least, in all those who are at the front and who are obliged to
assassinate and be assassinated. The newspapers say that it's
hardly possible to restrain the warlike ardor of the fighters....
They lie--consciously or unconsciously. Our chaplains in their
sermons dispute the legend that our military ardor is
slackening.... You can hardly believe how such tittle-tattle annoys
us. Let them be silent, and let them not talk about things of which
they can know nothing! Or better still, let them come not as
almoners who keep to the rear, but into the firing-line, rifle in
hand! Perhaps then they will get to know of the inner changes which
take place in so many of us. According to these chaplains, any one
who is without warlike enthusiasm is not a man such as our age
demands. To me it seems that we are greater heroes than the others,
we, who without being upheld by warlike enthusiasm, accomplish
faithfully our duty, while hating war with our whole souls.... They
talk of a holy war ... I know of no holy war. I only know of one
war which is the sum of all that is inhuman, impious, and bestial
in man; it is God's chastisement and a call to repentance for the
people that throws itself into war or lets itself be drawn into it.
God sends men through this hell so that they may learn to love
heaven. For the German people this war seems to me to be a
punishment and a call to repentance,--and most of all for our
German Church. I have friends who suffer at the idea of being
unable to do anything for the fatherland. Let them stay at home
with a calm conscience! All depends on their peaceful work. But let
the war enthusiasts come! Perhaps they will learn to keep silent.
* * * * *
"Why publish these pages?" I shall be asked by some people in France.
"What good is it, when once war is let loose, to arouse pity for our
adversaries, at the risk of blunting the ardor of the combatants?"--I
answer, because it is the truth, and because the truth substantiates our
judgment, the judgment of the whole world against the German leaders and
their policy. What their armies have done we know; but that they were
able to do it containing as they did such elements as those whose
confessions we have just heard, incriminates still more deeply their
masters. From the depths of the battlefield, these voices of a
sacrificed minority rise up as a vengeful condemnation of the
oppressors. To the accusations drawn up against predatory Empires and
their inhuman pride, in the name of violated right, of outraged humanity
by the victim peoples and by the combatants, is added the cry of pain of
the nobler souls of their own people whom the bad shepherds who let
loose this war have led and constrained into murder and madness. To
sacrifice one's body is not the worst suffering, but also to sacrifice,
to deny, to kill one's own soul!--You who die at least for a just cause,
and who, full of sap and loaded with faith, fall like ripe fruit, how
sweet is your lot beside this torture! But we shall so act that these
sufferings shall not be vain.
Let the conscience of humanity hear and accept their complaint! It will
resound in the future above the glory of battles; and whether she wills
or no, History will place it on her register. History will do justice
between the hangmen and their peoples. And the peoples will learn how to
deliver themselves from their hangmen.
_Journal de Genève_, June 14, 1915.
XVI. JAURÈS
Battles are being fought under our eyes in which thousands of men are
dying, yet the sacrifice of their lives does not always influence the
issue of the combat. In other cases the death of a single man may be a
great battle lost for the whole of humanity. The murder of Jaurès was
such a disaster.
Whole centuries were needed to produce such a life; rich civilizations
of North and South, of past and present, spread out on the good soil of
France, matured beneath our Western skies. The mysterious chance which
combines elements and forces will not easily produce a noble spirit like
his a second time.
Jaurès is a type, almost unique in modern times, of the great political
orator who is also a great thinker, and who combines vast culture with
penetrating observation, and moral grandeur with energetic activity. We
must go back to antiquity to find one who, like him, could stir the
crowd and give pleasure to the few; pour out his overflowing genius not
only in his speeches and social treatises, but also in his philosophical
and historical works;[40] and leave on all things the impress of his
personality, the furrow of his robust labor, the seeds of his
progressive mind. I have listened to him often in the Chamber, at
socialist congresses, at meetings held on behalf of oppressed nations;
he even did me the honor of presenting my _Danton_ to the people of
Paris. Again I see his full face, calm and happy like that of a kindly,
bearded ogre; his small eyes, bright and smiling; eyes as quick to
follow the flight of ideas as to observe human nature. I see him pacing
up and down the platform, walking with heavy steps like a bear, his arms
crossed behind his back, and turning sharply to hurl at the crowd, in
his monotonous, metallic voice, words like the call of a trumpet, which
reached the farthest seats in the vast amphitheatre, and went straight
to the heart, making the soul of the whole multitude leap in one united
emotion. What beauty there was in the sight of these proletarian masses
stirred by the visions which Jaurès evoked from distant horizons,
imbibing the thought of Greece through the voice of their tribune!
Of all this man's gifts the most fundamental was to be essentially a
_man_--not the man of a single profession, or class, or party, or
idea--but a complete, harmonious, and free man. His all-comprehensive
nature could be the slave of nothing. The highest manifestations of life
flowed together and met in him. His intelligence demanded unity,[41] his
heart was full of a passion for liberty,[42] and this twofold instinct
protected him alike from party despotism and anarchy. His spirit sought
to encompass all things, not in order to do violence to them, but to
bring them into harmony. Above all, he had the power of seeing the
_human_ element in all things, and this universal sympathy was equally
averse to narrow negation and fanatical affirmation. All intolerance
inspired him with horror.[43]
He had put himself at the head of a great revolutionary party, but it
was with the desire "of saving the great work of democratic revolution
from the sickening and brutal odor of blood, murder, and hatred which
still clings to the memory of the middle-class Revolution." In his own
name, and in the name of his party, he demanded "with regard to all
doctrines, respect for the human personality and for the spirit which is
manifested in each." The mere feeling of the moral antagonism which
exists between man and man, even when there is no open conflict, the
sense of the invisible barriers which render human brotherhood
impossible, was painful to him. He could not read those words of
Cardinal Newman in which he speaks of the gulf of damnation, which, even
in this life, is fixed between men, without having "a sort of
nightmare.... He saw the abyss ready to gape beneath the feet of fragile
and unhappy human beings who think themselves bound together by a
community of sympathy and suffering"--the sadness of this thought
obsessed him.
To fill in this abyss of misunderstanding was his life-work. Herein lay
the originality of his standpoint, that although he was the spokesman of
the most advanced parties, he became the continual mediator between
conflicting ideas. He sought to unite them all in the service of
progress and of the common good. In philosophy he united idealism and
realism--in history, the past and the present--in politics, the love of
his own country and a respect for other countries.[44] He refrained from
denouncing that which has been, in the name of that which is to be, as
many so-called free-thinkers have done; and far from condemning, he
upheld the theories of all those who had been fighters in past
centuries, to whatever party they might have belonged. "We reverence the
past," he said. "Not in vain have blazed the hearths of all the
generations of mankind--but it is we who are advancing, who are
fighting for a new ideal, it is we who are the true inheritors of the
hearth of our ancestors. We have taken the flame thereof, you have
preserved only the ashes." (January, 1909.) In his Introduction to
_l'Histoire socialiste de la Révolution_, in which he attempts to
reconcile Plutarch, Michelet, and Karl Marx, he writes: "We hail with
equal respect all men of heroic will. History, even when conceived as a
study of economic forms, will never dispense with individual valor and
nobility. The moral level of society tomorrow will be determined by the
standard of morality of conscience today. So that, to offer the examples
of all the heroic fighters who for the past century have been inspired
by an ideal and held death in sublime contempt, is to do revolutionary
work." In everything he touches he achieves a generous synthesis of
life; he imposes his grand panoramic conception of the universe, the
sense of the manifold and moving unity of all things. This admirable
equilibrium of countless elements presupposes in the man who achieves it
magnificent health of body and of mind, a mastery of his whole being.
And Jaurès possessed this mastery, and because of it he was the pilot of
European democracy.
How clear and far reaching was his foresight! In years to come, when the
record of the war of today is set down, he will appear therein as a
terrible witness. Was there anything he did not foresee? One needs only
to read through his speeches during the last ten years.[45] It is yet
too early, in the midst of the conflict, to quote freely his predictions
concerning the coming retribution. Let us recall only his agonized
presentiment, ever since the year 1905, of the monstrous war which was
imminent;[46] his consciousness "of the antagonism, now muffled, now
acute, but always profound and terrible, between Germany and England"
(November 18, 1909);[47] his denunciation of the secret dealings of
European finance and diplomacy, dealings which are encouraged by the
"torpor of public spirit"; his cry of alarm at "the sensational lies of
the press, actuated by the rotten system of capitalism, sowing panic and
hatred, and playing cynically with the lives of millions of men, through
mere financial considerations or delirious pride"; his contemptuous
words for those whom he calls "the jockeys of his country"; his clear
perception of all responsibilities;[48] his foreknowledge of the
domesticated attitude which would be adopted in case of war by the
Social-democratic party of Germany, to whom he showed, as in a mirror
(at the Amsterdam Congress in 1904) their haughty weakness, their lack
of revolutionary tradition, their want of parliamentary strength, their
"formidable powerlessness";[49] of the attitude which certain leaders of
French Socialism, too, and amongst others Jules Guesde, would maintain
in the conflict between the great States of Europe;[50] and, looking
even beyond the war, his premonition of the consequences, near and
remote, national and international, of this conflict of nations.
How would he have acted had he lived? The proletariat of Europe looked
to him for guidance, and had faith in him--Camille Huysmans has said so
in the speech delivered at his grave in the name of the Workers'
International.[51] There can be no doubt that when he had fought against
the war until all hope of preventing it was gone, he would have yielded
loyally to the common duty of national defense and taken part in it with
all his might. He had announced this point of view at the Congress in
Stuttgart, in 1907, in full agreement therein with Vandervelde and
Bebel: "If, whatever the circumstances, a nation were to refuse from the
outset to defend itself, it would be entirely at the mercy of the
Governments of violence, barbarism, and reaction.... A unity of mankind
which was the result of the absorption of conquered nations by one
dominating nation would be a unity realized in slavery." On his return
to Paris, in giving an account of the Congress to French Socialists
(September 7, 1907, at the Tivoli Vaux-Hall), he impressed upon them
their double duty--war against war, so long as it is only a menace upon
the horizon, and in the hour of danger war in defense of national
independence. For this great European was also a great Frenchman.[52]
Yet it is certain, too, that the firm accomplishment of his patriotic
duty would not have prevented him from maintaining his human ideals, and
watching with untiring eyes for every opportunity of reconstructing the
shattered unity. Certainly he would not have allowed the vessel of
socialism to drift, as his feeble successors have done.
* * * * *
He has passed from us. But the reflection of his luminous genius, his
kindness in the bitter struggle, his indestructible optimism even in the
midst of disaster, shine above the carnage of Europe, over which the
dusk is gathering, like the splendor of the setting sun.
There is one page which he wrote, which cannot be read without
emotion--an immortal page in which he represents the noble Herakles,
resting after his labors on the maternal earth:
"There are hours," he says, "when in feeling the earth beneath our feet,
we experience a joy deep and tranquil as the earth herself. How often
on my journey along footpaths and across fields I have realized suddenly
that it was indeed the earth on which I trod, that I belonged to her, as
she belonged to me! Then without thinking I went more slowly, because it
was not worth while to hasten across her surface, because I was
conscious of her and possessed her at each step I took, and my soul was
moving within her depths. How many times at the fall of day, as I lay by
the side of a ditch, my eyes turned towards the faint blue of the
eastern sky, I have suddenly realized that the earth was speeding on her
journey hastening from the fatigues of the day and the limited horizons
which the sun illumines, and rushing with prodigious force towards the
serenity of night and unlimited horizons, and bearing me with her. I
felt in my body as in my soul, and in the earth herself as in my body,
the thrill of this journey, and a strange sweetness in those blue spaces
which opened out before us, without a shock, without a fold, without a
murmur. Oh! how much deeper and more intense is this kinship of our
flesh with the earth, than the vague and wandering kinship of our eyes
with the starry heavens. How much less beautiful the night with its
stars would be to us, did we not feel ourselves at the same time bound
to the earth."
He has returned to the earth--that earth which belonged to him, that
earth to which he belonged. They have again taken possession of each
other, and his spirit is even now warming and humanizing her. Beneath
the torrents of blood shed upon his tomb the new life and the peace of
tomorrow are already springing. It was a favorite and often repeated
thought of Jaurès, as of Heraclitus of old, that nothing can interrupt
the flow of things, that "peace is only a form or aspect of war, war
only a form or aspect of peace, and what is conflict today is the
beginning of the reconciliation of tomorrow."
R. R.
_Journal de Genève_, August 2, 1915.
NOTES
TO PAGE 19 ("LETTER TO GERHART HAUPTMANN")
The letter to Gerhart Hauptmann, written after the destruction of
Louvain, and in the stress of the emotion aroused by the first news, was
provoked by a high-sounding article of Hauptmann which appeared a few
days previously. In that letter he rebutted the accusation of barbarism
hurled against Germany, and returned it ... against Belgium. The article
ended as follows:
" ... I assure M. Maeterlinck that no one in Germany thinks of imitating
the act of his 'civilized nation.' We prefer to be and to remain the
German barbarians for whom the women and the children of our enemies are
sacred. I can assure him that we never thoughtlessly massacre and make
martyrs of Belgian women and children. Our witnesses are on our
frontiers; the socialist beside the bourgeois, the peasant beside the
savant, and the prince beside the workman: and all fight with a full
realization of the object, for a noble and rich national treasure, for
internal and external goods which aid the progress and the ascent of
humanity."
TO PAGE 41 ("ABOVE THE BATTLE")
My enemies have not failed to make use of this passage to attribute to
me sentiments of contempt with regard to the peoples of Asia and Africa.
This charge is all the less justified in that I have precious
friendships amongst the intellectuals of Asia, with whom I have remained
in correspondence during this war. These friends have been so little
misled as to my real thought that one of them, a leading Hindu writer,
Ananda Coomaraswamy, has dedicated to me an admirable essay which
appeared in the _New Age_ (December 1914), entitled "A World Policy for
India," but--
1. Asiatic troops, recruited amongst races of professional warriors, in
no way represent the thought of Asia, as Coomaraswamy agrees.
2. The heroism of the troops of Africa and Asia is not under discussion.
There was no need for the hecatombs, which have been made during the
past year, to evoke admiration for their splendid devotion.
3. As regards barbarism, I am glad to confess that now the "white-skins"
can no longer reproach "skins, black, red, or yellow" in this respect.
4. It is not the latter but the former whom I blame. I denounce today
once more with as much vigor as fourteen months ago, the short-sighted
policy which has introduced Africa and Asia[53] into the quarrels of
Europe. The future will justify my indictment.
R. R.
* * * * *
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
INDEX
Abattoir of Ypres and Dixmude, the, 103.
Absurdity, a ferocious, 47.
Academicians and Professoren, the voice of, 153.
Academy of moral science, the, 44.
Address to the Civilized Nations, 60.
Ador, M. Gustave, 83.
Adversary, A Frenchman does not judge his, unheard, 17, 31.
_Agence internationale des prisonniers de guerre_, 83.
Ajax, the madness of, 78.
Albert, King, 93.
Allies, the, 73, 98.
Allophyles, 44.
Angell, Norman, 137.
Apostles, rival, 45.
Architecture like Rheims, a piece of, 24.
Archbishop of Canterbury, 12, 145.
Arguments, furious, 119.
Armies of the Marne and Meuse, 40.
Art, 16.
Aryan race, 44.
Asia and Africa, forces of, 99;
ethnological signification of the terms of, 194.
Atrocities committed in Flanders, 25;
in Russia, 70.
Attila, 21.
_Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer
in Deutschland_, 146.
Austerlitz, 45.
Austria, 50.
Authors of these wars, criminal, 42.
Babut, C. E., 76.
Bach, 44, 163.
Baker, M. P., J. Allen-, 145.
Banking and war, the justification of, 110.
Baptism of blood, 152.
Barbarians from the poles and those from the equator, 41, 44.
Barrès, 44.
Baumgarten, D., 146.
Bebel, 189.
Bees of Holy Writ, the, 91.
Beethoven, 58.
Behring, 61.
Belgium, the neutrality of noble, 20, 87, 93, 94.
Bennett, E. K., 12.
Bergson, 43.
Bishops, 46.
Bismarck, Prince, 45.
Blind loyalty, 26.
Bloody soil, 18.
Bonfire, stirring up the, 42.
Books of every kind and of every color, 77.
Boris Godunov, 59.
Brotherhood, 16, 101.
Brueghel, the stumbling blind men of, 30.
Bucher, Dr., of Strasbourg, 104.
Bull in the arena, a, 28.
Cæsar, 121.
_Cambridge Magazine, The_, 11.
Cardinals, 46.
Caste, a military and feudal, 50.
Catalonia, the thinkers of, 122.
Catechism of Force, 139.
Censor, the German, 163.
Central Bureau, the, 146.
Chamberlain, H. S., 28.
Chauvinism, 38, 147, 160.
Christianity and socialism, 45.
Christians of today, 48.
Cingalese, 41.
City of God, 54.
Civilization, the common trunk of our, 16, 41.
Civil war, a, 123.
Combatants, compassion and kindness between the, 101.
Combats, strange, 43.
Comparisons between the two nations, 167.
Congress in Stuttgart in 1907, the, 189.
Contagion, can we not resist this, 47.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 194.
Cornélienne, 100.
Correvon, Rev. Ch., 110.
Cosmic force, 11.
Cossack avalanche, the, 37, 41.
Coster, Charles de, 95.
Courtney, Lord and Lady, of Penwith, 145.
Cubism, 160.
Cyclone, the, 46.
Czarism, the ravenous greed of, 50, 60.
Danger for Europe, grave, 99.
D'Annunzio, 44.
Dante, 25.
Dehmel, 44, 61, 154.
"_Der neue Geist_," 163.
Destiny of nations, 10.
De Unamuno, Miguel, 29.
_Deutschland Über Alles_, 44.
Dickinson, Lowes, 10.
Dickinson, Right-Hon. W. H., 145.
Dilettantism, neronian, 47.
Dogs of war, the, 2.
Dollfus, M. Max., 83.
Don Quixote, 95.
Dostoievsky, 59, 61.
Dryander, Dr. Ernst, 76.
Dunois, Amédée, 14.
Dürer, 163.
Dutch Anti-War Council, 127.
Duty, to seek truth in the midst of error, 26, 169.
Eagles, the three rapacious, 50.
Eckehart, Meister, 165.
Egyptians, 41.
Elite of the World, the, 23.
Emergency committee for the assistance of Germans, Austrians, 144.
Emerson's, a saying of, 117.
Enemies, "for a year I (Rolland) have been rich in," 18.
England, all the hatred is turned against, 102, 145.
Enthusiasm, heroic, earnest, and even religious, 38.
Ephebi of old calmly going to sacrifice, the, 39.
Epic, this monstrous, 43.
Epidemic of homicidal fury, an, 43.
Esthonian nations, 66.
Eucken, 43.
Europe, a mutilated, 43, 123.
Eycks, Van, 95.
Faith in the virtues of one's own nation, 133.
Fatality, 20; of war, 42.
Father, all men are sons of the same, 106.
Fatherland, our earthly, 54.
Finns, the, 67.
Ferrière, M. Adolphe, 89, 168.
Flogged, the privilege of being, 70.
Foerster, Professor W., 146.
Fram, Andrea, 156.
France is ruined, if, 20;
the true, 98;
sublime history, 166.
Frank, 45.
Fratricidal struggle, 90.
Fried, Dr. Alfred H., 171.
Friendly relations exist between the prisoners and their guards, 81.
Fry, Mr. Roger, 11.
Funeral pyre, Europe ascending its, 41.
Galilean barque, the, 143.
George, Stefan, 159, 170.
German prisoners concentrated in France, 81;
my, friends, 99.
Germany, 19;
intellectual élite of, 25;
Kultur, 28;
great minds of, 30, 31;
and England, 187.
God, the great captain, 46.
Goethe, our, 19, 58.
Gondolf, Friedr., 29.
Good and evil, the eternal struggle between, 78.
Gorki, 61.
Greatness, intellectual and moral, 19.
Grodtken, 58.
Grünwald, 163.
Guesde, Jules, 188.
Guilbeaux, Henri, 14.
Haeckel, Professor Ernst, 61, 113, 160.
Hague Court, the, 52.
Hallucinations, passionate, 26.
Hangmen, the people will learn how to deliver themselves from their, 180.
Harden, Maximilian, 115.
Harmony of races, a, 55.
Harrach, Helene Græfin, 146.
Hatred, the wounds of, 91, 100.
Hauptmann, 19, 43, 61, 98, 155.
Herakles, 190.
Hercules, 41.
Heretics, 56.
Hervé, 45.
Herzog, Wilhelm, 57, 163, 170.
Hesse, Hermann, 157.
High Court, a moral, 51.
Hildebrand, 61.
History will pass judgment on each of the nations at war, 15.
Holy Guillotine, 110.
Holy War against Russia, a, 65.
Holz, Arno, 155.
Honor of their state, to defend the, 26.
Hugo, Victor, 120.
Human Mind, the force of, 2.
Humanity is a symphony of great collective souls, 54.
Humperdinck, 61.
Hungarians in distress, 145.
Huns, the, 22.
Huysmans, Camille, 188.
Idealism and German force, 35.
Ideas have no existence in themselves, 118.
Idols, the history of humanity is the history of, 108.
Imperialism, military, financial, feudal, republican, social
or intellectual, 50, 98.
Imperial Rome, 48.
Insulted without even a hearing, 16.
Intellectual élite of Russia, the, 60.
Intellectual leaders, Europe's, 8.
Intellectuals, guilty, 26;
of Germany, 22;
the criminal determination of ninety-three, 28;
provide terrible examples of hatred, 82;
French, 116;
the furious, 151.
Intelligence of the mind, 120.
Intelligent few, the, 109.
Internationalism, intellectual, 111.
International union of women suffrage societies, 146.
Invisible tribunal of humanity, 53.
Ideologues, 2.
Invocation to Peace, 158.
Islam, threats of disturbance in the world of, 99.
Japanese, 41.
Jaurès, 11;
a favorite thought of, 192;
democracy, 186;
the murder of, 181.
Jean-Christophe, 8.
Jena, the bells of, 33.
Jesuits, 46.
Jesus, 15.
Journalists, 162.
Jupiter of the Vatican, 48.
Justice to small nations, 74.
Kalish, 58.
Kant, sons of, 31, 37.
Kill! Kill! I hate the war, 79.
Kipling, 44.
Klein, Dr. Albert, 173.
Klemm, Wilhelm, 159.
Klinger, 61.
Knights-errant of the world, the, 39.
Kock, Hans, 159.
Kolb, Annette, 162, 163.
Kropotkin, 61.
Krupp, 109.
Kultur, 28.
Kulturträger, 67.
Labor parties did not desire war, 42.
_Lamm, der_, 155.
Lamprecht, Karl, 44.
_La Patrie_, 23.
Lasson, 164.
Law is the friend of the weak, 28.
Laws of Nations, the, 52.
Lawyers, 7.
Lee, Vernon, 137.
Legand, René, 187.
Leibnitz, 58.
Leonhard, Rudolf, 156.
_Le Paquet du prisonnier de guerre_, 149.
Letter to Romain Rolland, 64.