GOD'S HAND
Neither Gabrielle nor I spoke of these marvellous matters to anyone. It
was of course connected with my sister's peculiar power of mediumistic
control. The appearances were oddly varied, and we began to associate
the return of the spirits with certain atmospheric conditions. Then
there was a notable increase--if it could be so called--of these
mysterious visitants after heavy engagements, when we might assume
that the hosts of the disembodied had been greatly augmented. For
weeks the conditions of the house were normal, and there would be no
manifestations--manifestations which I myself began to appreciate
and detect. The times most favorable for the discarnate effects were
the still nights, and more generally after cold days than after hot
ones. Dark nights were not necessarily preferred, as on a wonderfully
splendid moonlight night, my sister saw the myriad shapes and lines of
these, shall I call them GHOSTS? I remember feeling myself the thrill
of some electric-like sensation penetrating my nerves, and half caught
before my eyes the scintillations of tiny specks of light.
At first we were both not a little frightened. The tremendous impact of
this mass of disembodied creatures broke down our mental equilibrium.
We felt suddenly half immersed in the other world, and felt too the
oncoming _denouement_ which, apprehended but unforeseen, awaited
this spectral deluge. How often we sat at nights, deep into the
night, at the front door under the leaf-embowered porch, fearful of
entrance into the house, which had become a sort of _adytum_, which
we might not penetrate, evicted as we were, by the unbidden tenants,
that swarmed from grave, and trench, and field, hilltop and valley,
from the crevices of walls, and the streets of villages, the cellars
of churches, and the torn up holes of tree-roots. We might indeed
have instituted--as at times I suggested--a sort of analysis of the
psychical constants of these disembodied beings whose actuality neither
of us doubted for an instant. We might have noted the exact moments of
their larger recurrence, the intervals of their absence, the occasions
when they became vocal, the peculiarities of their incidence upon
ourselves in our physical sensations, or mental susceptibilities, or
emotional response, if such observations were possible--that is if we
could discover that the presence of these souls (?) affected us in
those three elements of our existence at all.
Nothing of a systematic record was kept, but certain very sharp
and certain hopelessly hazy impressions are quite, by me, easily
recalled. The sharp impressions were in the nature of shocks allied
with what might be less flatteringly called _frights_, and the hazy
ones were indubitably aural influences such as have been determined as
electrical, or epileptic, or hysteric. Naturally the latter possess
the greater interest and have more to do with the extra-natural
mystical agencies of spirits. Perhaps it would not be amiss to describe
these--not too tediously--before I rehearse the last convincing stages
of the spiritualistic manifestations as they ushered in the final
descent of the "_Other World_" for the shame of human strife, and the
obliterating arrest of this infernal, this demoralizing, this vast
national embroilment of bitterness and hatred, that has unloosed the
satanic energies of HELL to the confusion of _Faith_ and _Hope_ and
_Charity_.
An experience of the first sort, followed immediately by the aural
influence, took place about the beginning of June in 1916. It was a
beautiful day, the light gloriously brilliant, and the summer fragrance
of St. Choiseul filling our little world with its inexhaustible
presence of roses, when, as I stood at my open window, leaning outward
to regale my senses with the precious offerings of the earth and
sky, I felt a wind, perhaps without any precise quality of heat or
coolness, blow over me, although not a breath of the moving atmosphere
outside stirred leaf or blade or flower, and then supervened a loss of
consciousness, a relaxation of my body in sleep, and I, overcome with
this unnatural drowsiness against which I forlornly struggled, sank
into a chair, and did not recover consciousness before the evening. Now
on that day was fought the battle of the ---- which killed 5000 men
here in the west, while almost simultaneously the conflict in Poland
added another 5000 to the number of the slain. There could be no doubt
that my unconsciousness partook of the immediate character of syncope,
or, to be even more scientific, that it was lethal, and might have
terminated my life. That is my firm conviction. From a later experience
I have become convinced that the ingestion so to speak into the air of
the disembodied, actually devitalizes the atmosphere, and produces in
those subjected to their multitudinous contact, asphyxiation. I awoke
from my sleep wearied and apathetic.
The second occasion happened at night, and was not attributable to
any sudden influx of the dead from contemporaneous battles. I have no
theory to explain it. I was asleep in my bed. It was in the following
August. I awoke with a start, almost as if I had been struck, and
realized the most curious tingling inside my head, as if a thousand
or more needles were therein busily engaged in employing their myriad
points upon my sensitive tissues. It was an excruciating agony,
not exactly acutely painful, but maddeningly intolerable and nerve
racking and confusing. It was unendurable. Instinctively I clapped
the bedclothes to my head and instantly there was complete relief.
Exposing my head again to this outside atmospheric bombardment the
agony recurred. I maintained my self-possession and actually tried the
experiment over and over again of alternately putting my head outside
of the bedclothes and then covering it with them. The effects were
constant, and the inference unimpeachable that the air contained some
agencies that exasperated my brain and pierced its envelope of skull,
while the interposition of the loose textures of the bed-coverings
stopped it. I can add authoritatively, that, as might have been
expected, the thicker the covering of my head the more complete the
relief, while upon no other part of my exposed body was any effect
noticeable. The irritatable surfaces were confined to my head only. Not
the spinal column nor the ganglionic centres along the thigh responded
to this inexplicable force. There was no cessation of this attack
throughout the night, but it slowly quieted down and disappeared as
the day broke. The aural effects upon me were dual in character. They
were physiological to the extent of producing a severe intermittent
headache, and they were psychic or mental inasmuch as they provoked an
irrepressible activity of thought, and, quite humiliatingly, with it,
an extreme emotional irritability. So cross did I become that I left
the house, and exhausted myself walking about the country to rid myself
of this abominable disagreeableness.
Another experience distinctly connected with the frightful cost of
the assaults upon the German trenches in September, 1915, took place
in that month, a few days after the engagements--the suggestion might
be hazarded that it requires some time for the "ghosts" to assemble
themselves and repair to any agreed upon _rendez-vous_--when entering
the house at evening, both my sister and myself became stifled with the
strange suffocating effect of the air. It was irrespirable. I muttered
"Again the spirits." The conclusion was ludicrous enough. We fell
to our knees and crawled out of the room. In fact the circumstances
resembled exactly the entrance of irrespirable gases into a room of
pure air, and the consequent escape of the victims by creeping along
the floor.
I must now state that these material effects were much more noticeable
with me than with my sister. My sister, as the foregoing pages have
reiterated was familiar with the spiritual world, and her powers
of mediumistic control had been successfully evoked. She had indeed
been visited apparently by numbers of the dead, and no unpleasant
bodily sensations had been felt. The voices _alone_ had become to
her unendurable, but for many months now these voices had been
stilled, as it were; in fact ever since that moment when she saw the
wraith of Sebastien Quintado above us in my room their intelligible
articulations had not been heard--hearing meaning a kind of _inaudible
utterance_ within the veil of the mind or soul. I do not think that
I ever attained the sensitivity necessary to distinguish the voices,
though, whether it was imagination or reality, my ears have possibly at
moments rung with an indescribable confused murmur. And never, until
the last _materialization_, did I discern faces. I except the special
incarnation of Blanchette. These incidents, I have recalled, have
only the slenderest value to establish any facts associated with the
nature and functions of the disembodied, and they need not be further
extended. Let me at once come to the ultimate act of this inexpressible
drama.
My readers all know how, upon the approach of the spring of 1917, the
Allies and their Teutonic adversaries prepared for the last desperate
struggle, how it had become almost mutually understood that the fierce
death-grapple should be undertaken outside of the trenches, and that
the arbitrament of war, under skies darkened by all the most hideous
emissions of shell, canister, powder, and infernal machines of poison,
should be attempted in a colossal conflict, that strains the mind to
conceive, and that might have approached in its horribleness of means
and results, the very uttermost image of the _End of All Things_.
The huge forces on both sides were assembled within the ten thousand
miles of trenches, that had converted the northeastern edges of our
country into a subterranean battlefield. From these trenches, almost
so arranged by some supervising destiny, they were to arise, like
implacable fiends or bloodless furies, and plunge their regiments,
their brigades, their squadrons, their divisions, their armies against
each other, in an unutterable tremendousness of slaughter, that
might have rent the vault of Heaven, if any feeling, any sympathy,
any recognition, any compassion, any power resided there! All of the
resources were accumulated, and the last promised carnage proclaimed
the extinction of civilized man in Europe.
Well that was the situation. On the eastern front the war had subsided.
Russia was practically fought to a standstill, and though, with the
customary Muscovite happiness of pretension, the Bear addressed his
allies with pompous declarations, no one seriously thought of him.
The Balkan turmoil had also simmered down to expectation simply. The
invasion of Egypt and the upheaval of the Indian mutineers had not so
very considerably materialized. Indeed everything now hung and was made
to hang, upon this final, incalculable, terrible decision. Would either
side survive its furious exterminating madness? Rumania was destroyed.
See what it meant. Two gigantic armies confronted each other over a
line of two hundred and fifty miles, and the last resources of all
the armaments of the magnified and reinforced invention of the great
nations of Europe had been marshalled together to bring to some lasting
decision the desecrating ravages of this racial duel. From the plain of
Antwerp and the winding valleys of the Meuse, to the hilltops of the
Marne, from Chalons to the slopes of the Vosges, the steel-bristling
squadrons, carrying in their flanks volcanic fires, watched each other
nervously, and yet, with a stolidity, born of custom and the grim
confidence of an irreparable doom; with a detachment also from earthly
ties, that made them seem like, almost like, discarnate beings. But
to these men, brought there from the ends of Europe, to meet DEATH,
as they might meet the morning or the evening of the common day, each
country, throughout its fields and shires, its wards and towns, its
bourgesses and departments and communes, its duchies, and electorates,
would soon become an empty cenotaph.
Ah, but that was not all. There was a miracle in it. Yes, a miracle.
God had moved the minds of the leaders towards this vast _denouement_.
The huge military programme, replete with bristling glories of arms and
men, the caparisoned squadrons of cavalry, the wide-mouthed, serried
cannon, the lumpy groups of the squandering "Busy Berthas," and "Jack
Johnsons," that wasted the ransom of kings in a few hours, the crowding
millions of men covering square miles of desolated countrysides, the
pitched tents, where the electric service, installed with thousands of
wires, kept the tendrilous nets of communication quivering with orders,
despatches, and rumors, the littered commissariats, filling screened
refuges with barrels, wagons, soup-kitchens, and interminable bales of
food, the long ranges of the hospital equipments, the stretchers, the
Red-Cross orderlies, the waiting doctors in barracks and in tents, the
auto-ambulances, the piled ramparts of bandages, and near at hand in
loosely framed operating chambers the sweet sickly odors of ether and
iodiform, and then back of all, along interminable alleys, the loaded
ammunition vans, carrying the shells and canisters, the cartridges
and gas engines and back again of these the grouped multitudes of
spectators--all of this vast spectacle, repeated on the opposite line
of the enemy--_vis-a-vis_--was thus concentrated, by a common impulse
in both camps, for the irrevocable decision, _because GOD willed it_.
In such a grandiose style should the last act of HIS interposition be
culminated, and the races of the earth should learn from the cavernous
receptacles of spirit, from the shrined multitudes of the DEAD,
enwrapped in the boundless fields of sky and star and cloud, issuing
perchance from the wide-swung gates of Paradise, or Heaven, or of Hell
itself--of the overwhelming pressure of the OTHER WORLD, learn thus too
of the maintenance of sympathy between the affairs this side, and the
affairs that side, of the narrow gap of DEATH! So it was.
But wonderful things had happened in the summer of 1916 and in its
early autumn. There had been awful carnage at Verdun where the Teuton
attempted to drive through to Paris and where the Gallic defiance
rang out, _Ils ne passeron pas_. To and fro had the lines wavered,
each interval strewn with innumerable corpses; the curtains of fire
had swept to and fro and in their murderous folds life had expired
as the flames destroy the swarming moths at harvest. Super-human
deeds of valor had amazed the world that watched the struggle with
terror-stricken eyes, and at last the Germans were pushed backward
and the valleys of the Meuse, its hills and fields, its villages lay
scorched, blackened, upheaved, overthrown, scarred from end to end,
with most damnable desolation.
And northward the English had, along the Somme, struck at the Teuton
with savage fury. The skies had been eclipsed with thunderous
avalanches of fire, and for days the satanic deluge of shot and shell
had stricken the German into helpless panic. Beyond Albert, with
headlong rushes animated by God only knows what courage, the Briton
had reached Thiepval Ginchy, Guillemont Clery and then shot forward
with staggering, awful vehemence towards Bapaume and Peronne, and the
defenses of the enemy, assailed on all sides, were melting away, and
the invasion promised the greatest results. Except on the east the
German forces seemed exhausted and the debacle had begun. The Allies
were ready for the supreme effort.
Yes--there had been talk of PEACE--and, for one short moment, the world
reeled almost in its dazed wonder-stricken joy. But the war-clouds
closed again, and the steel-toothed, fire-shrouded fight stormed out
again.
And then there had been another change. Their long line of armament
had again been pushed further west by the Germans, who had forced
our lines back, and again threatened the safety of Paris, had indeed
so far trespassed over France, that their trenches and up-flung
fortifications, their mounded parapets and encircling redoubts, broke
in the line from Maubeuge, Rocroi, Dinant, Mézières, and Montmedy,
eastward to Laon, again to Soissons, Compiègne, to Rheims, and now
indeed, from the high ruined tower of the Chateau at La Ferté the
trench line of the Teutons could be distinctly seen. The matter
is important for _there_ Gabrielle summoned--summoned I say--the
disembodied to the great intervention. _Ne riez pas; c'est vrai, le
dernier mot de verité intime. Attendez! Vous savez bien la grande chose
qui finit la guerre!_
All of this happened in the winter of 1917. And about the first of
April of that spring--let me see--that was on a Sunday morning,
Gabrielle came into my room--before our breakfast--and sat down at the
window, that one looking west. She had been to early mass, her face was
drawn and inspired, her eyes were large and frightened, and she was
trembling with excitement.
I had been reading and scarcely noticed her entrance. The instant my
eyes met hers I started with alarm.
"_Gabrielle qu'avez vous?_ What is it? The GHOSTS?"
She rose softly and came towards me. Then she knelt at my side, and
looking rather down at her moving fingers than at me, told me this
wonderful thing: One word--the spirits had not visited us for months,
and we had, partly at least, forgotten them, in the busy work of the
relief, and the frequent visits hither and thither, on errands of the
Red-Cross mission. Gabrielle spoke rapidly in parts of her narrative,
and then she hesitated, and seemed absent-minded, worn, and bewildered,
but as she went on her words flowed abundantly and fastly,--so you
remember it was before--and as she ended she had risen, and her
expression assumed a peculiar vividness of--of--Ah how shall I say?--of
seraphic beauty!
Yes, yes, it was just so. _Vraiment!_
"Alfred last night about two o'clock towards morning, I seemed to be
awake, and I _saw_--Alfred I was not awake, it was a vision in my
dreams--the figure of Sebastien Quintado like a blade of light standing
at my bed-side, his eyes fixed into mine so that I was spell-bound--"
Gabrielle here stopped, and her face blushed, I thought, with a kind
of modest shame I could not comprehend--"Finally he spoke, and his
voice sounded like an echo; I seemed just to hear it. Sometimes it grew
louder, and then it faded and died away and I thought I leaned towards
him to catch his words--so it seemed Alfred. He said this:
"'Gabrielle! Gabrielle! the spirits need you. The great war ends.
The millions who have died, who now, as I do, repine in spirit-land,
have gathered together, thousands upon thousands, upon thousands, and
GOD sends them to stop the slaughter. God has dispensed council--the
council of willfulness--to the nations and their generals, and in a
little while they will assemble the vast armies on the west, and try
out the conflict _in one great battle_. So it will be determined; So
God wills it.
"'And then Gabrielle _WE_--the millions of the dead, those torn away
from wives and children, from youth and love and joy, from friends and
country, from all of the ambitions which animate our kind on earth; we
will flock like clouds, when the north wind blows over St. Choiseul,
and descend, visible, luminous, vocal, from the glowing skies, and
from us, Gabrielle, will proceed a terrible Paralysis--Ay more--an
undeniable dread and weakness.
"'It will, like a contagion, spread throughout the armies from rank
to rank, from private to general, and back again; it will freeze the
blood, it will dwindle the heart, it will thrill the brain. Before
it bravery becomes a shrinking, ambition a regret, the thought of
conflict a remorse. It will do more. It will slowly become a strange,
unendurable, gnawing, piercing, scorching, internal pain, a pain so
bitter and keen, that flesh will refuse its infliction, and so there
will enter in that innumerable host just one thought--FLIGHT!
"'It will not be, though, the FLIGHT of cowards, but of
Conscience-stricken men. And then a greater thing will come. There will
be _no Flight_; the pain will manacle their feet, will stifle their
voices, will wither their wills--one monstrous Stupor will overcome
them, and for three days and a night, like the men overcome with sleep
that watched the Apostle St. Peter in the prison, the armies of the
Nations will sleep--Ay--and sleep in PAIN!
"'We shall abide above them. Our millions, by night and day, will
perpetually afflict them. By day we will be unseen, by night we shall
be seen. And from every particle of our incorporeal beings will flow
the influence of our terror and our punishment. There will be no
mitigation. GOD so wills it!
"'And when the three days are finished, then those men will
awake--General and Prince and King and Private and Officer--and their
strength will be as nothing, their vigor as a reed shaken by the wind,
their wills as shaking vials of water, their threats like sheets
whipped by the wind. So shall it be. Like men dazed in a flame, or
smoke, or men caught half dead from the waters, will it be to them. It
will be to them as the prophet Isaiah said:
"'"And they shall be brought down and shall speak out of the ground,
and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall
be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and their
speech shall whisper out of the dust."
"'But'--it was at this point that Gabrielle rose, and stood like some
Sybil or Prophetess, replenished with a divine ardor--'Gabrielle, you
have been chosen as the instrument of our incarnation. I chose you.
See! It is God's way! Great issues HE brings about through the lowly
and the humble, the contrite and the simple. God chooses you. There
must be the human, living, breathing, earth-born medium. Go to the
Chateau of La Ferté on ---- and use your power. It will be added to.
Let it be at night, the night before the great combat and the whole
world will be advertised of it. That is the intention of God. So does
He sway the feeble minds of men, turning their pride into humiliation,
their certainties into failures, their promises into dreams. GO!
"'And Gabrielle, perchance it shall happen that then you also will be
numbered with US--_those of the Over-World_.'"
Here Gabrielle stopped, a sudden flush mounted to her temples, and
after came a deathly pallor, and then she fell upon my neck in an
embrace utterly tearless, when I felt her body sway upon mine with deep
pulsations, while her lips sought my own, and almost inaudibly she
whispered in my ear--"Alfred, Sebastien kissed me as he vanished, and
his lips were like fire, and the power he brought to me rested with me
from his lips. I am ready to go. But you, Alfred, will go with me. It
may be afterwards we shall be no more together."
Truly upon us unutterable things had fallen. We sat there together,
almost unnoticing the passage of the day, immersed in a wonder that
deepened into sadness as the anticipation of some wild unearthly ending
of the great war steadily became more and more fixed in our minds, and
with it--Ah there was the desperate cruelty and anguish of it--the
possible separation of our lives. We hardly spoke, and only as the noon
hour flooded the room with light and heat, did we arise, and, hand
in hand, almost as if then we approached the tragic sacrifice of our
happiness, went out, and down the stairway to our duties.
Perhaps dear old Emile Chouteau thinking of our propitiation would have
said:
_Sic, sic juvat ire sub umbras._
* * * * *
During the long weeks before that awfully auspicious moment came,
Gabrielle and I kept working at our tasks; she at the villages about
us, in the homes of sick returning soldiers, and also at Paris on
errands of every sort, and I in work of distribution, supervision and
occasionally administration. But it was mostly at the hospital of Saint
Jean that I experienced the full measure of an unusual depression--the
customary, and now grown habitual, grievous seriousness of a national
crisis, deepened into a pathos, almost unassuaged with any hope of joy.
Here I saw our soldiers in that delicately conceived and apportioned
religious retreat, itself a poetic dream of gentle loveliness, with
its walls of time-stained stone, its avenues of trees, the ranged
gardens of its sunny domains, with the petunias, the geraniums, the
sages, and the high-browed and over shadowing chestnuts, the outspread
firm outlines of tower and hall, its innumerable vistas, at evenings
breathing a strange and subtle melancholy--_malheur à qui n'a pas senti
ces mélancolies_ (Renan)--and the devoted community of priests and
nurses. Here I saw the sons of my country dying, praying, chanting,
smiling in their ferocious sufferings, slipping away into eternity
with prayers for _La patrie_, or rising from the very border of the
grave with mutilated bodies, and yet yearning for the last chance of
fighting still again. Here I saw the deathless love of home, lingering
in the sick bodies, whose lips moved in a delirium of dreams, that
they were soon to revisit the old orchards, the vineyards, the chimney
places, and their people--_Ah c'était miserable_--and I have seen the
chapel filled with the mourners and the broken-limbed companions of the
dead, lifting the coffin so gently, as if the lifeless figure in it
might feel their friendliness and thank them for it. Yes more too--a
spectacle that might have touched the heart of Heaven--the wounded in
the wards singing, in murmurs, between their gasps of pain, or just
slowly gesturing, as it were, with body and fingers and with their
speaking eyes in unison, _La Marseillaise_. You know how M. ---- has
described it. _Ecoutez._
"_Nos blessés chantaient ainsi par la bouche de leur blessures et nous
en écoutant les strophes sublimes, il nous semblait les comprendre
pour la première fois!_"
Our--Gabrielle's and mine--miraculous mission was never forgotten. We
did not speak of it, but we watched the racing days, and as we watched
the words of the VISION grew visibly true. The Great Effort was to
be made; that we knew. In the face of all prudence, driven onward by
the irresistible purpose of the Almighty, the generals of the armies
announced the dread decision of "_trying it out_"--the English
said--in one colossal combat. It was the edict of fate that rushed
them on to this conclusion. And it was trumpeted to the whole world.
And no one thought it strange. No one wondered. And yet in any finite
human view what unutterable folly! Ah--it was God's way. HE had blinded
the eyes of the wise. HE had perverted the judgment of the mighty.
HE had turned the councils of the Great into childishness. His hand
indeed again rested on the earth, and its peoples, and the vast _END_
would be--so it became clear to my sister and to me--HIS Revelation
of Himself, blasting clean into the hearts of men this truth, that HE
LIVED.
So the armies of the Allies and of the Powers gathered together against
each other, along the line of the eastern frontiers of France, as I
have said. There the last gage of war was to be flung down, and the
issue tested.
But no new command came to us from the spirit-world. It was now within
two weeks of the hour set for the DESCENT, and Gabrielle and I wondered
that we should not hear again of the mysterious matter. Need we doubt?
See how the current of events foretold the END! That last night at
the old home in St. Choiseul I shall never forget. We sat together in
the big library throughout the night expecting some sudden GUIDANCE
from the Unknown. We said very little. The weight of our purpose had
withdrawn us from the companionship of our neighbors, and for weeks
we had lived alone in a reserve of solitude, of wondering suspense,
that also tied our tongues. We had become stupefied with the terror of
this admission to the supernatural, as if we were holding the hands of
the Creator! Did we believe? Gabrielle did, and--I will confess it--I
linked it all with the phantasmagoria of events of the hideous war, as
something possible--just possible.
That was the end of September. We must be at the Chateau of La
Ferté the following night if punctuality counted in this tremendous
eventuality. And of course it did count. How exactly GOD had given his
commands to Moses and Joshua, to Barak and to Gideon, to Jephthah, to
David, to Solomon, to Elijah! So instinctively we grouped ourselves
with the designs of Providence as indeed commissioned agents of its
ends.
It was almost morning; the eastern sky reddening with flakes of fire
scattered over it, and the light entering the room from the south wall
of the garden, where the clustering vines hung untouched and forgotten;
when Gabrielle spoke to me.
"Alfred have you any doubts? The time is short for our preparation.
Tonight we should be at La Ferté."
"I will go with you Gabrielle. Would you go alone?"
And my sister answered in the words of Barak to Deborah:
"'If thou will go with me then I will go; but if thou will not go with
me, then I will not go.'"
"Gabrielle all issues are with God. I will go with you."
Later, when the day had fully broken, and the sunlight flooded
everything without and within the house, and, from its singular
clarity, the not usual picture of the Eiffel Tower, far off in
Zeppelin-haunted Paris, was just descried as a hazy skein of lines in
the sky--we were both looking at it--the front door was assailed with a
furious knocking. I ran to it and opening it encountered Privat Deschat
with a paper in his hands, his face convulsed with emotion, his mouth
wide open, and crowded with insulting epithets, that he flung upon me
with such emphasis that, for an instant, I thought I was the occasion
of his rage. But it was not so. It was what he read that had startled
him into this unaccustomed excitement and denunciation.
"_Voila_," he shouted, waving the sheet he held in my face. "_Voila,
une clique des fous. Les scelerats; les imbecilles abominables;
traitres_; Dogs of Perdition. See, they intend to risk all on a single
cast of the die and then--_C'est assez à faire un homme honnête_--with
his head on his shoulders--_créver avec desespoir_, with madness.
Alfred Lupin, what do you suppose? The Allies and the Boches and their
forces have agreed upon tomorrow as a day of final quittance. There
is to be one huge battle, _un conflit superbe_ and then--_Quoi?_
Give up--_la FIN. C'est a dire une massacre insupportable_, unheard
of, monstrous, irreparable, and then--_Ah, le Diable pourquoi existe
je?--la renvoi à jour fixe._ Can you believe such a suicide of the
nation, such a shameless cowardice, such insanity, such depravity of
ideas? And they make of it a circus, _une parade macaronique_, and of
the nation _un jouet_. Is it not most damnable? Eh?"
Stunned by this unexpected outburst I retreated a step, and following
me with the offending paper he continued his onslaught.
"Have you not heard? The Generals, the Kings, the Princes, the
Diplomats, the Soldiers, have all agreed upon one infernal
exterminating duel, and with that over no matter who wins, they throw
down their arms and make peace. And here--HERE--" he shouted, still
pursuing me backward into the hall-way, while behind me gathered
Hortense, Julie, and even Gabrielle in appalled curiosity--"here they
proclaim it to their peoples, and bid them gather at the carnage,
_Une spectacle magnifique assurement_--the death of the nations. What
poison of insanity, of miserable, hopeless, brutal, depraved idiocy,
possesses our men? Has the whole world become a drivelling fool, _une
bête écervelé_?"
He was still holding out towards me the paper, and in despair over
his exasperation, I seized it, and rushed with it to the light, while
Privat Deschat rushed with me, and the little circle of auditors closed
about us in amazement. I saw at once the cause of Deschat's disgust.
The sheet he had brought to us was a broadside--_une bordée_--which
evidently was intended for circulation throughout the country, and
had been posted over the walls of the cities, where what I knew, was
frankly announced--the _umpirage_, the _arbitrament_ in one last
conflict of the undecided war. It read.
PROCLAMATION
PEACE COMES WITH VICTORY. ONE BATTLE MORE. THEN IT IS ALL OVER. ON
---- THE BATTLE BEGINS. THAT ENDS THE WAR. LET THE NATIONS GATHER. THE
TOURNAMENT OF CIVILIZATION IS AT HAND. SUCH IS THE DECISION OF THE
RULERS, AFTER THAT INDUSTRY, REST. PRAY FOR US, AND COME AND SEE.
L'ADMINISTRATION.
"Yes," mocked Deschat, "_l'es boutiquiers_ are selling seats for it
now in Paris, in Berlin, in London. _Mon Dieu je vais à me mettre au
cercueil._" With that admonishment he vanished from the house.
I turned to Gabrielle.
"Gabrielle, it is enough. It is the writing on the wall. GOD COMES. He
has truly turned the heads of the nations. It is again the words of the
prophet Jeremiah:
"'Yes, the stork in the heavens knoweth her appointed times; and the
turtle and the crane and the swallow, observe the time of their coming;
but my people know not the judgment of the Lord.'
"We need no further assurance, Gabrielle. It will be as the spirit of
Sebastien Quintado said. LET US GO AT ONCE."