"VIVE LA FRANCE"—HOW MEN DIE FOR THEIR COUNTRY

Last Messages of French Soldiers Told by Rene Bazin, Member of the French Academy

Behind the dry official reports of military events is a vast fund of emotional human stories. Glimpses of this side of the Great War are found in private letters, personal experiences, and thrilling episodes of courage, humor, or pathos which are being preserved in the New York Times Current History.

I have heard magnificent sayings of our soldiers; others have been written to me by those who heard them. I would not have them perish. It seems to me that they naturally form a part of the epoch we are living through; that they are good to read and meditate on, unconscious testimonies of that which historians will call the new life of France, of that which has ever been her deeper life, widened and developed in this hour of trial.

Therefore I shall record here not all these sayings and traits, but some of them.

At B., in the hospital of the Grand Hotel, a wounded soldier was to have a limb amputated. But he was so weak that the surgeon hesitated.

"If we could only give him some blood!"

"If that is all that is needed I am ready to give it!" answers another wounded soldier, a Breton.

The transfusion is made. The staff of the hospital, touched by the devotion of this wounded soldier, who was known to be very poor, made a little collection here and there, very quietly, and gathered five hundred francs, which they took great satisfaction in offering to him. One day one of them came close to his bed, spoke of the service he had rendered, thanked him and offered him the money. Mark his answer:

"Oh, no! I give my blood; I do not sell it!"

A very young soldier from the North, with a beardless and rather childish face, is stretched at the back of a trench, dying from a terrible shell wound in the stomach. In spite of the frightful wound he does not complain, he does not repine, and in his wide, upward-gazing eyes one could just perceive the expression of sadness which he often had. For since mobilizing he had received no news from his home in the occupied territory. His comrades are doing what they can for him, offering him water to drink, unbuttoning his tunic, trying to stanch the blood. Opening his eyes, which he had kept for a long moment closed, and no longer with an expression of suffering, he said to one of his comrades, a big, hairy fellow who was bending over him:

"Friend, you must not tell mother what a frightful wound I had! A bullet is better than what I have!" Then he distributed a few little things he had in his pocket—his knife, his purse, a corkscrew, a tinder-box—a last testament soon ended. Finally, with difficulty, he opened his notebook and, setting himself to write, though he could no longer see very clearly, he traced a few lines. When he had finished his soul departed.... Three minutes later, as the word of his end spread along the trench, at this time not under heavy bombardment by the enemy, a Captain arrived, smeared with mud up to the shoulders. He saw the soldier. "Oh, poor boy! One of my bravest!" Respectfully he took the notebook, which had fallen on the ground, opened it and read: "Au revoir, father; au revoir, mother; au revoir, little sisters; I am dying for my country. Vive la France!"

Sergeant Raissac of Beziers was mortally wounded in an assault on a German trench. When they lifted his body his hand still held a photograph representing his mother, his sisters and himself, and on the back of the picture he had managed to write, with his last effort, "Adieu! No tears, but a Christian acceptance. I am at peace with God."

Yesterday, during his two days' leave, I met the son of a poor countrywoman, a workman whom I have loved for a long time. When I took leave of him, saying, "Good luck to you, Marcel!" he looked up with unreproaching eyes and answered me: "On the one side, and on the other, I fear nothing!" And this meant: "Life? Death? What does it matter? I am ready!"

What does all this signify? It is the poetry of chivalry that continues; it is the unfinished Crusade; it is God making Himself manifest through purified France.

Those who seek the sublime will find nothing grander.

II—THE YOUNG HEROES OF FRANCE

Told by Maurice Barrès, in memory of Max Barthou, who volunteered at eighteen

I believe that young heroes abound at this moment when every family is cruelly involved in the war. The son dreams of helping his father, his elder brothers, of joining them, of avenging them. Are his city and his home invaded? With his whole heart he tries and examines himself as to what his duty and his honour demand. I remember how the minds of my companions, some 10 years old, and our slightly older brothers were fired in 1870....

Do you wish me to bring you my contribution to the monument of our young patriots?

First, a little story. On Nov. 24, 1914, on a cold day, about 3 in the afternoon, the Prussians, whom they call "Boches," are once again trying to cross the frontier, to enter France. It is very cold, there is a high wind, and snow covers the ground. Who tells the story? A workman at the front, who, from the neighbourhood of Pont-à-Mousson, writes to his two little children at his home at Neuillez sur Marne. They gave me his letter. I should spoil it if I retouched it. I transcribe it just as it is:

"My dear little Marcella, this story, which happened to some French soldiers, you are to tell to your little Charlie and your companions, and you are to show them how two little children saved the lives of twenty-eight papas.

"In a lonely farmhouse a detachment of reservists, composed of thirty men, are resting from the labours of the night in an underground cellar, waiting for the next night to begin their work again and accomplish their mission.

In a room about them, two children, Liza and John, are sitting beside their mamma near the fire. All three talk the old country dialect. All at once the mother rises, runs to the door and sees some horsemen coming from a distance.

"'My children,' she says, pressing them to her heart, 'I think the Prussians are coming. They will see that we have lodged and fed French soldiers, and they will surely want to make us tell where they are. They will take them and shoot them.'

"'We must say they have gone away there, just in the opposite direction!' said little John.

"'Oh, no!' said their mamma; 'if we deceive them with a lie they will come back and take vengeance. Listen rather! I shall speak to the Prussians only in dialect, and they won't understand a word. Do you also do as I do, and, to everything they say, answer always in the same phrase, in dialect.'

"The clatter of hoofs was heard, and the rattle of weapons.

"'Courage, my children!' said their mamma. The door opens. The Boches enter. They ask questions, but the mother's answers are unintelligible to them.

"'Look at these two children! They must learn French at school,' said the officer, who spoke a little French.

"One of the Germans seized little Lisa, while another caught little John.

"'Where is your father?' he asked in a harsh voice. 'Where are the French that passed here?'

"Lisa raised her blue eyes to this foreign soldier and, all trembling, replied in dialect. John did the same. The soldiers, irritated, suspecting a trick, searched the house, but did not find the trap-door which had been previously covered with dirty straw. They threatened to cut the children's throats. They told them they would kill their mother, too, if they did not answer. The poor children began to cry, but, faithful to their mother's directions, they repeated, through their tears, the same phrase.

"The French soldiers who were in the cellar and who heard everything through a ventilator felt their blood boil, and, but for their officer, would have come forth to protect the poor children, and, without doubt, would have been killed, for they were outnumbered.

"The Prussians did not think that such young children, threatened with death, would be capable of such heroic discretion; they ended by believing that they could not make themselves understood and rode away.

"And that is how two little children, Lisa, aged 8, and John, aged 10, by their obedience to their mother and by courage kept thirty men from being killed, twenty-eight wives still have their husbands, and forty-seven little children have their papas. Among these forty-seven little children my little Marcella and my little Charlie will perhaps see their papa again."

I leave this story in its fine simplicity. A workman who had become a soldier chats with his children far away. But the chief attraction in it for me is that the fact reported is quite authentic. I know the farm in the district of Meurthe et Moselle, and later on I shall tell its name, as well as those of the farmer's wife and the two children, who have received a well-earned reward.