• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 953 0

hammer-blows intended to destroy the English army. And even if the orders actually given by the commander do not fit in with this or that conception of his plan, the critics will always be at liberty to say, as the actor Mounet-Sully said to Coquelin when the latter assured him that Le Misanthrope was not the gloomy melodrama that he wanted to make it (for Molière himself, according to the evidence of contemporaries, gave a comical interpretation of the part and played it for laughs): ‘Well, Molière was wrong.’”

“And when aeroplanes first started”—it was Gilberten’s turn now—“you remember what he used to say (he had such charming expressions): ‘Every army will have to be a hundred-eyed Argus’? Alas, he never lived to see his prediction fulfilled!” “Oh! yes, he did,” I replied, “he saw the battle of the Somme and he knew that it began with blinding the enemy by gouging out his eyes, by destroying his aeroplanes and his captive balloons.” “Yes, that is true. And then,” she went on, for now that she “lived only for the mind” she had become a little pedantic, “he maintained that we return always to the methods of the ancients. Well, do you realise that the Mesopotamian campaigns of this war” (she must have read this comparison at the time in Brichot’s articles) “constantly recall, almost without alteration, Xenophon’s Anabasis? And that to get from the Tigris to the Euphrates the English command made use of the bellum, the long narrow boat—the gondola of the country—which was already being used by the Chaldeans at the very dawn of history.” These words did indeed give me a sense of that stagnation of the past through which in certain parts of the world, by virtue of a sort of specific gravity, it is indefinitely immobilised, so that it can be found after centuries exactly as it was. But I must admit that, because of the books which I had read at Balbec at no great distance from Robert himself, I myself had been more impressed first in the fighting in France to come again upon those “trenches” that were familiar to me from the pages of Mme de Sévigné and then in the Middle East, apropos of the siege of Kut-el-Amara (Kut-of-the-Emir, “just as we say Vaux-le-Vicomte or Bailleau-l’Evêque,” as the curé of Combray would have said had he extended his thirst for etymologies to the languages of the East), to see the name of Baghdad once more attended closely by that of Basra, which is the Bassorah so many times mentioned in the Arabian Nights, the town which, whenever he had left the capital or was returning thither, was used as his port of embarkation or disembarkation, long before the days of General Townshend and General Gorringe, when the Caliphs still reigned, by no less a personage than Sindbad the Sailor.

“There is one aspect of war,” I continued, “which I think Robert was beginning to comprehend: war is human, it is something that is lived like a love or a hatred and could be told like the story of a novel, and consequently, if anyone goes about repeating that strategy is a science, it won’t help him in the least to understand war, since war is not a matter of strategy. The enemy has no more knowledge of our plans than we have of the objective pursued by the woman whom we love, and perhaps we do not even know what these plans are ourselves. Did the Germans in their offensive of March 1918 aim at capturing Amiens? We simply do not know. Perhaps they did not know themselves, perhaps it was what happened—their advance in the west towards Amiens—that determined the nature of their plan. And even if war were scientific, it would still be right to paint it as Elstir painted the sea, by reversing the real and the apparent, starting from illusions and beliefs which one then slowly brings into line with the truth, which is the manner in which Dostoievsky tells the story of a life. Quite certainly, however, war is not strategic, it might better be described as a pathological condition, because it admits of accidents which even a skilled physician could not have foreseen, such as the Russian Revolution.”

Throughout this conversation