stupendous, or that it should be prolonged beyond anything that our
experience of wars has taught us to expect. It was our prompt and easy
defeat that was written in the annals of destiny. We had against us
all the force accumulated since the birth of Europe. We have to set
history revolving in the reverse direction. We are on the point of
succeeding; and, if it be true that intelligent beings watch us from
the vantage-point of other worlds, they will assuredly witness the
most curious spectacle that our planet has offered them since they
discovered it amid the dust of stars that glitters in space around
it. They must be telling themselves in amazement that the ancient and
fundamental laws of earth are suddenly being transgressed.
3
Suddenly? That is going too far. This transgression of a lower law,
which was no longer of the stature of mankind, had been preparing for
a very long time; but it was within an ace of being hideously
punished. It succeeded only by the aid of a part of those who formerly
swelled the great wave which they are to-day resisting by our side, as
though something in the history of the world or the plans of destiny
had altered, or rather as though we ourselves had at last succeeded in
altering that something and in modifying laws to which until this day
we were wholly subject.
But it must not be thought that the conflict will end with the
victory. The deep-seated forces of earth will not be at once disarmed;
for a long time to come the invisible war will be waged under the
reign of peace. If we are not careful, victory may even be more
disastrous to us than defeat. For defeat, indeed, like previous
defeats, would have been merely a victory postponed. It would have
absorbed, exhausted, dispersed the enemy, by scattering him about the
world, whereas our victory will bring upon us a twofold peril. It will
leave the enemy in a state of savage isolation in which, thrown back
upon himself, cramped, purified by misfortune and poverty, he will
secretly reinforce his formidable virtues, while we, for our part, no
longer held in check by his unbearable but salutary menace, will give
rein to failings and vices which sooner or later will place us at his
mercy. Before thinking of peace, then, we must make sure of the future
and render it powerless to injure us. We cannot take too many
precautions, for we are setting ourselves against the manifest desire
of the power that bears us.
This is why our efforts are difficult and worthy of praise. We are
setting ourselves--we cannot too often repeat it--against the will of
earth. Our enemies are urged forward by a force that drives us back.
They are marching with nature, whereas we are striving against the
great current that sweeps the globe. The earth has an idea, which is
no longer ours. She remains convinced that man is an animal in all
things like other animals. She has not yet observed that he is
withdrawing himself from the herd. She does not yet know that he has
climbed her highest mountain-peaks. She has not yet heard tell of
justice, pity, loyalty and honour; she does not realize what they are,
or confounds them with weakness, clumsiness, fear and stupidity. She
has stopped short at the original certitudes which were indispensable
to the beginnings of life. She is lagging behind us; and the interval
that divides us is rapidly increasing. She thinks less quickly; she
has not yet had time to understand us. Moreover, she does not reckon
as we do; and for her the centuries are less than our years. She is
slow because she is almost eternal, while we are prompt because we
have not many hours before us. It may be that one day her thought will
overtake ours; in the meantime, we have to vindicate our advance and
to prove to ourselves, as we are beginning to do, that it is lawful to
be in the right as against her, that our advance is not fatal and that
it is possible to maintain it.
4
For it is becoming difficult to argue that earth or nature is always
right and that those who do not blindly follow earth's impulse are
necessarily doomed to perish. We have learnt to observe her more
attentively and we have won the right to judge her. We have discovered
that, far from being infallible, she is continually making mistakes.
She gropes and hesitates. She does not know precisely what she wants.
She begins by making stupendous blunders. She first peoples the world
with uncouth and incoherent monsters, not one of which is capable of
living; these all disappear. Gradually she acquires, at the cost of
the life which she creates, an experience that is the cruel fruit of
the immeasurable suffering which she unfeelingly inflicts. At last she
grows wiser, curbs and amends herself, corrects herself, returns upon
her footsteps, repairs her errors, expending her best energies and her
highest intelligence upon the correction. It is incontestable that she
is improving her methods, that she is more skillful, more prudent,
less extravagant than at the outset. And yet the fact remains that, in
every department of life, in every organism, down to our own bodies,
there is a survival of bad workmanship, of twofold functions, of
oversights, changes of intention, absurdities, useless complications
and meaningless waste. We therefore have no reason to believe that our
enemies are in the right because earth is with them. Earth does not
possess the truth any more than we do. She seeks it, even as we do,
and discovers it no more readily. She seems to know no more than we
whither she is going nor whither she is being led by that which leads
all things. We must not listen to her without enquiry; and we need not
distress ourselves or despair because we are not of her opinion. We
are not dealing with an infallible and unchangeable wisdom, to oppose
which in our thoughts would be madness. We are actually proving to
her that it is she who is in the wrong; that man's reason for
existence is loftier than that which she provisionally assigned to
him; that he is already outstripping all that she foresaw; and that
she does wrong to delay his advance. She is, for that matter, full of
goodwill, is able on occasion to recognize her mistakes and to obviate
their disastrous results and by no means takes refuge in majestic and
inflexible self-conceit. If we are able to persevere, we shall be able
to convince her. This will take much time, for, I repeat, she is slow,
though in no wise obstinate. It will take much time because a very
long future is in question, a very great change and the most important
victory that man has ever hoped to win.
* * * * *
FOR POLAND
XXI
FOR POLAND
1
The Allies have entered into a solemn compact that none of them will
conclude a separate peace. They undertook recently, by an equally
irrevocable convention, that they would not lay down their arms until
Belgium was delivered. These two acts, one of prudence, the other of
elementary justice, appear at first sight superfluous. Yet they were
necessary. It is well that nations, even more than men, because their
conscience is less stable, should secure themselves against the
mistakes and weakness and ingratitude which too often accompany strife
and which even more often follow victory. To-morrow they will do for
Servia what they have done in the case of Belgium; but there is a
third victim, of whom too little is said, who has the same rights as
the other two; and to forget her would forever attaint the honour and
the justice of those who took up arms only in the name of justice and
honour.
2
I need not recall the fate of Poland. It is in certain respects more
tragic and more pitiful than that of Belgium or of Servia. She had not
even the opportunity to choose between dishonour and annihilation.
Three successive acts of injustice, which were, until to-day, the most
shameful recorded by history, deprived her of the glory of that heroic
choice which she would have made in the same spirit, for she had
already thrice made it in the past, a choice which this day sustains
and consoles her two martyred sisters in their profoundest
tribulations. It would be too unjust if an ancient injustice, which
even yet weighs upon the memory and the conscience of Europe, should
become the sole reason of yet a last iniquity, which this time would
be inexpiable.
3
True, the Grand-duke Nicolas made noble and generous promises to
Poland; and these promises were repeated at the opening of the Duma.
This is good and shows the irresistible force of the awakening
conscience of a great empire; but it is not enough. Such promises
involve only those who make them; they do not bind a nation. We will
not insult Russia by doubting her intentions; but among all the
certainties which history teaches us there is one that has been
acquired once and for all; and this is that in politics and
international morality intentions count for nothing and that a
promise, made by no matter what nations, will be kept only if those
who make it also render it impossible for themselves to do otherwise
than keep it. For the rest, the question at present is not one of
intentions, nor confidence, nor pity, nor even of interest. Others
have spoken and will speak again, better than I could, of Poland's
terrible distress and of the danger, which is far more formidable and
far more imminent than is generally believed, of those German
intrigues which are seeking to seduce from us and, despite themselves,
to turn against us twenty millions of desperate people and nearly a
million soldiers, who will die, perhaps, rather than join our enemies,
but who, in any case, cannot fight in our ranks as they would have
done had the word for which they are waiting in their anguish been
spoken before it was too late.
4
But, however grave the peril, we are, I repeat, far less concerned
with this at the present moment than with the question of justice.
Poland has an absolute and sacred right to be treated even as the
other two victims of this war of justice. She is their equal, she is
of the same rank and on the same level. She has suffered what they
have suffered, for the same cause, in the same spirit and with the
same heroism; and if she has not done what the two others have done it
is because only the ingratitude of all those whom she had more than
once saved, together with one of the greatest crimes in history,
prevented her from doing so.
It is time for the Europe of to-day to repair the iniquity committed
by the Europe of other days. We are nothing, we are no better than our
enemies, we have no title to deliver millions of innocent men to
death, unless we stand for justice. The idea of justice alone must
rule all that we undertake, for we are united, we have risen and we
exist only in its name. At this moment we occupy all the pinnacles of
this justice, to which we have brought such an impulse, such
sacrifices and such heroism as we shall perhaps never behold again. We
shall never rise higher; let us then form at this present time
resolutions which will forbid us to descend; and Europe would descend,
to a depth greater than was hers in the unpardonable hour of the
partition of Poland, did she not before all else repair the immense
fault which she committed when she had not yet discovered her
conscience and did not yet know what she knows to-day.
* * * * *
THE MIGHT OF THE DEAD
XXII
THE MIGHT OF THE DEAD
1
In _A Beleaguered City_, a little book which, in its curious way, is a
masterpiece, Mrs. Oliphant shows us the dead of a provincial town
suddenly waxing indignant over the conduct and the morals of those
inhabiting the town which they had founded. They rise up in rebellion,
invest the houses, the streets, the market-places and, by the pressure
of their innumerable multitude, all-powerful though invisible, repulse
the living, thrust them out of doors and, setting a strict watch,
permit them to return to their roof-trees only after a treaty of peace
and penitence has purified their hearts, atoned for their offences
and ensured a more worthy future.
There is undoubtedly a great truth beneath this fiction, which appears
too far-fetched because we perceive only material and ephemeral
realities. The dead live and move in our midst far more really and
effectually than the most venturesome imagination could depict. It is
very doubtful whether they remain in their graves. It even seems
increasingly certain that they never allowed themselves to be confined
there. Under the tombstones where we believe them to lie imprisoned
there are only a few ashes, which are no longer theirs, which they
have abandoned without regret and which, in all probability, they no
longer deign to remember. All that was themselves continues to have
its being in our midst. How and under what aspect? After all these
thousands, perhaps millions, of years, we do not yet know; and no
religion has been able to tell us with satisfying certainty, though
all have striven to do so; but we may, by means of certain tokens,
hope to learn.
Without further considering a mighty but obscure truth, which it is
for the moment impossible to state precisely or to render palpable,
let us concern ourselves with one which cannot be disputed. As I have
said elsewhere, whatever our religious faith may be, there is in any
case one place where our dead cannot perish, where they continue to
exist as really as when they were in the flesh and often more
actively; and this living abiding-place, this consecrated spot, which
for those whom we have lost becomes heaven or hell according as we
draw close to or depart from their thoughts and their desires, is in
us.
And their thoughts and their desires are always higher than our own.
It is, therefore, by uplifting ourselves that we approach them. It is
we who must take the first steps, for they can no longer descend,
whereas it is always possible for us to rise; for the dead, whatever
they have been in life, become better than the best of us. The least
worthy of them, in shedding the body, have shed its vices, its
littlenesses, its weaknesses, which soon pass from our memory as well;
and the spirit alone remains, which is pure in every man and able to
desire only what is good. There are no wicked dead because there are
no wicked souls. This is why, as we purify ourselves, we restore life
to those who were no more and transform our memory, which they
inhabit, into heaven.
2
And what was always true of all the dead is far more true to-day when
only the best are chosen for the tomb. In the region which we believe
to be under the earth, which we call the kingdom of the shades and
which in reality is the ethereal region and the kingdom of light,
there are at this moment perturbations no less profound than those
which we are experiencing on the surface of our earth. The young dead
are invading it from every side; and since the beginning of this world
they have never been so numerous, so full of energy and zeal. Whereas
in the customary sequence of the years the dwelling-place of those who
leave us receives only weary and exhausted lives, there is not one in
this incomparable host who, to borrow Pericles' expression, "has not
departed from life at the height of glory." Not one of them but has
gone up, not down, to his death clad in the greatest sacrifice that
man can make for an idea which cannot die. All that we have hitherto
believed, all that we have striven to attain beyond ourselves, all
that has lifted us to the level at which we stand, all that has
overcome the evil days and the evil instincts of human nature: all
this could have been no more than lies and illusions if such men as
these, such a mass of merit and of glory, were really annihilated, had
really forever disappeared, were forever useless and voiceless,
forever without influence in a world to which they have given life.
3
It is hardly possible that this could be so as regards the external
survival of the dead; but it is absolutely certain that it is not so
as regards their survival in ourselves. Here nothing is lost and no
one perishes. Our memories are to-day peopled by a multitude of heroes
struck down in the flower of their youth and very different from the
pale and languid cohort of the past, composed almost wholly of the
sick and the aged, who already had ceased to exist before leaving the
earth. We must tell ourselves that now, in each of our homes, both in
our cities and in the country-side, both in the palace and in the
meanest hovel, there lives and reigns a young dead man in the glory of
his strength. He fills the poorest, darkest dwelling with a splendour
of which it had never ventured to dream. His constant presence,
imperious and inevitable, diffuses through it and maintains a religion
and ideas which it had never known there before, hallows everything
around it, forces the eyes to look higher and the spirit to refrain
from descending, purifies the air that is breathed and the speech that
is held and the thoughts that are mustered there and, little by
little, ennobles and uplifts a whole people on a scale of unexampled
vastness.
4
Such dead as these have a power as profound, as fruitful as life and
less precarious. It is terrible that this experience should have been
made, for it is the most pitiless and the first in such enormous
masses that mankind has ever undergone; but, now that the ordeal is
almost over, we shall soon derive from it the most unexpected fruits.
It will not be long before we see the differences increase and the
destinies diverge between the nations which have acquired all these
dead and all this glory and those which were deprived of them; and we
shall perceive with amazement that those nations which have lost the
most are those which have kept their riches and their men. There are
losses which are inestimable gains; and there are gains whereby the
future is lost. There are dead whom the living cannot replace and the
mere thought of whom accomplishes things which their bodies could not
perform. There are dead whose energy surpasses death and recovers
life; and we are almost every one of us at this moment the mandataries
of a being greater, nobler, graver, wiser and more truly living than
ourselves. With all those who accompany him, he will be our judge, if
it is the fact that the dead weigh the soul of the living and that on
their verdict our happiness depends. He will be our guide and our
protector, for it is the first time, since history has revealed its
misfortunes to us, that man has felt so great a host of such mighty
dead soaring above his head and speaking within his heart.
5
We shall live henceforward under their laws, which will be more just
but not more severe nor more cheerless than ours; for it is a mistake
to suppose that the dead love nothing but gloom; they love only the
justice and the truth which are the eternal forms of happiness. From
the depths of this justice and this truth in which they are all
immersed, they will help us to destroy the great falsehoods of
existence: for war and death, if they sow innumerable miseries and
misfortunes, have at least the merit of destroying as many lies as
they occasion evils. And all the sacrifices which they have made for
us will have been in vain--and this is not possible--if they do not
first of all bring about the fall of the lies on which we live and
which it is not necessary to name, for each of us knows his own and is
ashamed of them and will be eager to make an end of them. They will
teach us, before all else, from the depths of our hearts which are
their living tombs, to love those who outlive them, since it is in
them alone that they wholly exist.
* * * * *
WHEN THE WAR IS OVER
XXIII
WHEN THE WAR IS OVER
1
Before closing this book, I wish to weigh for the last time in my
conscience the words of hatred and malediction which it has made me
speak in spite of myself. We have to do with the strangest of enemies.
He has knowingly and deliberately, while in the full possession of his
faculties and without necessity or excuse, revived all the crimes
which we supposed to be forever buried in the barbarous past. He has
trampled under foot all the precepts which man had so painfully won
from the cruel darkness of his beginnings; he has violated all the
laws of justice, humanity, loyalty and honour, from the highest, which
are almost godlike, to the simplest, the most elementary, which still
belong to the lower worlds. There is no longer any doubt on this
point: it has been proved over and over again until we have attained a
final certitude.
But on the other hand, it is no less certain that he has displayed
virtues which it would be unworthy of us to deny; for we honour
ourselves in recognizing the valour of those whom we are fighting. He
has gone to his death in deep, compact, disciplined masses, with a
blind, hopeless, obstinate heroism of which no such lurid example had
ever yet been known, a heroism which has many times compelled our
admiration and our pity. He has known how to sacrifice himself, with
unprecedented and perhaps unequalled abnegation, to an idea which we
know to be false, inhuman and even somewhat mean, but which he
believes to be just and lofty; and a sacrifice of this kind, whatever
its object, is always the proof of a force which survives those who
devote themselves to making it and must command respect.
I know very well that this heroism is not like the heroism which we
love. For us, heroism must before all be voluntary, freed from any
constraint, active, ardent, eager and spontaneous; whereas with them
it has mingled with it a great deal of servility, passiveness,
sadness, gloomy, ignorant, massive submission and rather base fears.
It is nevertheless the fact that, in the moment of supreme peril,
little remains of all these distinctions and that no force in the
world can drive to its death a people which does not bear within
itself the strength to confront it. Our soldiers make no mistake upon
this point. Question the men returning from the trenches: they detest
the enemy, they abhor the aggressor, the unjust and arrogant
aggressor, uncouth, too often cruel and treacherous; but they do not
hate the man: they do him justice; they pity him; and, after the
battle, in the defenceless wounded soldier or disarmed prisoner they
recognize, with astonishment, a brother in misfortune who, like
themselves, is submitting to duties and laws which, like themselves,
he too believes lofty and necessary. Under the insufferable enemy they
see an unhappy man who also is bearing the burden of life. They forget
the things that divide them to recall only those which unite them in a
common destiny; and they teach us a great lesson. Better than
ourselves, who are removed from danger, at the contact of profound and
fearful verities and realities they are already beginning to discern
something that we cannot yet perceive; and their obscure instinct is
probably anticipating the judgment of history and our own judgment,
when we see more clearly. Let us learn from them to be just and to
distinguish that which we are bound to despise and loathe from that
which we may pity, love and respect.
Setting aside the unpardonable aggression and the inexpiable violation
of treaties, this war, despite its insanity, has come near to being a
bloody but magnificent proof of greatness, heroism and the spirit of
sacrifice. Humanity was ready to rise above itself, to surpass all
that it had hitherto accomplished. It has surpassed it. Never before
had nations been seen capable, for months on end, perhaps for years,
of renouncing their repose, their security, their wealth, their
comfort, all that they possessed and loved down to their very life, in
order to accomplish what they believed to be their duty. Never before
had nations been seen that were able as a whole to understand and
admit that the happiness of each of those who live in this time of
trial is of no consequence compared with the honour of those who live
no more or the happiness of those who are not yet alive. We stand on
heights that had not been attained before. And if, on the enemies'
side, this unexampled renunciation had not been poisoned at its
source; if the war which they are waging against us had been as fine,
as loyal, as generous, as chivalrous as that which we are waging
against them, we may well believe that it would have been the last and
that it would have ended, not in battle, but, like the awakening from
an evil dream, in a noble and fraternal amazement. They have made that
impossible; and this, we may be sure, is the disappointment which the
future will find it most difficult to forgive them.
2