DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI
I am dead. I fall, I roll like a broken bird into bewilderments of
light, into canyons of darkness. Vertigo presses on my entrails,
strangles me, plunges into me. I drop sheer into the void, and my gaze
falls faster than I.
Through the wanton breath of the depths that assail me I see, far
below, the seashore dawning. The ghostly strand that I glimpse while I
cling to my own body is bare, endless, rain-drowned, and supernaturally
mournful. Through the long, heavy and concentric mists that the clouds
make, my eyes go searching. On the shore I see a being who wanders
alone, veiled to the feet. It is a woman. Ah, I am one with that
woman! She is weeping. Her tears are dropping on the sand where the
waves are breaking! While I am reeling to infinity, I hold out my two
heavy arms to her. She fades away as I look.
For a long time there is nothing, nothing but invisible time, and the
immense futility of rain on the sea.
* * * * * *
What are these flashes of light? There are gleams of flame in my eyes;
a surfeit of light is cast over me. I can no longer cling to
anything--fire and water!
In the beginning, there is battle between fire and water--the world
revolving headlong in the hooked claws of its flames, and the expanses
of water which it drives back in clouds. At last the water obscures
the whirling spirals of the furnace and takes their place. Under the
roof of dense darkness, timbered with flashes, there are triumphant
downpours which last a hundred thousand years. Through centuries of
centuries, fire and water face each other; the fire, upright, buoyant
and leaping; the water flat, creeping, gliding, widening its lines and
its surface. When they touch, is it the water which hisses and roars,
or is it the fire? And one sees the reigning calm of a radiant plain,
a plain of incalculable greatness. The round meteor congeals into
shapes, and continental islands are sculptured by the water's boundless
hand.
I am no longer alone and abandoned on the former battlefield of the
elements. Near this rock, something like another is taking shape; it
stands straight as a flame, and moves. This sketch-model thinks. It
reflects the wide expanse, the past and the future; and at night, on
its hill, it is the pedestal of the stars. The animal kingdom dawns in
that upright thing, the poor upright thing with a face and a cry, which
hides an internal world and in which a heart obscurely beats. A lone
being, a heart! But the heart, in the embryo of the first men, beats
only for fear. He whose face has appeared above the earth, and who
carries his soul in chaos, discerns afar shapes like his own, he sees
_the other_--the terrifying outline which spies and roams and turns
again, with the snare of his head. Man pursues man to kill him and
woman to wound her. He bites that he may eat, he strikes down that he
may clasp,--furtively, in gloomy hollows and hiding-places or in the
depths of night's bedchamber, dark love is writhing,--he lives solely
that he may protect, in some disputed cave, his eyes, his breast, his
belly, and the caressing brands of his hearth.
* * * * * *
There is a great calm in my environs.
From place to place, men have gathered together. There are companies
and droves of men, with watchmen, in the vapors of dawn; and in the
middle one makes out the children and the women, crowding together like
fallow deer. To eastward I see, in the silence of a great fresco, the
diverging beams of morning gleaming, through the intervening and somber
statues of two hunters, whose long hair is tangled like briars, and who
hold each other's hand, upright on the mountain.
Men have gone towards each other because of that ray of light which
each of them contains; and light resembles light. It reveals that the
isolated man, too free in the open expanses, is doomed to adversity as
if he were a captive, in spite of appearances; and that men must come
together that they may be stronger, that they may be more peaceful, and
even that they may be able to live.
For men are made to live their life in its depth, and also in all its
length. Stronger than the elements and keener than all terrors are the
hunger to last long, the passion to possess one's days to the very end
and to make the best of them. It is not only a right; it is a virtue.
Contact dissolves fear and dwindles danger. The wild beast attacks the
solitary man, but shrinks from the unison of men together. Around the
home-fire, that lowly fawning deity, it means the multiplication of the
warmth and even of the poor riches of its halo. Among the ambushes of
broad daylight, it means the better distribution of the different forms
of labor; among the ambushes of night, it stands for that of tender and
identical sleep. All lone, lost words blend in an anthem whose murmur
rises in the valley from the busy animation of morning and evening.
The law which regulates the common good is called the moral law.
Nowhere nor ever has morality any other purpose than that; and if only
one man lived on earth, morality would not exist. It prunes the
cluster of the individual's appetites according to the desires of the
others. It emanates from all and from each at the same time, at one
and the same time from justice and from personal interest. It is
inflexible and natural, as much so as the law which, before our eyes,
fits the lights and shadows so perfectly together. It is so simple
that it speaks to each one and tells him what it is. The moral law has
not proceeded from any ideal; it is the ideal which has wholly
proceeded from the moral law.
* * * * * *
The primeval cataclysm has begun again upon the earth. My
vision--beautiful as a fair dream which shows men's composed reliance
on each other in the sunrise--collapses in mad nightmare.
But this flashing devastation is not incoherent, as at the time of the
conflict of the first elements and the groping of dead things. For its
crevasses and flowing fires show a symmetry which is not Nature's; it
reveals discipline let loose, and the frenzy of wisdom. It is made up
of thought, of will, of suffering. Multitudes of scattered men, full
of an infinity of blood, confront each other like floods. A vision
comes and pounces on me, shaking the soil on which I am doubtless
laid--the marching flood. It approaches the ditch from all sides and
is poured into it. The fire hisses and roars in that army as in water;
it is extinguished in human fountains!
* * * * * *
It seems to me that I am struggling against what I see, while lying and
clinging somewhere; and once I even heard supernatural admonitions in
my ear, _as if I were somewhere else_.
I am looking for men--for the rescue of speech, of a word. How many of
them I heard, once upon a time! I want one only, now. I am in the
regions where men are earthed up,--a crushed plain under a dizzy sky,
which goes by peopled with other stars than those of heaven, and tense
with other clouds, and continually lighted from flash to flash by a
daylight which is not day.
Nearer, one makes out the human shape of great drifts and hilly fields,
many-colored and vaguely floral--the corpse of a section or of a
company. Nearer still, I perceive at my feet the ugliness of skulls.
Yes, I have seen them--wounds as big as men! In this new cess-pool,
which fire dyes red by night and the multitude dyes red by day, crows
are staggering, drunk.
Yonder, that is the listening-post, keeping watch over the cycles of
time. Five or six captive sentinels are buried there in that cistern's
dark, their faces grimacing through the vent-hole, their skull-caps
barred with red as with gleams from hell, their mien desperate and
ravenous.
When I ask them why they are fighting, they say:--
"To save my country."
I am wandering on the other side of the immense fields where the yellow
puddles are strewn with black ones (for blood soils even mud), and with
thickets of steel, and with trees which are no more than the shadows of
themselves; I hear the skeleton of my jaws shiver and chatter. In the
middle of the flayed and yawning cemetery of living and dead, moonlike
in the night, there is a wide extent of leveled ruins. It was not a
village that once was there, it was a hillside whose pale bones are
like those of a village. The other people--mine--have scooped fragile
holes, and traced disastrous paths with their hands and with their
feet. Their faces are strained forward, their eyes search, they sniff
the wind.
"Why are you fighting?"
"To save my country."
The two answers fall as alike in the distance as two notes of a
passing-bell, as alike as the voice of the guns.
* * * * * *
And I--I am seeking; it is a fever, a longing, a madness. I struggle,
I would fain tear myself from the soil and take wing to the truth. I
am seeking the difference between those people who are killing
themselves, and I can only find their resemblance. I cannot escape
from this resemblance of men. It terrifies me, and I try to cry out,
and there come from me strange and chaotic sounds which echo into the
unknown, which I almost hear!
They do not wear similar clothes on the targets of their bodies, and
they speak different tongues; but from the bottom of that which is
human within them, identically the same simplicities come forth. They
have the same sorrows and the same angers, around the same causes.
They are alike as their wounds are alike and will be alike. Their
sayings are as similar as the cries that pain wrings from them, as
alike as the awful silence that soon will breathe from their murdered
lips. They only fight because they are face to face. Against each
other, they are pursuing a common end. Dimly, they kill themselves
because they are alike.
And by day and by night, these two halves of war continue to lie in
wait for each other afar, to dig their graves at their feet, and I am
helpless. They are separated by frontiers of gulfs, which bristle with
weapons and explosive snares, impassable to life. They are separated
by all that can separate, by dead men and still by dead men, and ever
thrown back, each into its gasping islands, by black rivers and
consecrated fires, by heroism and hatred.
And misery is endlessly begotten of the miserable.
There is no real reason for it all; there is no reason. I do not wish
it. I groan, I fall back.
Then the question, worn, but stubborn and violent as a solid thing,
seizes upon me again. Why? Why? I am like the weeping wind. I seek,
I defend myself, amid the infinite despair of my mind and heart. I
listen. I remember all.
* * * * * *
A booming sound vibrates and increases, like the fitful wing-beats of
some dim, tumultuous archangel, above the heads of the masses that move
in countless dungeons, or wheel round to furnish the front of the lines
with new flesh:--
"Forward! It has to be! You shall _not_ know!"
I remember. I have seen much of it, and I see it clearly. These
multitudes who are set in motion and let loose,--their brains and their
souls and their wills are not in them, but outside them!
* * * * * *
Other people, far away, think and wish for them. Other people wield
their hands and push them and pull them, others, who hold all their
controlling threads; in the distance, the people in the center of the
infernal orbits, in the capital cities, in the palaces. There is a
higher law; up above men there is a machine which is stronger than men.
The multitude is at the same time power and impotence--and I remember,
and I know well that I have seen it with my own eyes. War is the
multitude--and it is not! Why did I not know it since I have seen it?
Soldier of the wide world, you, the man taken haphazard from among men,
remember--there was not a moment when you were yourself. Never did you
cease to be bowed under the harsh and answerless command, "It has to
be, it has to be." In times of peace encircled in the law of incessant
labor, in the mechanical mill or the commercial mill, slave of the
tool, of the pen, of your talent, or of some other thing, you were
tracked without respite from morning to evening by the daily task which
allowed you only just to overcome life, and to rest only in dreams.
When the war comes that you never wanted--whatever your country and
your name--the terrible fate which grips you is sharply unmasked,
offensive and complicated. The wind of condemnation has arisen.
They requisition your body. They lay hold on you with measures of
menace which are like legal arrest, from which nothing that is poor and
needy can escape. They imprison you in barracks. They strip you naked
as a worm, and dress you again in a uniform which obliterates you; they
mark your neck with a number. The uniform even enters into your flesh,
for you are shaped and cut out by the stamping-machine of exercises.
Brightly clad strangers spring up about you, and encircle you. You
recognize them--they are not strangers. It is a carnival, then,--but a
fierce and final carnival, for these are your new masters, they the
absolute, proclaiming on their fists and heads their gilded authority.
Such of them as are near to you are themselves only the servants of
others, who wear a greater power painted on their clothes. It is a
life of misery, humiliation and diminution into which you fall from day
to day, badly fed and badly treated, assailed throughout your body,
spurred on by your warders' orders. At every moment you are thrown
violently back into your littleness, you are punished for the least
action which comes out of it, or slain by the order of your masters.
It is forbidden you to speak when you would unite yourself with the
brother who is touching you. The silence of steel reigns around you.
Your thoughts must be only profound endurance. Discipline is
indispensable for the multitude to be melted into a single army; and in
spite of the vague kinship which is sometimes set up between you and
your nearest chief, the machine-like order paralyzes you first, so that
your body may be the better made to move in accordance with the rhythm
of the rank and the regiment--into which, nullifying all that is
yourself, you pass already as a sort of dead man.
"They gather us together but they separate us!" cries a voice from the
past.
If there are some who escape through the meshes, it means that such
"slackers" are also influential. They are uncommon, in spite of
appearances, as the influential are. You, the isolated man, the
ordinary man, the lowly thousand-millionth of humanity, you evade
nothing, and you march right to the end of all that happens, or to the
end of yourself.
You will be crushed. Either you will go into the charnel house,
destroyed by those who are similar to you, since war is only made by
you, or you will return to your point in the world, diminished or
diseased, retaining only existence without health or joy, a home-exile
after absences too long, impoverished forever by the time you have
squandered. Even if selected by the miracle of chance, if unscathed in
the hour of victory, you also, _you_ will be vanquished. When you
return into the insatiable machine of the work-hours, among your own
people--whose misery the profiteers have meanwhile sucked dry with
their passion for gain--the task will be harder than before, because of
the war that must be paid for, with all its incalculable consequences.
You who peopled the peace-time prisons of your towns and barns, begone
to people the immobility of the battlefields--and if you survive, pay
up! Pay for a glory which is not yours, or for ruins that others have
made with your hands.
Suddenly, in front of me and a few paces from my couch--as if I were in
a bed, in a bedroom, and had all at once woke up--an uncouth shape
rises awry. Even in the darkness I see that it is mangled. I see
about its face something abnormal which dimly shines; and I can see,
too, by his staggering steps, sunk in the black soil, that his shoes
are empty. He cannot speak, but he brings forward the thin arm from
which rags hang down and drip; and his imperfect hand, as torturing to
the mind as discordant chords, points to the place of his heart. I see
that heart, buried in the darkness of the flesh, in the black blood of
the living--for only shed blood is red. I see him profoundly, with my
heart. If he said anything he would say the words that I still hear
falling, drop by drop, as I heard them yonder--"Nothing can be done,
nothing." I try to move, to rid myself of him. But I cannot, I am
pinioned in a sort of nightmare; and if he had not himself faded away I
should have stayed there forever, dazzled in presence of his darkness.
This man said nothing. He appeared like the dead thing he is. He has
departed. Perhaps he has ceased to be, perhaps he has entered into
death, which is not more mysterious to him than life, which he is
leaving--and I have fallen back into myself.
* * * * * *
He has returned, to show his face to me. Ah, now there is a bandage
round his head, and so I recognize him by his crown of filth! I begin
again that moment when I clasped him against me to crush him; when I
propped him against the shell, when my arms felt his bones cracking
round his heart! It was he!--It was I! He says nothing, from the
eternal abysses in which he remains my brother in silence and
ignorance. The remorseful cry which tears my throat outstrips me, and
would find some one else.
Who?
That destiny which killed him by means of me--has it no human faces?
"Kings!" said Termite.
"The big people!" said the man whom they had snared, the close-cropped
German prisoner, the man with the convict's hexagonal face, he who was
greenish from top to toe.
But these kings and majesties and superhuman men who are illuminated by
fantastic names and never make mistakes--were they not done away with
long since? One does not know.
One does not see those who rule. One only sees what they wish, and
what they do with the others.
Why have They always command? One does not know. The multitudes have
not given themselves to Them. They have taken them and They keep them.
Their power is supernatural. It is, because it was. This is its
explanation and formula and breath--"It has to be."
As they have laid hold of arms, so they lay hold of heads, and make a
creed.
"They tell you," cried he, whom none of the lowly soldiers would deign
to listen to; "they say to you, 'This is what you must have in your
minds and hearts.'"
An inexorable religion has fallen from them upon us all, upholding what
exists, preserving what is.
Suddenly I hear beside me, as if I were in a file of the executed, a
stammering death-agony; and I think I see him who struggled like a
stricken vulture, on the earth that was bloated with dead. And his
words enter my heart more distinctly than when they were still alive;
and they wound me like blows at once of darkness and of light.
"Men _must_ not open their eyes!"
"Faith comes at will, like the rest!" said Adjutant Marcassin, as he
fluttered in his red trousers about the ranks, like a blood-stained
priest of the God of War.
He was right! He had grasped the chains of bondage when he hurled that
true cry against the truth. Every man is something of account, but
ignorance isolates and resignation scatters. Every poor man carries
within him centuries of indifference and servility. He is a
defenseless prey for hatred and dazzlement.
The man of the people whom I am looking for, while I writhe through
confusion as through mud, the worker who measures his strength against
toil which is greater than he, and who never escapes from hardships,
the serf of these days--I see him as if he were here. He is coming out
of his shop at the bottom of the court. He wears a square cap. One
makes out the shining dust of old age strewn in his stubbly beard. He
chews and smokes his foul and noisy pipe. He nods his head; with a
fine and sterling smile he says, "There's always been war, so there'll
always be."
And all around him people nod their heads and think the same, in the
poor lonely well of their heart. They hold the conviction anchored to
the bottom of their brains that things can never change any more. They
are like posts and paving stones, distinct but cemented together; they
believe that the life of the world is a sort of great stone monument,
and they obey, obscurely and indistinctly, everything which commands;
and they do not look afar, in spite of the little children. And I
remember the readiness there was to yield themselves, body and soul, to
serried resignation. Then, too, there is alcohol which murders; wine,
which drowns.
One does not see the kings; one only sees the reflection of them on the
multitude.
There are bemusings and spells of fascination, of which we are the
object. I think, fascinated.
My lips religiously recite a passage in a book which a young man has
just read to me, while I, quite a child, lean drowsily on the kitchen
table--"Roland is not dead. Through long centuries our splendid
ancestor, the warrior of warriors, has been seen riding over the
mountains and hills across the France of Charlemagne and Hugh the
Great. At all times of great national disaster he has risen before the
people's eyes, like an omen of victory and glory, with his lustrous
helmet and his sword. He has appeared and has halted like a
soldier-archangel over the flaming horizon of conflagrations or the
dark mounds of battle and pestilence, leaning over his horse's winged
mane, fantastically swaying as though the earth itself were inebriate
with pride. Everywhere he has been seen, reviving the ideals and the
prowess of the Past. He was seen in Austria, at the time of the
eternal quarrel between Pope and Emperor; he was seen above the strange
stirrings of Scythians and Arabs, and the glowing civilizations which
arose and fell like waves around the Mediterranean. Great Roland can
never die."
And after he had read these lines of a legend, the young man made me
admire them, and looked at me.
He whom I thus see again, as precisely as one sees a portrait, just as
he was that evening so wonderfully far away, was my father. And I
remember how devoutly I believed--from that day now buried among them
all--in the beauty of those things, because my father had told me they
were beautiful.
In the low room of the old house, under the green and watery gleam of
the diamond panes in the lancet window, the ancient citizen cries,
"There are people mad enough to believe that a day will come when
Brittany will no longer be at war with Maine!" He appears in the
vortex of the past, and so saying, sinks back in it. And an engraving,
once and for a long time heeded, again takes life: Standing on the
wooden boom of the ancient port, his scarred doublet rusted by wind and
brine, his old back bellied like a sail, the pirate is shaking his fist
at the frigate that passes in the distance; and leaning over the tangle
of tarred beams, as he used to on the nettings of his corsair ship, he
predicts his race's eternal hatred for the English.
"Russia a republic!" We raise our arms to heaven. "Germany a
republic!" We raise our arms to heaven.
And the great voices, the poets, the singers--what have the great
voices said? They have sung the praises of the victor's laurels
without knowing what they are. You, old Homer, bard of the lisping
tribes of the coasts, with your serene and venerable face sculptured in
the likeness of your great childlike genius, with your three times
millennial lyre and your empty eyes--you who led us to Poetry! And
you, herd of poets enslaved, who did not understand, who lived before
you could understand, in an age when great men were only the domestics
of great lords--and you, too, servants of the resounding and opulent
pride of to-day, eloquent flatterers and magnificent dunces, you
unwitting enemies of mankind! You have all sung the laurel wreath
without knowing what it is.
There are dazzlings, and solemnities and ceremonies, to amuse and
excite the common people, to dim their sight with bright colors, with
the glitter of the badges and stars that are crumbs of royalty, to
inflame them with the jingle of bayonets and medals, with trumpets and
trombones and the big drum, and to inspire the demon of war in the
excitable feelings of women and the inflammable credulity of the young.
I see the triumphal arches, the military displays in the vast
amphitheaters of public places, and the march past of those who go to
die, who walk in step to hell by reason of their strength and youth,
and the hurrahs for war, and the real pride which the lowly feel in
bending the knee before their masters and saying, as their cavalcade
tops the hill, "It's fine! They might be galloping over us!" "It's
magnificent, how warlike we are!" says the woman, always dazzled, as
she convulsively squeezes the arm of him who is going away.
And another kind of excitement takes form and seizes me by the throat
in the pestilential pits of hell--"They're on fire, they're on fire!"
stammers that soldier, breathless as his empty rifle, as the flood of
the exalted German divisions advances, linked elbow to elbow under a
godlike halo of ether, to drown the deeps with their single lives.
Ah, the intemperate shapes and unities that float in morsels above the
peopled precipices! When two overlords, jewel-set with glittering
General Staffs, proclaim at the same time on either side of their
throbbing mobilized frontiers, "We will save our country!" there is one
immensity deceived and two victimized. There are two deceived
immensities!
There is nothing else. That these cries can be uttered together in the
face of heaven, in the face of truth, proves at a stroke the
monstrosity of the laws which rule us, and the madness of the gods.
I turn on a bed of pain to escape from the horrible vision of
masquerade, from the fantastic absurdity into which all these things
are brought back; and my fever seeks again.
Those bright spells which blind, and the darkness which also blinds.
Falsehood rules with those who rule, effacing Resemblance everywhere,
and everywhere creating Difference.
Nowhere can one turn aside from falsehood. Where indeed is there none?
The linked-up lies, the invisible chain, the Chain!
Murmurs and shouts alike cross in confusion. Here and yonder, to right
and to left, they make pretense. Truth never reaches as far as men.
News filters through, false or atrophied. On _this_ side--all is
beautiful and disinterested; yonder--the same things are infamous.
"French militarism is not the same thing as Prussian militarism, since
one's French and the other's Prussian." The newspapers, the somber
host of the great prevailing newspapers, fall upon the minds of men and
wrap them up. The daily siftings link them together and chain them up,
and forbid them to look ahead. And the impecunious papers show blanks
in the places where the truth was too clearly written. At the end of a
war, the last things to be known by the children of the slain and by
the mutilated and worn-out survivors will be all the war-aims of its
directors.
Suddenly they reveal to the people an accomplished fact which has been
worked out in the _terra incognita_ of courts, and they say, "Now that
it is too late, only one resource is left you--Kill that you be not
killed."
They brandish the superficial incident which in the last hour has
caused the armaments and the heaped-up resentment and intrigues to
overflow in war; and they say, "That is the only cause of the war." It
is not true; the only cause of war is the slavery of those whose flesh
wages it.
They say to the people, "When once victory is gained, agreeably to your
masters, all tyranny will have disappeared as if by magic, and there
will be peace on earth." It is not true. There will be no peace on
earth until the reign of men is come.
But will it ever come? Will it have time to come, while hollow-eyed
humanity makes such haste to die? For all this advertisement of war,
radiant in the sunshine, all these temporary and mendacious reasons,
stupidly or skillfully curtailed, of which not one reaches the lofty
elevation of the common welfare--all these insufficient pretexts
suffice in sum to make the artless man bow in bestial ignorance, to
adorn him with iron and forge him at will.
"It is not on Reason," cried the specter of the battlefield, whose
torturing spirit was breaking away from his still gilded body; "it is
not on Reason that the Bible of History stands. Else are the law of
majesties and the ancient quarrel of the flags essentially supernatural
and intangible, or the old world is built on principles of insanity."
He touches me with his strong hand and I try to shake myself, and I
stumble curiously, although lying down. A clamor booms in my temples
and then thunders like the guns in my ears; it overflows me,--I drown
in that cry----
"It must be! It has to be! You shall _not_ know!" That is the
war-cry, that is the cry of war.
* * * * * *
War will come again after this one. It will come again as long as it
can be determined by people other than those who fight. The same
causes will produce the same effects, and the living will have to give
up all hope.
We cannot say out of what historical conjunctions the final tempests
will issue, nor by what fancy names the interchangeable ideals imposed
on men will be known in that moment. But the cause--that will perhaps
everywhere be fear of the nations' real freedom. What we do know is
that the tempests will come.
Armaments will increase every year amid dizzy enthusiasm. The
relentless torture of precision seizes me. We do three years of
military training; our children will do five, they will do ten. We pay
two thousand million francs a year in preparation for war; we shall pay
twenty, we shall pay fifty thousand millions. All that we have will be
taken; it will be robbery, insolvency, bankruptcy. War kills wealth as
it does men; it goes away in ruins and smoke, and one cannot fabricate
gold any more than soldiers. We no longer know how to count; we no
longer know anything. A billion--a million millions--the word appears
to me printed on the emptiness of things. It sprang yesterday out of
war, and I shrink in dismay from the new, incomprehensible word.
There will be nothing else on the earth but preparation for war. All
living forces will be absorbed by it; it will monopolize all discovery,
all science, all imagination. Supremacy in the air alone, the regular
levies for the control of space, will suffice to squander a nation's
fortune. For aerial navigation, at its birth in the middle of envious
circles, has become a rich prize which everybody desires, a prey they
have immeasurably torn in pieces.
Other expenditure will dry up before that on destruction does, and
other longings as well, and all the reasons for living. Such will be
the sense of humanity's last age.
* * * * * *
The battlefields were prepared long ago. They cover entire provinces
with one black city, with a great metallic reservoir of factories,
where iron floors and furnaces tremble, bordered by a land of forests
whose trees are steel, and of wells where sleeps the sharp blackness of
snares; a country navigated by frantic groups of railway trains in
parallel formation, and heavy as attacking columns. At whatever point
you may be on the plain, even if you turn away, even if you take
flight, the bright tentacles of the rails diverge and shine, and cloudy
sheaves of wires rise into the air. Upon that territory of execution
there rises and falls and writhes machinery so complex that it has not
even names, so vast that it has not even shape; for aloft--above the
booming whirlwinds which are linked from east to west in the glow of
molten metal whose flashes are great as those of lighthouses, or in the
pallor of scattered electric constellations--hardly can one make out
the artificial outline of a mountain range, clapped upon space.
This immense city of immense low buildings, rectangular and dark, is
not a city. They are assaulting tanks, which a feeble internal gesture
sets in motion, ready for the rolling rush of their gigantic knee-caps.
These endless cannon, thrust into pits which search into the fiery
entrails of the earth, and stand there upright, hardly leaning so much
as Pisa's tower; and these slanting tubes, long as factory chimneys, so
long that perspective distorts their lines and sometimes splays them
like the trumpets of Apocalypse--these are not cannon; they are
machine-guns, fed by continuous ribbons of trains which scoop out in
entire regions--and upon a country, if need be--mountains of
profundity.
In war, which was once like the open country and is now wholly like
towns--and even like one immense building--one hardly sees the men. On
the round-ways and the casemates, the footbridges and the movable
platforms, among the labyrinth of concrete caves, above the regiment
echelonned downwards in the gulf and enormously upright,--one sees a
haggard herd of wan and stooping men, men black and trickling, men
issuing from the peaty turf of night, men who came there to save their
country. They earthed themselves up in some zone of the vertical
gorges, and one sees them, in this more accursed corner than those
where the hurricane reels. One senses this human material, in the
cavities of those smooth grottoes, like Dante's guilty shades.
Infernal glimmers disclose ranged lines of them, as long as roads,
slender and trembling spaces of night, which daylight and even sunshine
leave befouled with darkness and cyclopean dirt. Solid clouds overhang
them and hatchet-charged hurricanes, and leaping flashes set fire every
second to the sky's iron-mines up above the damned whose pale faces
change not under the ashes of death. They wait, intent on the
solemnity and the significance of that vast and heavy booming against
which they are for the moment imprisoned. They will be down forever
around the spot where they are. Like others before them, they will be
shrouded in perfect oblivion. Their cries will rise above the earth no
more than their lips. Their glory will not quit their poor bodies.
I am borne away in one of the aeroplanes whose multitude darkens the
light of day as flights of arrows do in children's story-books, forming
a vaulted army. They are a fleet which can disembark a million men and
their supplies anywhere at any moment. It is only a few years since we
heard the puling cry of the first aeroplanes, and now their voice
drowns all others. Their development has only normally proceeded, yet
they alone suffice to make the territorial safeguards demanded by the
deranged of former generations appear at last to all people as comical
jests. Swept along by the engine's formidable weight, a thousand times
more powerful than it is heavy, tossing in space and filling my fibers
with its roar, I see the dwindling mounds where the huge tubes stick up
like swarming pins. I am carried along at a height of two thousand
yards. An air-pocket has seized me in a corridor of cloud, and I have
fallen like a stone a thousand yards lower, garrotted by furious air
which is cold as a blade, and filled by a plunging cry. I have seen
conflagrations and the explosions of mines, and plumes of smoke which
flow disordered and spin out in long black zigzags like the locks of
the God of War! I have seen the concentric circles by which the
stippled multitude is ever renewed. The dugouts, lined with lifts,
descend in oblique parallels into the depths. One frightful night I
saw the enemy flood it all with an inexhaustible torrent of liquid
fire. I had a vision of that black and rocky valley filled to the brim
with the lava-stream which dazzled the sight and sent a dreadful
terrestrial dawn into the whole of night. With its heart aflame Earth
seemed to become transparent as glass along that crevasse; and amid the
lake of fire heaps of living beings floated on some raft, and writhed
like the spirits of damnation. The other men fled upwards, and piled
themselves in clusters on the straight-lined borders of the valley of
filth and tears. I saw those swarming shadows huddled on the upper
brink of the long armored chasms which the explosions set trembling
like steamships.
All chemistry makes flaming fireworks in the sky or spreads in sheets
of poison exactly as huge as the huge towns. Against them no wall
avails, no secret armor; and murder enters as invisibly as death
itself. Industry multiplies its magic. Electricity lets loose its
lightnings and thunders--and that miraculous mastery which hurls power
like a projectile.
Who can say if this enormous might of electricity alone will not change
the face of war?--the centralized cluster of waves, the irresistible
orbs going infinitely forth to fire and destroy all explosives, lifting
the rooted armor of the earth, choking the subterranean gulfs with
heaps of calcined men--who will be burned up like barren coal,--and
maybe even arousing the earthquakes, and tearing the central fires from
earth's depths like ore!
That will be seen by people who are alive to-day; and yet that vision
of the future so near at hand is only a slight magnification, flitting
through the brain. It terrifies one to think for how short a time
science has been methodical and of useful industry; and after all, is
there anything on earth more marvelously easy than destruction? Who
knows the new mediums it has laid in store? Who knows the limit of
cruelty to which the art of poisoning may go? Who knows if they will
not subject and impress epidemic disease as they do the living
armies--or that it will not emerge, meticulous, invincible, from the
armies of the dead? Who knows by what dread means they will sink in
oblivion this war, which only struck to the ground twenty thousand men
a day, which has invented guns of only seventy-five miles' range, bombs
of only one ton's weight, aeroplanes of only a hundred and fifty miles
an hour, tanks, and submarines which cross the Atlantic? Their costs
have not yet reached in any country the sum total of private fortunes.
But the upheavals we catch sight of, though we can only and hardly
indicate them in figures, will be too much for life. The desperate and
furious disappearance of soldiers will have a limit. We may no longer
be able to count; but Fate will count. Some day the men will be
killed, and the women and children. And they also will disappear--they
who stand erect upon the ignominious death of the soldiers,--they will
disappear along with the huge and palpitating pedestal in which they
were rooted. But they profit by the present, they believe it will last
as long as they, and as they follow each other they say, "After us, the
deluge." Some day all war will cease for want of fighters.
The spectacle of to-morrow is one of agony. Wise men make laughable
efforts to determine what may be, in the ages to come, the cause of the
inhabited world's end. Will it be a comet, the rarefaction of water,
or the extinction of the sun, that will destroy mankind? They have
forgotten the likeliest and nearest cause--Suicide.
They who say, "There will always be war," do not know what they are
saying. They are preyed upon by the common internal malady of
shortsight. They think themselves full of common-sense as they think
themselves full of honesty. In reality, they are revealing the clumsy
and limited mentality of the assassins themselves.
The shapeless struggle of the elements will begin again on the seared
earth when men have slain themselves because they were slaves, because
they believed the same things, because they were alike.
I utter a cry of despair and it seems as if I had turned over and
stifled it in a pillow.
* * * * * *
All is madness. And there is no one who will dare to rise and say that
all is not madness, and that the future does not so appear--as fatal
and unchangeable as a memory.
But how many men will there be who will dare, in face of the universal
deluge which will be at the end as it was in the beginning, to get up
and cry "No!" who will pronounce the terrible and irrefutable issue:--
"No! The interests of the people and the interests of all their
present overlords are not the same. Upon the world's antiquity there
are two enemy races--the great and the little. The allies of the great
are, in spite of appearances, the great. The allies of the people are
the people. Here on earth there is one tribe only of parasites and
ringleaders who are the victors, and one people only who are the
vanquished."
But, as in those earliest ages, will not thoughtful faces arise out of
the darkness? (For this is Chaos and the animal Kingdom; and Reason
being no more, she has yet to be born.)
"You must think; but with your own ideas, not other people's."
That lowly saying, a straw whirling in the measureless hand-to-hand
struggle of the armies, shines in my soul above all others. To think
is to hold that the masses have so far wrought too much evil without
wishing it, and that the ancient authorities, everywhere clinging fast,
violate humanity and separate the inseparable.
There have been those who magnificently dared. There have been bearers
of the truth, men who groped in the world's tumult, trying to make
plain order of it. They discover what we did not yet know; chiefly
they discover what we no longer knew.
But what a panic is here, among the powerful and the powers that be!
"Truth is revolutionary! Get you gone, truth-bearers! Away with you,
reformers! You bring in the reign of men!"
That cry was thrown into my ears one tortured night, like a whisper
from deeps below, when he of the broken wings was dying, when he
struggled tumultuously against the opening of men's eyes; but I had
always heard it round about me, always.
In official speeches, sometimes, at moments of great public flattery,
they speak like the reformers, but that is only the diplomacy which
aims at felling them better. They force the light-bearers to hide
themselves and their torches. These dreamers, these visionaries, these
star-gazers,--they are hooted and derided. Laughter is let loose
around them, machine-made laughter, quarrelsome and beastly:--
"Your notion of peace is only utopian, anyway, as long as you never,
any day, stopped the war by yourself!"
They point to the battlefield and its wreckage:--
"And you say that War won't be forever? Look, driveler!"
The circle of the setting sun is crimsoning the mingled horizon of
humanity:--
"You say that the sun is bigger than the earth? Look, imbecile!"
They are anathema, they are sacrilegious, they are excommunicated, who
impeach the magic of the past and the poison of tradition. And the
thousand million victims themselves scoff at and strike those who
rebel, as soon as they are able. All cast stones at them, all, even
those who suffer and while they are suffering--even the sacrificed, a
little before they die.
The bleeding soldiers of Wagram cry: "Long live the emperor!" And the
mournful exploited in the streets cheer for the defeat of those who are
trying to alleviate a suffering which is brother to theirs. Others,
prostrate in resignation, look on, and echo what is said above them:
"After us the deluge," and the saying passes across town and country in
one enormous and fantastic breath, for they are innumerable who murmur
it. Ah, it was well said:
"I have confidence in the abyss of the people."
* * * * * *
And I?
I, the normal man? What have I done on earth? I have bent the knee to
the forces which glitter, without seeking to know whence they came and
whither they guide. How have the eyes availed me that I had to see
with, the intelligence that I had to judge with?
Borne down by shame, I sobbed, "I don't know," and I cried out so
loudly that it seemed to me I was awaking for a moment out of slumber.
Hands are holding and calming me; they draw my shroud about me and
enclose me.
It seems to me that a shape has leaned over me, quite near, so near;
that a loving voice has said something to me; and then it seems to me
that I have listened to fond accents whose caress came from a great way
off:
"Why shouldn't _you_ be one of them, my lad,--one of those great
prophets?"
I don't understand. I? How could I be?
All my thoughts go blurred. I am falling again. But I bear away in my
eyes the picture of an iron bed where lay a rigid shape. Around it
other forms were drooping, and one stood and officiated. But the
curtain of that vision is drawn. A great plain opens the room, which
had closed for a moment on me, and obliterates it.
Which way may I look? God? "_Miserere_----" The vibrating fragment
of the Litany has reminded me of God.
* * * * * *
I had seen Jesus Christ on the margin of the lake. He came like an
ordinary man along the path. There is no halo round his head. He is
only disclosed by his pallor and his gentleness. Planes of light draw
near and mass themselves and fade away around him. He shines in the
sky, as he shone on the water. As they have told of him, his beard and
hair are the color of wine. He looks upon the immense stain made by
Christians on the world, a stain confused and dark, whose edge alone,
down on His bare feet, has human shape and crimson color. In the
middle of it are anthems and burnt sacrifices, files of hooded cloaks,
and of torturers, armed with battle-axes, halberds and bayonets; and
among long clouds and thickets of armies, the opposing clash of two
crosses which have not quite the same shape. Close to him, too, on a
canvas wall, again I see the cross that bleeds. There are populations,
too, tearing themselves in twain that they may tear themselves the
better; there is the ceremonious alliance, "turning the needy out of
the way," of those who wear three crowns and those who wear one; and,
whispering in the ear of Kings, there are gray-haired Eminences, and
cunning monks, whose hue is of darkness.
I saw the man of light and simplicity bow his head; and I feel his
wonderful voice saying:
"I did not deserve the evil they have done unto me."
Robbed reformer, he is a witness of his name's ferocious glory. The
greed-impassioned money-changers have long since chased Him from the
temple in their turn, and put the priests in his place. He is
crucified on every crucifix.
Yonder among the fields are churches, demolished by war; and already
men are coming with mattock and masonry to raise the walls again. The
ray of his outstretched arm shines in space, and his clear voice says:
"Build not the churches again. They are not what you think they were.
Build them not again."
* * * * * *
There is no remedy but in them whom peace sentences to hard labor, and
whom war sentences to death. There is no redress except among the
poor.
* * * * * *
White shapes seem to return into the white room. Truth is simple.
They who say that truth is complicated deceive themselves, and the
truth is not in them. I see again, not far from me, a bed, a child, a
girl-child, who is asleep in our house; her eyes are only two lines.
Into our house, after a very long time, we have led my old aunt. She
approves affectionately, but all the same she said, very quietly, as
she left the perfection of our room, "It was better in my time." I am
thrilled by one of our windows, whose wings are opened wide upon the
darkness; the appeal which the chasm of that window makes across the
distances enters into me. One night, as it seems to me, it was open to
its heart.
_I_--my heart--a gaping heart, enthroned in a radiance of blood. It is
mine, it is _ours_. The heart--that wound which we have. I have
compassion on myself.
I see again the rainy shore that I saw before time was, before earth's
drama was unfolded; and the woman on the sands. She moans and weeps,
among the pictures which the clouds of mortality offer and withdraw,
amid that which weaves the rain. She speaks so low that I feel it is
to me she speaks. She is one with me. Love--it comes back to me.
Love is an unhappy man and unhappy woman.
I awake--uttering the feeble cry of the babe new-born.
All grows pale, and paler. The whiteness I foresaw through the
whirlwinds and clamors--it is here. An odor of ether recalls to me the
memory of an awful memory, but shapeless. A white room, white walls,
and white-robed women who bend over me.
In a voice confused and hesitant, I say:
"I've had a dream, an absurd dream."
My hand goes to my eyes to drive it away.
"You struggled while you were delirious--especially when you thought
you were falling," says a calm voice to me, a sedate and familiar
voice, which knows me without my knowing the voice.
"Yes," I say!