NO!
The opening of our War Museum, which was the conspicuous event of the
following days, filled Crillon with delight.
It was a wooden building, gay with flags, which the municipality had
erected; and Room 1 was occupied by an exhibition of paintings and
drawings by amateurs in high society, all war subjects. Many of them
were sent down from Paris.
Crillon, officially got up in his Sunday clothes, has bought the
catalogue (which is sold for the benefit of the wounded) and he is
struck with wonder by the list of exhibitors. He talks of titles, of
coats of arms, of crowns; he seeks enlightenment in matters of
aristocratic hierarchy. Once, as he stands before the row of frames,
he asks:
"I say, now, which has got most talent in France--a princess or a
duchess?"
He is quite affected by these things, and with his eyes fixed on the
lower edges of the pictures he deciphers the signatures.
In the room which follows this shining exhibition of autographs there
is a crush.
On trestles disposed around the wall trophies are arranged--peaked
helmets, knapsacks covered with tawny hair, ruins of shells.
The complete uniform of a German infantryman has been built up with
items from different sources, some of them stained.
In this room there was a group of convalescents from the overflow
hospital of Viviers. These soldiers looked, and hardly spoke. Several
shrugged their shoulders. But one of them growled in front of the
German phantom, "Ah the swine!"
With a view to propaganda, they have framed a letter from a woman found
in a slain enemy's pocket. A translation is posted up as well, and
they have underlined the passage in which the woman says, "When is this
cursed war going to end?" and in which she laments the increasing cost
of little Johann's keep. At the foot of the page, the woman has
depicted, in a sentimental diagram, the increasing love that she feels
for her man.
How simple and obvious the evidence is! No reasonable person can
dispute that the being whose private life is here thrown to the winds
and who poured out his sweat and his blood in one of these rags was not
responsible for having held a rifle, for having aimed it. In the
presence of these ruins I see with monotonous and implacable obstinacy
that the attacking multitude is as innocent as the defending multitude.
On a little red-covered table by the side of a little tacked label
which says, "Cold Steel: May 9," there is a twisted French bayonet--a
bayonet, the flesh weapon, which has been twisted!
"Oh, it's fine!" says a young girl from the castle.
"It isn't Fritz and Jerry, old chap, that bends bayonets!"
"No doubt about it, we're the first soldiers in the world," says
Rampaille.
"We've set a beautiful example to the world," says a sprightly Member
of the Upper House to all those present.
Excitement grows around that bayonet. The young girl, who is beautiful
and expansive, cannot tear herself away from it. At last she touches
it with her finger, and shudders. She does not disguise her pleasant
emotion:--
"I confess _I'm_ a patriot! I'm more than that--I'm a patriot and a
militarist!"
All heads around her are nodded in approval. That kind of talk never
seems intemperate, for it touches on sacred things.
And I, I see--in the night which falls for a moment, amid the tempest
of dying men which is subsiding on the ground--I see a monster in the
form of a man and in the form of a vulture, who, with the death-rattle
in his throat, holds towards that young girl the horrible head that is
scalped with a coronet, and says to her: "You do not know me, and you
do not know, but you are like me!"
The young girl's living laugh, as she goes off with a young officer,
recalls me to events.
All those who come after each other to the bayonet speak in the same
way, and have the same proud eyes.
"They're not stronger than us, let me tell you! It's us that's the
strongest!"
"Our allies are very good, but it's lucky for them we're there on the
job."
"Ah, la, la!"
"Why, yes, there's only the French for it. All the world admires them.
Only we're always running ourselves down."
When you see that fever, that spectacle of intoxication, these people
who seize the slightest chance to glorify their country's physical
force and the hardness of its fists, you hear echoing the words of the
orators and the official politicians:--
"There is only in our hearts the condemnation of barbarism and the love
of humanity."
And you ask yourself if there is a single public opinion in the world
which is capable of bearing victory with dignity.
I stand aloof. I am a blot, like a bad prophet. I hear this
declaration, which bows me like an infernal burden: It is only defeat
which can open millions of eyes!
I hear some one say, with detestation, "German militarism----"
That is the final argument, that is the formula. Yes, German
militarism is hateful, and must disappear; all the world is agreed
about that--the jack-boots of the Junkers, of the Crown Princes, of the
Kaiser, and their courts of intellectuals and business men, and the
pan-Germanism which would dye Europe black and red, and the
half-bestial servility of the German people. Germany is the fiercest
fortress of militarism. Yes, everybody is agreed about that.
But they who govern Thought take unfair advantage of that agreement,
for they know well that when the simple folk have said, "German
militarism," they have said all. They stop there. They amalgamate the
two words and confuse militarism with Germany--once Germany is thrown
down there's no more to say. In that way, they attach lies to truth,
and prevent us from seeing that militarism is in reality everywhere,
more or less hypocritical and unconscious, but ready to seize
everything if it can. They force opinion to add, "It is a crime to
think of anything but beating the German enemy." But the right-minded
man must answer that it is a crime to think only of that, for the enemy
is militarism, and not Germany. I know; I will no longer let myself be
caught by words which they hide one behind another.
The Liberal Member of the Upper House says, loud enough to be heard,
that the people have behaved very well, for, after all, they have found
the cost, and they must be given credit for their good conduct.
Another personage in the same group, an Army contractor, spoke of "the
good chaps in the trenches," and he added, in a lower voice, "As long
as they're protecting us, we're all right."
"We shall reward them when they come back," replied an old lady. "We
shall give them glory, we shall make their leaders into Marshals, and
they'll have celebrations, and Kings will be there."
"And there are some who won't come back."
We see several new recruits of the 1916 class who will soon be sent to
the front.
"They're pretty boys," says the Member of the Upper House,
good-naturedly; "but they're still a bit pale-faced. We must fatten
'em up, we must fatten 'em up!"
An official of the Ministry of War goes up to the Member of the Upper
House, and says:
"The science of military preparedness is still in its beginnings.
We're getting clear for it hastily, but it is an organization which
requires a long time and which can only have full effect in time of
peace. Later, we shall take them from childhood; we shall make good
sound soldiers of them, and of good health, morally as well as
physically."
Then the band plays; it is closing time, and there is the passion of a
military march. A woman cries that it is like drinking champagne to
hear it.
The visitors have gone away. I linger to look at the beflagged front
of the War Museum, while night is falling. It is the Temple. It is
joined to the Church, and resembles it. My thoughts go to those
crosses which weigh down, from the pinnacles of churches, the heads of
the living, join their two hands together, and close their eyes; those
crosses which squat upon the graves in the cemeteries at the front. It
is because of all these temples that in the future the sleep-walking
nations will begin again to go through the immense and mournful tragedy
of obedience. It is because of these temples that financial and
industrial tyranny, Imperial and Royal tyranny--of which all they whom
I meet on my way are the accomplices or the puppets--will to-morrow
begin again to wax fat on the fanaticism of the civilian, on the
weariness of those who have come back, on the silence of the dead.
(When the armies file through the Arc de Triomphe, who is there will
see--and yet they will be plainly visible--that six thousand miles of
French coffins are also passing through!) And the flag will continue
to float over its prey, that flag stuck into the shadowy front of the
War Museum, that flag so twisted by the wind's breath that sometimes it
takes the shape of a cross, and sometimes of a scythe!
Judgment is passed in that case. But the vision of the future agitates
me with a sort of despair and with a holy thrill of anger.
Ah, there are cloudy moments when one asks himself if men do not
deserve all the disasters into which they rush! No--I recover
myself--they do not deserve them. But _we_, instead of saying "I wish"
must say "I will." And what we will, we must will to build it, with
order, with method, beginning at the beginning, when once we have been
as far as that beginning. We must not only open our eyes, but our
arms, our wings.
This isolated wooden building, with its back against a wood-pile, and
nobody in it----
Burn it? Destroy it? I thought of doing it.
To cast that light in the face of that moving night, which was crawling
and trampling there in the torchlight, which had gone to plunge into
the town and grow darker among the dungeon-cells of the bedchambers,
there to hatch more forgetfulness in the gloom, more evil and misery,
or to breed unavailing generations who will be abortive at the age of
twenty!
The desire to do it gripped my body for a moment. I fell back, and I
went away, like the others.
It seems to me that, in not doing it, I did an evil deed.
For if the men who are to come free themselves instead of sinking in
the quicksands, if they consider, with lucidity and with the epic pity
it deserves, this age through which I go drowning, they would perhaps
have thanked me, even me! From those who will not see or know me, but
in whom for this sudden moment I want to hope, I beg pardon for not
doing it.
* * * * * *
In a corner where the neglected land is turning into a desert, and
which lies across my way home, some children are throwing stones at a
mirror which they have placed a few steps away as a target. They
jostle each other, shouting noisily; each of them wants the glory of
being the first to break it. I see the mirror again that I broke with
a brick at Buzancy, because it seemed to stand upright like a living
being! Next, when the fragment of solid light is shattered into
crumbs, they pursue with stones an old dog, whose wounded foot trails
like his tail. No one wants it any more; it is ready to be finished
off, and the urchins are improving the occasion. Limping, his
pot-hanger spine all arched, the animal hurries slowly, and tries
vainly to go faster than the pebbles.
The child is only a confused handful of confused and superficial
propensities. _Our_ deep instincts--there they are.
I scatter the children, and they withdraw into the shadows unwillingly,
and look at me with malice. I am distressed by this maliciousness,
which is born full-grown. I am distressed also by this old dog's lot.
They would not understand me if I acknowledged that distress; they
would say, "And you who've seen so many wounded and dead!" All the
same, there is a supreme respect for life. I am not slighting
intellect; but life is common to us along with poorer living things
than ourselves. He who kills an animal, however lowly it may be,
unless there is necessity, is an assassin.
At the crossing I meet Louise Verte, wandering about. She has gone
crazy. She continues to accost men, but they do not even know what she
begs for. She rambles, in the streets, and in her hovel, and on the
pallet where she is crucified by drunkards. She is surrounded by
general loathing. "That a woman?" says a virtuous man who is going by,
"that dirty old strumpet? A woman? A sewer, yes." She is harmless.
In a feeble, peaceful voice, which seems to live in some supernatural
region, very far from us, she says to me:
"I am the queen."
Immediately and strangely she adds, as though troubled by some
foreboding:
"Don't take my illusion away from me."
I was on the point of answering her, but I check myself, and just say,
"Yes," as one throws a copper, and she goes away happy.
* * * * * *
My respect for life is so strong that I feel pity for a fly which I
have killed. Observing the tiny corpse at the gigantic height of my
eyes, I cannot help thinking how well made that organized speck of dust
is, whose wings are little more than two drops of space, whose eye has
four thousand facets; and that fly occupies my thought for a moment,
which is a long time for it.
* * * * * *