If the month of July 1830 had its heroes, it had in you its martyrs, O my brave comrades! – who are now all separated and dispersed. After the tempestIf the month of July 1830 had its heroes, it had in you its martyrs, O my brave comrades! – who are now all separated and dispersed. After the tempest, many among you retired silent to your ancestral roofs, however poor they were, much preferring them to the shadow of a flag not your own. Others have chosen to seek their lilies in the brambles of the Vendée, and have bathed them anew with their blood; others have gone to die under foreign kings; while others still, still bleeding from the wounds of the Three Days, have been unable to resist the call of the sword, and have taken it up again for France, and for her have conquered new fortresses. Everywhere the same necessity of giving oneself up body and soul, the same need to devote oneself, the same desire to uphold and practice, somewhere and somehow, the arts of suffering well and dying well.
I love military history, though I find that my reading tends to neglect hardware specs and battle details in favor of Grand Strategy, the sociology of mass mobilization, and, above all else, the peculiar subcultures of professional soldiers and sailors. I’m fascinated by the Old Regulars, their thoughts and behavior, especially after a lost war, especially during peacetime downsizing and dispersal. Vigny’s ambivalent, philosophic Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835) was made for such a taste. Its mixed form, too, is my kind of thing: the narrator, or rather compiler/auditor, recognizably Vigny himself, is prompted by the July Revolution of 1830 to recall stories he had heard from men met in his soldiering days, these stories linked by Vigny’s own memoirettes and meditations.
Son of the old military nobility, Vigny grew up on tales of his father’s and uncle’s exploits in the Seven Years’ War. In 1814, at age seventeen, he gained a commission in the Household Cavalry, joining the army at a suggestively equivocal juncture: full of Napoleon’s veterans, it now obeyed the restored Bourbon king, Louis XVIII. Vigny opens with a keynote story. While covering the flight of Louis XVIII into another exile, after Napoleon’s 100-day return to power in 1815, he falls in with an old major who committed an atrocity under orders from one regime (the Directory), atoned for the act while serving another (the Empire), and tells the tale to his new comrade while on the march under the flag of a third (the Restoration).
With France’s frequent revolutions, coups and broils, and the seesaw of glory and defeat, the soldier is “thrown wherever others please him to go, and in arms today against the cockade of one faction, he must ask himself whether tomorrow he will be wearing it in his own hat.” And generally a soldier’s existence is “the saddest relic of barbarism that subsists among men”; he is “a slave of the army,” an institution whose “gross servitude and backward customs” are “inimical to the development of character and intelligence.”
And yet for Vigny the idea of abnegation, “common to them all, frequently lends a majestic character to this forbidding mass of men.” “[T]he abnegation of the warrior is a cross heavier than that of the martyr.” And as martyrs some soldiers retrieve honor and dignity from their situation in “those acts of self-dedication that seek no special recognition,” “those unsung acts of devotion which do not seek even to be noticed by their beneficiaries.” I think Terrence Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’s The Thin Red Line illustrates this idea as well as any of Vigny’s examples. After desertion and recapture, Private Witt accepts that he will likely die on Guadalcanal, alongside other men of Charlie Company – “the only family I got” – “they’re my people.” And perhaps in reply to Sergeant Welsh’s mocking question - “What difference you think you can make, one single man, in all this madness?” – Witt sacrifices himself for Charlie Company. When they follow a foolish officer into a trap, Witt draws the Japanese ambushers away, into a clearing where he is finally surrounded and shot down, thus allowing the rest of the company to escape. (I remember being amused when Mel Gibson cast Jim Cavizel in The Passion of the Christ - Cavizel had already played a Christ-figure, for Malick, in what I will assume is the better movie!) Vigny writes,
It must truly be that sacrifice is the finest thing on earth, since it manifests so much beauty through simple men, who usually have no idea of their merits or of the meaning of their existence. It is this which ensures that out of a life of boredom and restriction there comes, as if by a miracle, a character formed by artifice, but generous, whose lineaments are as grand and fine as those on an antique medal.
The complete self-abnegation of which I speak, the continual and unconcerned expectation of death, the complete renunciation of the freedom to think and act, the impediments imposed on petty ambitions, and the impossibility of acquiring wealth – these produce virtues which are much less common amongst freer and more active classes of men.
Flaubert, writing of the book to Louise Colet, said he could understand personal devotion to Napoleon; but Vigny’s “dry, abstract idea of duty,” on the other hand, is “a concept I’ve never been able to grasp and which does not seem to me inherent in human entrails.” Vigny would have replied that the concept is inherent enough, and certainly not abstract, as the acts of sacrifice and abnegation Vigny describes are usually performed spontaneously, as much for the sake of a soldier’s comrades as for a stated ideal; he would have replied by pointing to his own experience, described in a passage in the book Flaubert claimed to have read. On “the high road to Artois and Flanders,”
My horse lowered his head; I did the same: I began to reflect, and asked myself for the first time where I was going. I had absolutely no idea; but that did not preoccupy me long: I was certain that where my squadron was, so there too lay my duty. And since at heart I felt a profound and unalterable calm, I gave thanks to the ineffable sentiment of Duty – and I sought to understand it. Having witnessed at first hand the way in which unheard of fatigues were cheerfully borne by young heads and old alike, and the cavalier fashion in which an assured future was put at risk by so many successful and worldly men – and now partaking myself in the miraculous satisfaction given to every man by the conviction that he cannot evade even the slightest obligation due to honour – I realized that abnegation is something easier and more generally felt than one might think.
To be sure, it is the young who are most susceptible. Vigny, like his characters, experienced the cycle of ardor, disillusionment, and the mature search for deeper meaning, for something redeeming. In the last and best story Captain Renaud regrets “the falsity of our barbarous, brutal education, of our insatiable need to be drugged by action,” though he still postpones his retirement to rejoin his men in the crisis of 1830. After hearing another of Renaud’s anecdotes Vigny’s stand-in declares, “When I hear stories like that I congratulate myself that the officer in me died years ago.”
A singular, haunting book. The list of mood-mates might include the memoirs of Ségur and Chateaubriand, The Captain’s Daughter, Moby-Dick, Roth’s The Radetzky March, Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, and Falconer’s The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers....more
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