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ABOVE THE BATTLE
"The fire smouldering in the forest of Europe was beginning to burst
into flames. In vain did they try to put it out in one place; it only
broke out in another. With gusts of smoke and a shower of sparks it
swept from one point to another, burning the dry brushwood. Already in
the East there were skirmishes as the prelude to the great war of the
nations. All Europe, Europe that only yesterday was sceptical and
apathetic, like a dead wood, was swept by the flames. All men were
possessed by the desire for battle. War was ever on the point of
breaking out. It was stamped out, but it sprang to life again. The world
felt that it was at the mercy of an accident that might let loose the
dogs of war. The world lay in wait. The feeling of inevitability weighed
heavily even upon the most pacifically minded. And ideologues, sheltered
beneath the massive shadows of the cyclops, Proudhon, hymned in war
man's fairest title of nobility...."
_"This, then, was to be the end of the physical and moral resurrection
of the races of the West! To such butchery they were to be borne along
by the currents of action and passionate faith! Only a Napoleonic genius
could have marked out a chosen, deliberate aim for this blind, onward
rush. But nowhere in Europe was there any genius for action. It was as
though the world had chosen the most mediocre to be its governors. The
force of the human mind was in other things--so there was nothing to be
done but to trust to the declivity down which they were moving. This
both the governing and the governed classes were doing. Europe looked
like a vast armed camp."_
_Jean-Christophe_, vol. x (1912).
[English translation by Gilbert Cannan, vol. iv, p. 504.]
ABOVE THE BATTLE
BY
ROMAIN ROLLAND
TRANSLATED BY
C. K. OGDEN, M. A.
(Editor of _The Cambridge Magazine_)
CHICAGO
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY
1916
_Copyright 1916_
_The Open Court Pub. Co., Chicago._
_First published in 1916._
(_All rights reserved._)
INTRODUCTION
CONTENTS
PREFACE
NOTES
FOOTNOTES
INTRODUCTION
_"Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,
Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problem of
freedom yet._
* * * * *
_(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?
Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?
Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)"_
These lines of Walt Whitman will be recalled by many who read the
following pages: for not only does Rolland himself refer to Whitman in
his brief Introduction, but, were it not for a certain _bizarrerie_
apart from their context, the words "Over the Carnage" might perhaps
have stood on the cover of this volume as a striking variant on
_Au-dessus de la Mêlée_.
Yet though the voice comes to us over the carnage, its message is not
marred by the passions of the moment. After eighteen months of war we
are learning to look about us more calmly, and to distinguish amid the
ruins those of Europe's intellectual leaders who have not been swept off
their feet by the fury of the tempest. Almost alone Romain Rolland has
stood the test. The two main characteristics which strike us in all that
he writes are lucidity and common sense--the qualities most needed by
every one in thought upon the war. But there is another feature of
Rolland's work which contributes to its universal appeal. He describes
our feelings and sensations in the presence of a given situation, not
what actually passes before our eyes: he describes the effects and
causes of things, but not the things themselves. Through his work for
the _Agence internationale des prisonniers de guerre_, to which one of
the articles now collected is largely devoted, he is, moreover, in a
position to observe every phase of the great battle between ideals and
between nations which fills him with such anguish and indignation. And
with his matchless insight and sympathy he gives permanent form to our
vague feelings in these noble and inspiring essays.
It will not, however, surprise the vast public who have read
_Jean-Christophe_ to find that while so many have capitulated to the
madness of the terrible year through which we have passed, Rolland has
remained firm, and has surpassed himself. He was prepared. As the
extract placed at the beginning of this volume shows, he was one of the
few who realized only too well the horror he was powerless to prevent.
Yet he made every effort to open the eyes of Europe and especially of
the young, so many of whom had learned to look up to him as a leader. To
these young men, one of the finest essays in the present collection is
primarily addressed--_O jeunesse héroique du monde_....
Eighteen months have passed and they still endure the terrible ordeal,
the young men of Germany and France, whom he had striven so hard to
bring together; on whose aspirations and failings _Jean-Christophe_ is a
critical commentary. The movements and tendencies of society were there
given a dramatic embodiment, permeated for Rolland by the Life
Force--that struggle between Good and Bad, Love and Hatred, which makes
life worth living. All is set down with the clear analysis of feeling
natural to a musical critic. But in spite of his burning words on the
destruction of Rheims, Rolland, as is clear from his other critical and
biographical writings, is more interested in men than in their
achievements. And the men of today interest him most passionately.
"Young men," he has said, "do not bother about the old people. Make a
stepping-stone of our bodies and go forward."
And above all it is the permanent things in life with which he is
concerned. As Mr. Lowes Dickinson puts it, "M. Rolland is one of the
many who believe, though their voice for the moment may be silenced,
that the spiritual forces that are important and ought to prevail are
the international ones; that co-operation, not war, is the right destiny
of nations; and that all that is valuable in each people may be
maintained in and by friendly intercourse with the others. The war
between these two ideals is the greater war that lies behind the present
conflict. Hundreds and thousands of generous youths have gone to battle
in the belief that they are going to a 'war that will end war,' that
they are fighting against militarism in the cause of peace. Whether,
indeed, it is for that they will have risked or lost their lives, only
the event can show."
The forces against such ideals are powerful, but Rolland is not
dismayed. "Come, friends! let us make a stand! Can we not resist this
contagion, whatever its nature and virulence be--whether moral epidemic
or cosmic force." And he appeals not only in the name of humanity but in
the name of that France which he loves so dearly--"la vraie France" of
which Jaurès wrote (in the untranslatable words which Rolland has
quoted), "qui n'est pas résumée dans une époque et dans un jour, ni dans
le jour d'il y a des siècles, ni dans le jour d'hier, mais la France
tout entière, dans la succession de ses jours, de ses nuits, de ses
aurores, de ses crépuscules, de ses montées, de ses chutes, et qui, à
travers toutes ces ombres mêlées, toutes ces lumières incomplètes et
toutes ces vicissitudes, s'en va vers une pleine clarté qu'elle n'a pas
encore atteinte, mais dont le pressentiment est dans sa pensée!"
But though his love for France inspires every word that Rolland has
written, the significance of the present volume is not less apparent to
English readers. Some of the articles and letters now collected have
already appeared in English, for the most part in the pages of _The
Cambridge Magazine_, from which they have been widely quoted in the
press. For help in rendering the translations as adequately as possible
I may also take this opportunity of acknowledging my special
indebtedness to Mr. Roger Fry,[1] who has just issued through the Omega
Workshops a striking translation of some of the most recent French
poetry inspired by the war; to Mr. James Wood, who has himself done part
of the translation, particularly "pro Aris"; and to Mr. E. K. Bennett,
of Caius College, whose version of "Above the Battle" has already been
quoted by the Archbishop of Canterbury and others. For the most part,
the articles here collected have not appeared in English before; and
they have been almost inaccessible even in French, as their author
explains in his Preface.
C. K. OGDEN.
MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, _January, 1916_.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION BY THE TRANSLATOR 7
PREFACE 15
I. AN OPEN LETTER TO GERHART HAUPTMANN 19
II. PRO ARIS 23
III. ABOVE THE BATTLE 37
IV. THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS: PANGERMANISM,
PANSLAVISM 56
V. INTER ARMA CARITAS 76
VI. TO THE PEOPLE THAT IS SUFFERING FOR JUSTICE 93
VII. LETTER TO MY CRITICS 97
VIII. THE IDOLS 107
IX. FOR EUROPE: MANIFESTO OF THE WRITERS AND
THINKERS OF CATALONIA 122
X. FOR EUROPE: AN APPEAL FROM HOLLAND TO THE
INTELLECTUALS OF ALL NATIONS 127
XI. LETTER TO FREDERIK VAN EEDEN 136
XII. OUR NEIGHBOR THE ENEMY 142
XIII. A LETTER TO SVENSKA DAGBLADET OF STOCKHOLM 151
XIV. WAR LITERATURE 153
XV. THE MURDER OF THE ELITE 168
XVI. JAURÈS 181
NOTES 193
INDEX 195
FOOTNOTES
NOTES OF ETEXT TRANSCRIBER
It is my pleasant duty to thank the brave friends who have defended me
during the past year, in the Parisian press:--at the end of October
1914, Amédée Dunois in _l'Humanité_, and Henri Guilbeaux, in the
_Bataille syndicaliste_; in the same paper, _Fernand Deprès_; Georges
Pioch in the _Hommes du Jour_; J. M. Renaitour, in the _Bonnet Rouge_;
Rouanet, in _l'Humanité_; Jacques Mesnil, in the _Mercure de France_,
and Gaston Thiesson, in the _Guerre Sociale_. To these faithful comrades
in the struggle I express my affectionate gratitude.
R. R.
_October, 1915._
PREFACE
A great nation assailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect: it
must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the
hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets loose. To
each his part: to the armies the protection of the soil of their native
land; to the thinkers the defense of its thought. If they subordinate
that thought to the passions of their people they may well be useful
instruments of passion; but they are in danger of betraying the spirit,
which is not the least part of a people's patrimony. One day History
will pass judgment on each of the nations at war; she will weigh their
measure of errors, lies, and heinous follies. Let us try and make ours
light before her!
Children are taught the Gospel of Jesus and the Christian ideal.
Everything in the education they receive at school is designed to
stimulate in them intellectual understanding of the great human family.
Classical education makes them see, beyond the differences of race, the
roots and the common trunk of our civilization. Art makes them love the
profound sources of the genius of a people. Science makes them believe
in the unity of reason. The great social movement which renews the
world, reveals the organized effort of the working classes all round
them to unite their forces in the hopes and struggles which break the
barriers of nations. The brightest geniuses of the earth, like Walt
Whitman and Tolstoi, chant universal brotherhood in joy and suffering,
or else like our Latin spirits, pierce with their criticism the
prejudices of hatred and ignorance which separate individuals and
peoples.
Like all the men of my time, I have been brought up on these thoughts; I
have tried in my turn to share the bread of life with my younger or less
fortunate brothers. When the war came I did not think it my duty to deny
these thoughts because the hour had come to put them to the test.
I have been insulted. I knew that I should be and I went forward. But I
did not know that I should be insulted without even a hearing.
For several months no one in France could know my writings except
through scraps of phrases arbitrarily extracted and mutilated by my
enemies. It is a shameful record. For nearly a year this has gone on.
Certain socialist or syndicalist papers may have succeeded here and
there in getting some fragments through,[2] but it was only in the month
of June 1915 that for the first time my chief article, the one which was
the object of the most violent criticism, "Above the Battle," dating
from September 1914, could be published in full (almost in full), thanks
to the malevolent zeal of a maladroit pamphleteer, to whom I am indebted
for bringing my words before the French public for the first time.
A Frenchman does not judge his adversary unheard. Whoever does so judges
and condemns himself: for he shows that he fears the light. I place
before the world the texts they have slandered.[3] I shall not defend
them. Let them defend themselves!
One single word will I add. For a year I have been rich in enemies. Let
me say this to them: they can hate me, but they will not teach me to
hate. I have no concern with them. My business is to say what I believe
to be fair and humane. Whether this pleases or irritates is not my
business. I know that words once uttered make their way of themselves.
Hopefully I sow them in the bloody soil. The harvest will come.
ROMAIN ROLLAND.
_September, 1915._
I. AN OPEN LETTER TO GERHART HAUPTMANN
_Saturday, August 29, 1914._[4]
I am not, Gerhart Hauptmann, one of those Frenchmen who regard Germany
as a nation of barbarians. I know the intellectual and moral greatness
of your mighty race. I know all that I owe to the thinkers of old
Germany; and even now, at this hour, I recall the example and the words
of _our_ Goethe--for he belongs to the whole of humanity--repudiating
all national hatreds and preserving the calmness of his soul on those
heights "_where we feel the happiness and the misfortunes of other
peoples as our own_." I myself have labored all my life to bring
together the minds of our two nations; and the atrocities of this
impious war in which, to the ruin of European civilization, they are
involved, will never lead me to soil my spirit with hatred.
Whatever pain, then, your Germany may give me, whatever reasons I may
have to stigmatize as criminal German policy and the means it employs, I
do not attach responsibility for it to the people which is burdened with
it and is used as its blind instrument. It is not that I regard, as you
do, war as a fatality. A Frenchman does not believe in fatality.
Fatality is the excuse of souls without a will. War springs from the
weakness and stupidity of nations. One cannot feel resentment against
them for it; one can only pity them. I do not reproach you with our
miseries; for yours will be no less. If France is ruined, Germany will
be ruined too. I did not even raise my voice when I saw your armies
violating the neutrality of noble Belgium. This flagrant breach of
honor, which incurs the contempt of every upright conscience, is quite
in the political tradition of your Prussian kings; it did not surprise
me.
But when I see the fury with which you are treating that magnanimous
nation whose only crime has been to defend its independence and the
cause of justice to the last, as you Germans yourselves did in 1813 ...
that is too much! The world is revolted by it. Keep these savageries for
us Frenchmen, your true enemies! But to wreak them against your
victims, against this small, unhappy, innocent Belgian people ... how
shameful is this!
And not content to fling yourselves on living Belgium, you wage war on
the dead, on the glories of past ages. You bombard Malines, you burn
Rubens, and Louvain is now no more than a heap of ashes--Louvain with
its treasures of art and of science, the sacred town! What are you,
then, Hauptmann, and by what name do you want us to call you now, since
you repudiate the title of barbarians? Are you the grandsons of Goethe
or of Attila? Are you making war on enemies or on the human spirit? Kill
men if you like, but respect masterpieces. They are the patrimony of the
human race. You, like all the rest of us, are its depositories; in
pillaging it, as you do, you show yourselves unworthy of our great
heritage, unworthy to take your place in that little European army which
is civilization's guard of honor.
It is not to the opinion of the rest of the world that I address myself
in challenging you, Hauptmann. In the name of our Europe, of which you
have hitherto been one of the most illustrious champions, in the name of
that civilization for which the greatest of men have striven all down
the ages, in the name of the very honor of your Germanic race, Gerhart
Hauptmann, I abjure you, I challenge you, you and the intellectuals of
Germany, amongst whom I reckon so many friends, to protest with all your
energy against this crime which is recoiling upon you.
If you fail to do this, you will prove one of two things: either that
you approve what has been done--and in that case may the opinion of
mankind crush you--or else that you are powerless to raise a protest
against the Huns who command you. If this be so, by what title can you
still claim, as you have claimed, that you fight for the cause of
liberty and human progress? You are giving the world a proof that,
incapable of defending the liberty of the world, you are even incapable
of defending your own, and that the best of Germany is helpless beneath
a vile despotism which mutilates masterpieces and murders the spirit of
man.
I am expecting an answer from you, Hauptmann, an answer that may be an
act. The opinion of Europe awaits it as I do. Think about it: at such a
time silence itself is an act.
_Journal de Genève_, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1914.
II. PRO ARIS[5]
Among the many crimes of this infamous war which are all odious to us,
why have we chosen for protest the crimes against things and not against
men, the destruction of works and not of lives?
Many are surprised by this, and have even reproached us for it--as if we
have not as much pity as they for the bodies and hearts of the thousands
of victims who are crucified! Yet over the armies which fall, there
flies the vision of their love, and of _la Patrie_, to which they
sacrifice themselves--over these lives which are passing away passes the
holy Ark of the art and thought of centuries, borne on their shoulders.
The bearers can change. May the Ark be saved! To the élite of the world
falls the task of guarding it. And since the common treasure is
threatened, may they rise to protect it!
I am glad to think that in the Latin countries this sacred duty has
always been regarded as paramount. Our France which bleeds with so many
other wounds, has suffered nothing more cruel than the attack against
her Parthenon, the Cathedral of Rheims, "Our Lady of France." Letters
which I have received from sorely tried families, and from soldiers who
for two months have borne every hardship, show me (and I am proud of it
for them and for my people) that there was no burden heavier for them to
bear. It is because we put spirit above flesh. Very different is the
case of the German intellectuals, who, to my reproaches for the
sacrilegious acts of their devastating armies, have all replied with one
voice, "Perish every _chef-d'oeuvre_ rather than one German soldier!"
A piece of architecture like Rheims is much more than one life; it is a
people--whose centuries vibrate like a symphony in this organ of stone.
It is their memories of joy, of glory, and of grief; their meditations,
ironies, dreams. It is the tree of the race, whose roots plunge to the
profoundest depths of its soil, and whose branches stretch with a
sublime _élan_ towards the sky. It is still more: its beauty which soars
above the struggles of nations is the harmonious response made by the
human race to the riddle of the world--this light of the spirit more
necessary to souls than that of the sun.
Whoever destroys this work, murders more than a man; he murders the
purest soul of a race. His crime is inexpiable, and Dante would have it
punished with an eternal agony, eternally renewed. We who repudiate the
vindictive spirit of so cruel a genius, do not hold a people responsible
for the crimes of a few. The drama which unfolds itself before our eyes,
and whose almost certain _dénouement_ will be the crushing of the German
hegemony, is enough for us.
What brings it home to us most nearly is that not one of those who
constitute the moral and intellectual élite of Germany--that hundred
noble spirits, and those thousands of brave hearts of which no great
nation was ever destitute--not one really suspects the crimes of his
Government; the atrocities committed in Flanders, in the north and in
the east of France during the two or three first weeks of the war; or
(one can safely wager) the voluntary devastations of the towns of
Belgium and the ruin of Rheims. If they came to look at the reality, I
know that many of them would weep with grief and shame; and of all the
shortcomings of Prussian Imperialism, the worst and the vilest is to
have concealed its crimes from its people. For by depriving them of the
means of protesting against those crimes, it has involved them for ever
in the responsibility; it has abused their magnificent devotion. The
intellectuals, however, are also guilty. For if one admits that the
brave men, who in every country tamely feed upon the news which their
papers and their leaders give them for nourishment, allow themselves to
be duped, one cannot pardon those whose duty it is to seek truth in the
midst of error, and to know the value of interested witnesses and
passionate hallucinations. Before bursting into the midst of this
furious debate upon which was staked the destruction of nations and of
the treasures of the spirit, their first duty (a duty of loyalty as much
as of common sense) should have been to consider the problems from both
sides. By blind loyalty and culpable trustfulness they have rushed head
foremost into the net which their Imperialism had spread. They believed
that their first duty was, with their eyes closed, to defend the honor
of their State against all accusation. They did not see that the noblest
means of defending it was to disavow its faults and to cleanse their
country of them....
I have awaited this virile disavowal from the proudest spirits of
Germany, a disavowal which would have been ennobling instead of
humiliating. The letter which I wrote to one of them, the day after the
brutal voice of Wolff's Agency pompously proclaimed that there remained
of Louvain no more than a heap of ashes, was received by the entire
élite of Germany in a spirit of enmity. They did not understand that I
offered them the chance of releasing Germany from the fetters of those
crimes which its Empire was forging in its name. What did I ask of them?
What did I ask of you all, finer spirits of Germany?--to express at
least a courageous regret for the excesses committed, and to dare to
remind unbridled power that even the Fatherland cannot save itself
through crime, and that above its rights are those of the human spirit.
I only asked for _one_ voice--a _single_ free voice.... None spoke. I
heard only the clamor of herds, the pack of intellectuals giving tongue
on the track whereon the hunter loosed them, and that insolent
Manifesto, in which, without the slightest effort to justify its crimes,
you have unanimously declared that they do not exist. And your
theologians, your pastors, your court-preachers, have stated further
that you are very just and that you thank God for having made you
thus.... Race of Pharisees, what chastisement from on high shall scourge
your sacrilegious pride!... Do you not suspect the evil which you have
done to your own people? The megalomania, a menace to the world, of an
Ostwald or an H. S. Chamberlain,[6] the criminal determination of
ninety-three intellectuals not to wish to see the truth, will have cost
Germany more than ten defeats.
How clumsy you are! I believe that of all your faults _maladresse_ is
the worst. You have not said one word since the beginning of this war
which has not been more fatal for you than all the speeches of your
adversaries. It is you who have light-heartedly furnished the proof or
the argument of the worst accusations that have been brought against
you; just as your official agencies, under the stupid illusion of
terrorizing us, have been the first to launch emphatic recitals of your
most sinister devastations. It is you, who when the most impartial of
your adversaries were obliged, in fairness, to limit the responsibility
of these acts to a few of your leaders and armies, have angrily claimed
your share. It is you who the day after the destruction of Rheims,
which, in your inmost hearts, should have dismayed the best amongst you,
have boasted of it in imbecile pride, instead of trying to clear
yourselves.[7] It is you, wretched creatures, you, representatives of
the spirit, who have not ceased to extol force and to despise the weak,
as if you did not know that the wheel of fortune turns, that this force
one day will weigh afresh upon you, as in past ages, when your great
men, at least, retained the consolation of not having yielded to it the
sovereignty of the spirit and the sacred rights of Right!... What
reproaches, what remorse are you heaping up for the future, O blind
guides--you who are leading into the ditch your nation, which follows
you like the stumbling blind men of Brueghel!
What poor arguments you have opposed to us for two months!
1. _War is war_, say you, that is to say without common measure with the
rest of things, above morals and reason and all the limits of ordinary
life, a kind of supernatural state before which one can only bow without
discussion;
2. _Germany is Germany_, that is to say without common measure with the
rest of nations. The laws which apply to others do not apply to her, and
the rights which she arrogates to herself to violate Right appertain to
her alone. Thus she can, without crime, tear up written promises, betray
sworn oaths, violate the neutrality of peoples which she has pledged
herself to defend. But she claims in return the right to find, in the
nations which she outrages, "chivalrous adversaries," and that they
should not be so, that they should dare to defend themselves by all the
means and the arms that remain to them, she proclaims a crime!...
One recognizes there indeed the interested teaching of your Prussian
masters! Great minds of Germany, I do not doubt your sincerity, but you
are no longer capable of seeing the truth. Prussian Imperialism has
crushed down over your eyes and conscience, its spiked helmet.
"_Necessity knows no law._" ... Here is the eleventh commandment, the
message that you bring to the universe today, sons of Kant!... We have
heard it more than once in history: it is the famous doctrine of Public
Safety, mother of heroisms and crimes. Every nation has recourse to it
in the hour of danger, but the greatest are those who defend against it
their immortal soul. Fifteen years have passed since the famous trial
which saw a single innocent man opposed to the force of the State.
Fifteen years have passed since we French affronted and shattered the
idol of public safety, when it threatened, as our Péguy says, "the
eternal safety of France."
Listen to him, whom you have killed; listen to a hero of the French
conscience, writers who have the keeping of the conscience of Germany.
"_Our enemies of that time_," wrote Charles Péguy, "_spoke the language
of the_ raison d'Etat, _of the temporal safety of the people and the
race. But we, by a profound Christian movement, by a revolutionary
effort, at unity with traditional Christianity, aimed at no less than
attaining the heights of sacrifice, in our anxiety for the eternal
salvation of this people. We did not wish to place France in the
position of having committed the unpardonable sin._"
You do not trouble yourselves about that, thinkers of Germany. You
bravely give your blood to save the mortal life, but do not bother about
the life eternal. It is a terrible moment, I grant. Your fatherland as
ours struggles for its life, and I understand and admire the ecstasy of
sacrifice which impels your youth, as ours, to make of its body a
rampart against death. "To be or not to be," do you say? No, that is not
enough. To be the great Germany, to be the great France, worthy of their
past, and respecting one another even while fighting, that is what I
wish. I should blush for victory if my France bought it at the price for
which you will pay for your temporary success. Even while the battles
are being fought upon the plains of Belgium and amongst the chalky
slopes of Champagne, another war is taking place upon the field of the
spirit, and often victory below means defeat above. The conquest of
Belgium, Malines, Louvain and Rheims, the carillons of Flanders, will
sound a sadder knell in your history than the bells of Jena; and the
conquered Belgians have robbed you of your glory. You know it. You are
enraged because you know it. What is the good of vainly trying to
deceive yourselves? Truth will be clear to you in the end. You have done
your best to silence her--one day she will speak; she will speak by the
mouth of one of your own in whom will be awakened the conscience of your
race.... Oh, that he may soon appear and that we may hear his voice--the
pure and noble voice of the redeemer who shall set you free! He who has
lived in the intimacy of your old Germany, who has clasped her hand in
the twisted streets of her heroic and sordid past, who has caught the
breath of her centuries of trials and shames, remembers and waits: for
he knows that even if she has never proved strong enough to bear victory
without wavering, it is in her hours of trouble that she reforms
herself, and her greatest geniuses are sons of sorrow.
_September 1914._
* * * * *
Since these lines were written I have watched the birth of the anxiety
which little by little is making its way into the consciences of the
good people of Germany. First a secret doubt, kept under by a stubborn
effort to believe the bad arguments collected by their Government to
oppose it--documents fabricated to prove that Belgium had renounced her
neutrality herself, false allegations (in vain repudiated four times by
the French Government, by the Commander-in-Chief, by the Cardinal and
the Archbishop, and by the Mayor of Rheims)--accusing the French of
using the Cathedral of Rheims for military purposes. Lacking arguments,
their system of defense is at times disconcerting in its naïveté.
"Is it possible," they say, "that we should be accused of wishing to
destroy artistic monuments, we, the people above all others who venerate
art, in whom is instilled this respect from infancy, who have the
greatest number of text books and historical collections of art and the
longest list of lectures on æsthetics? Is it possible to accuse of the
most barbarous actions the most humane, the most affectionate, and the
most homely of peoples?"
The idea never strikes them that Germany is not constituted by a single
race of men, and that besides the obedient masses who are born to obey,
to respect the law--all the laws--there is the race which commands,
which believes itself above all laws, and which makes and unmakes them
in the name of force and necessity (_Not_....) It is this evil marriage
of idealism and German force which leads to these disasters. The
idealism proves to be a woman; a woman captive, who like so many worthy
German wives, worships her lord and master, and refuses even to think
that he could ever be wrong.
It is, however, necessary for the salvation of Germany that she should
one day countenance the thought of divorce, or that the wife should have
the courage to make her voice heard in the household. I already know
several who are beginning to champion the rights of the spirit against
force. Many a German voice has reached us lately in letters protesting
against war and deploring with us the injustices which we deplore. I
will not give their names in order not to compromise them. Not very
long ago I told the "Fair"[8] which obstructed Paris that it was not
France. I say today to the German Fair, "You are not the true Germany."
There exists another Germany juster and more humane, whose ambition is
not to dominate the world by force and guile, but to absorb in peace
everything great in the thought of other races, and in return to reflect
the harmony. With that Germany there is no dispute; we are not her
enemies, we are the enemies of those who have almost succeeded in making
the world forget that she still lives.
_October 1914._
Edition des _Cahiers Vaudois_ 10 cahier, 1914 (Lausanne, C. Tarin).
III. ABOVE THE BATTLE
O young men that shed your blood with so generous a joy for the starving
earth! O heroism of the world! What a harvest for destruction to reap
under this splendid summer sun! Young men of all nations, brought into
conflict by a common ideal, making enemies of those who should be
brothers; all of you, marching to your death, are dear to me.[9] Slavs,
hastening to the aid of your race; Englishmen fighting for honor and
right; intrepid Belgians who dared to oppose the Teutonic colossus, and
defend against him the Thermopylæ of the West; Germans fighting to
defend the philosophy and the birthplace of Kant against the Cossack
avalanche; and you, above all, my young compatriots, in whom the
generation of heroes of the Revolution lives again; you, who for years
have confided your dreams to me, and now, on the verge of battle, bid
me a sublime farewell.
Those years of scepticism and gay frivolity in which we in France grew
up are avenged in you; your faith, which is ours, you protect from their
poisonous influence; and with you that faith triumphs on the
battlefield. "A war of revenge" is the cry. Yea! revenge indeed; but in
no spirit of Chauvinism. The revenge of faith against all the egotisms
of the senses and of the spirit--the surrender of self to eternal ideas.
One of the most powerful of the young French novelists--Corporal
X.--writes to me:--
"What are our lives, our books, compared with the magnitude of the
aim? The war of the Revolution against feudalism is beginning anew.
The armies of the Republic will secure the triumph of democracy in
Europe and complete the work of the Convention. We are fighting for
more than our hearths and homes, for the awakening of liberty."
Another of these young people, of noble spirit and pure heart, who
will be, if he lives, the first art critic of our time--Lieutenant
X.:--
"My friend, could you see our Army as I do, you would be thrilled
with admiration for our people, for this noble race. An enthusiasm,
like an outburst of the Marseillaise, thrills them; heroic,
earnest, and even religious. I have seen the three divisions of my
army corps set out; the men of active service first, young men of
twenty marching with firm and rapid steps, without a cry, without a
gesture, like the ephebi of old calmly going to sacrifice. After
them come the reserve, men of twenty-five to thirty years, more
stalwart and more determined, who will reinforce the younger men
and make them irresistible. We, the old men of forty, the fathers
of families, are the base of the choir; and we too, I assure you,
set out confidently, resolute and unwavering. I have no wish to
die, but I can die now without regret; for I have lived through a
fortnight, which would be cheap at the price of death, a fortnight
which I had not dared to ask of fate. History will tell of us, for
we are opening a new era in the world. We are dispelling the
nightmare of the materialism of a mailed Germany and of armed
peace. It will fade like a phantom before us; the world seems to
breathe again. Reassure your Viennese friend,[10] France is not
about to die; it is her resurrection which we see. For throughout
history--Bouvines, the Crusades, Cathedrals, the Revolution--we
remain the same, the knights-errant of the world, the paladins of
God. I have lived long enough to see it fulfilled; and we who
prophesied it twenty years ago to unbelieving ears may rejoice
today."
O my friends, may nothing mar your joy! Whatever fate has in store, you
have risen to the pinnacle of earthly life, and borne your country with
you. And you will be victorious. Your self-sacrifice, your courage, your
whole-hearted faith in your sacred cause, and the unshaken certainty
that, in defending your invaded country, you are defending the liberty
of the world--all this assures me of your victory, young armies of the
Marne and Meuse, whose names are graven henceforth in history by the
side of your elders of the Great Republic. Yet even had misfortune
decreed that you should be vanquished, and with you France itself, no
people could have aspired to a more noble death. It would have crowned
the life of that great people of the Crusades--it would have been their
supreme victory. Conquerors or conquered, living or dead, rejoice! As
one of you said to me, embracing me on the terrible threshold: "A
splendid thing it is to fight with clean hands and a pure heart, and to
dispense divine justice with one's life."
You are doing your duty, but have others done theirs? Let us be bold and
proclaim the truth to the elders of these young men, to their moral
guides, to their religious and secular leaders, to the Churches, the
great thinkers, the leaders of socialism; these living riches, these
treasures of heroism you held in your hands; for what are you
squandering them? What ideal have you held up to the devotion of these
youths so eager to sacrifice themselves? Their mutual slaughter! A
European war! A sacrilegious conflict which shows a maddened Europe
ascending its funeral pyre, and, like Hercules, destroying itself with
its own hands!
And thus the three greatest nations of the West, the guardians of
civilization, rush headlong to their ruin, calling in to their aid
Cossacks, Turks, Japanese, Cingalese, Soudanese, Senegalese, Moroccans,
Egyptians, Sikhs and Sepoys--barbarians from the poles and those from
the equator, souls and bodies of all colors.[11] It is as if the four
quarters of the Roman Empire at the time of the Tetrarchy had called
upon the barbarians of the whole universe to devour each other.
Is our civilization so solid that you do not fear to shake the pillars
on which it rests? Can you not see that all falls in upon you if one
column be shattered? Could you not have learned if not to love one
another, at least to tolerate the great virtues and the great vices of
each other? Was it not your duty to attempt--you have never attempted it
in sincerity--to settle amicably the questions which divided you, the
problem of peoples annexed against their will, the equitable division of
productive labor and the riches of the world? Must the stronger forever
darken the others with the shadow of his pride, and the others forever
unite to dissipate it? Is there no end to this bloody and puerile sport,
in which the partners change about from century to century--no end,
until the whole of humanity is exhausted thereby?
The rulers who are the criminal authors of these wars dare not accept
the responsibility for them. Each one by underhand means seeks to lay
the blame at the door of his adversary. The peoples who obey them
submissively resign themselves with the thought that a power higher than
mankind has ordered it thus. Again the venerable refrain is heard: "The
fatality of war is stronger than our wills." The old refrain of the herd
that makes a god of its feebleness and bows down before him. Man has
invented fate, that he may make it responsible for the disorders of the
universe, those disorders which it was his duty to regulate. There is no
fatality! The only fatality is what we desire; and more often, too, what
we do not desire enough. Let each now repeat his _mea culpa_. The
leaders of thought, the Church, the Labor Parties did not desire war ...
That may be.... What then did they do to prevent it? What are they doing
to put an end to it? They are stirring up the bonfire, each one bringing
his faggot.
The most striking feature in this monstrous epic, the fact without
precedent, is the unanimity for war in each of the nations engaged. An
epidemic of homicidal fury, which started in Tokio ten years ago, has
spread like a wave and overflowed the whole world. None has resisted it;
no high thought has succeeded in keeping out of the reach of this
scourge. A sort of demoniacal irony broods over this conflict of the
nations, from which, whatever its result, only a mutilated Europe can
emerge. For it is not racial passion alone which is hurling millions of
men blindly one against another, so that not even neutral countries
remain free of the dangerous thrill, but all the forces of the spirit,
of reason, of faith, of poetry, and of science, all have placed
themselves at the disposal of the armies in every state. There is not
one amongst the leaders of thought in each country who does not proclaim
with conviction that the cause of his people is the cause of God, the
cause of liberty and of human progress. And I, too, proclaim it.
Strange combats are being waged between metaphysicians, poets,
historians--Eucken against Bergson; Hauptmann against Maeterlinck;
Rolland against Hauptmann; Wells against Bernard Shaw. Kipling and
D'Annunzio, Dehmel and de Régnier sing war hymns, Barrès and Maeterlinck
chant paeans of hatred. Between a fugue of Bach and the organ which
thunders _Deutschland über Alles_, Wundt, the aged philosopher of
eighty-two, calls with his quavering voice, the students of Leipzig to
the holy war. And each nation hurls at the other the name "Barbarians."
The academy of moral science, in the person of its president, Bergson,
declares the struggle undertaken against Germany to be "_the struggle of
civilization itself against barbarism_." German history replies with the
voice of Karl Lamprecht that "_this is a war between Germanism and
barbarism and the present conflict is the logical successor of those
against the Huns and Turks in which Germany has been engaged throughout
the ages._" Science, following history into the lists, proclaims through
E. Perrier, director of the Museum, member of the Academy of Sciences,
that the Prussians do not belong to the Aryan race, but are descended in
direct line from the men of the Stone Age called Allophyles, and adds,
"_the modern skull, resembling by its base, the best index of the
strength of the appetites, the skull of the fossilized man in the
Chapelle-aux-Saints most nearly, is none other than that of Prince
Bismarck!_"
But the two moral forces whose weakness this contagious war shows up
most clearly are Christianity and Socialism. These rival apostles of
religious and secular internationalism have suddenly developed into the
most ardent of nationalists. Hervé is eager to die for the standard of
Austerlitz. The German socialists, pure trustees of the pure doctrine,
support this bill of credit for the war in the Reichstag. They place
themselves at the disposal of the Prussian minister, who uses their
journals to spread abroad his lies, even into the barracks, and sends
them as secret agents to attempt to pervert Italy. It was believed for
the honor of their cause for a moment that two or three of them had been
shot rather than take arms against their brothers. Indignant, they
protest; they are all marching under arms! Liebknecht, forsooth, did not
die for the cause of socialism;[12] but Frank, the principal champion of
the Franco-German union, fell under French fire, fighting in the cause
of militarism. These men have courage to die for the faith of others;
they have no courage to die for their own.
As for the representatives of the Prince of Peace--priests, pastors,
bishops--they go into battle in their thousands, to carry out, musket in
hand, the Divine commands: _Thou shalt not kill_, and _Love one
another_. Each bulletin of victory, whether it be German, Austrian, or
Russian, gives thanks to the great captain God--_unser alter Gott, notre
Dieu_--as William II or M. Arthur Meyer says. For each has his own God,
and each God, whether old or young, has his Levites to defend him and
destroy the God of the others.
Twenty thousand French priests are marching with the colors; Jesuits
offer their services to the German armies; cardinals issue warlike
mandates; and the Serb bishops of Hungary incite their faithful flocks
to fight against their brothers in Greater Serbia. The newspapers
report, with no expressions of astonishment, the paradoxical scene at
the railway station at Pisa, where the Italian socialists cheered the
young ordinands who were rejoining their regiments, all singing the
Marseillaise together. So strong the cyclone that sweeps them all before
it; so feeble the men it encounters on its career--and I am amongst
them....
Come, friends! Let us make a stand! Can we not resist this contagion,
whatever its nature and virulence be--whether moral epidemic or cosmic
force? Do we not fight against the plague, and strive even to repair the
disaster caused by an earthquake? Or must we bow ourselves before it,
agreeing with Luzzatti in his famous article[13] that "_In the universal
disaster, the nations triumph_"? Shall we say with him that it is good
and reasonable that "the demon of international war, which mows down
thousands of beings, should be let loose," so that the great and simple
truth, "love of our country," be understood? It would seem, then, that
love of our country can flourish only through the hatred of other
countries and the massacre of those who sacrifice themselves in the
defense of them. There is in this theory a ferocious absurdity, a
Neronian dilettantism which repels me to the very depths of my being.
No! Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and slay those
noble and faithful souls who also love theirs, but rather that I should
honor them and seek to unite with them for our common good.
You Christians will say--and in this you seek consolation for having
betrayed your Master's orders--that war exalts the virtue of sacrifice.
And it is true that war has the privilege of bringing out the genius of
the race in the most commonplace of hearts. It purges away, in its bath
of blood, all dross and impurity; it tempers the metal of the soul of a
niggardly peasant, of a timorous citizen; it can make a hero of Valmy.
But is there no better employment for the devotion of one people than
the devastation of another? Can we not sacrifice ourselves without
sacrificing our neighbors also? I know well, poor souls, that many of
you are more willing to offer your blood than to spill that of
others.... But what a fundamental weakness! Confess, then, that you who
are undismayed by bullets and shrapnel yet tremble before the dictates
of racial frenzy--that Moloch that stands higher than the Church of
Christ--the jealous pride of race. You Christians of today would not
have refused to sacrifice to the gods of Imperial Rome; you are not
capable of such courage! Your Pope Pius X died of grief to see the
outbreak of this war--so it is said. And not without reason. The Jupiter
of the Vatican who hurled thunderbolts upon those inoffensive priests
who believed in the noble chimera of modernism--what did he do against
those princes and those criminal rulers whose measureless ambition has
given the world over to misery and death? May God inspire the new
Pontiff who has just ascended the throne of St. Peter, with words and
deeds which will cleanse the Church from the stain of this silence.
As for you socialists who on both sides claim to be defending liberty
against tyranny--French liberty against the Kaiser, German liberty
against the Czar, is it a question of defending one despotism against
another? Unite and attack both.