who, if they did succeed in arresting the march of the barbarian army, could not prevent them from embarking with all the Persian cavalry which had just been recuperating on the plains. Besides, it is not at all clear that the Persians made any special effort in this battle.”
M. Roux deposited his sabre in a corner of the study and sat down in a chair offered him by the professor.
“It is now four months,” said he, “since I have heard a single intelligent word. During these four months I have been concentrating all the powers of my mind on the task of conciliating my corporal and my sergeant-major by carefully calculated tips. So far, that is the only side of the art of warfare that I can really say I have mastered. It is, however, the most important side. Yet I have in the process lost all power of grasping a general idea or of following a subtle thought. And here you are, my dear sir, telling me that the Greeks were conquered at Marathon and that the Romans were not warlike. My head whirls.”
M. Bergeret calmly replied:
“I merely said that Miltiades did not succeed in breaking through the forces of the barbarians. As for the Romans, they were not essentially a military people, since they made profitable and lasting conquests, in contradistinction to the true military nations, such as the French, for instance, who seize all, but retain nothing.
“It is also to be noted that in Rome, in the time of the kings, aliens were not allowed to serve as soldiers. But in the reign of the good king Servius Tullius the citizens, being by no means anxious to reserve to themselves alone the honour of fatigue and perils, admitted aliens resident in the city to military service. There are such things as heroes, but there are no nations of heroes, nor are there armies of heroes. Soldiers have never marched save under penalty of death. Military service was hateful even to those Latin herdsmen who gained for Rome the sovereignty of the world and the glorious name of goddess among the nations. The wearing of the soldier’s belt was to them such a hardship that the very name of this belt, ærumna, eventually expressed for them the ideas of dejection, weariness of body and mind, wretchedness, misfortune and disaster. When well led they made, not heroes, but good soldiers and good navvies; little by little they conquered the world and covered it with roads and highways. The Romans never sought glory: they had no imagination. They only waged absolutely necessary wars in defence of their own interests. Their triumph was the triumph of patience and good sense.
“The make of a man is shown by his ruling passion. With soldiers, as with all crowds, the ruling passion, the predominant thought, is fear. They go to meet the enemy as the foe from whom the least danger is to be feared. Troops in line are so drawn up on both sides that flight is impossible. In that lies all the art of battle. The armies of the Republic were victorious because the discipline of the olden times was maintained in them with the utmost severity, while it was relaxed in the camp of the Allied Armies. Our generals of the second year after the Revolution were none other than sergeants like that la Ramée who used to have half a dozen conscripts shot every day in order to encourage the others, as Voltaire put it, and to arouse them with the trumpet-note of patriotism.”
“That’s very plausible,” said M. Roux. “But there is another point. There is such a thing as the innate joy of firing a musket-shot. As you know, my dear sir, I am by no means a destructive animal. I have no taste for military life. I have even very advanced humanitarian ideas, and I believe that the brotherhood of the nations will be brought about by the triumph of socialism. In a word, I am filled with the love of humanity. But as soon as they put a musket in my hand I want to fire at everyone. It’s in the blood. …”
M. Roux was a fine hearty fellow who had quickly shaken down in his regiment. Violent exercise suited his robust temperament, and being in addition very adaptable, although he had acquired no special taste for the profession, he found life in barracks quite bearable, and so remained both healthy and happy.
“You have left the power of suggestion out of your calculations, sir,” said he. “Only give a man a bayonet at the end of a musket and he will instantly be ready to plunge it into the body of the first comer and so make himself a hero, as you call it.”
The rich southern tones of M. Roux were still echoing through the room when Madame Bergeret came in. As a rule she seldom entered the study when her husband was there. To-day M. Bergeret noticed that she wore her fine pink and white peignoir.
Expressing great surprise at finding M. Roux in the study, she explained that she had just come in to ask her husband for a volume of poems with which she might while away an hour or two.
She was suddenly a charming, good-tempered woman: the professor noticed the fact, as a fact, though he felt no special interest in it.
Removing Freund’s Dictionary from an old leather arm-chair, M. Roux cleared a seat for Madame Bergeret, while her husband’s thoughts strayed, first to the quartos stacked against the wall and then to his wife who had taken their place in the arm-chair. These two masses of matter, the dictionary and the lady, thought he, were once but gases floating in the primitive nebulosity. Though now they are strangely different from one another in look, in nature and in function, they were once for long ages exactly similar.
“For,” thought he to himself, “Madame Bergeret once swam in the vasty abyss of the ages, shapeless, unconscious, scattered in light gleams of oxygen and carbon. At the same time, the molecules that were one day to make up this Latin dictionary were whirling in this same vapour, which was destined at last to give birth to monstrous forms, to minute insects and to a slender thread of thought. These imperfect and often harassing creations, these monuments of my weary life, my wife and my dictionary, needed the travail of eternity to produce them. Yet Amélie is just a paltry mind in a coarsened body, and my dictionary is full of mistakes. We can see from this example alone that there is very little hope that even new æons of time would ever give us perfect knowledge and beauty. As it is, we live but for a moment, yet by living for ever we should gain nothing. The faults we see in nature, and how faulty she is we know, are produced neither by time nor space!”
And in the restless perturbation of his thoughts M. Bergeret continued:
“But what is time itself, save just the movements of nature, and how can I judge whether these are long or short? Granted that nature is cruel in her cast-iron laws, how comes it that I recognise the fact? And how do I manage to place myself outside her, so that I can weigh her deeds in my scales? Had I but another standpoint in it, perchance the universe might even seem to me a happier place.”
M. Bergeret hereupon suddenly emerged from his day-dream, and leant forward to push the tottering pile of quartos close against the wall.
“You are somewhat sunburnt, Monsieur Roux,” said Madame Bergeret, “and rather thinner, I fancy. But it suits you well enough.”
“The first few months are trying,” answered M. Roux. “Drill, of course, in the barrack-yard at six o’clock in the morning and with eight degrees of frost is rather a painful process, and just at first one finds it difficult to look on the mess as appetising. But weariness is, after all, a great blessing, stupefaction a priceless remedy and the stupor in which one lives is as soporific as a feather-bed. And because at night one only sleeps in snatches, by day one is never wide awake. And this state of automatic lethargy in which we all live is admirably conducive to discipline, it suits the tone of military life and produces physical and moral efficiency in the ranks.”
In short, M. Roux had nothing to complain of, but one of his friends, a certain Deval, a student of Malay at the school of Oriental languages, was plunged in the depths of misery and despair. Deval, an intelligent, well-educated, intrepid man, was cursed with a sort of rigidity of mind and body that made him tactless and awkward. In addition to this he was harassed by a painfully exact sense of justice which gave him peculiar views of his rights and duties. This unfortunate turn of mind
