would occur, and these violent oscillations of the barometer did not
always correspond with the course of events. Pessimism was easily
explained, but its contrary was more remarkable, and it would have
been difficult to account for it. They were just a handful of people
without means of action, and every day seemed to give the lie to their
ideas, but they appeared more contented as things grew worse. Their
hope was in the worst, that mad belief proper to fanatical and
oppressed minorities; Anti-Christ was to bring back Christ; the new
order would rise when the crimes of the old had brought it to ruin;
and it did not disturb them that they and their dreams might be swept
away also. These young irreconcilables wished above all to prevent the
partial realisation of their dreams in the old order of things. All
or nothing! How foolish to try to make the world better; let it be
perfect, or go to pieces. It was a mysticism of the Great Overturning,
of the Revolution, and it affected the minds of those least religious;
they even went farther than the churches. Foolish race of man! Always
this faith in the absolute, which leads ever to the same intoxication,
but the same disasters. Always mad for the war between nations, for
the war of classes, for universal peace. It seems as if when humanity
stuck its nose out of the boiling mud of the Creation, it had a
sun-stroke from which it has never recovered, and which, at intervals,
subjects it to a recurrence of delirium.
Perhaps these mystical revolutionaries are forerunners of mutations
that are brooding in the race--which may brood for centuries
and perhaps never burst forth. For there are millions of latent
possibilities in nature, for one realised in the time allotted to our
humanity. And it is perhaps this obscure sentiment of what might be,
but will not come to pass, which sometimes gives to this sort of
mysticism another form, rarer, more tragical--an exalted pessimism,
the dangerous attraction of sacrifice. How many of these
revolutionists have we seen secretly convinced of the overwhelming
force of evil, and the certain defeat of their cause, and yet
transported with love for a lost cause "... _sed victa Catoni_"
... and filled with the hope of dying for her, destroying or being
destroyed. The crushed Commune gave rise to many aspirations, not for
its victory, but for a similar annihilation!--In the hearts of the
most materialistic there burns forever a spark of that eternal fire,
that hope so often buffeted and denied, but still maintained, of an
imperishable refuge for all the oppressed in some better Hereafter.
These young people welcomed Clerambault with great affection and
esteem, hoping to make him one of themselves. Some of them read in
his ideas a reflection of their own, while others saw in him just
a sincere old _bourgeois_ whose heart had been hitherto his only
guide--a rather insufficient, though generous one. They hoped that he
would let himself be taught by their science, and like them, would
follow to their extreme limits the logical consequences of the
principles laid down. Clerambault resisted feebly, for he knew that
nothing can be done to convince a young man who has made himself part
of a system. Discussion is hopeless at that age. Earlier there is some
chance to act on him, when, as it were, the hermit-crab is looking for
his shell; and later something may be done when the shell begins to
wear and be uncomfortable; but when the coat is new, the only thing is
to let him wear it while it fits him. If he grows, or shrinks, he will
get another. We will force no one, but let no one try to put force on
us!
No one in this circle, at least in the early days, thought of
constraining Clerambault, but sometimes it seemed to him that his
ideas were strangely habited in the fashion of his hosts. What
unexpected echoes he heard on their lips! He let his friends talk,
while he himself said but little, but when he had left them, he would
feel troubled and rather ironical. "Are those my thoughts?" he would
say to himself. It is terribly difficult for one soul to communicate
with another, impossible perhaps, and who knows?... Nature is wiser
than we ... it may be that this is for our good.
Is it right, is it even possible for us to utter all our thoughts? We
reach a conclusion slowly, painfully, through a series of trials;
it is the formula of the delicate equilibrium between the inward
elements. Change the elements, their proportions, their nature, the
formula is no longer accurate and will produce different results, and
if you suddenly communicate your whole thought to another, you run the
risk of alarming, not helping him. There are cases in which, if he had
understood, it might have killed him. Nature, however, is prudent and
takes precautions. Your friend does not comprehend you, because he
cannot, his instinct will not let him; all that he gets from your
thought is the shock when it touches his; the ball glances off, but it
is not so easy to tell in what direction.
Men do not listen with their brains alone, but with their dispositions
and their passions, and out of what you offer them, each chooses his
own and rejects the rest, through a deep instinct of self-defence. Our
minds do not throw open the door to every new idea, but rather keep a
wary eye on new-comers through a peep-hole. The lofty thoughts of the
sages, of Jesus, of Socrates; how were they received? In those days
men who spoke such things were killed; twenty years later they were
treated as gods--another way of killing them, in fact, by placing
their thoughts at a distance, in the kingdom of heaven. The world
would indeed come to an end if such ideas were to be put in practice
here and now; and their authors knew this well. Perhaps they showed
the greatness of their souls more by what they did not say than by
what they did; how eloquent were the pathetic silences of Jesus! The
golden veil of the ancient symbols and myths, made to shield our weak
timid sight! Too often, what is for one the breath of life, is for
another death, or worse, murder!
What are we to do, if our hands are full of verities? Shall we spread
them broadcast?--Suppose the seed of thought may spring up in weeds or
poisonous plants ...?
Poor thinker, there is no need to tremble, you are not the master of
Fate, but you form part of it, you are one of its voices. Speak, then;
that is the law of your being. Speak out your whole thought, but with
kindness; be like a good mother. It may not be given to her to make
men of her children, but she can patiently teach them how to make men
of themselves if they will.
You cannot set others free, in spite of them, and from the outside;
and even if it were possible, what good would it do? If they do not
free themselves, tomorrow they will fall back into slavery. All you
can do is to set a good example, and say: "There is the road, follow
it and you will find Freedom." ...
In spite of his resolution to do the best he could and leave the rest
to the gods, it was fortunate for Clerambault that he could not see
all the consequences of his ideas. His thought aspired to the reign
of Peace; and very probably it would contribute in some degree to
the stirring up of social struggles, like all true pacifism, however
paradoxical this may seem. For true pacifism is a condemnation of the
present.
Clerambault had no suspicion of the terrible forces that would one
day make use of his name. With a wholly opposite effect, his spirit
produced a harmony among his young associates by reacting against
their violence. He felt the value of life all the more, because they
held it in such light esteem; and in this respect they were not
different from the Nationalists whom he opposed. Very few prefer
life to their ideals--which is, we are told, one of Man's noblest
qualities.
In spite of all this, it was a pleasure to Clerambault when he met a
man who loved life for its own sake. This was a comrade of Moreau's,
who had also been severely wounded. His name was Gillot, and in civil
life he had been an industrial designer. A shell had plastered him
from head to foot; he had lost a leg and his ear-drum was broken, but
he had re-acted more energetically against his fate than Moreau. He
was small and dark, with bright eyes full of gaiety, in spite of all
that he had gone through. Though he agreed with Moreau in general as
to the war and the crimes of the social order, he viewed the same
events and the same men with different eyes; from which arose many
discussions between the two young men.
One day Moreau had just been telling Clerambault of some gloomy
experience of the trenches: "Yes," said Gillot, "it did happen like
that and the worst of it was, that it had no effect on us, not the
least little bit." And when Moreau protested indignantly: "Well,
perhaps you, and one or two more may have minded a little,--but
most of them did not even notice it." He kept on to stop further
remonstrances from his friend: "I am not trying to make out that you
were better than the rest, old man, there is no need for that; I only
say it because it is so. Look here," he added, turning to Clerambault,
"those who have come back and written about all this, they tell us,
of course, what they felt. But they felt more than ordinary mortals
because they were artists, and naturally everything got on their
nerves, while the rest of us were tougher. Now that I think of it,
that makes it more terrible; when you read these stories that sicken
you, and make the hair stand up on your head, you don't get the full
effect. Think of fellows looking on, smoking, chaffing, busy with
something else. You have to, you know, or you would go all to pieces....
All the same, it is astonishing what human creatures can get used
to! I believe they could make themselves comfortable at the bottom of
a sewer. It really disgusts a man, for I was just the same myself. You
mustn't suppose that I was like this chap here, always staring at
a death's head. Like everybody else, I thought the whole thing was
idiotic; but life is like that, as far as I can see! ... We did what
we had to do, and let it go at that;--the end? Well, one is as good as
another, whether you lose your own skin or the war comes to an end, it
finishes it up all the same; and in the meantime you are alive, you
eat, you sleep, your bowels--excuse me, one must tell things as they
are!... Do you want to know what is at the bottom of it all, Sir? The
real truth is that we do not care for life, or not enough. In one of
your articles you say very truly that life is the great thing;--only
you wouldn't think so to see most people at this minute! Not much life
about them; they all seem drowsy, waiting for the last sleep; it looks
as if they said to themselves: 'We are flat on our backs now, no need
to stir an inch.' No, we don't make enough out of life. And then
people are always trying to spoil it for you. From the time you are
a child they keep on telling you about the beauty of death, or about
dead folks. In the catechism, in the history books, they are
always shouting: '_Mourir pour la Patrie!_' It is either popery or
patriotism, whichever you please; and then this life of the present
day is a perfect nuisance; it looks as if it was made expressly to
take the backbone out of a man. There is no more initiative. We are
all nothing but machines, but with no real system; we only do pieces
of work, never knowing where our work will fit in; most often it
doesn't fit at all. It is all a mess, with no good in it for anyone;
we are thrown in on top of one another like herrings in a barrel, no
one knows why;--but then we don't know either why we live at all; it
is not life, we are just there.
"They tell us about some time in the dark ages when our grandfathers
took the Bastille. Well, you would think to hear the fakers talk who
run things now that there was nothing left to do, that we were all in
heaven; you can see it carved on the monuments. We know that it is not
so; there is another pot boiling, another revolution on the way; but
the old one did not do such great things for us after all! It's hard
to see plain, hard to trust anybody; there is no one to show us the
way, to point to something grand and fine above all these swamps full
of toads.... People are always doing something to confuse the issue,
nowadays; talking about Right, Justice, Liberty. But that trick is
played out. Good enough to die for, but you can't live for things like
that."
"How about the present?" asked Clerambault.
"Now? There is no going, back, but I often think that if I had to
begin over again--"
"When did you change your mind about all these things?"
"That was the funniest thing of all. It was as soon as I was wounded.
It was like getting out of bed in the morning. I had hardly slipped a
leg out of life than I wanted to draw it in again. I had been so well
off, and never thought of it, ass that I was! I can still see myself,
as I came to. The ground was all torn up around me, worse even than
the bodies themselves lying in heaps, mixed pell-mell like a lot of
jack-straws; the ground simply reeked, as if it was itself bleeding.
It was pitch dark, and at first I did not feel anything but the cold,
except that I knew I was hit, all right.... I didn't know exactly what
piece of me was missing, but I was not in a hurry to find out; I was
afraid to know, afraid to stir, there was only one thing I was sure
of, that I was alive. If I had only a minute left, I meant to hold
on to it.... There was a rocket in the sky; I never thought what it
meant, I didn't care, but the curve it made, and the light, like a
bright flower.... I can't tell you how lovely it seemed. I simply
drank it in.... I remembered when I was a child, one night near La
Samaritaine. There were fireworks on the river. That child seemed to
be someone else, who made me laugh, and yet I was sorry for him; and
then I thought that it was a good thing to be alive, and grow up, and
have something, somebody, no matter who to love ... even that rocket;
and then the pain came on, and I began to howl, and didn't know any
more till I found myself in the ambulance. There wasn't much fun in
living then; it felt as if a dog was gnawing my bones ... might as
well have stayed at the bottom of the hole ... but even then how fine
it seemed to live the way I used to, just live on every day without
pain ... think of that! and we never notice it,--without any pain at
all ... none!... it seemed like a dream, and when it did let up for a
second, just to taste the air on your tongue, and feel light all over
your body--God Almighty! to think that it was like that all the time
before, and I thought nothing of it.... What fools we are to wait till
we lose a thing before we understand it! And when we do want it, and
ask pardon because we did not appreciate it before, all we hear is:
'Too late!'"
"It is never too late," said Clerambault.
Gillot was only too ready to believe this; as an educated workman he
was better armed for the fray than Moreau or Clerambault himself.
Nothing depressed him for long; "fall down, pick yourself up again,
and try once more," he would say, and he always believed he could
surmount any obstacle that barred his way. He was ready to march
against them on his one leg, the quicker the better. Like the others,
he was devoted to the idea of revolution and found means to reconcile
it with his optimism; everything was to pass off quietly according to
him, for he was a man without rancour.
It would not have been safe, however, to trust him too much in this
respect; there are many surprises in these plebeian characters, for
they are very easily moved and apt to change. Clerambault heard him
one day talking with a friend named Lagneau on leave from the front;
they said the poilus meant to knock everything to pieces when the war
was over, maybe before. A man of the lower classes in France is often
charming, quick to seize on your idea before you have had a chance to
explain it thoroughly; but good Lord! how soon he forgets. He forgets
what was said, what he answered, what he saw, what he believed, what
he wanted; but he is always sure of what he says, and sees, and thinks
now. When Gillot was talking to Lagneau, his arguments were exactly
contrary to those he had advanced on the previous day to Clerambault.
It was not only that his ideas had changed, but apparently his whole
disposition. One morning there would be nothing violent enough for his
thirst for action and destruction, and the next he would talk about
going into a little business with lots of money, the best of food, a
tribe of children to bring up, and to hell with the rest! Though they
all called themselves sincere internationalists, there were few
among these poilus who had not preserved the old French prejudice of
superiority of race over the rest of the world, enemies or friends;
and even in their own country over the other provinces, or if they
were Parisians, over the rest of France. This idea was firmly embedded
in their minds, and they boasted of it, not maliciously but by way of
a joke. Uncomplaining, willing, always ready to go, like Gillot, they
were certainly capable of making a revolution and then un-making it,
starting another, and so on--tra-la-la--till all was upset and they
were ready to be the prey of the first adventurer who happened along.
Our political foxes know well enough that the best way to check a
revolution is, at the right moment, to let it blow over while the
people are amused.
It looked then as if the hour was at hand. A year before the end of
the war in both camps there were months and weeks when the infinite
patience of the martyrised people seemed on the point of giving way;
when a great cry was ready to go up, "Enough." For the first time
there was the universal impression of a bloody deception. It is easy
to understand the indignation of the people seeing billions thrown
away on the war when before it their leaders had haggled over a few
hundred thousand for social betterments. There were figures that
exasperated them more than any speeches on the subject. Someone had
calculated that it cost 75,000 francs to kill a man; that made ten
millions of corpses, and for the same sum we could have had ten
millions of stockholders. The stupidest could see the immense value of
the treasure, and the horrible, the shameful, waste for an illusion.
There were things more abject still; from one end of Europe to the
other, there were vermin fattening on death, war-profiteers, robbers
of corpses.
"Do not talk to us any more," said these young men to themselves, "of
the struggle of democracies against autocracies;--they are all tarred
with the same brush. In all countries the war has pointed out the
leaders to the vengeance of the people; that unworthy middle class,
political, financial, intellectual, that in a single century of power
has heaped on the world more exactions, crimes, ruins and follies,
than kings and churches had inflicted in ten centuries."
This is why when the axes of those heroic woodsmen, Lenine and
Trotzky, were heard in the forest, many oppressed hearts thrilled with
joy and hope, and in every country there was sharpening of hatchets.
The leading classes rose up against the common danger, all over
Europe, in both opposing camps. There was no negotiation needed for
them to reach an agreement on this subject, for their instinct spoke
loudly. The fiercest enemies of Germany, through the organs of the
_bourgeoisie_, tacitly gave a free hand to the Kaiser to strangle
Russian liberty which struck at the root of that social injustice on
which they all lived. In the absurdity of their hatred, they could not
conceal their delight when they saw Prussian Militarism--that monster
who afterwards turned on them--avenge them on these daring rebels.
Naturally this only increased the admiration for these excommunicated
defiers of the world, on the part of the down-trodden masses and the
small number of independent spirits.
The pot began to boil with a vengeance, and to stop it the governments
of Europe shut down the lid and sat on it. The stupid class in control
kept throwing fuel on the flame, and then wondered at the alarming
rumblings. This revolt of the elements was attributed to the wicked
designs of some free speakers, to mysterious intrigues, to the enemy's
gold, to the pacifists; and none of them saw--though a child would
have known it--that, if they wanted to prevent an explosion, the first
thing to do was to put out the fire. The god of all these powers was
force; no matter what they were called, empires, or republics, it was
the mailed fist, disguised, gloved but hard and sure of itself. It
became also, like a rising tide, the law of the oppressed, a dark
struggle between two contrary pressures. Where the metal had worn
thin--in Russia first--the boiler had burst. Where there were cracks
in the cover--as in neutral countries--the hissing steam escaped,
but a deceitful calm reigned over the countries at war, kept down by
oppression. To the oppressors this calm was reassuring; they were
armed equally against the enemy or their own citizens. The machine of
war is double-ended, the cover strong, made of the best steel, and
firmly screwed down; that, at least, cannot be torn off--no, but
suppose the whole thing blows up together!
Repressed, like everyone else, Clerambault saw rebellion gathering
around him. He understood it, thought it inevitable; but that was not
a reason for loving it. He did not believe in the _Amor Fati_. It was
enough to understand; the tyrant has no claim to be loved.
Clerambault's young friends were not sparing of their ideas, and it
surprised them to see how little warmth he showed towards the new idol
from the North: the rule of the proletariat. They had no timorous
scruples or half-measures, they meant to make the world happy in
their way--perhaps not in its own. At one stroke they decreed the
suppression of all liberties in opposition to theirs; the fallen
middle classes were not to be allowed to meet, or to vote, or to have
the freedom of the press.
"This is all very well," said Clerambault, "but at this rate they will
be the new proletariat, tyranny will merely change places."
"Only for a time," was the answer, "the last oppression, which will
kill tyranny."
"Yes, the same old war for right and liberty; which is always going to
be the war to end war; but in the meantime it is stronger than ever,
and rights like liberty are trampled under foot."
Of course they all protested indignantly against this comparison; in
their eyes war and those who waged it were equally infamous.
"None the less," said Clerambault gently, "many of you have fought,
and nearly all of you have believed in it ... no, do not deny it!
Besides, the feeling that inspired you had its noble side; a great
wickedness was shown to you, and you threw yourselves upon it to root
it out, in a very fine spirit. Only you seem to think that there is
only one wickedness in the world, and, that when that has been purged
away, we shall all return to the Golden Age. The same thing happened
at the time of the Dreyfus Case; all the well-meaning people of
Europe--I among them--seemed never to have heard before of the
condemnation of an innocent man. They were terribly upset by it, and
they turned the world inside out to wash off the impurity. Alas! this
was done, but both washers and washed grew discouraged in the process,
and when it was all over, lo,--the world was just as black as ever! It
seems as if man were incapable of grasping the whole of human misery;
he dreads to see the extent of the evil, and in order not to be
overwhelmed by it, he fixes on some one point, where he localises all
the trouble, and will see nothing further. All this is human nature,
and easy enough to understand, my friends; but we should have more
courage, and acknowledge the truth that the evil is everywhere; among
ourselves, as well as with the enemy. You have found this out little
by little in our own country, and seeing the tares in the wheat, you
want to throw yourselves against your governments with the same fury
that made you see incarnate evil in the person of the enemy. But if
ever you recognise that the tares are in you also, then you may turn
on yourselves in utter despair. Is not this much to be feared, after
the revolutions we have seen, where those who came to bring justice
found themselves, without knowing why, with soiled hands and hearts?
You are like big children. When will you cease to insist on the
absolute good?"
They might have replied that you must will the absolute, in order to
arrive at the real; the mind can dally with shades of meaning, which
are impossible to action, where it must be all or nothing. Clerambault
had the choice between them and their adversaries; there was no other.