the eternal verities, or whatever we may be pleased to call them,
have tried to show us here that time and space are one and the same
illusion, one and the same convention and have no existence outside our
little day-spanned understanding; that “everywhere” and “always” are
exactly synonymous terms and reign alone as soon as we cross the narrow
boundaries of the obscure consciousness in which we live. We are quite
ready to admit that Cavaliere de Figueroa may have had by clairvoyance
an exact and detailed vision of places which he was not to visit until
later: this is a pretty frequent and almost classical phenomenon, which,
as it affects the realities of space, does not astonish us beyond
measure and, in any case, does not take us out of the world which our
senses perceive. The field, the house, the hut, the loft do not move;
and it is no miracle that they should be found in the same place. But,
suddenly, quitting this domain where all is stationary, the phenomenon
is transferred to time and, in those unknown places, at the foretold
second, brings together all the moving actors of that little drama in
two acts, of which the first was performed some two and a half months
before, in the depths of some mysterious other life where it seemed to be
motionlessly and irrevocably awaiting its terrestrial realization. Any
explanation would but condense this vapour of petty mysteries into a few
drops in the ocean of mysteries.
Let us note again, in passing, the strange freakishness of these
premonitions. They accumulate the most precise and circumstantial details
as long as the scene remains insignificant, but come to a sudden stop
before the one tragic and interesting scene of the drama: the duel and
its issue. We here once more recognize the inconsistent, impotent,
ironical or humorous habits of our unknown guest.
30
But we will not prolong these somewhat vain speculations concerning
space and time. We are merely playing with words that represent very
badly ideas which we do not put into form at all. To sum up, while it
is difficult for us to conceive that the future preexists, perhaps it
is even more difficult for us to understand that it does not exist;
moreover, a certain number of facts tend to prove that it is as real and
definite and has, both in time and in 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 on every side, that we should
not discover it oftener and more easily. It remains to be learnt what
would become of our life if everything were foreseen in it, if we saw
it unfolding beforehand, in its entirety, with its events which would
have to be inevitable, because, if it were possible for us to avoid
them, they would not exist and we could not perceive them. Suppose
that, instead of being abnormal, uncertain, obscure, debatable and very
unusual, prediction became, so to speak, scientific, habitual, clear and
infallible: in a short time, having nothing more to foretell, it would
die of inanition. If, for instance, it was prophesied to me that I must
die in the course of a journey in Italy, I should naturally abandon the
journey; therefore it could not have been predicted to me; and thus all
life would soon be nothing but inaction, pause and abstention, a sort of
vast desert where the embryos of still-born events would be gathered in
heaps and where nothing would grow save perhaps one or two more or less
fortunate enterprises and the little insignificant incidents which no one
would trouble to avoid. But these again are questions to which there is
no solution; and we will not pursue them further.
IX
HEROISM
1
One of the consoling surprises of the war is the unlooked-for and, so
to speak, universal heroism which it has revealed among all the nations
taking part in it.
We were rather inclined to believe that courage, physical and moral
fortitude, self-denial, stoicism, the renunciation of every sort of
comfort, the faculty of self-sacrifice and the power of facing death
belonged only to the more primitive, the less happy, the less intelligent
nations, to the nations least capable of reasoning, of appreciating
danger and of picturing in their imagination the dreadful abyss that
separates this life from the life unknown. We were even almost persuaded
that war would one day cease for lack of soldiers, that is to say,
of men foolish enough or unhappy enough to risk the only absolute
realities—health, physical comfort, an unimpaired body and, above all,
life, the greatest of earthly possessions—for the sake of an ideal which,
like all ideals, is more or less invisible.
And this argument seemed the more natural and convincing because,
as existence grew gentler and men’s nerves more sensitive, the means
of destruction by war showed themselves more cruel, ruthless and
irresistible. It seemed more and more probable that no man would ever
again endure the infernal horrors of a battlefield and that, after the
first slaughter, the opposing armies, officers and men alike, all seized
with insuppressible panic, would turn their backs upon one another, in
simultaneous, supernatural affright, and flee from unearthly terrors
exceeding the most monstrous anticipations of those who had let them
loose.
2
To our great astonishment the very opposite is now proclaimed.
We realize with amazement that until to-day we had but an incomplete and
inaccurate idea of man’s courage. We looked upon it as an exceptional
virtue and one which is the more admired as being also the rarer the
farther we go back in history.
Remember, for instance, Homer’s heroes, the ancestors of all the heroes
of our day. Study them closely. These models of antiquity, the first
professors, the first masters of bravery, are not really very brave.
They have a wholesome dread of being hit or wounded and an ingenuous
and manifest fear of death. Their mighty conflicts are declamatory and
decorative but not so very bloody; they inflict more noise than pain
upon their adversaries, they deliver many more words than blows. Their
defensive weapons—and this is characteristic—are greatly superior to
their arms of offence; and death is an unusual, unforeseen and almost
indecorous event which throws the ranks into disorder and most often
puts a stop to the combat or provokes a headlong flight that seems quite
natural. As for the wounds, these are enumerated and described, sung and
deplored as so many remarkable phenomena. On the other hand, the most
discreditable routs, the most shameful panics are frequent; and the old
poet relates them without condemning them, as ordinary incidents to be
ascribed to the gods and inevitable in any warfare.
This kind of courage is that of all antiquity, more or less. We will
not linger over it, nor delay to consider the battles of the Middle
Ages or the Renascence, in which the fiercest hand-to-hand encounters
of the mercenaries often left not more than half-a-dozen victims
on the field. Let us rather come straight to the great wars of the
Empire. Here the courage displayed begins to resemble our own, but with
notable differences. In the first place, those concerned were solely
professionals. We see not a whole nation fighting, but a delegation, a
martial selection, which, it is true, becomes gradually more extensive,
but never, as in our time, embraces every man between eighteen and fifty
years of age capable of shouldering a weapon. Again—and above all—every
war was reduced to two or three pitched battles, that is to say, two
or three culminating moments: immense efforts, but efforts of a few
hours, or a day at most, towards which the combatants directed all the
vigour and all the heroism accumulated during long weeks or months of
preparation and waiting. Afterwards, whether the result was victory or
defeat, the fighting was over; relaxation, respite and rest followed; men
went back to their homes. Destiny must not be defied more than once; and
they knew that in the most terrible affray the chances of escaping death
were as twenty to one.
3
Nowadays, everything is changed; and death itself is no longer what it
was. Formerly, you looked it in the face, you knew whence it came and
who sent it to you. It had a dreadful aspect, but one that remained
human. Its ways were not unknown: its long spells of sleep, its brief
awakenings, its bad days and dangerous hours. At present, to all these
horrors it adds the great, intolerable fear of mystery. It no longer
has any aspect, no longer has habits or spells of sleep and it is never
still. It is always ready, always on the watch, everywhere present,
scattered, intangible and dense, stealthy and cowardly, diffuse,
all-encompassing, innumerous, looming at every point of the horizon,
rising from the waters and falling from the skies, indefatigable,
inevitable, filling the whole of space and time for days, weeks and
months without a minute’s lull, without a second’s intermission. Men
live, move and sleep in the meshes of its fatal web. They know that the
least step to the right or left, a head bowed or lifted, a body bent or
upright, is seen by its eyes and draws its thunder.
Hitherto we had no example of this preponderance of the destructive
forces. We should never have believed that man’s nerves could resist so
great a trial. The nerves of the bravest man are tempered to face death
for the space of a second, but not to live in the hourly expectation
of death and nothing else. Heroism was once a sharp and rugged peak,
reached for a moment but quitted forthwith, for mountain-peaks are not
inhabitable. To-day it is a boundless plain, as uninhabitable as the
peaks; but we are not permitted to descend from it. And so, at the very
moment when man appeared most exhausted and enervated by the comforts and
vices of civilization, at the moment when he was happiest and therefore
most selfish, when, possessing the minimum of faith and vainly seeking
a new ideal, he seemed less capable of sacrificing himself for an idea
of any kind, he finds himself suddenly confronted with an unprecedented
danger, which he is almost certain that the most heroic nations of
history would not have faced nor even dreamed of facing, whereas he does
not even dream that it is possible to do aught but face it. And let it
not be said that we had no choice, that the danger and the struggle were
thrust upon us, that we had to defend ourselves or die and that in such
cases there are no cowards. It is not true: there was, there always has
been, there still is a choice.
4
It is not man’s life that is at stake, but the idea which he forms of the
honour, the happiness and the duties of his life. To save his life he
had but to submit to the enemy; the invader would not have exterminated
him. You cannot exterminate a great people; it is not even possible to
enslave it seriously or to inflict great sorrow upon it for long. He had
nothing to be afraid of except disgrace. He did not so much as see the
infamous temptation appear above the horizon of his most instinctive
fears; he does not even suspect that it is able to exist; and he will
never perceive it, whatever sacrifices may yet await him. We are not,
therefore, speaking of a heroism that would be but the last resource of
despair, the heroism of the animal driven to bay and fighting blindly
to delay death’s coming for a moment. No, it is heroism freely donned,
deliberately and unanimously hailed, heroism on behalf of an idea and
a sentiment, in other words, heroism in its clearest, purest and most
virginal form, a disinterested and wholehearted sacrifice for that which
men regard as their duty to themselves, to their kith and kin, to mankind
and to the future. If life and personal safety were more precious than
the idea of honour, of patriotism and of fidelity to the tradition and
the race, there was, I repeat, and there is still a choice to be made;
and never perhaps in any war was the choice easier, for never did men
feel more free, never indeed were they more free, to choose.
But this choice, as I have said, did not dare show its faintest shadow
on the lowest horizons of even the most ignoble consciences. Are you
quite sure that in other times which we think better and more virtuous
than our own men would not have seen it, would not have spoken of it? Can
you find a nation, even among the greatest, which, after six months of a
war compared with which all other wars seem child’s-play, of a war which
threatens and uses up all that nation’s life and all its possessions, can
you find, I say, in history, not an instance—for there is no instance—but
some similar case which allows you to presume that the nation would not
have faltered, would not at least, were it but for a second, have looked
down and cast its eyes upon an inglorious peace?
5
Nevertheless, they seemed much stronger than we are, all those who came
before us. They were rude, austere, much closer to nature, poor and
often unhappy. They had a simpler and a more rigid code of thought;
they had the habit of physical suffering, of hardship and of death.
But I do not believe that any one dares contend that these men would
have done what our soldiers are now doing, that they would have endured
what is being endured all around us. Are we not entitled to conclude
from this that civilization, contrary to what was feared, so far from
enervating, depraving, weakening, lowering and dwarfing man, elevates
him, purifies him, strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him capable of
acts of sacrifice, generosity and courage which he did not know before?
The fact is that civilization, even when it seems to entail corruption,
brings intelligence with it and that intelligence, in days of trial,
stands for potential pride, nobility and heroism. That, as I said in the
beginning, is the unexpected and consoling revelation of this horrible
war: we can rely on man implicitly, place the greatest trust in him, nor
fear lest, in laying aside his primitive brutality, he should lose his
manly qualities. The greater his progress in the conquest of nature and
the greater his apparent attachment to material welfare, the more does he
become capable nevertheless, unconsciously, deep down in the best part of
him, of self-detachment and of self-sacrifice for the common safety and
the more does he understand that he is nothing when he compares himself
with the eternal life of his forbears and his children.
It was so great a trial that we dared not, before this war, have
contemplated it. The future of the human race was at stake; and the
magnificent response that comes to us from every side reassures us fully
as to the issue of other struggles, more formidable still, which no doubt
await us when it will be a question no longer of fighting our fellow-men
but rather of facing the more powerful and cruel of the great mysterious
enemies that nature holds in reserve against us. If it be true, as I
believe, that humanity is worth just as much as the sum total of latent
heroism which it contains, then we may declare that humanity was never
stronger nor more exemplary than now and that it is at this moment
reaching one of its highest points and capable of braving everything and
hoping everything. And it is for this reason that, despite our present
sadness, we are entitled to congratulate ourselves and to rejoice.
X
ON RE-READING THUCYDIDES
1
At moments above all when history is in the making, in these times when
great and as yet incomplete pages are being traced, pages by the side
of which all that had already been written will pale, it is a good and
salutary thing to turn to the past in search of instruction, warning
and encouragement. In this respect, the unwearying and implacable war
which Athens kept up against Sparta for twenty-seven years, with the
hegemony of Greece for a stake, presents more than one analogy with that
which we ourselves are waging and teaches lessons that should make us
reflect. The counsels which it gives us are all the more precious, all
the more striking or profound inasmuch as the war is narrated to us by
a man who remains, with Tacitus, despite the striving of the centuries,
the progress of life and all the opportunities of doing better, the
greatest historian that the earth has ever known. Thucydides is in fact
the supreme historian, at the same time swift and detailed, scrupulously
sifting his evidence but giving free play to intuition, setting forth
none but incontestable facts, yet divining the most secret intentions and
embracing at a glance all the present and future political consequences
of the events which he relates. He is withal one of the most perfect
writers, one of the most admirable artists in the literature of mankind;
and from this point of view, in an entirely different and almost
antagonistic world, he has not an equal save Tacitus.
But Tacitus is before everything a wonderful tragic poet, a painter of
foul abysses, of fire and blood, who can lay bare the souls of monsters
and their crimes, whereas Thucydides is above all a great political
moralist, a statesman endowed with extraordinary perspicacity, a painter
of the open air and of a free state, who portrays the minds of those
sane, ingenious, subtle, generous and marvellously intelligent men
who peopled ancient Greece. The one piles on the gloom with a lavish
hand, gathers dark shadows which he pierces at each sentence with
lightning-flashes, but remains sombre and oppressed on the very summits,
whereas the other condenses nothing but light, groups together judgments
that are so many radiant sheaves and remains luminous and breathes freely
in the very depths. The first is passionate, violent, fierce, indignant,
bitter, sincerely but pitilessly unjust and all made up of magnificent
animosities; the second is always even, always at the same high level,
which is that which the noblest endeavour of human reason can attain. He
has no passion but a passion for the public weal, for justice, glory and
intelligence. It is as though all his work were spread out in the blue
sky; and even his famous picture of the plague of Athens seems covered
with sunshine.
2
But there is no need to follow up this parallel, which is not my object.
I will not dwell any longer—though perhaps I may return to them one
day—upon the lessons which we might derive from that Peloponnesian War,
in which the position of Athens towards Lacedæmon provides more than one
point of comparison with that of France towards Germany. True, we do
not there see, as in our own case, civilized nations fighting a morally
barbarian people: it was a contest between Greeks and Greeks, displaying,
however, in the same physical race two different and incompatible
spirits. Athens stood for human life in its happiest development,
gracious, cheerful and peaceful. She took no serious interest except in
the happiness, the imponderous riches, the innocent and perfect beauties,
the sweet leisures, the glories and the arts of peace. When she went to
war, it was as though in play, with the smile still on her face, looking
upon it as a more violent pleasure than the rest, or as a duty joyfully
accepted. She bound herself down to no discipline, she was never ready,
she improvised everything at the last moment, having, “with habits not
of labour but of ease and courage not of art but of nature,” as Pericles
said, “the double advantage of escaping the experience of hardships in
anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as
those who are never free from them.”[27]
For Sparta, on the other hand, life was nothing but endless work, an
incessant strain, having no other objective than war. She was gloomy,
austere, strict, morose, almost ascetic, an enemy to everything that
excuses man’s presence on this earth, a nation of spoilers, looters,
incendiaries and devastators, a nest of wasps beside a swarm of bees,
a perpetual menace and danger to everything around her, as hard upon
herself as upon others and boasting an ideal which may appear lofty if
it be man’s ideal to be unhappy and the contented slave of unrelenting
discipline. On the other hand, she differed entirely from those whom we
are now fighting in that she was generally honest, loyal and upright and
showed a certain respect for the gods and their temples, for treaties and
for international law. It is none the less true that, if she had from the
beginning reigned alone or without encountering a long resistance, Hellas
would never have been the Hellas that we know. She would have left in
history but a precarious trace of useless warlike virtues and of minor
combats without glory; and mankind would not have possessed that centre
of light towards which it turns to this day.
3
What was to be the issue of this war? Here begins the lesson which it
were well to study thoroughly. It would seem indeed as if, with the
first encounters in that conflict, as in our own, the inexplicable will
that governs nations was favourable to the less civilized; and in fact
Lacedæmon gained the upper hand, at least temporarily and sufficiently
to abuse her victory to such a degree that she soon lost its fruits.
But Athens held the evil will in check for seven-and-twenty years;
for twenty-seven summers and twenty-seven winters, to use Thucydides’
reckoning, she proved to us that it is possible, in defiance of
probability, to fight against what seems written in the book of heaven
and hell. Nay more, at a time when Sparta, whose sole industry, whose
sole training, whose only reason for existence and whose only ideal was
war, was hugging the thought of crushing in a few weeks, under the weight
of her formidable hoplites, a frivolous, careless and ill-organized city,
Athens, notwithstanding the treacherous blow which fate dealt her by
sending a plague that carried off a third of her civil population and a
quarter of her army, Athens for seventeen years definitely held victory
in her grasp. During this period, she more than once had Lacedæmon at
her mercy and did not begin to descend the stony path of ruin and defeat
until after the disastrous expedition to Sicily, in which, carried away
by her rhetoricians and bitten with inconceivable folly, she hurled
all her fleet, all her soldiers and all her wealth into a remote,
unprofitable, unknown and desperate adventure. She resisted the decline
of her fortunes for yet another ten years, heaping up her sins against
wisdom and simple common sense and with her own hands drawing tighter
the knot that was to strangle her, as though to show us that destiny is
for the most part but our own madness and that what we call unavoidable
fatality has its root only in mistakes that might easily be avoided.
4
To point this moral was again not my real object. In these days when we
have so many sorrows to assuage and so many deaths to honour, I wished
merely to recall a page written over two thousand years ago, to the glory
of the Athenian heroes who fell for their country in the first battles of
that war. According to the custom of the Greeks, the bones of the dead
that had been burnt on the battlefield were solemnly brought back to
Athens at the end of the year; and the people chose the greatest speaker
in the city to deliver the funeral oration. This honour fell to Pericles
son of Xanthippus, the Pericles of the golden age of human beauty. After
pronouncing a well-merited and magnificent eulogium on the Athenian
nation and institutions, he concluded with the following words:
“Indeed, if I have dwelt at some length upon the character
of our country, it has been to show that our stake in the
struggle is not the same as theirs who have no such blessing
to lose and also that the panegyric of the men over whom I am
now speaking might be by definite proofs established. That
panegyric is now in a great measure complete; for the Athens
that I have celebrated is only what the heroism of these and
their like have made her, men whose fame, unlike that of most
Hellenes, will be found to be only commensurate with their
deserts. And, if a test of worth be wanted, it is to be found
in their closing scene; and this not only in the cases in which
it set the final seal upon their merit, but also in those
in which it gave the first intimation of their having any.
For there is justice in the claim that steadfastness in his
country’s battles should be as a cloak to cover a man’s other
imperfections, since the good action has blotted out the bad
and his merit as a citizen more than outweighed his demerits as
an individual. But none of these allowed either wealth with its
prospect of future enjoyment to unnerve his spirit, or poverty
with its hope of a day of freedom and riches to tempt him to
shrink from danger. No, holding that vengeance upon their
enemies was more to be desired than any personal blessings
and reckoning this to be the most glorious of hazards, they
joyfully determined to accept the risk, to make sure of their
vengeance and to let their wishes wait; and, while committing
to hope the uncertainty of final success, in the business
before them they thought fit to act boldly and trust in
themselves. Thus choosing to die resisting rather than to live
submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face
to face and, after one brief moment, while at the summit of
their fortune, escaped not from their fear but from their glory.