"What is that face?" gasped a voice.
Those who were able drew near in a circle, like frogs. We could not
gaze upon the head that showed in low relief upon the trench-wall that
the landslide had laid bare. "His face? It isn't his face!" In place of
the face we found the hair, and then we saw that the corpse which had
seemed to be sitting was broken, and folded the wrong way. In dreadful
silence we looked on the vertical back of the dislocated dead, upon the
hanging arms, backward curved, and the two outstretched legs that
rested on the sinking soil by the points of the toes. Then the
discussion began again, revived by this fearful sleeper. As though the
corpse was listening they clamored--"No! To win isn't the object. It
isn't those others we've got to get at--it's war."
"Can't you see that we've got to finish with war? If we've got to begin
again some day, all that's been done is no good. Look at it there!--and
it would be in vain. It would be two or three years or more of wasted
catastrophe."
* * * * *
"Ah, my boy, if all we've gone through wasn't the end of this great
calamity! I value my life; I've got my wife, my family, my home around
them; I've got schemes for my life afterwards, mind you. Well, all the
same, if this wasn't the end of it, I'd rather die."
"I'm going to die." The echo came at that moment exactly from Paradis'
neighbor, who no doubt had examined the wound in his belly. "I'm sorry
on account of my children."
"It's on account of my children that I'm not sorry," came a murmur from
somewhere else. "I'm dying, so I know what I'm saying, and I say to
myself, 'They'll have peace.'"
"Perhaps I shan't die," said another, with a quiver of hope that he
could not restrain even in the presence of the doomed, "but I shall
suffer. Well, I say, 'more's the pity,' and I even say 'that's all
right'; and I shall know how to stick more suffering if I know it's for
something."
"Then we'll have to go on fighting after the war?"
"Yes, p'raps--"
"You want more of it, do you?"
"Yes, because I want no more of it," the voice grunted. "And p'raps
it'll not be foreigners that we've got to fight?"
"P'raps, yes--"
A still more violent blast of wind shut our eyes and choked us. When it
had passed, and we saw the volley take flight across the plain, seizing
and shaking its muddy plunder and furrowing the water in the long
gaping trenches--long as the grave of an army--we began again.
"After all, what is it that makes the mass and the horror of war?"
"It's the mass of the people."
"But the people--that's us!"
He who had said it looked at me inquiringly.
"Yes," I said to him, "yes, old boy, that's true! It's with us only
that they make battles. It is we who are the material of war. War is
made up of the flesh and the souls of common soldiers only. It is we
who make the plains of dead and the rivers of blood, all of us, and
each of us is invisible and silent because of the immensity of our
numbers. The emptied towns and the villages destroyed, they are a
wilderness of our making. Yes, war is all of us, and all of us
together."
"Yes, that's true. It's the people who are war; without them, there
would be nothing, nothing but some wrangling, a long way off. But it
isn't they who decide on it; it's the masters who steer them."
"The people are struggling to-day to have no more masters that steer
them. This war, it's like the French Revolution continuing."
"Well then, if that's so, we're working for the Prussians too?"
"It's to be hoped so," said one of the wretches of the plain.
"Oh, hell!" said the chasseur, grinding his teeth. But he shook his
head and added no more.
"We want to look after ourselves! You shouldn't meddle in other
people's business," mumbled the obstinate snarler.
"Yes, you should! Because what you call 'other people,' that's just
what they're not--they're the same!"
"Why is it always us that has to march away for everybody?"
"That's it!" said a man, and he repeated the words he had used a moment
before. "More's the pity, or so much the better."
"The people--they're nothing, though they ought to be everything," then
said the man who had questioned me, recalling, though he did not know
it, an historic sentence of more than a century ago, but investing it
at last with its great universal significance. Escaped from torment, on
all fours in the deep grease of the ground, he lifted his leper-like
face and looked hungrily before him into infinity.
He looked and looked. He was trying to open the gates of heaven.
* * * * *
"The peoples of the world ought to come to an understanding, through
the hides and on the bodies of those who exploit them one way or
another. All the masses ought to agree together."
"All men ought to be equal."
The word seems to come to us like a rescue.
"Equal--yes--yes--there are some great meanings for justice and truth.
There are some things one believes in, that one turns to and clings to
as if they were a sort of light. There's equality, above all."
"There's liberty and fraternity, too."
"But principally equality!"
I tell them that fraternity is a dream, an obscure and uncertain
sentiment; that while it is unnatural for a man to hate one whom he
does not know, it is equally unnatural to love him. You can build
nothing on fraternity. Nor on liberty, either; it is too relative a
thing in a society where all the elements subdivide each other by force.
But equality is always the same. Liberty and fraternity are words while
equality is a fact. Equality should be the great human formula--social
equality, for while individuals have varying values, each must have an
equal share in the social life; and that is only just, because the life
of one human being is equal to the life of another. That formula is of
prodigious importance. The principle of the equal rights of every
living being and the sacred will of the majority is infallible and must
be invincible; all progress will be brought about by it, all, with a
force truly divine. It will bring first the smooth bed-rock of all
progress--the settling of quarrels by that justice which is exactly the
same thing as the general advantage.
And these men of the people, dimly seeing some unknown Revolution
greater than the other, a revolution springing from themselves and
already rising, rising in their throats, repeat "Equality!"
It seems as if they were spelling the word and then reading it
distinctly on all sides--that there is not upon the earth any
privilege, prejudice or injustice that does not collapse in contact
with it. It is an answer to all, a word of sublimity. They revolve the
idea over and over, and find a kind of perfection in it. They see
errors and abuses burning in a brilliant light.
"That would be fine!" said one.
"Too fine to be true!" said another.
But the third said, "It's because it's true that it's fine. It has no
other beauty, mind! And it's not because it's fine that it will come.
Fineness is not in vogue, any more than love is. It's because it's true
that it has to be."
"Then, since justice is wanted by the people, and the people have the
power, let them do it."
"They're beginning already!" said some obscure lips.
"It's the way things are running," declared another.
"When all men have made themselves equal, we shall be forced to unite."
"And there'll no longer be appalling things done in the face of heaven
by thirty million men who don't wish them."
It is true, and there is nothing to reply to it. What pretended
argument or shadow of an answer dare one oppose to it--"There'll no
longer be the things done in the face of heaven by thirty millions of
men who don't want to do them!"
Such is the logic that I hear and follow of the words, spoken by these
pitiful fellows cast upon the field of affliction, the words which
spring from their bruises and pains, the words which bleed from them.
Now, the sky is all overcast. Low down it is armored in steely blue by
great clouds. Above, in a weakly luminous silvering, it is crossed by
enormous sweepings of wet mist. The weather is worsening, and more rain
on the way. The end of the tempest and the long trouble is not yet.
"We shall say to ourselves," says one, "'After all, why do we make
war?' We don't know at all why, but we can say who we make it for. We
shall be forced to see that if every nation every day brings the fresh
bodies of fifteen hundred young men to the God of War to be lacerated,
it's for the pleasure of a few ringleaders that we could easily count;
that if whole nations go to slaughter marshaled in armies in order that
the gold-striped caste may write their princely names in history, so
that other gilded people of the same rank can contrive more business,
and expand in the way of employees and shops--and we shall see, as soon
as we open our eyes, that the divisions between mankind are not what we
thought, and those one did believe in are not divisions."
"Listen!" some one broke in suddenly.
We hold our peace, and hear afar the sound of guns. Yonder, the
growling is agitating the gray strata of the sky, and the distant
violence breaks feebly on our buried ears. All around us, the waters
continue to sap the earth and by degrees to ensnare its heights.
"It's beginning again."