Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/137

 picture it draws of the army from within is one of unspeakable sadness. This vaunted French school of abnegation is full of intrigues, perfidies, injustices, petty persecutions, petty miseries. It makes men glad to be outside it, breathing the air of liberty and personal responsibility.

An Englishman said to me one day, "There was only one honest man in the French army, and they turned him out." This is naturally an extravagant assertion, but it expresses in wild fashion a secret feeling in the minority. "I was bred in the worship of the army, and brought up a fervent Catholic," said an eminent French writer lately; "well, it is with difficulty now I keep myself from looking away when I see an officer or a priest." There can be no denial that soldiers with a delicate conscience are not approved of in the French army. They are regarded as dangerous subjects, apt to create "affairs." When a colonel exposed a scandalous abuse in a certain regiment, the President of the day sent him word that "a due regard for the honour of the army should prevent every officer from making an accusation, however justified, or creating any scandal that could diminish the prestige of the army." The army, we see, is the one institution insusceptible to the rigours of justice, wherein ill-doers enjoy immunity (if they are not of Jewish persuasion) for the sake of that extraordinary thing called the "honour of the army."