Nevertheless there have been protests. There have always been some; desertion and insubordination were necessarily born with the institution of standing armies, but these were scarcely conscious acts; the deserter, the insubordinate, did not appeal directly to individual rights; their acts were undoubtedly due to feelings of personal repugnance which they hardly took the trouble to analyze. Let us go further: the protests raised in literature against war and militarism were scarcely more than explosions of feeling, and hardly, if at all, supported by logical deductions based upon human nature and individual rights.
The army! The country! But the bourgeoisie and the litterateurs, its censer-bearers, had intoned so many praises in their honor, heaped up so many sophisms and lies in their favor, as to succeed in making them appear embellished with all the qualities with which they had decorated them, and nobody dared to question the existence of the said qualities; it was posited as a fact that the army was the reservoir of all the civic qualities and virtues. Hardly a romance in which we do not find the portrait of “the brave old soldier,” model of loyalty and probity, attached to his old general, whose servant he had been, following his master through all the vicissitudes of the latter’s existence, helping that master to escape the snares spread by invisible enemies, and finally giving his life to save his superior’s. Or again—for a change—saving an orphan, hiding him and bringing him up, making a hero of him, and furnishing him the means of entering into possession of the fortune which the enemies of his family had stolen from him!
Anon behold how the poets exalted the brave troopers! Military honor, devotion, fidelity, loyalty, were the least of their virtues. The bourgeoisie had to commit this tremendous blunder of forcing everybody to pass a longer or shorter time under its flags before men could see that, under the brilliant tinsel with which the poets and litterateurs had been pleased to cover their idol, were hidden nothing but infamies and rottenness. The volunteering for a year and twenty-eight days has done more against militarism than all that anybody had previously been able to say against it. As long as the workers were the only ones to sacrifice their youth, to become brutalized in the barracks, as long as the public knew nothing of the army but its stage-setting, the glittering of its brass, the rolling of its drums, the gilt of its stripes, the flapping of the flag in the wind, the clatter of arms, in fine all the apotheosis with which it is surrounded when exhibited to the people, so long did the litterateurs and poets help to swell this apotheosis in their works, to contribute their share of lies to the glorification of the monster. But with the day they were put in a position to study the institution closely; with the day they had to bow to the brutalizing discipline themselves; when they themselves had to endure the rebuffs and coarseness of the fellows with stripes on their sleeves;—with that day respect departed; they commenced to pull off the mask from the infamy; they belittled these “virtues” which their forefathers had been so ready to extol; and the soldier, including the officer, began to make his appearance before the public in his true character—that is to say in the character of an alcoholic brute, an unconscious machine!
Ah! One must have sojourned in that hell to understand all that a man of refined sensibilities can suffer there; one must have worn the uniform to know all the vileness and idiocy it engenders. Once matriculated you are no longer a man, but an automaton bound to obey the nod and beck of him who commands. You have a gun in your hands, but you must submit without flinching to the insolence of every petty officer who vents upon you his ill-humor or the fumes of the alcohol he has drunk. Not a move, not a word, or you may pay for it with your whole life or with many years of your liberty. In addition they will take care to read to you, every Saturday, the penal code, whose refrain “Death, death, death!” will haunt your brain whenever the instincts of rebellion begin buzzing beneath your skull.
But what exasperates you most are the thousand and one minutiae of the trade, the meddlings, the annoyances of rule. And for the subaltern who bears a grudge against you, or who, without having a grudge, is simply an unconscious brute, there are numberless opportunities daily to find fault with you, to make you submit to vexations of every sort which his brutishness may find pleasure in inflicting upon you. At roll-call for a poor adjustment of a strap, one button more tarnished than the rest, for the probable neglect to put on braces, etc., you get a blackguarding; the guardhouse, and faultfinding inspections without end! Every seam of your clothes is inspected; you are even made to open your garments to let your underclothes
