LITTLE more than two years ago, I recommended 
in these columns the first vohmie of a series in 
which the most accomplished of living French 
authors had undertaken to interpret the spirit of 
his country at this great crisis of its history. It was called 
(after a formula which had all its freshness then) V Union 
Sacrce, and consisted of articles contributed at the rate of 
two or three a week to a Paris newspaper. In this long 
nterval. Maurice Barres has published six other volumes, of 
•vhich the least that can be said is that, while tlieir permanent 
^'alue is as certain as that of an\- writings which the war has 
inspired upon our side, they ha\c the immediate virtue of a 
cordial. With an unfailing justness of accent, he has 
praised the fraternity of the trenches and the devotion of 
French women, recorded his impressions of the country- 
sides recovered from the grip of the invader, and pleaded the 
cause of disabled soldiers. But the latest instalment of 
this moral chronicle is concerned with a matter more delicate 
and indeed more vital.* 
Its exceptional interest will I think appear from a ba« 
statement of its leading thought. In the years of peace, 
opposite conceptions of life were the cause or the pretext of 
the most dangerous hostility between French citizens. Far 
from losing tlieir power, they have been fortified by the war, 
for its mo;^ obvious conditions have thrown back the individual 
combatant upon his moral reserves ; but every belief, every 
ideal, that is capable of raising the mind to a height from 
which it contemplates danger, suffering and death without dis- 
may, has confirmed or sanctified the same willing sacrifice 
in the same national cause. The soul of the conflict (thinks 
Barres) is in the letters and diaries of soldiers. Many of 
course are colourless, empty of thought ; but the confidences 
of the finest natures among those who have died for their 
country, reveal the various spiritual sources of an equal 
heroism, and anticipate that harmony of differences which 
is the promise of to-morrow. 
The " Spiritual Families " to which Maurice Barres has 
confined his record arc five — the Catholics, the Huguenots, 
the Jews, the Socialists, the Traditionalists ; the list is 
evidently incomplete. His very title pledged him not only 
to do equal justice to the large minorities whoso existence 
has long since broken the spiritual unity of the older France, 
but almost to forget that they are minorities still. No one 
will grudge the space he has assigned them. The immensely 
greater number of his readers needed no telling how a Catholic 
soldier is sustained by his faith. It is mainlyof the priests 
in the French army, of their admirable example and incalcu- 
lable influence, that he tells in the chapter" devoted to the 
Catholics. They number some five and twenty thousand, 
and most of them are in the ranks. Fifty-six fell in battle 
during a single month ; tw6 hundred and six were killed before 
Verdun last year. 
There is abundant testimony to the devotion of the Huguenot 
soldiers. The extracts froiT\,the letters of Pierre de Maupeou, 
of Francis Monod, of Maurice Diatcrlin, and especially 
the opening words of a sermon preached at Nimes by an aged 
minister after the death of his son, are very precious docu- 
ments. It would seem that the French Protestant is pre- 
occupied, in a peculiar degree, with the justice of the national 
cause. Of the Jewish soldiers of France Barres writes, 
naturally, with some liesitation. The Jew does not always 
belong to the Jewish spiritual family in any sense which would 
imply a definite system of dogmatic jjelief : he always 
belongs to a separate race. It is impossible to read what 
Barres tells here of .\medec Rothstein without sympathy. 
This was a young Zionist (jf foreign birth, who enlisted en- 
thusiastically in the French army, won a commission and was 
killed last year. He was a Jewish patriot above all else, and 
his hope was that his service to France might somehow help 
the cause of Israel. Hardly less touching is the case of 
Robert Hertz, a Jew of German origin, who wrote to his wife : 
1 consid^ this war as a welcome opportunity to "regularise 
the situation " for us and for our children. Later on, they 
may work if they hkc for.sujjer-nationali.'imor internationalism ; 
but first, it was essential to show by our acts that we were 
not below the national ideal. 
Barres remarks very justly that for these new-comers, 
" who cannot feel the irrational and almost animal side of 
our lovf for our country," patriotism is an act of the will, a 
matter of intelligent choice, of voluntary partnership. But 
there arc Jews who descend from generations of French 
citizens. The appendix includes an illuminating letter from 
. : *(L'Amc (rancaise ct la Guerre) — vii. Les diverses Families 
Spirituellcs de la fiance. —Paris, Emile-Paul Irdres, 191 7, 3! 50. 
a Jewish Alsatian. A characteristic (though a rare) figure 
was Roger Calm, a Xormalien and a free-thinker, detached 
from the religious tradition of his race, whose letters from 
.Argonne (where he was killed) express a curious indifference, 
impossible to a Frenchman of French stock, to the great 
drama in which he played his modest but entirely honourable 
part. Happy in his insulation, he was intent only ujwn 
enriching his consciousness with poetical sensations. " I 
shall bring back," he wrote, " a splendid collection of pictures 
and impressions." 
The chapter on the French Socialists is introduced by a 
short account of the vicissitudes through which the official 
party has passed during the war. But the Socialists at the 
front are another affair. As was only to be expected, the 
author of L'Ennemi des Lois can enter into the scruples of 
sincere idealists and that candid faith which identifies the 
\ictory of this country with the renovation of the world. 
He insists upwn the French artisan's respect for good work 
(which goes far to explain why so many "conscious proletarians" 
make excellent soldiers) and for a freely accepted discipline. 
.\n officer, himself a Socialist by conviction, who had in per- 
fection " the delicate art of commanding in the French wav." 
put the matter very clearly when he said : " The Socialist 
in the army- does not put his confidence in gold lace. Ho 
waits to see his superiors show what they are made of." One 
of the most attractive figures in this book is that of a Syndi- 
calist schoolmaster killed in the war. Albert ThieiTy left 
behind him a kind of testament, which resumes his vision of a 
juster and more united France. He was the son of a Paris 
stonemason, and the strongest of his convictions was an 
abhorrence (his master Proudhon felt it long ago) for that 
want of stability which the worship of success in life encourages. 
The duty of sticking to one's class was one he was never tired 
of impressing upon the children of working-men who were his 
pupils. Here is a notable passage quoted by Barres : 
The Frenchman, worthy of the name, proud of his history, 
of his thought, or of his faith, desires to be just or not to 
live. He tomes into the world as best he can, born in a 
country not easily defended nor easily pacified, burdened 
with the inequality of mind and body which belongs to nature, 
and the economic and hi.storical inequalities that belong to 
society. He receives, whatever his birth, an education 
grounded above all on labour, .science and history ; and 
by it, his mind and heart open to the conceptions of equality, 
justice and truth. .\ moral sj-stem clearly based uix)n the 
new principle of the "refusal to rise in the world," makes 
of each of these Frenchmen a citizen who disdains mere 
enjoyment, desires to do ser\-ice, is in love with his work, 
free from self-seeking, worthy to be loved. , .-r- 
Reverence for the past, no less than Utopian dreams, may 
supply an incentive to heroic sacrifice. But do the Tradi- 
tionalists — and under that denomination Barres includes 
Catholics and followers of Comte. Camelots dit Roi along with 
Nationalists of his own type and temper — form a true spiritual 
family ? It is, at any rate, certain that among young French 
soldiers of the intellectual classes the emulation of the dead, 
a love of the soil enlarged and purified by the historical 
imagination, a conscious fidelity to the genius of tlic race 
are active and vivacious forces distinguishable from the 
positive creeds which they accompany. 
A very beautiful and moving chapter (which must not be 
mutilated by quotation) describes that fair Christmas Eve 
on the French front which has passed already into legend • 
" a night of hope and reconciliation," when all the divergent 
motives for self-sacrifice and endurance took contact and 
" France recognised the unity of her heart." Will the 
proinise of that comrades' feast be kept ? " No doubt we 
shall not remain on those heights." But this book ends on a 
note of confidence : 
y This time of stress will remain as a kind of ideal for tho.se 
who lived through it in their youth. . . . They will 
always remember what the Holy Concord really meant 
during the war. ... It did "not consist in i-ecanting 
our beliefs or hiding them away in a cupboard like something 
useless which we could attend to later. It implied no forget- 
fulness of that which \ivifies our consciences, but on the 
contrary was born of those beliefs, which meet far below 
the surface in their more excellent parts. Each of our 
Spiritual Families has maintained its rights, but in their purest 
form, and has thus found itself nearer to others which it had 
.supposed more hostile. 
We Frenchmen are united, because from the scholar down 
to the humblest peasant, we have a clear vision of something 
superior to our little personal concerns and a kind of instinct 
which prompts us to sacrifice ourselves cheerfully to. the 
triumph of that ideal. A Crusader thinks it nothing to 
redeem the Tomb of the Saviour at the price of his own 
hie ; old Corneille enraptures all his public with his declama- 
