and quiet heroism of all the women who do their duty, that is, of
those whom we see about us day by day, working, hoping, keeping vigil,
solacing and succouring others, wearing themselves out without
complaint, suffering in secret and mourning their dead in silence.
4
She passed like a flash of light which for one moment illumined that
vast and innumerable multitude, confirming our confidence and our
admiration. She has added a final beauty to the great revelations of
this war; for the war, which has taught us many things that will never
fade from our memory, has above all revealed us to ourselves. In the
first days of the terrible ordeal, we did not know for certain how men
and women would comport themselves. In vain did we interrogate the
past, hoping thereby to learn something of the future. There was no
past that would serve for a comparison. Our eyes were drawn back to
the present; and we closed them, full of uneasiness. In what condition
should we find ourselves facing duty, sacrifice, suffering and death,
after so many years of peace, well-being and pleasure, of heedlessness
and moral indifference? What had been the vast and invisible journey
of the human conscience and of those secret forces which are the
whole of man, during this long respite, when they had never been
called upon to confront fate? Were they asleep, were they weakened or
lost, would they respond to the call of destiny, or had they sunk so
deep that they would never recover the energy to ascend to the surface
of life? There was a moment of anguish and silence; and lo, suddenly,
in the midst of this anguish and silence, the most splendid response,
the most magnificent cry of resurrection, of righteousness, of heroism
and sacrifice that the earth has ever heard since it began to roll
along the paths of space and time! They were still there, the ideal
forces! They were mounting upward, on every side, from the depths of
all those swiftly-assembling souls, not merely intact but more than
ever radiant, more than ever pure, more numerous and mightier than
ever! To the amazement of all of us, who possessed them without
knowing it, they had increased in strength and stature while
apparently neglected and forgotten.
To-day there is no longer any doubt. We may expect all things and hope
all things from the men and the women who have surmounted this long
and grievous trial. If the heroism displayed by man on the battlefield
has never been comparable with that which is being lavished at this
moment, we may also say of the women that their heroism is even more
beyond comparison. We knew that a certain number of men were capable
of giving their lives for their country, for their faith or for a
generous ideal; but we did not realize that all would wrestle with
death for endless months, in great unanimous masses; and above all we
did not imagine, or perhaps we had to some extent forgotten, since the
days of the great martyrs, that woman was ready with the same gift of
self, the same patience, the same sacrifices, the same greatness of
soul and was about--less perhaps in blood than in tears, for it is
always on her that sorrow ends by falling--to prove herself the rival
and the peer of man.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 8: Delivered in Paris, at the Trocadéro, 18 December, 1915.]
* * * * *
THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
XVIII
THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
1
The other day I went to see a woman whom I knew before the war--she
was happy then--and who had lost her only son in one of the battles in
the Argonne. She was a widow, almost a poor woman; and, now that this
son, her pride and her joy, was no more, she no longer had any reason
for living. I hesitated to knock at her door. Was I not about to
witness one of those hopeless griefs at whose feet all words fall to
the ground like shameful and insulting lies? Which of us to-day is not
familiar with these mournful interviews, this dismal duty?
To my great astonishment, she offered me her hand with a kindly smile.
Her eyes, to which I hardly dared raise my own, were free of tears.
"You have come to speak to me of him," she said, in a cheerful tone;
and it was as though her voice had grown younger.
"Alas, yes! I had heard of your sorrow; and I have come...."
"Yes, I too believed that my unhappiness was irreparable; but now I
know that he is not dead."
"What! He is not dead? Do you mean that the news...? But I thought
that the body...."
"Yes, his body is down there; and I have even a photograph of his
grave. Let me show it to you. See, that cross on the left, the fourth
cross: that is where they have laid him. One of his friends, who
buried him, sent me this card, with all the details. He did not suffer
any pain. There was not even a death-struggle. And he has told me so
himself. He is quite astonished that death should be so easy, so
slight a thing.... You do not understand? Yes, I see what it is: you
are just as I used to be, as all the others are. I do not explain the
matter to the others; what would be the use? They do not wish to
understand. But you, you will understand. He is more alive than he
ever was; he is free and happy. He does just as he likes. He tells me
that one cannot imagine what a release death is, what a weight it
removes from you, nor the joy which it brings. He comes to see me when
I call him. He loves especially to come in the evening; and we chat as
we used to do. He has not altered; he is just as he was on the day
when he went away, only younger, stronger, handsomer. We have never
been happier, or more united, or nearer to one another. He divines my
thoughts before I utter them. He knows everything; he sees everything;
but he cannot tell me everything he knows. He says that I must be
wanting to follow him and that I must wait for my hour. And, while I
wait, we are living in happiness greater than that which was ours
before the war, a happiness which nothing can ever trouble again...."
Those about her pitied the poor woman; and, as she did not weep, as
she was gay and smiling, they believed her mad.
2
Was she as mad as they thought? At the present moment, the great
questions of the world beyond the grave are pressing upon us from
every side. It is probable that, since the world began, there have
never been so many dead as now. The empire of death was never so
mighty, so terrible; it is for us to defend and enlarge the empire of
life. In the presence of this mother, which are right or wrong, those
who are convinced that their dead are forever swept out of existence,
or those who are persuaded that their dead do not cease to live, who
believe that they see them and hear them? Do we know what it is that
dies in our dead, or even if anything dies? Whatever our religious
faith may be, there is at any rate one place where they cannot die.
That place is within ourselves; and, if this unhappy mother went
beyond the truth, she was yet nearer to it than those despairing ones
who nourish the mournful certainty that nothing survives of those whom
they loved. She felt too keenly what we do not feel keenly enough. She
remembered too much; and we do not know how to remember. Between the
two errors there is room for a great truth; and, if we have to choose,
hers is the error towards which we should lean. Let us learn to
acquire through reason that which a wise madness bestowed on her. Let
us learn from her to live with our dead and to live with them without
sadness and without terror. They do not ask for tears, but for a happy
and confident affection. Let us learn from her to resuscitate those
whom we regret. She called to hers, while we repulse ours; we are
afraid of them and are surprised that they lose heart and pale and
fade away and leave us forever. They need love as much as do the
living. They die, not at the moment when they sink into the grave, but
gradually as they sink into oblivion; and it is oblivion alone that
makes the separation irrevocable. We should not allow it to heap
itself above them. It would be enough to vouchsafe them each day a
single one of those thoughts which we bestow uncounted upon so many
useless objects: they would no longer think of leaving us; they would
remain around us and we should no longer understand what a tomb is;
for there is no tomb, however deep, whose stone may not be raised and
whose dust dispersed by a thought.
There would be no difference between the living and the dead if we but
knew how to remember. There would be no more dead. The best of what
they were dwells with us after fate has taken them from us; all their
past is ours; and it is wider than the present, more certain than the
future. Material presence is not everything in this world; and we can
dispense with it and yet not despair. We do not mourn those who live
in lands which we shall never visit, because we know that it depends
on us whether we go to find them. Let it be the same with our dead.
Instead of believing that they have disappeared never to return, tell
yourselves that they are in a country to which you yourself will
assuredly go soon; a country not so very far away. And, while waiting
for the time when you will go there once and for all, you may visit
them in thought as easily as if they were still in a region inhabited
by the living. The memory of the dead is even more alive than that of
the living; it is as though they were assisting our memory, as though
they, on their side, were making a mysterious effort to join hands
with us on ours. One feels that they are far more powerful than the
absent who continue to breathe as we do.
3
Try then to recall those whom you have lost, before it is too late,
before they have gone too far; and you will see that they will come
much closer to your heart, that they will belong to you more truly,
that they are as real as when they were in the flesh. In putting off
this last, they have but discarded the moments in which they loved us
least or in which we did not love at all. Now they are pure; they are
clothed only in the fairest hours of life; they no longer possess
faults, littlenesses, oddities; they can no longer fall away, or
deceive themselves, or give us pain. They care for nothing now but to
smile upon us, to encompass us with love, to bring us a happiness
drawn without stint from a past which they live again beside us.
* * * * *
THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS
XIX
THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS
At the end of an essay occurring in _The Unknown Guest_ and entitled,
_The Knowledge of the Future_, in which I examined a certain number of
phenomena relating to the anticipatory perception of events, such as
presentiments, premonitions, precognitions, predictions, etc., I
concluded in nearly the following terms:
"To sum up, if it is difficult for us to conceive that the
future preexists, perhaps it is just as difficult for us to
understand that it does not exist; moreover, many facts tend
to prove that it is as real and definite and has, both in
time and eternity, the same permanence and the same
vividness as the past. Now, from the moment that it
preexists, it is not surprising that we should be able to
know it; it is even astonishing, granted that it overhangs
us from every side, that we should not discover it oftener
and more easily."
Above all is it astonishing and almost inconceivable that this
universal war, the most stupendous catastrophe that has overwhelmed
humanity since the origin of things, should not, while it was
approaching, bearing in its womb innumerable woes which were about to
affect almost every one of us, have thrown upon us more plainly, from
the recesses of those days in which it was making ready, its menacing
shadow. One would think that it ought to have overcast the whole
horizon of the future, even as it will overcast the whole horizon of
the past. A secret of such weight, suspended in time, ought surely to
have weighed upon all our lives; and presentiments or revelations
should have arisen on every hand. There was none of these. We lived
and moved without uneasiness beneath the disaster which, from year to
year, from day to day, from hour to hour, was descending upon the
world; and we perceived it only when it touched our heads. True, it
was more or less foreseen by our reason; but our reason hardly
believed in it; and besides I am not for the moment speaking of the
inductions of the understanding, which are always uncertain and which
are resigned beforehand to the capricious contradictions which they
are accustomed daily to receive from facts.
2
But I repeat, beside or above these inductions of our everyday logic,
in the less familiar domain of supernatural intuitions, of divination,
prediction or prophecy properly so-called, we find that there was
practically nothing to warn us of the vast peril. This does not mean
that there was any lack of predictions or prophecies collected after
the event; these number, it appears, no fewer than eighty-three; but
none of them, excepting those of Léon Sonrel and the Rector of Ars,
which we will examine in a moment, is worthy of serious discussion. I
shall therefore mention, by way of a reminder, only the most widely
known; and, first of all, the famous prophecy of Mayence or Strasburg,
which is supposed to have been discovered by a certain Jecker in an
ancient convent founded near Mayence by St. Hildegard, of which the
original text could not be found and of which no one until lately had
ever heard. Then there is another prophecy of Mayence or Fiensberg,
published in the _Neue Metaphysische Rundschau_ of Berlin in February,
1912, in which the end of the German Empire is announced for the year
1913. Next, we have various predictions uttered by Mme. de Thèbes, by
Dom Bosco, by the Blessed Andrew Bobola, by Korzenicki, the Polish
monk, by Tolstoy, by Brother Hermann and so on, which are even less
interesting; and lastly the prophecy of "Brother Johannes," published
by M. Joséphin Peladan in the _Figaro_ of 16 September, 1914, which
contains no evidence of genuineness and must therefore meanwhile be
regarded merely as an ingenious literary conceit.
3
All these, on examination, leave but a worthless residuum; but the
prophecies of the Rector of Ars and of Léon Sonrel are more curious
and worthy of a moment's attention.
Father Jean-Baptiste Vianney, Rector of Ars, was, as everybody knows,
a very saintly priest, who appears to have been endowed with
extraordinary mediumistic faculties. The prophecy in question was
made public in 1862, three years after the miracle-worker's death, and
was confirmed by a letter which Mgr. Perriet addressed to the Very
Rev. Dom Gréa on the 24th of February, 1908. Moreover, it was printed,
as far back as 1872, in a collection entitled, _Voix prophétiques, ou
signes, apparitions et prédictions modernes_. It therefore has an
incontestable date. I pass over the part relating to the war of 1870,
which does not offer the same safeguards; but I give that which
concerns the present war, quoting from the 1872 text:
"The enemies will not go altogether; they will return again
and destroy everything upon their passage; we shall not
resist them, but will allow them to advance; and after that
we shall cut off their provisions and make them suffer great
losses. They will retreat towards their country; we shall
follow them and there will be hardly any who return home.
Then we shall take back all that they took from us and much
more."
As for the date of the event, it is stated definitely and rather
strikingly in these words:
"They will want to canonize me, but there will not be time."
Now the preliminaries to the canonization of Father Vianney were begun
in July, 1914, but abandoned because of the war.
I now come to the Sonrel prediction. I will summarize it as briefly as
possible from the admirable article which M. de Vesme devoted to it in
the _Annales des sciences psychiques_.[9]
On the 3rd of June, 1914--observe the date--Professor Charles Richet
handed M. de Vesme, from Dr. Amédée Tardieu, a manuscript of which
the following is the substance: on the 23rd or 24th of July, 1869, Dr.
Tardieu was strolling in the gardens of the Luxembourg with his friend
Léon Sonrel, a former pupil of the Higher Normal School and teacher of
natural philosophy at the Paris Observatory, when the latter had a
kind of vision in the course of which he predicted various precise and
actual episodes of the war of 1870, such as the collection on behalf
of the wounded at the moment of departure and the amount of the sum
collected in the soldiers' képis; incidents of the journey to the
frontier; the battle of Sedan, the rout of the French, the civil war,
the siege of Paris, his own death, the birth of a posthumous child,
the doctor's political career and so on: predictions all of which were
verified, as is attested by numerous witnesses who are worthy of the
fullest credence. But I will pass over this part of the story and
consider only that portion which refers to the present war:
"I have been waiting for two years," to quote the text of
Dr. Tardieu's manuscript of the 3rd of June, "for the sequel
of the prediction which you are about to read. I omit
everything that concerns my friend Léon's family and my
private affairs. Yet there is in my life at this moment a
personal matter, which, as always happens, agrees too
closely with general occurrences for me to doubt what
follows:
"'O my God! My country is lost: France is dead!... What a
disaster!... Ah, see, she is saved! She extends to the
Rhine! O France, O my beloved country, you are triumphant;
you are the queen of nations!... Your genius shines forth
over the world.... All the earth wonders at you....'"
These are the words contained in the document written at the Mont-Doré
on the 3rd and handed to M. de Vesme on the 13th of June 1914, at a
moment when no one was thinking of the terrible war which to-day is
ravaging half the world.
When questioned, after the declaration of war, by M. de Vesme on the
subject of the prophetic phrase, "I have been waiting for two years
for the sequel of the prediction which you are about to read," Dr.
Tardieu replied, on the 12th of August:
"I have been waiting for two years; and I will tell you why. My friend
Léon did not name the year, but the more general events are described
simultaneously with the events of my own life. Now the events which
concern me privately and which were doubtful two years ago became
certain in April or May last. My friends know that since May last I
have been announcing war as due before September, basing my prediction
on coincidences with events in my private life of which I do not
speak."
4
These, up to the present, are the only prophecies known to us that
deserve any particular attention. The prediction in both is timid and
laconic; but, in those regions where the least gleam of light assumes
extraordinary importance, it is not to be neglected. I admit, for the
rest, that there has so far been no time to carry out a serious
enquiry on this point, but I should be greatly surprised if any such
enquiry gave positive results and if it did not allowed us to state
that the gigantic event, as a whole, as a general event, was neither
foreseen nor divined. On the other hand, we shall probably learn, when
the enquiry is completed, that hundreds of deaths, accidents, wounds
and cases of individual ruin and misfortune, included in the great
disaster, were predicted by clairvoyants, by mediums, by dreams and by
every other manner of premonition with a definiteness sufficient to
eliminate any kind of doubt. I have said elsewhere what I think of
individual predictions of this kind, which seem to be no more than the
reading of the presentiments which we carry within us, presentiments
which themselves, in the majority of cases, are but the perception, by
the as yet imperfectly known senses of our subconsciousness, of
events, in course of formation or in process of realization, which
escape the attention of our understanding. However, it would still
remain to be explained how a wholly accidental death or wound could be
perceived by these subliminal senses as an event in course of
formation. In any case, it would once more be confirmed, after this
great test, that the knowledge of the future, so soon as it ceases to
refer to a strictly personal fact and one, moreover, not at all
remote, is always illusory, or rather impossible.
Apart then from these strictly personal cases, which for the moment we
will agree to set aside, it appears more than ever certain that there
is no communication between ourselves and the vast store of events
which have not yet occurred and which nevertheless seem already to
exist at some place where they await the hour to advance upon us, or
rather the moment when we shall pass before them. As for the
exceptional and precarious infiltrations which belong not merely to
the present that is still unknown, veiled or disguised, but really to
the future, apart from the two which we have just examined, which are
inconclusive, I for my part know of but four or five that appear to be
rigorously verified; and these I have discussed in the essay already
mentioned. For that matter, they have no bearing upon the present war.
They are, when all is said, so exceptional that they do not prove
much; at the most, they seem to confirm the idea that a store exists
filled with future events as real, as distinct and as immutable as
those of the past; and they allow us to hope that there are paths
leading thither which as yet we do not know, but which it will not be
for ever impossible to discover.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 9: August, September and October, 1915.]
* * * * *
THE WILL OF EARTH
XX
THE WILL OF EARTH
1
To-day's conflict is but a revival of that which has not ceased to
drench the west of Europe in blood since the historical birth of the
continent. The two chief episodes in the conflict, as we all know, are
the invasion of Roman Gaul, including the north of Italy, by the
Franks and the successive conquests of England by the Anglo-Saxons and
the Normans. Without delaying to consider questions of race, which are
complex, uncertain and always open to discussion, we may, regarding
the matter from another aspect, perceive in the persistency and the
bitterness of this conflict the clash of two wills, of which one or
the other succumbs for a moment, only to rise up again with increased
energy and obstinacy. On the one hand is the will of earth or nature,
which, in the human species as in all others, openly favours brute or
physical force; and on the other hand is the will of humanity, or at
least of a portion of humanity, which seeks to establish the empire of
other more subtle and less animal forces. It is incontestable that
hitherto the former has always won the day. But it is equally
incontestable that its victory has always been only apparent and of
brief duration. It has regularly suffered defeat in its very triumph.
Gaul, invaded and overrun, presently absorbs her victor, even as
England little by little transforms her conquerors. On the morrow of
victory, the instruments of the will of earth turn upon her and arm
the hand of the vanquished. It is probable that the same phenomenon
would recur once more to-day, were events to follow the course
prescribed by destiny. Germany, after crushing and enslaving the
greater part of Europe, after driving her back and burdening her with
innumerable woes, would end by turning against the will which she
represents; and that will, which until to-day had always found in this
race a docile tool and its favourite accomplices, would be forced to
seek these elsewhere, a task less easy than of old.
2
But now, to the amazement of all those who will one day consider them
in cold blood, events are suddenly ascending the irresistible current
and, for the first time since we have been in a position to observe
it, the adverse will is encountering an unexpected and insurmountable
resistance. If this resistance, as we can now no longer doubt,
maintains itself victoriously to the end, there will never perhaps
have been such a sudden change in the history of mankind; for man
will have gained, over the will of earth or nature or fatality, a
triumph infinitely more significant, more heavily fraught with
consequences and perhaps more decisive than all those which, in other
provinces, appear to have crowned his efforts more brilliantly.