The Splendor of Glittering Helmets Dawn of the Great War in Proust

Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 79/2017, p. 683-716

THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS DAWN OF THE GREAT WAR IN PROUST

by Nicolas de Warren (Pennsylvania)

Although the first installment of À la recherche du temps perdu was published just one year shy of the catastrophe that would engulf and transform European civilization, this impending war unlike any other was not without its own quiet foreboding in Du côté de chez Swan, surrounded as it was by louder, darker apprehensions.1 1913 marked a crucial inflection point in European sensibilities and artistic expression, betraying a pervasive cultural unease reaching back to the dawn of the new century. In Paris, the performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with its staging of sacrificial death and Nijinski’s explosive dancing, provoked skirmishes in the audience, and would long after be taken as an augur of things to come.2

Nicolas de Warren is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. Among his most recent publications: “Imagination of Stupidity: Jules de Gaultier, Flaubert, and Le Bovarysme” and, as co-editor, Philosophers at the Front: Phenomenology and the First World War (Leuven: Leuven Univ. Press, 2017). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / erc grant agree- ment n° 617659 (graph) on “The Great War and Modern Philosophy.” 1 Through a Borgesian typographical error, the publication date in the first edition ofDu côté de chez Swan was indicated as 1914. Abbreviations used in this article: SW = Marcel Proust, Swan’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (London: Penguin, 2015); GW = Marcel Proust, Guermantes’ Way, trans. Mark Treharne (London: Penguin, 2015). 2 See Modris Eksteins, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Knopf, 1989).

The exhibition “Les peintres futuristes italiens” in 1912 at the Berheim-Jeune Galerie, with works by Boccioni and Carrà among others, aimed at releasing painting from “l’ondoyante incertitude où elle se traîne.”3 Apollinaire gave voice to this spirit of the times in his 1913 volume of poetry Alcool with its sleek Alexandrine (from “Zone”): “À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien.” Geo-political events and national chauvinisms were likewise agitating: the Agadir Crisis in 1911; the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913; von Bernhardi’s ominously enti- tled Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (1911). Everywhere in Proust’s aesthetic and intellectual milieu, there was turmoil and revolution; but not in Marcel’s world, set during the pre-war years of rural Com- bray, the sea-side resort of Balbec, and the gossipy metropolitan life of Paris.4 There was little by way of distraction, other than the visits of the mysterious Swann, the budding desire for Gilberte amongst grassy hills filled with hawthorns, the illicit allure of “le petit cabinet sentant l’iris,” and the eternal aura of L’église St-Hilaire. Marcel’s reveries were occasionally punctured by the excitement of the gardener’s daughter, who would shout “they’re coming, they’re coming,” as she darted across the garden causing a minor tumult and slight injury to herself. Marcel and Françoise, the family servant, would be roused not to miss the coming excitement. Idyllic Combray resided next to military barracks housing a regiment of cuirassiers, and on days when these stout soldiers went on manoeuvres, they would march past the town, gleaming, proud, and regal in their splendid uniforms. While servants from local households watched the procession of Combray citizens on their leisurely Sunday walk within the town square, Marcel and Françoise, led by the gardener’s daughter, were drawn to the “glitter of helmets” and cantering procession of fine, mounted steads, flooding down a back alley way. Gathered around the axis of Combray’s immortalizing church, these parallel spectacles of bourgeois procession and le défilé militaire exhibited in tandem the secured magnificence of France’s distinctive way of being.

3 Les peintres futurists italiens: Exposition du lundi 5 au samedi 24 février 1912, Paris, p. 2, https:// www.rodoni.ch/busoni/boccioni/paris1912/paris1.html. 4 I shall through-out refer to the narrator of La Recherche as “Marcel.” THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 685

Though Françoise is notoriously compared to une guêpe fouisseuse (recall her taunting of “Giotto’s Charity”), and is often given to expres- sions of cruel indifference, we catch her in a rare moment when the wasp has succumbed to the sting of pity. “Poor children,” she exclaims, “to be mown down like grass in a meadow; the very thought of it gives me a shock, she added, putting her hand down on her heart, where she had received that shock” (SW, 90). This mild affectation of gesturing shock with her hand is nonetheless truthful to the traumatic memory of the Franco-Prussian War, which Françoise, in her rustic temperament and oral memory, carries within her, albeit here never explicitly named. The involuntary memory of that shock, as if her heart were wounded once again, voices pity for those who were mown down as well as for “those who are going to have died” (to import Geoff Dyer’s expression from The Missing of the Somme) in a war still unimaginable within her world as well as within the design of Proust’s Recherche. Unimaginable, and yet haunting, and for which only Françoise has eyes in seeing in these proud cuirassiers the ghosts of those who have died in 1870-1871. Beneath the glitter of what she sees, there is the affect of what she remembers as the truth of war. Like a prophet unconscious to her own vision, those uned- ucated eyes apprehend these proud cuirassiers as ghosts of the future, for a future remembrance of devastated time, to wit, the very time of this foreboding for those who shall one day die. For even if there is no genuine foreknowledge or direct anticipation of the war looming just beyond the horizon of Combray and the world of Du côté de chez Swan, the ghosts of those mown down like grass in 1870-1871 have been given life once more with the glittering bodies now parading before her eyes in the spirit of prideful revenge and confidence. The affect of this splendor touches her with this unspoken wisdom that if there is any truth to war, it is the pity of war and the question of sacrifice that returns to each generation with a vengeance, and especially for an army haunted by a past far from having been laid down to rest. Any truth to war is a truth which cannot remain long uncontested. And, indeed, her “shock” immediately embroils Françoise in a minor fra- cas with the gardener concerning the ordained sacrifice of les enfants de la patrie. Not wanting to miss his chance to needle Françoise, the gardener 686 Nicolas DE WARREN takes the bait. “A fine sight, isn’t it, Madame Françoise, all these young- sters with no care for their lives?” Françoise replies with her amazement at these men, “madmen,” she calls them, who care nothing for their lives, and who have been transformed by “those wretched wars” into courageous “lions.” As hundreds more file past them, and as the gardener’s daughter, not without representing a sarcastic interpolation within this vignette, braves “death a hundred times” to fetch water from across the path, Fran- çoise and the gardener exchange a few words on the meaning of sacrifice and war. The gardener’s anarchist sensibilities, rooted in an instinctual skepticism, decries war to be a conspiracy of the state, and looks for a revolution as the only hope to end all wars. Echoes of Proudhon’s War and Peace pass fleetingly through the gardeners’ attitude. The mission of the 19th-century, as Proudhon had optimistically proposed, was to end mili- tarism by means of a radical revolution in morality and thinking. Yet, the gardener’s genuine worry is more that the trains will stop running in the event of war, to which Françoise knowingly remarks, so that “we doesn’t run off.” The charm of her characteristically awkward grammar marks with blunt honesty the inseparability of the question of sacrifice from the question of its avoidance; there are no heroes at the front without les embus- qués at the rear. Their conversation tapers-off, inconclusively, as we are left with a parting glimpse of “new helmets flowing and shining in the sun,” as a vision of beatitude proceeding towards an unknown future, down Rue Sainte-Hildegarde. Within the elaborate tapestry of Du côté de chez Swan, it is an incon- spicuous moment, yet in this brief exchange, the question of sacrifice and the truth of war are posed at the margins of Combray and, in this manner, inscribed within the then unfinished Recherche, the design of which, already established in Proust’s imagination in 1913, did not (and could not) foresee the war that would soon irrupt within its midst, which would propel even more vigorously Proust’s indefatigable writing, and re-writing.5 Marching-off to their field exercises of preparing for

5 As Brigitte Mahuzier observes, the issues posed in this exchange are “profound” and placed in the mouthpieces of the gardener, representing la France profonde and the Françoise’s untutored memory, see Proust et la guerre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014), 40 ff. THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 687 and playing at war, these cuirassiers are reminders that Marcel’s pursuit of his aesthetic vocation finds itself in a time caught between a past that could not be forgotten, France’s catastrophic defeat of 1870-1871, and a future fervently imagined, the desired return of France’s triumph. This national project of re-invention crystallized around a collective dream of revenge and redemption, within which dashing figures of French cavalry offered a focal-image for a national epic in the making.6 In the years after the humiliation of 1870-1871, the image of the cuirassier stood as a powerful symbol for the rejuvenation of France’s élan vital and rebirth of the French army. As an element of shock, cuirassiers were tasked with delivering the decisive charge against the enemies’ lines, meant to shatter physical resistance as well as moral resolve (and whose futile attacks against English squares at Waterloo had long since receded from memory). Amplified in the image of the cuirassier, this culture of war was essentially forged in the imaginary where the war imagined to come was a war as imagined to have once been. In particular, the reconstruction of the French Army and reaffirmation of the Nation became aesthetically fashioned in the medium of nostalgia for the glorious campaigns of Napoleon and his legendary Grande Armée. As Charles Péguy muses in his Notre Jeunesse (1910): Even in 1870, in the month of August, if the French Army as it then was had been put into the hands of a Napoleon Bonaparte, all the files, all the prepa- rations, all the registers of a Moltke would today be the laughing stock of the historians themselves.7 This Napoleonic imaginary is embraced in the artworks of Édouard Detaille. As official painter of the French Army, Detaille’s paintings and panoramas enjoyed widespread acclaim during the years leading to the Great War. His fame extended into Proust’s Recherche, where he is received at the home of the Princesse de Guermantes, there simply known as “the creator of Le rêve.”

6 The cavalryman will remain a guiding figure in French 20th-century literature in its reflection on two world wars. In Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, Bardamu finds himself thrown into World War I as an unwitting soldier in a cavalry regiment. In Claude Simon’s La route des Flandres, Cap- tain de Reixach serves in a cavalry unit. 7 Charles Péguy, Temporal and Eternal, trans. Alexander Dru (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 72. 688 Nicolas DE WARREN

Photo (C) RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) - © Hervé Lewandowski Le rêve (oil on canvas), painted by Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Detaille (1848-1912)

In this painting (1888), one of his most popular works, remembrance and aspiration hove in alignment in the dream of a national epic. Over- head, we see the victorious armies of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, whose triumphal storm upon the heavens, like Valkyries perpetually afoot, announces the rosy-fingered dawn of the new day. Below, we see French infantrymen, with unmistakable faces of youth, asleep in fraternal community in open fields, melded with French soil. Held up before our eyes by the upraised hands of crossed- rifles, as a host lifted unto heaven, is a wrapped standard. In the words of the esteemed Napoleonic historian and friend of Detaille, Frédéric Masson, this flag is “not yet deployed and waiting to receive its THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 689 baptism.”8 In the same manner, these sleeping soldiers, wrapped in blankets against each other in warmth, await their deployment and baptism of fire. These soldiers are as yet unborn as the heroes they dream to become. The dog which sleeps along with his masters, whose white fur and nearness in our field of vision catches our eye at the head of the column of soldiers stretched out behind, bespeaks unconditional fidelity. The prelude of the coming dawn heralded by the heavenly hosts of ghostly glories animates their aspirations for the war to come. That aspiration, as the collective dream of the Army, as the collective dream of the Nation, is the desire for a beautiful death, or the apotheosis of sleep in a glorious dawn without end. Heroes never sleep, since in their sacrifice for the Nation, they have become gods, elevated to the heavens, to be adored from below. Once risen, the soldiers who sleep along the horizontal axis of time and the Earth will be elevated along a vertical axis of eternal glory and perpetual remembrance, much as the unfurling of flags held in victory. Detaille’s painting is a paean to the truth of war as the epic of sacrifice. As Hubert and Mauss would theorize in their important 1898 Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, sacrifice brings together the sacred and the profane through the mediation of a victim. As depicted in Le rêve, war is a dream of sacrifice. The sacred and profane, indicated by the division of the painting’s composition into brightly illuminated sky and profoundly slumbering earth, are brought together along the horizon of the flag awaiting its unfurled apotheosis. As Hubert and Mauss argued, sacrifice is the passage of an object — the sacrificial victim — from the profane to the sacred, from the human to the divine. This passage from one sphere to the other crosses a divide, across which what has been given returns as a gain. As Durkheim would later more explicitly elaborate, the true subject of sacrifice is society itself: something, or better: someone from society must be sacrificed in the name of the community “to the gods” in order for society to be blessed with gains, yet “the gods,” as the transcendence to which the sacrifice is

8 Frédéric Masson, “Le rêve,” Carnet de la Sabretache: Revue militaire rétrospective, 2ème série (1912), 769, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1153662. 690 Nicolas DE WARREN given, is in truth society itself, as immanent in itself. To die for the Nation is to give the Nation renewed life. Through the sacrifice of beautiful deaths, the Nation will be reborn. As Detaille notes in his journal in 1907: “Nous souhaitons vivement une guerre qui régénère un peu notre pauvre pays. C’est un remède héroïque, mais qui peut empêcher la pourriture où nous tombons.”9 Seductive in its visual rhetoric, Detaille’s aesthetic imaginary did not pass without criticism. In the words of the art-critic Camille Mauclair in 1898: “Historiographe de nos états-majors, commentateur non des âmes mais des uniformes, M. Detaille est le capitaine d’habillement de nos gloires guerrières. C’est son droit. Le droit à la médiocrité est indéniable.”10 This “right to mediocrity” nonetheless served effectively as a seductive arming of France’s collection passion for a national epic. For what Mau- clair misses is how in Detaille’s aesthetics, and more generally, within the self-image of France it sustains, the uniform becomes the soul it distinctly renders manifest. “Le droit à la médiocrité” is the right to dream extrav- agantly, and think no more of its mediocrity, other than what everyone else dreams for the other in the name of the Nation. Detaille’s official artworks exhibit with unequaled clarity three important gestalts of French national consciousness in the aftermath of 1870-1871. Having witnessed first-hand the gruesome nature of warfare in 1870-1871, Detaille’s Panorama de Rezonville (1883) shows dead and dying French soldiers. In sketches from his wartime service, Detaille unsparingly depicts the truth of war. In his drawing Un coup de mitrail- leuse, a row of mown down Prussians presents a truly ghastly sight: the dead are tightly crumpled together in contorted poses of endless dying, as closely arrayed visually as the clumped rows of sleeping French soldiers in Le rêve. Whereas the latter have laid to rest in dreams of eternal glory, the former have been cut down in death without transcendence; from dust emerges only dust. This drawing unwittingly suggests the reversibility of both images: splayed-out in clumps, are the dead marching eternally

9 Quoted in: Jean Humbert, Edouard Detaille: L’héroïsme d’un siècle (Paris: Copernic, 1979), 22. 10 Ibid., 27 THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 691 in heaven or butchered in forlorn fields under nameless skies? Only a dream, or the supreme illusion of a beautiful death, can secure by means of the imaginary a transcendence that death in combat would seem to prohibit when nakedly exposed. The battle-dead are not to be wor- shipped; they are to be mourned. Even the French soldiers appear hushed in respectful silence. As Detaille writes to Jules Claretie (direc- tor of the Théâtre Français): “Une impression que l’on ne pourra jamais rendre, c’est celle des cadavres défigurés, des blessés sans bras ni jambes [...]. Jamais l’on ne pourrait se permettre, je crois, de présenter cela au public.”11 Detaille’s self-censure was not merely a matter of decorum and good taste. With greater distance from the horrors of 1870-1871, his paintings gave way to more idyllic representations of French military life in the heyday years of its reconstruction and reform into l’Armée nouvelle. In La baignard du régiment à Saint-Germain (1880), a group of soldiers are seen bathing together, frolicking as young men do without care or shame, when on holiday or at summer camp. Fraternity in arms is also the theme of Ambulance à la revue de Longchamps (1877). A small group of medical orderlies are seen resting, eating, chatting, and smoking on the banks of a stream. This dejeuner sur l’herbe belies the butcher’s work of medical personnel in time of war. In this time of waiting, war plays itself out as leisure, fraternity, and glittering helmets on bright summer days. The illustrious exploits of Napoleon’s Grand Armée and its splendid array of uniforms richly adorn Detaille’s paintings during the last decades of his life. Many of these paintings portray the capture of enemy standards by cavalrymen and storming of the heavens by soldiers drawn upwards to eternal glory. This emphasis on images of charging cavalry and captured standards vividly expresses the ideal of l’élan vital and mentality of l’attaque à l’outrance which increasingly dominated the culture of war and military thinking during La Belle Époque. In an especially dramatic painting, a carabinier jumps over a defunct cannon while holding a Prussian flag in declaration of victory surrounded by his charging regiment. An officer in the background stares in amazement,

11 Ibid., 8. 692 Nicolas DE WARREN his gaze crossing ours, the spectators, at the meeting point of a bran- dished Prussian flag. The virtue of individual courage and valor of collective élan are brightly portrayed with this mounted deity of war, whose copper breastplate and red-crested helmet gleam in the triumph of moral might over technological and physical force. As with numerous other paintings, the apotheosis of battlefield glory in Detaille’s Napoleonic imaginary was inseparable from the splendor of uniforms and the spectacle of combat. Detaille himself was a pas- sionate collector of military uniforms, founding member in 1901 of La Sabretache, “Société des collectionneurs de figurines et des amis de l’histoire militaire” (Le Carnet de la Sabretache, a journal dedicated to the study of military uniforms, was launched in 1893), and original contributor to Le musée historique de l’Armée, founded in 1896.12 Detaille’s Types et uniforms: L’Armée française (1885-1889), with accom- panying texts by Jules Richard, is a sumptuous work parading the haute couture of the French military in the Third Republic. Even those illus- trations of soldiers in scenes of combat retain something essentially posed, where war is but a stage for the showcase of fashion, military prestige, and the spectacle of the Nation. This passion for military uniforms and the pageantry of war not only bespeaks an aestheticization of war and, by extension, an aestheticization of politics. Military uniforms have a significant function as bearers of national identity and social distinction. As with fashion more generally, military uniforms in late 19th-century France belonged to the wider culture of appearances, where clothing provided the indispensible medium for the construction of the self in the cadre of collective belonging.13 Military uniforms face out- wards towards the enemy as well as inwards towards members of one’s society. The function of differentiation is here two-fold: an uniform marks the soldier from his enemy while marking him from civilians within his own society. In distinguishing between friend and foe, the

12 In 1905, Le musée historique de l’Armée and Le musée d’Artillerie were brought together to form Le musée de l’Armée, Invalides. This society and journal dedicated to military uniforms, with the mission of “safeguarding the memories of our armies,” stills exists today: http://lasabretache.fr. 13 See Daniel Roche, La culture des apparences: Une histoire du vêtement (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Fayard, 1989). THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 693 distinctive color and pattern of a uniform visibly identifies a body dis- posed to kill and predisposed to be killed. A uniformed soldier is an embodied subject who has become an instrument of the Nation, and, more specifically, a sanctioned instrument of violence. In this manner, the uniform is the material condition for the exercise of military force.14 An uniformed body becomes an image of the Nation, and through this image, the clothed subject becomes incorporated into a collective identity. The uniform subjects the body of an individual to the collective while giving that collective an individual and recognizable form of appearance.15 Military uniforms incorporate the body into an institu- tion; uniformed bodies are an immediate manifestation of the state in its sovereignty over the life and death of its citizens. It is, therefore, not surprising that the standardized military uniform is a modern phenom- enon dating from the 17th-century and the monopolization of violence in the modern Nation-State. In France, the transition from the white- uniforms of the Royal Armies to the blue-uniforms of the Republican Army (and preserved under Napoleon) represents an important trans- formation in how color provided a material support for national identity and the idea of the “citizen-soldier.” The term “citizen-soldier” codified the soldier who was both apart from civilians and yet integral to the constitution of the Nation as the collective of equal citizens. Military uniforms faced inwards, in distinguishing soldiers from civilians, while simultaneously reminding civilians of the sacredness of citizenship and devotion to the Nation that bound them together. In France, the uniform within civilian life became an unmistakable marker of social prestige and moral authority, and contributed essentially to “la mystique militaro-républicaine” enjoyed by career officers.16 In 1912, Detaille was entrusted with the task of designing new uniforms for the French army. This responsibility came at a time when a

14 See Eric Letonturier, “Modernité, individualisation et culture militaire,” in Normes, discours et pathologies du corps politique, sous la dir. d’Eric Letonturier et Pierre-Yves Gaudard (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), 13-33. 15 Yvonne Deslandres, Le costume, image de l’homme (Paris: Alban Michel, 1976), 209 ff. 16 See Jean Boulègue, “L’officier dans la société française : L’héritage de la Troisième République,” Revue française de sociologie 44 (2003): 695-711. See also Deslandres, 217 ff. 694 Nicolas DE WARREN debate regarding France’s distinctive pantalon rouge had reached an heightened pitch of acrimony and passion. While other European armies had abandoned the colorful uniforms of 19th-century armies, France proudly retained its red trousers, commonly known as le pantalon garance. Even though French military observers during the Bal- kan wars (1912-1913) had warned against the continued use of such brightly colored attire on the modern battle-field, and despite a lengthy investigation of the issue by a specially formed commission from 1899 to 1911, with a final recommendation to dispatch with these pants, a patriotic defense continued amongst French politicians and the military establishment. Detaille himself weighed into the fray, declaring: “si nous avons eu tous un bonnet à poil dans le coeur, nous y avons plus encore et, bien que de frâche date, un pantalon rouge.” Whereas the Napoleonic bonnet in our hearts benefitted from venerable origins (Detaille’s reference is to the iconic headdress of Napoleon’s Old Guard), the red pants in question were of a more recent provenance. First introduced by Charles X in 1829, the choice of the plant garance (rubia tinctorum, more commonly called dyer’s madder) for its colorful dye stemmed from purely economic reasons, namely, to support the madder (garance) industry in the department of Vaucluse. Despite this original economic rationale (and functionalist use: the switch from traditional white pants to red pants would better mask blood), the red pants became transformed into a symbol of National pride and forever inscribed within the memory of 1870-1871. Rather than disrobe this traumatic memory of its affect by symbolically shedding the bloodied red pants associated with this humiliating defeat, through an inverse and stubborn logic of the imagination, the red pants become transfig- ured into the very soul of France itself.17 In the revealing words of a French politician, the red paints were “consecrated” and made “sacred

17 The importance of uniforms for cementing military identity is not in itself unusual. In the French army, the 32nd regiment of dragoons, for example, staunchly refused to part with its grenade- adorned tunic buttons when requested to do so before the Great War. The attachment to this detail prevailed. The regiment was allowed to keep its distinctive buttons. In fact, what is unusual with le pantalon garance is that it represents an exception to the rule. In the history of warfare, it is in fact rare for vanquished armies to retain their humiliated uniforms. See Letonturier, “Modernité, individualisation et culture militaire,” 17. THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 695 in defeat.” The suffering of defeat became transformed into an experience of the promissory sacred. The color red thus attained a symbolic meaning of revenge: to defeat the Germans in the next war with the red pants of the humiliation from 1870-1871 would redeem the dese- cration of France. France itself is this legacy of “sacredness in defeat” in anticipation of the greater glory to come. As the Minister of War, Eugen Etienne, declared in 1913 in response to calls for a less colorful uniform for the French infantry: “Éliminer le pantalon rouge? Jamais! Le pantalon rouge, c’est la France!”18 The appalling loses suffered by these red trousered lions in August 1914 is legendary. On August 22, 27,000 French soldiers were killed in combat — the bloodiest single day for the French army in the Great War, and, in fact, in any war fought by France.19 By the 1st of Septem- ber, the French army had suffered more than 300,000 causalities. Although it would be a stretch to fault exclusively these sacred pants for such catastrophic loses (the doctrine of attack, inept command, and other factors also conspired in this outrage), the multiple levels of irony in this tragedy of pants are striking.20 The National Assembly had voted on July 9, 1914 to drop the red pants and adopt a more sensible palette of colors. Since a uniform of the Nation must still express the soul of the Nation, the sensible alternative was an equitable mixture of blue, white, and red that only produced an anemic grey tone, which nonetheless was officially baptized as the color “tri-color.” In reality, the French army had stopped using their nationally produced garance dye in the 1880s and opted instead for synthetic dyes produced by the Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik (BASF), which, of course, promptly stopped shipments to France with the outbreak of war in August 1914. In essence, the Germans had been supplying the very red pants with which to fashion ideal targets for German guns.21 Even Adolphe Messimy, Minister of War, could not have imagined the poignant truth of his

18 Quoted in Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly (London: Random House, 1984). 19 See Jean-Michel Steg, Le jour le plus meurtrier de l’histoire de France: 22 août 1914 (Paris: Fayard, 2013). 20 German losses were equally staggering. 21 The French would eventually adopt blue in 1915. 696 Nicolas DE WARREN own words, when he remarked in 1911: “such blind, stupid attachment to the most visible colours will have cruel consequences.”22

A year after the exhibition of Le Rêve, the 18-year old Marcel Proust volunteered for military service with the 76th Infantry Regiment stationed at Orléans.23 There is a celebrated photo of Proust in uniform, striking the pose of a dandy in an overcoat adorned with epaulettes and bright buttons the size of eyes wide open, all clearly too large for his slender frame. There is little first-hand testimony for Proust’s military service, and Proust himself rarely speaks of his service in his corre- spondence, but something about this brief military stint permanently remained with him. Writing retrospectively, Proust remarks to Maurice Duplay: “Curieux [...] que nous ayons vu le régiment, toi comme un bagne, moi comme un paradis.” 24 This nostalgic sentiment for the paradise of military life becomes reshaped in La Recherche in the form of Marcel’s visit to Robert de Saint-Loup’s barracks at Doncières in Le Côte de Guermantes. As with the cuirassiers’ défilé in Combray, the significance of this vignette of military life nestled in a quiet garrison town only becomes fully manifest après-coup, from an inverted perspective in which everything about that blissful time has become disjointed and undone. Set before the war without any awareness of the catastrophe to come, these halycon days (and which Proust in fact wrote during the war) serve as a framing device for the irruption of war and its trans-valuation of values in Le temps retrouvé. When viewed from this later depiction of wartime Paris, this image of paradise poignantly (and not without irony) meas- ures the sense of a world laid waste to war through the concentrated

22 Quoted in William Buckingham, Verdun: The Deadliest Battle of the First World War (Glouces- tershire: Amberley Books, 2016), 44. 23 See Clovis Duveau, “Proust à Orléans,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Marcel Proust 33 (1983): 9-68. 24 Quoted in Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 182. THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 697 lens of its self-defining ideal, now suddenly revealed as a grand illusion, and from which very little, or so it would seem, can be redeemed. “Will such happy days ever return again?” Marcel wistfully asks Saint-Loup in 1916. Even before the advent of catastrophe, Doncières held a unique place in Marcel’s recollections. After the death of his revered grandmother, Marcel fondly remembers “la couleur grise et douce d’une campagne matinale et le goût d’une tasse de chocolat” at Doncières. These memories offer a degree of consolation for his irreparable loss, since the memory of his grandmother as well as that of visiting Saint-Loup both gravitate around the experience of strange bedrooms made familiar through the re-assuring presence of an other. The genuineness of his physical, intellectual, and moral life — his life as such — experienced in Don- cières forms within him a series of pleasures which are entirely distinct from all other pleasures. What speaks to him in these memories are the pleasures and days of the harmony of external and internal landscapes, the softness of the dawn emerging across the fields and the velvety warmth of chocolate spreading over the palate. Unable to come to Paris due to military and amorous obligations (Saint-Loup’s mistress is once again proving to be a source of distress), Marcel decides to visit his friend at his garrison town. Doncières is not far from Combray. He plans for a quick visit, with the hope of returning in the evening to be with his mother and grandmother, and, most critically, to sleep in his own bed. Accidently, however, and given his typical lassitude and indecision, Marcel is forced to stay the night in Doncières at a local hotel. As with his stay in Balbec, this prospect of sleeping in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar town becomes a source of anxiety; he believes that his friend might stay with him at the hotel, much as his grandmother had stayed with him in Balbec, in placing her bed on the other side of the wall of their adjoining rooms. Yet, Saint- Loup is nowhere to be found. Marcel must make his way to the military barracks and call upon him. Arriving in delight, Saint-Loup greets his friend in a flurry of excitement, with “his monocle flying in front of him.” This characteristic detail of his singular way being attests to his aristocratic bearing and generous, out-reaching élan. Saint-Loup, who 698 Nicolas DE WARREN knows his young friend well, is granted exceptional permission from his commanding officer to allow Marcel to spend his first night in his private room in the barracks. In Combray, Marcel observed military life from the outside, looking out from within the world of civilian life. In Doncières, Marcel has passed to the inside; he can now enjoy looking out onto the world from within the maternal fraternity of military life. Benefitting as he does from his own quarters as an officer, Saint- Loup’s room provides Marcel with a space of domestic tranquility and sense of being at home. Marcel finds photographs of himself and his adored Madame Guermantes, whose aura attracted him to form a closer relationship with Saint-Loup. A fire-place guards over the premises and its newly received guest like an “animal crouched in ardent watchful- ness, noiseless and faithful.” The hush of Saint-Loup’s room is given sharper profile by the solitary tick of a watch as it marks a time empty of cares and concerns. While admiring Madame de Guermantes’ photo, Marcel discerns in her face the image of Saint-Loup and basks in the warmth of admiration. As he muses, “that race retains its individuality in a world by which it is not submerged and in which it remains isolated in its divinely ornithological glory, for it seems to have sprung, in the age of mythology, from the union of a goddess and a bird” (GW, 77). Marcel’s stay becomes prolonged, like a traveler waylaid in paradise. Once settled, Marcel quickly enters into a daily routine of walks through the town, dinners with Saint-Loup and his comrades, and observing Saint-Loup’s regiment on manoeuvre. Perched atop the town, Saint-Loup’s room gives a commanding view over the country-side. As Marcel describes: Like a diver breathing through a tube which rises above the surface of the water, I felt I was somehow in contact with healthy, open-air life through my connection with these barracks, this high observatory dominating the countryside furrowed with canals of green enamel, into whose various buildings I regarded it as a priceless privilege, one I hoped would last, to be free to go whenever I chose, always certain of a welcome. (GW, 93) This harmony of military life, townsfolk, and country-landscapes was already intimated as Marcel first neared Doncières by train. While THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 699 approaching his destination, Marcel describes how Doncières’ surrounding landscape merged with a sonorous landscape created by the blare of bugles and sounds of horses. This soundscape delineates from afar the field-exercises of the garrison’s regiment of dragoons. In perfect harmony with the countryside, an atmospheric quality colored by the sounds of trumpet-calls and trotting-horses pervades Doncières’ secured presence. The naturalness of military presence amplifies the sense of peace and domesticity over-which it prevails. In this paradise, Marcel undertakes a number of promenades solitaire. He explores the town as one would explore a foreign land of fascinating sights. Rather than perceive the town’s street in merely functional terms, as a means for spatial transportation and connection, these streets become conduits for Marcel’s roaming imagination. His wanderings allow him to alight upon features of the everyday — the common transactions of the town’s inhabitants at home, which offer glimpses of “genuine and mysterious scenes of lives I might not enter” (GW, 93). Such tableaus of the life-world notably include scenes of shared public life among officers and the local population. Like a rare and delicate butterfly, Marcel flutters easily between the countryside, the town, and Saint-Loup’s military barracks, in a world of suspended time where gravity seems to weigh slightly less than anywhere else. This portrait of Doncières highlights the Ideal of a republican integration of civilian and military spheres of life. Of a younger generation of officers, the aristocratic Saint-Loup, a non-commissioned officer with the rank of sergeant, is popular among his men. He is an accomplished horseman “with some style,” a reader of contemporary intellectuals, and knowledgeable in current military affairs. His political sympathies are progressive and, most significantly, he is a declared Dreyfusard. In his kindness towards Marcel, Saint-Loup takes upon himself the role of educator in instructing his young friend on matters of military strategy and doctrine. There is something distinctive and gracious with his “ornithological glory” that sets him apart. As Marcel recounts: They [the men] recognized in these details [his monocle, his pants and cap] the character, the style that they assigned at once and for all to this most 700 Nicolas DE WARREN

popular of the officers in the regiment, manners like no one else’s, scorn for the opinion of his superior officers, which seemed to them to be the natural upshot of his kindness to his subordinates” (GW, 90). This contrast between Saint-Loup and his superior officers is pro- nounced with the officer who granted permission for Marcel’s stay. Described as the “biggest fool who’s ever walked the earth,” this commanding officer “[gives] orders with a studied nobility of gesture that belonged to some historical painting, and as though he were setting off to some battle of the First Empire, when in fact he was simply about to ride home to the house that he had rented for the period of his service at Doncières” (GW, 71). This Captain de Borodino is observed as “pass- ing majestically by with his horse at a trot, as if he fancied himself taking part in the Battle of Austerlitz” (GW, 136). Marcel is unsparing in this sarcastic evocation: “Sitting on his horse, his face slightly chubby, his cheeks of an Imperial fullness, his gaze clear-sighted, the Prince must have been the victim of some hallucination [...].” (GW, 136). As worn on the sleeve of his name, Captain de Borodino is subject to the Napoleonic imaginary. Captured in an image of a glorious past, he breaths in the element of fiction with his affected manner of riding his horse “as if taking part in the Battle of Austerlitz.” In looking at his posed manner of self-presentation, one beholds a figure framed within a tableau, as if one were to see a double-image: the present and the past, to wit, the past as the present. Captain de Borodino plays at being an officer of la Grande Armée without grasping the irony caused by his own title: while Austerlitz (1805) stands as an exemplary model of Napoleon’s military genius, with his strategy of feigning weakness in his right flank so as to lure the Austrian-Russian army to expose its own center and left flank, the battle of Borodino (1812) represents one of Napoleon’s most costly and least imaginative victories — a victory in name only. In the mem- orable words of Foch a century later: “a battle won is a battle in which one will not confess oneself beaten.” While the spell of Captain de Borodino’s name contaminates the present with the Napoleonic imaginary, Saint-Loup’s name is at once more archaic, and hence less precise, and more resonant, and hence more atmospheric; it evokes a THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 701 venerable aristocratic genealogy (he is the nephew to both the Baron de Charlus and les Guermantes ) and the distant hagiographical memory of Saint Lupus of Troyes, who reputedly saved that city from the rav- ages of Attila the Hun. What characterizes his image is not a tableau from the past, but that singular élan of his monocle flying in front of him. As living in the past, this image of Captain de Borodino contrasts with narrator’s final image of Saint-Loup at Doncières. Having finally decided to take leave of this paradise in order to return to his mother and grandmother, he is, however, unable to meet up with Saint-Loup one last time, as he had wished. Much as with his farewell from Saint- Loup in wartime Paris, shortly before his death at the front, Marcel is forced to take his leave from his friend in a missed encounter. He asks for his whereabouts in the barracks, and falls upon a gruff soldier, who exclaims: “You didn’t see old Saint-Loup parading about the place in his new pants! Wait till our captain sees it, it’s officer’s cloth!” (GW, 135). This old soldier evidently takes offense at this up-start officer, a mere sergeant, who allows himself the privileged pants made from cloth befit- ting only of a superior officer, like Captain de Borodino. The soldier openly mocks Saint-Loup for “the way he flings his legs, and that head of his [...] And that monocle — all over the ruddy place.” As he decries: “What sort of NCO is that?” (GW, 136). An answer to this question is not far at hand. In Doncières, the character of Saint-Loup incarnates the ideal French officer, as advocated in the reconstructive aftermath of 1870-1871 by Hubert Lyautey. For his part, Captain de Borodino represents the kind of officer criticized and held responsible for the catastrophe of 1870-1871 by Lyautey. A descendent of a Napoleonic general and French aristocracy, Lyautey served as Chief of Staff with the 7th Cavalry Division stationed in Meaux before an extended service in various French colonies before returning to France during the Great War. In an 1891 article “Du rôle social de l’officier dans le service militaire universel,” published anonymously in Revue des Deux Mondes, Lyautey (at the time still serving as a cavalry officer in Saint-Germain-en-Laye) argued that French officers should take on the public role of moral 702 Nicolas DE WARREN educators, much as with teachers and priests.25 The occasion for this publication was the newly instituted policy of universal military con- scription which affected French society by institutionalizing a tighter integration between the military and civilian life. This expanded influx of citizens into the military also transformed the relationship within the military between career officers and citizen-soldiers. In Lytautey’s vision, the army was tasked with an essential social function in the reconstruction of the French nation. As a model for the Republic, military life should instill and exhibit the virtues of patriotism, personal initiative, and fraternity. War, in this institutional sense of the military, was not just the pursuit of the political by other (violent) means, as Clausewitz had argued. It should also become during peacetime the pursuit of the political by other (social) means, namely, through the cultivation of fraternity and modeling of social relations. The military becomes in this manner a social experiment of the Nation where strategies of what Fou- cault termed “bio-power” become tested and deployed.26 This institu- tionalization of military fraternity, as an exclusive form of male collective existence, is meant to foster the regeneration of the social body of the French Nation. This emphasis on military fraternity continued a long-standing tradition reaching back to the French Revolution. As one the foundational virtues of the French Nation during the Revolution, the fraternity of men living and fighting together came to exemplify the civic virtue of fraternity which was enshrined in France’s republican values of liberté, égalité, fraternité.27 Fraternity is not simply a value, but a collective passion fostered by the Nation insofar as it demanded of men to bind themselves emotionally to each other and willingly, and, with such leveraged emotional attachments, to sacrifice their lives for each other, for the sake of the Nation.

25 Anonymous, “Du rôle social de l’officier dans le service militaire universel,”Revue des deux mondes 61, mars (1891), http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb32858360p/date1891. 26 See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). 27 See Brian Joseph Martin, Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy & Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France (Lebanon, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 2011). THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 703

This emotional bond of male fraternity was not without homo erotic vibrations. As Foucault notes, however, the radicalism of such a purely male form of friendship should not be simplistically reduced to homosexuality as sexual practice and desire.28 The homo-eroticism in the relationship between Marcel and Saint-Loup (even if Saint- Loup serves as a desired medium through which Marcel projects his attraction to Madame de Guermantes) is not a desire, but something desirable, as a form of friendship and shared form of existence. As Foucault suggests, whereas modern societies are accepting of women living together and having access to each other’s bodies, such an acceptance of shared forms of male existence is virtually non-existent, with the notable exception of military life. In the military, men are called upon to love each other, to form into a band of brothers, and, under the extreme circumstances of war as well as the idyllic circumstances of peace, to care for each other. This ethics of philia is not without the constant threat of shame for an erotic attachment deemed too pure or impure, where the difference often becomes itself blurred. In times of peace, les enfants de la patrie sont les enfants du paradis. In time of war, this emotional bond becomes even more critical to co-existence in the presence of death’s threat. As Foucault observes: During World War I, men lived together completely, on one top of another, and for them it was nothing at all, insofar as death was present and finally the devotion to one another and the services rendered were sanctioned by the play of life and death. What sanctions, however, this culture of devotion and attachment was an unswerving attachment to the Nation and devotion to the ideal of a beautiful death, or, as in Detaille’s Le rêve, the apotheosis of the individual in the eternal remembrance of the Nation. “Infantry,” in French infanterie, in its original etymological meaning meant “youth, inexperienced,” and “infant” (Latin: infante, which gave rise to the Ital- ian term infanteria and Spanish infantería during the late 16th-century).

28 Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Foucault Life: Collected Interviews, 1961- 1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e) (New York: Autonomedia, 1996), 308-12. 704 Nicolas DE WARREN

The Nation loves its children, it itself loves to devour; the children love the Nation, they themselves love to imagine. Lyautey’s Ideal French officer, as exemplified with Saint-Loup, molded in the collective experience of fraternity and graced with individual spontaneity offered a precarious image, however, that oscillated between purity and impurity. As echoed by the old soldier’s grumbling over Saint-Loup’s pants, Lyautey’s views were not uniformly accepted. Until the Great War, when Lyautey was repatriated to France to command in the war and serve as Minister of War in 1917, his military career had been shunted to the far-reaches of the French colonies. He was seen to be a “renegade general,” and not only for his reform-minded ideas, “socialism,” and support of Dreyfus.29 It was also widely known that he was homosexual, with a notorious disposition for colonial troops. While in command of the 1st Squadron of the 4th Light Calvary Regiment in 1887 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, he had met Proust, and circumstantial evidence suggests that Proust modeled as well Baron de Charlus on Lyautey.30 Lytautey provides a model split across two contrasting, though related characters, each of whom would come to play a symbolic role in the final cataclysmic denouement of wartime Paris in Le temps retrouvé: the ideal French officer as represented by Saint-Loup, whose death at the front, leading his men with his monocle flying in front of him, would be singularly mourned by Marcel; and the debauched sexual preference for colonial soldiers as represented by Baron de Charlus, whose whipping scene in Jupien’s brothel symbolically desecrates the sacred ideal of sacrifice, which had been so glowingly consecrated in the years leading up to the Pompeian eruption of the Great War, and whose vocal critique of the stupidity of nationalism contrasts vividly with the fortitude of Saint-Loup’s silent patriotism and discrete heroism.

29 See Pascal Venier, Lyautey and the Dreyfus Affaire: An Officer Intellectuel?, esri Working Papers in Contemporary History & Politics (European Studies Research Institute, 1996). 30 Spencer C. Tucker, ed., World War I: The Definitive Encyclopedia and Document Collection, 5 vols., 1005. For the argument of Lyautey as possible source for Baron de Charlus, see Christian Gury, Lyautey-Charlus (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1998) and Proust et Lyautey (Paris: Editions Non Lieu, 2009). For an assessment of this reading, see Robert Aldrich, “Homosexuality in the French Colo- nies,” in Homosexuality in French History and Culture, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis (Lon- don: Routledge, 2012). THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 705

III

Marcel’s wanderings in Doncières often culminated with dinners with Saint-Loup. On one such evening, after having become lost in a maze of streets, Marcel finds his way to the hotel where he’s awaited by Saint-Loup in the company of friends. It is the beginning of a festive season in Doncières, attracting numerous visitors to the town, who participate in “feasts of Biblical proportion.” In this something of a paradise, military life is just as much the life of the intellect: dinners are occasions to have Platonic style banquets filled with discourse on politics and military thinking. The intellectual atmosphere is charged, of course, with the Dreyfus Affair, which tested the loyalties and fabric of the newly reformed French Army. Through-out La recherche until the Great War, the Dreyfus Affair provides principle dramatic political backdrop against which social identities and conflicts have their play. But, on this evening, it is not this affair that commands discussion and interest. Marcel’s curiosity in military history, however, has been sparked by Saint-Loup, who has absorbed the most recent trends in military thought during his service. A soldier named Gibergue sees a striking resemblance between Marcel’s face and a certain Major Duroc. As Saint-Loup responds: Ah yes, Major Duroc, the man I was telling you about who lectures to us on military history. He’s someone who, from all accounts, is deeply in support of our views [regarding the Dreyfus Affair]. I’d have been surprised to learn that he wasn’t, because he’s not only supremely intelligent but a Radical Socialist and a Freemason as well. Marcel presses Saint-Loup to expand on Major Duroc’s military theories and finds especially suggestive a proposed comparison between military strategy and art. As Saint-Loup explains, military history, as a narrative centered on battles, must be understood as a text of signs, and more specifically, as palimpsest of texts. Every detail in a military operation must be grasped as an “indication of an idea that has to be extracted and which often conceals other ideas” (GW, 106). Understanding the truth of war is an intellectual exercise as mentally satisfying “as any sci- ence or art.” Essential to the art of warfare is the combination of an 706 Nicolas DE WARREN historical hermeneutics and a theoretical knowledge of basic principles of war. As Saint-Loup elaborates at length, in reading about past military operations, the names of regiments, the type of operation, the movement of troops, and other aspects of a campaign are equally significant. A military campaign is a system of signs; decoding these signs reveals a dense web of significations within which resides a central Idea. An adept student of military history must thus be able to entertain and judge different possible interpretations of signs: the movement of a unit might represent a feint, an advance, or a retreat. Knowledge of geography and the lay of the land, as Saint-Loup notes in echo of Clausewitz, are essential for military intelligence. Think, for example, as he recalls, of Napo- leon’s deliberate weakening of the Pratzen Heights at the Battle of Aus- terlitz. Lured to attack this apparent weakness that promised a way for the Allies to severe Napoleon’s line of communications and supply with Vienna, the Austro-Russian army found instead its own center and left critically exposed. The catastrophic Allied mistake consisted here in fail- ing to read the deceptive nature of what seemed to have been a textbook mistake on the part of Napoleon, namely, to have ceded the prominent ground of the Pratzen Heights. Even though, as Saint-Loup continues, there are rules in the art of warfare, these rules must be applied by a faculty of judgment seasoned by experience and attentive to the specific situation of a battle. In a word, as Clausewitz had argued, a military commander must possess a reflective form of judgment much as Kant proposed for aesthetic judgment: not as the subsumption of the particular to the universal, but as the invocation of the universal in the particular. A military commander must know how to read a situation in order to know how, and in what combinations, to implement correctly a given rule of war. Much as Deleuze would read Proust’s Recherche in Proust and Signs, Saint-Loup understands the history of war as a kind of literary work of art constituted through a world of signs, where the fundamental risk of understanding consists in the deceptive, that is, strategic nature of war’s art. This analogy between war and art reflects a conception of artworks and artistic creation internal to La recherche, but which Marcel will come to reject only after the war and his experience of artistic illumination in THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 707 the library of Guermantes. Through-out Marcel’s quest for Art, he is obsessed with discovering hidden resemblances and affinities beneath a tapestry of sign-details. This mode of aesthetic perception recalls Berg- son’s claim about “great artists” in their capacity to insightfully grasp an identity across a picturesque variety. What Marcel himself calls a “radi- ographic observation” consists in grasping an idea which has to be extracted from heterogeneous elements, much as with his attempt to fathom the secret workings of individuals in the societal pastiches of the Goncourt brothers.31 Likewise, while military history presents at first glance a “jumbled account,” upon closer consideration, it reveals a composition much like a painting or artwork, where heterogeneous signs are structured together into a meaningful sequence. As with paintings, so Saint-Loup declares, a spectator must grasp what those details symbolize. As he remarks: it’s the same with these military operations; quite apart from their immediate objective, they’re habitually modeled, in the mind of the general who is directing the campaign, on earlier battles which constitute, if I can put it like this, the past, the library holdings, the learning, the etymology, the aristocracy of the battles that are to come. (GW, 108) To the degree that the relation of signs to each other, and of each sign to its meaning, is understood, the truth of war reveals itself as the splendid unity of an immaterial Idea. This Idea is the Idea of battle. As Saint-Loup argues, great historical battles such as Lodi, Ulm, Leipzig, and Cannae are each a “strategic carbon copy” of the Ideal Battle. In this sense, the history of a warfare is a palimpsest where each historical battle is a kind of text superimposed upon other battles, or texts. The study of military history is thus essential in the preparation for war, much as the study of art-history is essential for the creation of a new artwork. As Saint-Loup tellingly observes: I don’t know whether there’ll be another war in the future or what nations will be involved, but if there is, you can be certain that it will contain (and deliberately on the commander’s part) another Cannae, an Austerlitz, a Ross- bach, a Waterloo, and so on and so forth. (GW, 109)

31 F.C. Green, The Mind of Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1949), 462. 708 Nicolas DE WARREN

This apparently academic discourse on the art of warfare immediately takes on contemporary relevance with Saint-Loup’s familiarity with die Strategiestreit among German military theorists and historians. This debate, which animated German war-planning before the Great War, pitted two conflicting conceptions of strategy and understanding of Clausewitz’s distinction in On War between “absolute war” and “relative war.” Following from a basic definition of war as “a duel on an extensive scale,” whereby combatants employ violence, as an instrument for the pursuit of political aims, as a means “to compel our opponent to compel our will,” Clausewitz fashioned what he termed a “pure concept of war,” by which he understood, an exercise of force without any limita- tion or restriction.32 Given that war involves a necessary employment of violence for the purpose of disarming the enemy and compelling their will, there is no inherent logical limit in the possible exertion of such violence. When considered abstractly or, in other words, abso- lutely, war tends towards an unlimited and unrestricted employment of violence, much like an inertial body in motion in a frictionless sphere, where, paradoxically, war is both an inertial mass and a gravitational pull on itself. Given that war, however, involves a reciprocal relation between two opponents and, as significantly, that war is an instrument for the pursuit of political aims, war is always tempered and constrained in its flourishing of violence. War is not an end itself, but a political means. Additional factors falling under the heading of “friction of war” further curb the intrinsic tendency of war’s violence towards an unre- strained absolute. Clausewitz’s theoretical idea of pure war imagines war as unrestricted violence, whereas real, i.e., historical wars are always limited in their manifestations of violence. For Clausewitz, war mani- fested itself in its essential form as battle, i.e., the “duel” between two conflicting armies, since war was essentially a political means to force or reach a decision. This emphasis on the notion of battle gave rise to two distinct, and related, aims of battle: the destruction of an opponent’s combat forces and the disarming of the opponent’s moral resolve

32 Carl von Clausewitz, On War. Trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), Book I, Ch. I. THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 709 and political will to continue fighting. Although essentially a manifestation of physical force and material bodies, the aim of battle is not just material destruction. It consists more elusively in the effort to compel the will of the other to submit to one’s own will. Moral resolve cements the physical as much as the physical encases the moral. These Clausewitzean distinctions became the subject of intense debate and interpretative variation among German military thinkers during the second half of the 19th-century. Much of this debate, as mir- rored in Saint-Loup’s dinner discourse, responded to the German military historian Hans Delbrück’s study of the campaigns of Frederick the Great. Victory over the French in the war of 1870-1871 and Germany unification led to a steady stream of military histories of this and other Prussian campaigns (the second war against the Danish in 1864 and the war against Austria-Hungary in 1866) by the German war college. Official military history was an integral element in the cementing of a national consciousness for a newly unified Germany. The image of the nation was bound intrinsically to the image of war, given that the unification of Germany in 1871, was achieved through war.33 Delbrück, however, challenged the dominant view of warfare among military thinkers and this debate, although historical in its origins as a debate regarding the military thinking of Frederick the Great, was inseparable from German military planning. As von Schlieffen often remarked: “We must study the past to gain knowledge which the present refuses to give us.”34 Foremost amongst these was the study of the campaigns of Frederick the Great, who was portrayed as having employed the same strategy of seeking decisive battles of annihilation as General Helmuth von Moltke had adopted in his victorious campaigns in 1866 and 1870- 1871. This revisionist image of Frederick the Great’s campaigns was meant to trace a continuous lineage of Prussian military thinking from past to present as well as justify the “strategy of annihilation” which Moltke and other Staff officers advocated. It was against this image of

33 See Arden Bucholz, Hans Delbrück and the German Military Establishment: War Images in Conflict (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1985). 34 Quoted in Arden Bucholz, Moltke, Schlieffen, and Prussian War Planning(Oxford: Berg Pub- lishers, 1991), vii. 710 Nicolas DE WARREN war, theoretically as well as historically, that Delbrück reacted in devel- oping a more historically accurate and methodologically sophisticated understanding of war. Credited as the founder of modern military history, Delbrück, however, was not a Staff officer, but a civilian, even if he did see service in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, whose gruesome sights of battle-fields strewn with dead left a deep impression. Within On War, Delbrück proposed that Clausewitz (who died before completing his master-work) had intended to differentiate between two forms of strategy: Vernichtungsstrategie (strategy of annihilation) and Ermattungsstrategie (strategy of attrition). Delbrück further argued that the idea of “absolute war” corresponded to a strategy of annihilation (Vernichtungsstrategie), where the principle object of military operations is the complete destruction of the enemy in battle. The aim of battle is to decisively destroy the physical strength and moral resolve of the enemy. In contrast, Delbrück argued that Frederick the Great’s campaigns demonstrated another form of strategy, with an operational use of movement to avoid battle, and which he called a strategy of attrition (Ermattungsstrategie).35 The aim here was not exclusively focused on the battle-field destruction of an opponent’s forces, but just as importantly, on compelling an opponent to give up their resolve to continue fighting by putting them in a disadvantageous strategic position. Delbrück also notes that Frederick’s strategy of attrition squared more closely with the Clausewitzean definition of war as the continuation of politics by other means, since such a strategic frame of thinking allowed for leeway between military action and political initiative. As Delbrück remarks about Moltke, he is “different from other great commanders with which one might compare him in that he was exclusively a soldier.”36 Reacting to what was perceived as an unpatriotic image of Frederick the Great’s military prowess, and under the influence of a tendency towards a more aggressive strategic posture under the sway of Jomini’s theories, established German military planners advocated against Delbrück for the

35 See Sven Lange, Hans Delbrück und der “Strategiestreit”: Kriegführung und Kriegsgeschichte in der Kontroverse 1879-1914 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach Verlag, 1995). 36 Hans Delbrück, Delbrück’s Modern Military History, trans. Arden Bucholz (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1997), 67. THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 711 supremacy of the offensive over the defensive (in contradiction to Clausewitz’s stated argument for the superiority of the defensive over the offensive), as well as for the idea of battles as decisive breakthroughs. This embrace of a “strategy of annihilation” as the truth of war produced a number of significant conflations within the constellation of Clause- witz’s conceptual distinctions. Most importantly, on this reconfigured image of war, the aim of battle was perceived to be the complete destruction of opponent’s forces, and hence, the realization of the idea of absolute war. This fixation on battles, which, in one act, would decide the drama of war, as the truth of war, became enshrined in von Schlieffen’s operational plans for the invasion of France (first formulated in 1905). As Saint-Loup observes, von Schlieffen’s strategy of encirclement, whereby German armies would outflank, with a massive sweep through Belgium and Northern France, the French armies massed along the German borders, is modeled on Hannibal’s victory over the Romans at Cannae. Indeed, von Schlieffen found inspiration for his strategic plan in this classical battle of antiquity and what he considered its repeated confirmation through-out the history of warfare until Moltke’s victory at the battle of Königgrätz in 1866, which von Schlieffen witnessed as a staff officer in a Prussian cavalry corps. Von Schlieffen authored an influential work of military history Cannae in which he established the basic operational principles for this strategy of encirclement and battle of annihilation. The manoeuvring element of encirclement became folded back into the main objective of destruction. What seemed to be a concession to proponents of a “strategy of attrition” actually reinforced and emboldened the proponents of a “strategy of annihilation.” In referencing his debate, Saint-Loup also mentions the alternative view of General von Bernhardi, who criticized von Schlieffen’s thinking. An unapologetic militarist who argued for the German “right” to military expansion, von Bernhardi took issue in Vom heutigen Kriege (1912) with von Schlieffen’s “schematic thinking” in arguing for a more flexible relation between seeking a decisive battle of annihilation and operational manoeuvring. This debate concerning the truth of war equally animated military thinkers in France during the aftermath of 1870-1871. Within his own 712 Nicolas DE WARREN regiment, Saint-Loup speaks of an officer who envisions future battles as reincarnations of Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz. With this idealiza- tion of Austerlitz as the model for all successful battles, Saint-Loup reflects a widespread conviction among French military thinkers, much as their German adversaries, for the advantage of aggressive offensive action. As Saint-Loup comments: “we’re more or less condemned to frontal attacks now, because we can’t afford to repeat the mistakes we made in ’70. We have to assume the offensive, and nothing but the offensive” (GW, 109). Those “mistakes” were in part the consequence of an unforeseen contingency in Moltke’s battle plan. What Saint-Loup has in mind is the battle of Gravelotte, or Saint-Privat (Saint-Loup refers to this battle with the latter title), where Moltke undertook a daring outflanking manoeuver in the style of Napoleon, but whose dispositions soon exposed him to be cut-off by the French. Compounded by errors among his sub-ordinary commander (including, ironically, General von Steinmetz, himself a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars), Moltke’s gambit would have been a disaster were it not for the lack of initiative by French commander Baizine and, as Saint-Loup notes, the example of “sublime self-denial” by Prussian soldiers in their sacrifice (GW, 114).37 Unaware of the inconsistency introduced into his statement that a commander’s battle plan springs forth from this thinking, Saint-Loup further entangles his “bookish” thinking, as Marcel observes, in further contradictions. For even as he refers to Austerlitz as a paradigmatic justification from a military doctrine of attack, he in the same breath cites the French General Mangin, who, on the contrary, pointed to Austerlitz as an “exemplary model” for military doctrine of the defensive. Instead of a clear Idea of war and battle emerging from examples in military history, Saint-Loup’s discourse has produced the very kind of pastiche, lacking any underlying unity or ideal, that Marcel will only later come to recognize as the faulty conception of artworks. Indeed, in the presence of such an elaborate discourse on warfare, Marcel seems

37 A young Hans Delbrück has left a vivid portrayal of the battle-fields of mown-down soldiers, Prussian as well as French, in his wartime letters to his mother. See Delbrück, Delbrück’s Modern Military History, 43-49. THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 713 unimpressed by this train of examples, for as he notes to Saint-Loup, what fascinates him is the power of a genius to grasp something universal through the particular, which would itself be the particular universal rather than an universalized particular. Saint-Loup gives ground and agrees that, with reference to Napoleon, military genius is not in the application of rules, but in an intuitive intelligence that grasps under what specific circumstances a rule of war should be applied, but, as importantly, if not more (as with the example of Austerlitz), when a given rule should not be applied even when all right thinking and the weight of history would speak for its application. One should not “slav- ishly imitate” Napoleon, as he continues; the unthinking imitation of Napoleon’s genius produces stupidity, when we follow an image of war rather than respond to the novel circumstances of war. And yet, even as Saint-Loup, in a very Clausewitzean vein, accepts this element of unpredictability, he still reminds Marcel of “that philosophy book we read together in Balbec,” “the richness of the world of possibility compared with the real world” (GW, 112). For Saint-Loup, the richness of possibilities is bound to the richness of laws, to which “reality” must “conform more or less” (GW, 112). What is here missing entirely is the irruption of the impossible or unimaginable which would undo and expose the richness of possibilities as bound to the impoverishment of intelligence bound to the possible, namely, the imaginary. As the concluding image of war left behind by Saint-Loup in this pastiche à la Goncourt of the unruly landscape of military thought in the years prior to the Great War, German as well as French, we are left with an evident contradiction between two extreme possibilities. On the one hand, Saint-Loup confidently remarks: Now the most intelligent of our teachers, all the best minds in the cavalry, and particularly the major I was speaking about, take the contrary view [contrary to idea in the 1895 Service Regulations where cavalry is seen as only moral force] that the issue will be decided by a real free-for-all with sabre and lance, and that the side that can hold out longer will be the victor, not just in psychological terms by creating panic, but physically. (GW, 113) This image of a future war is dominated by the irresistible breakthrough force of the cavalry, much as with Detaille’s painting of the triumphant 714 Nicolas DE WARREN carabinier. On the other hand, Saint-Loup confidently foresees that “the amazing advances in artillery, the wars of the future, if there are any, will be so short that peace will have been declared before there is time to put our lessons into practice” (GW, 113). Much as the obscure Polish banker Ivan Bloch argued in his 1898 La Guerre Future, in which he argued that modern technological advances will soon make war in its traditional, battle-laden form obsolete (a view taken up from an economic argument by Norman Angell in his 1909 The Great Illusion), Saint-Loup puts forth the idea that the coming war of the future will be war over by Christmas. Both images of the next war in Saint-Loup’s thinking, whether decided by the blunt force of charging cavalry or the blunt force of advanced artillery, hinges on a shared underlying image of attack in the excess, as symbolized with the distinctive trait of his “monocle flying in front of him.” And not without a certain bitter sense of irony for the future that soon will irrupt in the midst of this paradise of discourse and longing. These discussions in Doncières would seem dilettantish if they were not so tragic in their revelation of the Zeitgeist before the coming storm. That this vignette is placed among junior officers, and not generals or staff officers, and that this discussion lacks consistency and depth of exposition chimes well with actual lack of systematic doctrine that reigned among French military thinkers in the years leading up the 1914.38 Nonetheless, although these disparate elements of military thought, in its pastiche-like character, was not held together and expressive of an Idea, it did crystallize in the hollow of an Image of War. The Napoleonic imaginary did not only provide the medium or substance through which the culture of war perceived itself in aesthetic terms and fashioned its aspiration for revenge and redemption on the aesthetic plane. This weight of the Napoleonic legacy was equally

38 See Douglas Porch, “Clausewitz and the French: 1871-1914,” in Clausewitz and Modern Strat- egy, ed. M. Handel (London: Frank Cass, 1986), 287-301 (p. 300). As Porch remarks: “Lastly, ‘moral force’ and the offensive were the product of a carefully considered system. Rather, they betrayed the army’s lack of any system of tactical thought. It was the very disorganization and disorientation of the French army before the Great War which was responsible for its popularity.” To this diagnosis, Proust’s vignette adds the critical element of the imaginary. THE SPLENDOR OF GLITTERING HELMETS 715

present in the formation of French military thinking and planning. Perceived lack of initiative and an all-too defensive mentality (in contrast to the aggressive and Napoleon inspired thinking of Prussians and Molke) along with a cultural impatience for revenge and redemption bolstered the military doctrine of l’attaque or offensive à outrance (liter- ally: attack to excess).39 Directing the Third Bureau responsible for strategy, Colonel Loyzeau de Grandmaison advocated this cult of the offensive.40 As he writes: “The experience of every age shows that in the offensive, safety is gained first by creating this depression in the enemy that renders him incapable of action. There exists no other means but attack, immediate and total [...].”41 With Joffre’s appointment as Com- mander in Chief in 1911, the doctrine of offensive a l’outrance becomes officially enshrined in regulations. As stated in the 1913 Infantry Reg- ulations: “The French army, returning to its traditions, accepts no law in the conduct of operations other than the offensive.” The clause “returning to its traditions” is here the central and catastrophic premise in its manifestation of the Napoleonic imaginary. As one military historian comments: “In a textbook case of fighting the next war with methods designed to win the last, the French army went to war in 1914 with an operational philosophy tailored to solve the problems of 1870.”42 As the noted historian Alistair Horne writes: “French stubble-fields became transformed into gay carpets of red and blue. Splendid cuirassiers in glittering breastplates of another age hurled their horses hope- lessly at the machine guns that were slaughtering the infantry.”43 One could dimly hear everywhere across the fields a woman’s voice in eternal lament. “Poor children, to be mown down like grass in a meadow; the very thought of it gives me a shock, she added, putting her hand down on her heart, where she had received that shock.”

39 See Robert Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War (Cam- bridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008). 40 For the reception of Clausewitz in France in the years leading to the Great War and the role of Grandmaison, see Benoît Durieux, Clausewitz en France: Deux siècles de réflexion sur la guerre, 1807-2007 (Paris: Economica, 2008). 41 Quoted in Buckingham, 45. 42 Ibid., 53. 43 Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, revised ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 62. 716 Nicolas DE WARREN

Keywords: First World War, Proust, Warfare, Nationalism, Sacrifice, Detaille, Fraternity

Summary

This paper explores the pre-figurations of the Great War in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Through a set of cross-disciplinary lenses (art history, military theory, anthropology, sociology), the weave of Proust’s narrative of Mar- cel’s time in Combray and Doncières before the outbreak of war — a war which was both expected and unimaginable — is explored. Emphasis is placed on the ideology of heroic sacrifice, debates of military theory, homosexuality and fraternity, and the idea of France that structured the imagination of nationalism and war during the Belle Epoque, as reflected in Proust’s Recherche.