Already there is uneasy hesitation in these castaways' discussion of
their tragedy, in the huge masterpiece of destiny that they are roughly
sketching. It is not only the peril and pain, the misery of the moment,
whose endless beginning they see again. It is the enmity of
circumstances and people against the truth, the accumulation of
privilege and ignorance, of deafness and unwillingness, the taken
sides, the savage conditions accepted, the immovable masses, the
tangled lines.
And the dream of fumbling thought is continued in another vision, in
which everlasting enemies emerge from the shadows of the past and stand
forth in the stormy darkness of to-day.
* * * * *
Here they are. We seem to see them silhouetted against the sky, above
the crests of the storm that beglooms the world--a cavalcade of
warriors, prancing and flashing, the charges that carry armor and
plumes and gold ornament, crowns and swords. They are burdened with
weapons; they send forth gleams of light; magnificent they roll. The
antiquated movements of the warlike ride divide the clouds like the
painted fierceness of a theatrical scene.
And far above the fevered gaze of them who are upon the ground, whose
bodies are layered with the dregs of the earth and the wasted fields,
the phantom cohort flows from the four corners of the horizon, drives
back the sky's infinity and hides its blue deeps.
And they are legion. They are not only the warrior caste who shout as
they fight and have joy of it, not only those whom universal slavery
has clothed in magic power, the mighty by birth, who tower here and
there above the prostration of the human race and will take their
sudden stand by the scales of justice when they think they see great
profit to gain; not only these, but whole multitudes who minister
consciously or unconsciously to their fearful privilege.
"There are those who say," now cries one of the somber and compelling
talkers, extending his hand as though he could see the pageant, "there
are those who say, 'How fine they are!'"
"And those who say, 'The nations hate each other!'"
"And those who say, 'I get fat on war, and my belly matures on it!'"
"And those who say, 'There has always been war, so there always will
be!'"
"There are those who say, 'I can't see farther than the end of my nose,
and I forbid others to see farther!'"
"There are those who say, 'Babies come into the world with either red
or blue breeches on!'"
"There are those," growled a hoarse voice, "who say, 'Bow your head and
trust in God!'"
* * * * *
Ah, you are right, poor countless workmen of the battles, you who have
made with your hands all of the Great War, you whose omnipotence is not
yet used for well-doing, you human host whose every face is a world of
sorrows, you who dream bowed under the yoke of a thought beneath that
sky where long black clouds rend themselves and expand in disheveled
lengths like evil angels--yes, you are right. There are all those
things against you. Against you and your great common interests which
as you dimly saw are the same thing in effect as justice, there are not
only the sword-wavers, the profiteers, and the intriguers.
There is not only the prodigious opposition of interested
parties--financiers, speculators great and small, armorplated in their
banks and houses, who live on war and live in peace during war, with
their brows stubbornly set upon a secret doctrine and their faces shut
up like safes.
There are those who admire the exchange of flashing blows, who hail
like women the bright colors of uniforms; those whom military music and
the martial ballads poured upon the public intoxicate as with brandy;
the dizzy-brained, the feeble-minded, the superstitious, the savages.
There are those who bury themselves in the past, on whose lips are the
sayings only of bygone days, the traditionalists for whom an injustice
has legal force because it is perpetuated, who aspire to be guided by
the dead, who strive to subordinate progress and the future and all
their palpitating passion to the realm of ghosts and nursery-tales.
With them are all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull you
to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing may
change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the historians--and how
many more?--who befog you with the rigmarole of theory, who declare the
inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time when the only unity
possessed by each nation of to-day is in the arbitrary map-made lines
of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by an artificial amalgam of
races; there are the worm-eaten genealogists, who forge for the
ambitious of conquest and plunder false certificates of philosophy and
imaginary titles of nobility. The infirmity of human intelligence is
short sight. In too many cases, the wiseacres are dunces of a sort, who
lose sight of the simplicity of things, and stifle and obscure it with
formulae and trivialities. It is the small things that one learns from
books, not the great ones.
And even while they are saying that they do not wish for war they are
doing all they can to perpetuate it. They nourish national vanity and
the love of supremacy by force. "We alone," they say, each behind his
shelter, "we alone are the guardians of courage and loyalty, of ability
and good taste!" Out of the greatness and richness of a country they
make something like a consuming disease. Out of patriotism--which can
be respected as long as it remains in the domain of sentiment and art
on exactly the same footing as the sense of family and local pride, all
equally sacred--out of patriotism they make a Utopian and impracticable
idea, unbalancing the world, a sort of cancer which drains all the
living force, spreads everywhere and crushes life, a contagious cancer
which culminates either in the crash of war or in the exhaustion and
suffocation of armed peace.
They pervert the most admirable of moral principles. How many are the
crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the
word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is
eternally the same they substitute each their national truth. So many
nations, so many truths; and thus they falsify and twist the truth.
Those are your enemies. All those people whose childish and odiously
ridiculous disputes you hear snarling above you--"It wasn't me that
began, it was you!"--"No, it wasn't me, it was you!"--"Hit me
then!"--"No, you hit me!"--those puerilities that perpetuate the
world's huge wound, for the disputants are not the people truly
concerned, but quite the contrary, nor do they desire to have done with
it; all those people who cannot or will not make peace on earth; all
those who for one reason or another cling to the ancient state of
things and find or invent excuses for it--they are your enemies!
They are your enemies as much as those German soldiers are to-day who
are prostrate here between you in the mud, who are only poor dupes
hatefully deceived and brutalized, domestic beasts. They are your
enemies, wherever they were born, however they pronounce their names,
whatever the language in which they lie. Look at them, in the heaven
and on the earth. Look at them, everywhere! Identify them once for all,
and be mindful for ever!
* * * * *
"They will say to you," growled a kneeling man who stooped with his two
hands in the earth and shook his shoulders like a mastiff, 'My friend,
you have been a wonderful hero!' I don't want them to say it!
"Heroes? Some sort of extraordinary being? Idols? Rot! We've been
murderers. We have respectably followed the trade of hangmen. We shall
do it again with all our might, because it's of great importance to
follow that trade, so as to punish war and smother it. The act of
slaughter is always ignoble; sometimes necessary, but always ignoble.
Yes, hard and persistent murderers, that's what we've been. But don't
talk to me about military virtue because I've killed Germans."
"Nor to me," cried another in so loud a voice that no one could have
replied to him even had he dared; "nor to me, because I've saved the
lives of Frenchmen! Why, we might as well set fire to houses for the
sake of the excellence of life-saving!"
"It would be a crime to exhibit the fine side of war, even if there
were one!" murmured one of the somber soldiers.
The first man continued. "They'll say those things to us by way of
paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they haven't
done. But military glory--it isn't even true for us common soldiers.
It's for some, but outside those elect the soldier's glory is a lie,
like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality, the soldier's
sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that make up the waves
of attack have no reward. They run to hurl themselves into a frightful
inglorious nothing. You cannot even heap up their names, their poor
little names of nobodies."
"To hell with it all," replies a man, "we've got other things to think
about."
"But all that," hiccupped a face which the mud concealed like a hideous
hand, "may you even say it? You'd be cursed, and 'shot at dawn'!
They've made around a Marshal's plumes a religion as bad and stupid and
malignant as the other!"
The man raised himself, fell down, and rose again. The wound that he
had under his armor of filth was staining the ground, and when he had
spoken, his wide-open eyes looked down at all the blood he had given
for the healing of the world.
* * * * *
The others, one by one, straighten themselves. The storm is falling
more heavily on the expanse of flayed and martyred fields. The day is
full of night. It is as if new enemy shapes of men and groups of men
are rising unceasingly on the crest of the mountain-chain of clouds,
round about the barbaric outlines of crosses, eagles, churches, royal
and military palaces and temples. They seem to multiply there, shutting
out the stars that are fewer than mankind; it seems even as if these
apparitions are moving in all directions in the excavated ground, here,
there, among the real beings who are thrown there at random, half
buried in the earth like grains of corn.
My still living companions have at last got up. Standing with
difficulty on the foundered soil, enclosed in their bemired garb, laid
out in strange upright coffins of mud, raising their huge simplicity
out of the earth's depths--a profoundity like that of ignorance--they
move and cry out, with their gaze, their arms and their fists extended
towards the sky whence fall daylight and storm. They are struggling
against victorious specters, like the Cyranos and Don Quixotes that
they still are.
One sees their shadows stirring on the shining sad expanse of the
plain, and reflected in the pallid stagnant surface of the old
trenches, which now only the infinite void of space inhabits and
purifies, in the center of a polar desert whose horizons fume.
But their eyes are opened. They are beginning to make out the boundless
simplicity of things. And Truth not only invests them with a dawn of
hope, but raises on it a renewal of strength and courage.
"That's enough talk about those others!" one of the men commanded; "all
the worse for them!--Us! Us all!" The understanding between
democracies, the entente among the multitudes, the uplifting of the
people of the world, the bluntly simple faith! All the rest, aye, all
the rest, in the past, the present and the future, matters nothing at
all.
And a soldier ventures to add this sentence, though he begins it with
lowered voice, "If the present war has advanced progress by one step,
its miseries and slaughter will count for little."
And while we get ready to rejoin the others and begin war again, the
dark and storm-choked sky slowly opens above our heads. Between two
masses of gloomy cloud a tranquil gleam emerges; and that line of
light, so blackedged and beset, brings even so its proof that the sun
is there.