MOUNTAIN PATHS
THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK
ESSAYS
THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE
WISDOM AND DESTINY
THE LIFE OF THE BEE
THE BURIED TEMPLE
THE DOUBLE GARDEN
THE MEASURE OF THE HOURS
ON EMERSON, AND OTHER ESSAYS
OUR ETERNITY
THE UNKNOWN GUEST
THE WRACK OF THE STORM
MOUNTAIN PATHS
PLAYS
SISTER BEATRICE, AND ARDIANE AND BARBE BLEUE
JOYZELLE, AND MONNA VANNA
THE BLUE BIRD, A FAIRY PLAY
MARY MAGDALENE
PÉLLÉAS AND MÉLISANDE, AND OTHER PLAYS
PRINCESS MALEINE
THE INTRUDER, AND OTHER PLAYS
AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE
THE MIRACLE OF SAINT ANTHONY
THE BETROTHAL; A SEQUEL TO THE BLUE BIRD POEMS
HOLIDAY EDITIONS
OUR FRIEND THE DOG
THE SWARM
DEATH
THOUGHTS FROM MAETERLINCK
THE BLUE BIRD
THE LIFE OF THE BEE
NEWS OF SPRING AND OTHER NATURE STUDIES
THE LIGHT BEYOND
Mountain Paths
BY
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
_Translated by_
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE POWER OF THE DEAD 3
II MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE 15
III BAD NEWS 31
IV THE SOUL OF NATIONS 41
V THE MOTHERS 51
VI THREE UNKNOWN HEROES 59
VII WASTED BEAUTIES 77
VIII THE INSECT WORLD 87
IX EVIL-SPEAKING 123
X OF GAMBLING 133
XI THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS 165
XII THE TWO LOBES 179
XIII HOPE AND DESPAIR 191
XIV MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM 201
XV HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE 213
XVI THE GREAT REVELATION 229
XVII THE NECESSARY SILENCE 271
XVIII KARMA 281
THE POWER OF THE DEAD
MOUNTAIN PATHS
I
THE POWER OF THE DEAD
1
In that curious little masterpiece _A Beleagured City_, Mrs. Oliphant
shows us the dead of a provincial town suddenly waxing indignant over
the conduct and the morals of those inhabiting the town which they
founded. They rise up in rebellion, invest the houses, the streets,
the market-places and, by the pressure of their innumerable multitude,
all-powerful though invisible, repulse the living, thrust them out
of doors and, setting a strict watch, permit them to return to their
roof-trees only after a treaty of peace and penitence has purified
their hearts, atoned for their offences and ensured a more worthy
future.
Undoubtedly a great truth underlies this fiction, which appears to us
far-fetched because we perceive only material and ephemeral realities.
The dead life and move in our midst far more really and effectually
than the most venturesome imagination could depict. It is very doubtful
whether they remain in their graves. It even seems increasingly certain
that they never allowed themselves to be confined there. Under the
tombstones where we believe them to lie imprisoned there are only a few
ashes, which are no longer theirs, which they have abandoned without
regret and which in all probability they no longer deign to remember.
All that was themselves continues to have its being in our midst. How
and under what aspect? After all these thousands, perhaps millions of
years, we do not yet know; and no religion has been able to tell us
with satisfying certainty, though all have striven to do so; but we
may, by means of certain tokens, hope to learn.
2
Without further considering a mighty but obscure truth, which it is
for the moment impossible to state precisely or to render palpable,
let us concern ourselves with one which cannot be disputed. As I have
said elsewhere, whatever our religious faith may be, there is at any
rate one place where our dead cannot perish, where they continue to
exist as really as when they were in the flesh and often more actively;
and this living abiding-place, this consecrated spot, which for those
whom we have lost becomes Heaven or Hell according as we draw nearer
to or travel farther from their thoughts and their desires, is within
ourselves.
And their thoughts and their desires are always higher than our own. It
is, therefore, by uplifting ourselves that we approach them. It is we
who must take the first steps, for they can no longer descend, whereas
it is always possible for us to rise; for the dead, whatever they may
have been in life, become better than the best of us. The least worthy
of them, in shedding the body, have shed its vices, its littlenesses,
its weaknesses, which soon pass from our memory as well; and the spirit
alone remains, which is pure in every man and able to desire only what
is good. There are no wicked dead, because there are no wicked souls.
This is why, as we purify ourselves, we restore life to those who were
no more and transform our memory, which they inhabit, into Heaven.
3
And what was always true of all the dead is far more true to-day, when
only the best are chosen for the tomb. In the region which we believe
to be under the earth, which we call the Kingdom of the Shades and
which in reality is the ethereal region and the Kingdom of Light, there
are at this moment disturbances no less profound than those which we
have experienced on the surface of the earth. The young dead have
invaded it from every side; and since the beginning of this world they
have never been so numerous, so full of energy and zeal. Whereas in
the customary sequence of the years the dwelling-place of those who
leave us receives only weary and exhausted lives, there is not one in
this incomparable host who, to borrow Pericles’ expression, “has not
departed from life at the height of glory.” Not one of them but has
gone up, not down, to his death clad in the greatest sacrifice that
man can make for an idea that cannot die. All that we have hitherto
believed, all that we have striven to attain beyond ourselves, all that
has lifted us to the level at which we stand, all that has overcome
the evil days and the evil instincts of human nature: all this could
have been no more than lies and illusions if such men as these, such
a mass of merit and of glory, were really annihilated, had for ever
disappeared, were for ever useless and voiceless, for ever without
influence in a world to which they have given life.
4
It is hardly possible that this could be so as regards the external
survival of the dead; but it is absolutely certain that it is not so
as regards their survival in ourselves. Here nothing is lost and no
one perishes. Our memories are to-day peopled by a multitude of heroes
struck down in the flower of their youth and very different from the
pale and languid cohort of the past, composed almost wholly of the sick
and the old, who had already ceased to exist before leaving the earth.
We must tell ourselves that now, in every one of our homes, both in our
cities and in the country-side, both in the palace and in the meanest
hovel, there lives and reigns a young dead man in the glory of his
strength. He fills the poorest, darkest dwelling with a splendour of
which it had never ventured to dream. His constant presence, imperious
and inevitable, diffuses and maintains a religion and ideas which it
had never known before, hallows everything around it, makes the eyes
look higher, prevents the spirit from descending, purifies the air
that is breathed and the speech that is held and the thoughts that are
mustered there and, little by little, ennobles and uplifts the whole
people on a scale of unexampled vastness.
5
Such dead as these have a power as profound, as fruitful as life and
less precarious. It is terrible that this experience should have been
made, for it is the most pitiless and the first in such enormous masses
that mankind has undergone; but, now that the ordeal is over, we shall
soon gather the most unexpected fruits. It will not be long before we
see the differences widen and the destinies diverge between the nations
which have acquired all these dead and all this glory and those which
were deprived of them; and we shall perceive with amazement that the
nations which have lost the most are those which have kept their riches
and their men. There are losses which are inestimable gains; and there
are gains whereby the future is lost. There are dead whom the living
cannot replace and the mere thought of whom accomplishes things which
our bodies cannot perform. There are dead whose energy surpasses death
and recovers life; and we are almost every one of us at this moment the
mandataries of a being greater, nobler, graver, wiser and more truly
living than ourselves. With all those who accompany him, he will be our
judge, if it be true that the dead weigh the soul of the living and
that our happiness depends on their verdict. He will be our guide and
our protector, for it is the first time, since history has revealed its
misfortunes to us, that man has felt so great a host of such mighty
dead soaring above his head and speaking within his heart.
We shall live henceforward under their laws, which will be more just
but not more severe nor more cheerless than ours; for it is a mistake
to suppose that the dead love nothing but gloom: they love only that
justice and that truth which are the eternal forms of happiness.
From the depths of this justice and this truth in which they are
all immersed, they will help us to destroy the great falsehoods of
existence; for war and death, if they sow innumerable miseries and
misfortunes, have at least the merit of destroying as many lives as
they occasion evils. And all the sacrifices which they have made for us
will have been in vain--and this is not possible--if they do not first
of all bring about the fall of the lies on which we live and which it
is not necessary to name, for each of us knows his own and is ashamed
of them and will be eager to make an end of them.
They will teach us, before all else, from the depths of our hearts
which are their living tombs, to love those who outlive them, since it
is in them alone that they wholly exist.
MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE
II
MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE
1
Sir Oliver Lodge is one of the most distinguished men of learning in
our day. He is also one of the oldest, most active and most prominent
members of that well-known Society for Psychical Research which,
founded in 1882, has ever since striven to study with irreproachable
scientific precision all the wonderful, inexplicable, occult and
supernatural phenomena which have always baffled and still elude
the comprehension of mankind. In addition to his purely scientific
works, of which, not being qualified to judge, I do not speak, he is
the author of some extremely remarkable books, such as _Man and the
Universe_, _The Ether of Space_ and _The Survival of Man_, in which
the loftiest and most daring metaphysical speculations are constantly
controlled by the most prudent, wise and steadfast common sense.
Sir Oliver Lodge, therefore, is at the same time a philosopher and a
practical, working scientist, accustomed to scientific methods which
do not readily allow him to go astray; he has, in a word, one of the
best-balanced brains that we could hope to meet; and he is convinced
that the dead do not die and that they are able to communicate with
us. He has tried to make us share his conviction in _The Survival of
Man_. I am not sure that he has quite succeeded. True, he gives us
a certain number of extraordinary facts, but they are facts which,
in the last resort, can be explained by the unconscious intervention
of intelligences other than those of the dead. He does not bring us
the irrefutable proof, such as we should consider, for instance,
the revelation of an incident, a detail, a piece of information so
absolutely unknown to any living creature that it could come only from
a spirit no longer of this world. We must admit, however, that such a
proof is, as he says, as difficult to conceive as to provide.
2
Sir Oliver’s youngest son, Raymond, was born in 1889, became an
engineer and enlisted for the duration of the war in September, 1914.
He was sent out to Flanders early in the spring of 1915; and, on the
14th of September of the same year, before Ypres, while the company
under his command was leaving the front-line trench, he was hit in the
left side by a splinter of a shell; and he died a few hours later.
He was, as a photograph shows us, one of those admirable young British
soldiers who are the perfect type of a robust, fresh, joyous humanity,
clean and bright, and whose death seems the more cruel and the more
incredible as it annihilates a greater aggregate of strength, hope and
beauty.
His father has dedicated to his memory a volume entitled, _Raymond, or
Life and Death_; and we are at first somewhat bewildered at seeing
that it is not, as one might expect, a book of lamentation, regrets and
tears, but the accurate, deliberately impassive and at times almost
cheerful report of a man of learning who thrusts aside his sorrow so
that he may see clearly before him, wrestles with the thought of death
and beholds the rising dawn of an immense and very strange hope.
3
I will not linger over the first part of the volume, which aims at
making us acquainted with Raymond Lodge. It contains some forty letters
written in the trenches, the testimony of his brother-officers’
devotion to him, details of his death and so on. The letters, I may
say in passing, are charmingly vivid and marked by a delicate and
delightful humour whose only object is to reassure those who are not
themselves in danger. I have not time to dwell upon them; and they are
not what most interests us here.
But the second part, which Sir Oliver Lodge calls _Supernormal
Portion_, passes from the life that exists on the surface of our earth
and introduces us into a very different world.
In the very first lines, the author reminds us that he has “made no
secret of his conviction, not merely that personality persists, but
that its continued existence is more entwined with the life of every
day than has been generally imagined; that there is no real breach
of continuity between the dead and the living; and that methods of
intercommunion across what has seemed to be a gulf can be set going in
response to the urgent demand of affection; that in fact, as Diotima
told Socrates (_Symposium_, 202 and 203), ‘Love bridges the Chasm.’”
Sir Oliver Lodge, then, is persuaded that his son, though dead, has
not ceased to exist and that he has not gone far from those who love
him. Raymond, in fact, seeks to communicate with his father as early
as eleven days after his death. We know that these communications or
so-called communications from beyond the grave--let us not prejudge
the issue for the moment--are made through the agency of a medium who
is or believes himself to be inspired or possessed by the deceased or
by a familiar spirit speaking in his name and repeating what the latter
reveals to him. The medium conveys his information either orally or by
automatic writing, or again, although this is very rare in the present
instance, by table-turning. But I will pass over these preliminaries,
which would carry us too far, and come straight to the communication
which is, I think, the most astonishing of all and perhaps the only
one that cannot be explained, or at least is exceedingly difficult to
explain, by the intervention of the living.
About the end of August, 1915, that is to say, not many days before
his death, Raymond, who, as we have seen, was near Ypres, had been
photographed with the officers of his battalion by a travelling
photographer. On the 27th of September following, in the course of a
sitting with the medium Peters, the spirit speaking by Peters’ mouth
said, suddenly:
“You have several portraits of this boy. Before he went away you had
a good portrait of him--two, no, three. Two where he is alone and one
where he is in a group of other men. He is particular that I should
tell you of this. In one you see his walking-stick.”
Now at that time the members of Sir Oliver Lodge’s family did not know
of the existence of this group. They attached no great importance,
however, to the revelations but in subsequent sittings, notably on the
3rd of December, before the photographs had arrived, before they were
seen, more detailed information was received. According to the spirit’s
statements, the photograph was of a dozen officers or more, taken
out of doors, in front of a sort of shelter (the medium kept drawing
vertical lines in the air). Some were sitting down and some were
standing up at the back. Raymond was sitting; somebody was leaning on
him. There were several photographs taken.
On the 7th of December, the photographs arrived at Mariemont, Sir
Oliver’s house near Edgbaston. There were three copies, all differing
slightly, of the same group of twenty-one officers, those in the back
row standing up, the others seated. The group was taken outside a sort
of temporary wooden structure, such as might be a hospital shed, with
six conspicuous nearly vertical lines on the roof. Raymond was one of
those sitting on the ground in front; his walking-stick, mentioned
in the first revelation, was lying across his feet. And a striking
piece of evidence is that his is the only instance where one man is
leaning or resting his hand on the shoulder of another, in two of the
photographs, or, in the third, his leg.
This manifestation is one of the most remarkable that have hitherto
been obtained, because it eliminates almost entirely any telepathic
interference, that is to say, any subconscious intercommunication
between the persons present at the sitting, all of whom were absolutely
unaware of the existence of the photographs. If we refuse to admit
the intervention of the deceased--which should, I agree, be admitted
only in the last resort--we must, in order to explain the revelation,
suppose that the subconsciousness of the medium or of one of those
present entered into communication, through the vast mazes and deserts
of space and amid millions of strange souls, with the subconsciousness
of one of the officers or of one of the people who had seen these
photographs whose existence there was no reason for suspecting. This is
possible; but it is so fortuitous, so prodigious that the survival and
intervention of the deceased would, in the circumstances, seem almost
less supernatural and more probable.
4
I will not enter into the details of the numerous sittings which
preceded or followed this one; nor will I even undertake to summarize
them. To share the emotion aroused, we must read the reports which
faithfully reproduce these strange dialogues between the living and
the dead. We receive the impression that the departed son comes daily
closer and closer to life and converses more and more easily, more and
more familiarly with all those who loved him before he was overtaken
by the shadows of the grave. He recalls to each of them a thousand
little forgotten incidents. He remains among his own kindred as though
he had never left them. He is always present and prepared to answer.
He mingles so completely in their whole life that no one any longer
thinks of mourning his loss. They question him about his present
state, ask him where he is, what he is, what he is doing. He needs no
pressing; he at once declares himself astonished at the incredible
reality of that new world. He is very happy there, reforming himself,
condensing himself, so to speak, and gradually finding himself again.
The existence of the intelligence and of the will, disencumbered of
the body, is freer, lighter, of greater range and diffusion, but
continues very like what it was in the flesh. The environment is no
longer physical but spiritual; and there is a translation to another
plane rather than the break, the complete overthrow, the extraordinary
transitions which we are pleased to imagine. After all, is it not
fairly plausible? And are we not wrong in believing that death changes
everything, from one day to the next, and that there is a sudden and
inconceivable abyss between the hour which precedes decease and that
which follows it? Is it in conformity with the habits of nature? Is
the life-force which we carry within ourselves and which doubtless
cannot be extinguished, is that force to so great a degree crippled and
cramped by our body that, when it leaves this body, it becomes, then
and there, entirely different and unrecognizable?
But I must set a limit to speculation and, lest I exceed the limits of
this essay, I must pass by two or three revelations less striking than
that of the photograph, but pretty strange notwithstanding. Obviously,
it is not the first time that such manifestations have occurred; but
these are really of a higher quality than those which crowd several
volumes of the _Proceedings_. Do they furnish the proof for which we
ask? I do not think so; but will any one ever be able to supply us
with that compelling proof? What can the discarnate spirit do when
trying to establish that it continues to exist? If it speak to us of
the most secret, the most private incidents of a common past, we reply
that it is we who are reviving those memories within ourselves. If it
aim at convincing us by its description of the world beyond the grave,
not all the most glorious and unexpected pictures of that world which
it might trace are worth anything as evidence, for they cannot be
controlled. If we seek a proof by asking it to foretell the future, it
confesses that it does not know the future much better than we do,
which is likely enough, seeing that any knowledge of this kind implies
a sort of omniscience and consequently omnipotence which can hardly be
acquired in a moment. All that remains to it, therefore, is such little
snatches of evidence and uncertain attempts at proof as we find here.
It is not enough, I admit; for psychometry, that is to say, a similar
manifestation of clairvoyance between one living subconsciousness
and another, gives almost equally astonishing results. But here as
there these results show at least that we have around us wandering
intelligences, already enfranchised from the narrow and burdensome
laws of space and matter, that sometimes know things which we do not
know or no longer know. Do they emanate from ourselves, are they only
manifestations of faculties as yet unknown, or are they external,
objective and independent of ourselves? Are they merely alive in the
sense in which we speak of our bodies, or do they belong to bodies
which have ceased to exist? That is what we cannot yet decide; but it
must be acknowledged that, once we admit their existence, which at this
date is hardly contestable, it becomes much less difficult to agree
that they belong to the dead.
This at least may be said: if experiments such as these do not
demonstrate positively that the dead are able directly, manifestly
and almost materially to mingle with our existence and to remain in
touch with us, they prove that they continue to live in us much more
ardently, profoundly, personally and passionately than had hitherto
been believed; and that in itself is more than we dared hope.
BAD NEWS
III
BAD NEWS
1
For more than four years, evil tidings passed night and day over almost
half the world of men. Never since our earth came into being were they
known to spread in crowds so dense and busy and commanding. In the
happy days of peace, we would come upon the gloomy visitants here and
there, travelling over hill and dale, nearly always alone, sometimes in
couples, rarely in companies of three, timid and shy, seeking to pass
unnoticed and humbly undertaking the smallest messages of sorrow that
destiny confided to their charge. Now they go with heads erect; they
are almost arrogant; and swollen with their importance, they neglect
any misfortunes that are not deathly. They encumber the roads, cross
the seas and rivers, invade the streets, do not forget the by-ways and
climb the most rugged and stony tracks. There is not a hovel cowering
in the dingiest and most obscure suburb of a great city, not a cottage
hidden in the recesses of the poorest hamlet of the most inaccessible
mountain, which escapes their search and towards which one of them,
detached from the sinister band, does not hasten with its little
footstep, eager, pitiless and sure. Each has its goal whence nothing
can divert it. Through time and space, over rocks and walls they press
onward, swift and determined, blind and deaf to all that would retard
them, thinking only of fulfilling their duty, which is to announce as
soon as may be to the most sensitive and defenceless heart the greatest
sorrow that can fall upon it.
2
We watch them pass as emissaries of destiny. To us they seem as fatal
as the very misfortune of which they are but the heralds; and no one
dreams of barring the way before them. So soon as one of them arrives,
all unexpected, in our midst, we leave everything, we rush forward, we
gather round it. Almost a religious fear compasses it about; we whisper
reverently; and we should bow no lower in the presence of a messenger
of God. Not only would no one dare to contradict it, or advise it, or
beg it to be patient, to grant a few hours of respite, to hide in the
darkness or to arrive by a longer road; on the contrary, all compete in
offering it zealous if humble service. The most compassionate, the most
pitiful are the most assiduous and obsequious, as though there were no
duty more unmistakable, no act of charity more meritorious than to lead
the dark envoy by the shortest and the quickest way to the heart which
it is to strike.
3
Once again, we are here confounding that which belongs to destiny with
that which belongs to ourselves. The misfortune was perhaps not to be
avoided; but a great part of the sorrows that attend it remain in our
power. It is for us to be careful of them, to direct them, to subdue
them, disarm them, delay them, turn them aside and sometimes even to
stop them altogether.
In effect, we hardly yet know the psychology of sorrow, which is as
deep, as complex and as worthy of study as the passions to which
we devote so much of our time. In everyday life, it is true, great
sorrows, though not so rare as we could have wished, were nevertheless
too widely scattered for us to study them easily, step by step. To-day,
alas, they are the ground of all our thoughts; and we are learning
at last that, even as love or happiness or vanity, they have their
secrets, their habits, their illusions, their sophistries, their dark
corners, their baffling mazes and their unforeseen abysses; for man,
whether he love or rejoice or weep, remains ever constant to himself!
It is not true, as we too willingly agree, that, since unhappiness
must be known sooner or later, our only duty is to reveal it at the
earliest moment, for the sorrow that is yet green is very different
from the sorrow that is already fading. It is not true, as we admit
without question, that anything is better than ignorance or uncertainty
and that there is a sort of cowardice in not forthwith announcing the
bad news which we know to those whom it must prostrate in the dust. On
the contrary, cowardice lies in ridding ourselves of the bad news as
quickly as we may and in not bearing its whole burden, secretly and
alone, as long as we are able. When the bad news arrives, our first
duty is to set it apart, to prevent it from spreading, to master it as
we would a malefactor or a stalking pestilence, to close all means of
escape, to mount guard over it, so that it cannot break forth and do
harm. Our duty is not merely, as the best of us and the most prudent
seem to believe, to usher in the bad news with a thousand precautions,
with short and muffled, sidelong and measured steps, by the back-door,
into the dwelling which it is to devastate; rather is it our duty
definitely to forbid its entrance and to have the courage to chain it
in our own dwelling, which it will fill with unjust and insupportable
reproaches and upbraidings. Instead of making ourselves the easy echo
of its cries, we should think only of stifling its voice. Each hour
that we thus pass in restless and painful intimacy with the hateful
prisoner is an hour of suffering which we accept for ourselves and
which we spare the victim of fate. It is almost certain that the
malignant recluse will end by escaping our vigilance; but here the very
minutes have their value and there is no gain, however small, that we
are entitled to neglect. The hour-glass that measures the phases of
sorrow is much finer and truer than that which marks the stages of
pleasure. The time that passes between the death of one whom we love
and the moment when we hear of his death is as full of pain as it is
of days. Most to be feared of all is the first blow of misfortune;
it is then that the heart is smitten and torn with a wound that will
never heal. But this blow has not its shattering and sometimes mortal
force unless it strike its victim at once and, so to speak, fresh from
the event. Every hour that is interposed deadens the sting and lessens
its virulence. A death already some weeks old no longer wears the
same face as that which is made known on the very day when it occurs;
and, if a few months have covered it, it is no longer a death, it has
become a memory. The days that divide us from it have almost the same
value whether they pass before we hear of it or afterwards. They remove
beforehand from the eyes and heart the blinding horror of the loss;
they step forward and draw it out of the clutch of madness into a past
like that which softens regret. They weave a sort of retrospective
memory which stretches into the past and grants straightway all that
true memory would have given little by little, hour by hour, during
the long months that part the first despair from the sorrow which grows
wise and reconciled and ready to hope anew.
THE SOUL OF NATIONS
IV
THE SOUL OF NATIONS
1
In the admirable and touching pages in which Octave Mirbeau bequeaths
his last thoughts to us, the great friend whose loss is mourned by
all who in this world hunger and thirst after justice expresses
his surprise at finding how in the supreme moments of its life the
collective soul of the French nation differs from the soul of each of
the individuals of which it is composed.
He had devoted the best part of his work to examining, dissecting,
presenting in a blinding and sometimes unbearable light and
stigmatizing with unequalled eloquence and bitterness the weaknesses
and selfishness, the folly and meannesses, the vanity and sordid
money-sense, the lack of conscience, honesty, charity, dignity, the
shameful stains on the life of his fellow-countrymen. And behold,
in the hour of insistent duty, there arises suddenly, as in a fairy
scene, out of the quagmire which he had so long stirred with rough and
generous disgust, the purest, noblest, most patient, fraternal and
whole-hearted spirit of heroism and sacrifice that the world has ever
known, not only in the most glorious days of its history, but even in
the time of its most romantic legends, which were but glorious dreams
which it never hoped to realize.
I could say as much of another nation, which I know well, since it
lives in the land where I was born. The Belgians, in the guise in which
we saw them daily, appeared to give us no promise of a noble soul.
They seemed to us narrow and limited, a little commonplace, honest
in a mean, inglorious way, without ideals or generous aspirations,
wholly absorbed by their petty material welfare, their petty local
wrangles. Yet, when the same hour of duty sounded for them, more
menacing and formidable than those of the other nations, because it
preceded all of them in a terrible mystery; while there was everything
to gain and nothing to lose, save honour, if they proved faithless to
a plighted word; at the first call of their conscience aroused as by a
thunderbolt, without hesitating or glancing at what they had to meet or
undergo, with an unanimous and irresistible impulse, they astonished
mankind by a decision such as no other people had ever taken and saved
the world, well knowing that themselves could not be saved. And this
assuredly is the noblest sacrifice that the heroes and martyrs who have
hitherto appeared to be the professed exponents of sublime courage are
able to achieve upon this earth of ours.
On the other hand, to those of us who had had occasion to mix with
Germans, who had lived in Germany and believed that they knew German
manners and letters, it seemed beyond doubt that the Bavarians,
Saxons, Hanoverians and Rhinelanders, notwithstanding some defects of
education rather than character which grated upon us a little, also
possessed certain qualities, notably a genial kindness, a gravity, a
laboriousness, a steadiness, an uncomplaining temper, a simplicity
in their domestic life, a sense of duty and a habit of taking life
conscientiously, which we had never known or had succeeded in losing.
So, despite the warnings of history, we were struck dumb with amazement
and at first refused to believe the early tales of atrocities which
were not incidental, as in every war, but deliberate, premeditated,
systematic and perpetrated with a light heart by an entire people
setting itself of sober purpose and with a sort of perverse pride
outside the pale of humanity, transforming itself of a sudden into a
pack of devils more formidable and destructive than all those which
Hell had hitherto belched forth into our world.
2
We knew already and Dr. Gustave Le Bon had demonstrated to us in a
curious way that the soul of a crowd does not resemble the soul
of any of its component members. According to the leaders and the
circumstances that control it, the collective soul is sometimes
loftier, juster, more generous and most often more impulsive, more
credulous, more cruel, more barbarous and blind. But a crowd has only
a provisional, momentary soul, which does not survive the short-lived
and nearly always violent event that calls it into being; and its
contingent and transitory psychology is hardly able to tell us how the
profound, lasting and, so to speak, immortal soul of a nation takes
shape.
3
It is quite natural that a nation should not know itself at all and
that its acts should plunge it into a state of bewilderment from which
it does not recover until history has explained them to a greater or
lesser degree. None of the men who make up a nation knows himself;
still less does any of them know his fellows. Not one of us really
knows who or what he is; not one of us can say what he will do in
unexpected circumstances which are a trifle more serious than those
which form the customary tissue of life. We spend our existence in
questioning and exploring ourselves; our acts are as much a revelation
to ourselves as to others; and, the nearer we draw to our end, the
farther stretches the vista of that which still remains for us to
discover. We own but the smallest part of ourselves; the rest, which is
almost the whole, does not belong to us at all, but merges in the past
and the future and in other mysteries more unknown than the future or
the past.
What is true of each one of us is very much more true of a great nation
composed of millions of men. That represents a future and a past
stretching incomparably farther than those of a single human life. We
admit and constantly repeat that a nation is guided by its dead. It is
certain that the dead continue to live in it a far more active life
than is generally believed and that they control it unknown to itself,
even as, at the other end of the ages, the men of the future, that
is to say, all those who are not yet born, all those whom it carries
within itself as it does its dead, play no less important a part in a
nation’s decisions. But in its very present, at the moment when it is
living and putting forth its activity on this earth, in addition to
the power of those who no longer are and those who are not yet, there
is outside the nation, outside the aggregate of bodies and brains that
make it up, a host of forces and faculties which have not found or have
not wished to take their place, or which do not abide in the nation
consistently, and which nevertheless belong to it as essentially and
direct it as effectively as those which are comprised within it. What
our body contains when we believe ourselves circumscribed is little in
comparison with what it does not contain; and it is in what the body
does not contain that the highest and most powerful part of our being
seems to dwell. We must not forget that it grows stronger each day
that we neither die nor come into being, in a word, that we are not
wholly incarnate, and that, on the other hand, our flesh comprises
much more than ourselves. It is this that constitutes all the floating
forces which make up the real soul of a people, forces very much deeper
and more numerous than those which seem fixed in the body and the
spirit. They do not show themselves in the petty incidents of daily
life, which concern only the mean and narrow covering in which a nation
goes sheltered; but they unite, join forces and reveal their passionate
ardour at the grave and tragic hours when everlasting destiny is at
stake. They then lay down decisions which history inscribes on her
records, decisions whose grandeur, generosity and heroism astonish even
those who have taken them more or less unknown to themselves and often
in spite of themselves, decisions which are manifested in their own
eyes as an unexpected, magnificent and incomprehensible revelation of
themselves.
THE MOTHERS
V
THE MOTHERS
1
It was they who bore the main burden of suffering in this war.
In our streets and open spaces and all along the roads, in our
churches, in our towns and villages, in every house, we come into
contact with mothers who have lost their son or are living in an
anguish more cruel than the certainty of death.
Let us try to understand their loss. They know what it means, but they
do not tell the men.
Their son is taken from them at the fairest moment of his life, when
their own is in its decline. When a child dies in infancy, it is as
though his soul had hardly gone, as though it were lingering near the
mother who brought it into the world, awaiting the time when it may
return in a new form. The death which visits the cradle is not the
same as that which spreads terror over the earth; but a son who dies
at the age of twenty does not come back again and leaves not a gleam
of hope behind him. He carries away with him all the future that his
mother had remaining to her, all that she gave to him and all his
promise: the pangs, anguish and smiles of birth and childhood, the joys
of youth, the reward and the harvest of maturity, the comfort and the
peace of old age.
He carries away with him something much more than himself: it is not
his life only that comes to an end, it is numberless days that finish
suddenly, a whole generation that becomes extinct, a long series of
faces, of little fondling hands, of play and laughter, all of which
fall at one blow on the battle-field, bidding farewell to the sunshine
and reentering the earth which they will not have known. All this the
eyes of our mothers perceive without understanding; and this is why, at
certain times, the weight and sadness of their glance are more than any
of us can bear.
2
And yet they do not weep as the mothers wept in former wars. All their
sons disappear one by one; and we do not hear them complain or moan
as in days gone by, when great sufferings, great massacres and great
catastrophes were surrounded by the clamours and lamentations of the
mothers.
They do not gather in the public places, they do not utter
recriminations, they rail at no one, they do not rebel. They swallow
their sobs and stifle their tears, as though obeying a command which
they have passed from one to the other, unknown to the men.
We do not know what it is that sustains them and gives them the
strength to endure the remnant of their lives. Some of them have other
children; and we can understand that they transfer to these the love
and the future which death has shattered. Many of them have never lost
or are striving to recover their faith in the eternal promises; and
here again we can understand that they do not despair, for the mothers
of the martyrs did not despair either. But thousands of others, whose
home is for ever deserted and whose sky is peopled by none but pale
phantoms, retain the same hope as those who keep on hoping. What gives
them this courage which astonishes whenever we behold it?
When the best, the most compassionate, the wisest among us meet one of
these mothers who has just stealthily wiped her eyes, so that the sight
of her unhappiness may not offend others who are happier, when we seek
for words which, uttered amid the glaring directness of the most awful
sorrow that can strike a human heart, shall not sound like odious or
ridiculous lies, we can hardly find anything to say to her. We speak
to her of the justice and the beauty of the cause for which her hero
fell, of the immense and necessary sacrifice, of the remembrance and
gratitude of mankind, of the irreality of life, which is measured not
by the length of days but by the lofty height of duty and glory. We
add perhaps that the dead do not die, that there are no dead, that
those who are no more live nearer to our souls than when they were in
the flesh and that all that we loved in them lingers in our hearts so
long as it is visited by our memory and revived by our love.
But, even while we speak, we feel the emptiness of what we say. We
are conscious that all this is true only for those whom death has
not hurled into the abyss where words are nothing more than childish
babble; that the most ardent memory cannot take the place of a dear
reality which we touch with our hands or lips; and that the most
exalted thought is as nothing compared with the daily going out and
coming in, the familiar presence at meals, the morning and evening
kiss, the fond embrace at the departure and the intoxicating delight
at the return. The mothers know and feel this better than we do; and
that is why they do not answer our attempts at consolation and why
they listen to them in silence, finding within themselves other
reasons for living and hoping than those which we, vainly searching the
whole horizon of human certainty and thought, try to bring them from
the outside. They resume the burden of their days without telling us
whence they derive their strength or teaching us the secret of their
self-sacrifice, their resignation and their heroism.
THREE UNKNOWN HEROES
VI
THREE UNKNOWN HEROES
1
The Belgian government published last year a _Reply to the German White
Book of 10 May 1915_.
This reply gives peremptory and categorical denials to all the
allegations in the White Book on the subject of _francs-tireurs_, of
attacks by civilians and of the Belgian women’s cruelty to the German
prisoners and wounded. It contains a body of authentic and overwhelming
evidence upon the massacres at Andenne, Dinant, Louvain and Aerschot
which enables history here and now to pronounce its verdict with even
greater certainty than the most scrupulous jury of a criminal court.
Among the most frightful incidents reported in these accounts by
eye-witnesses, I would linger to-day upon only two of those which
marked the sack of Aerschot; not that they are more odious or cruel
than the others--on the contrary, beside the unprovoked murders and
wholesale executions at Andenne, Dinant and Louvain, which are of
unsurpassable horror, they seem almost kindly--but I select them for
the very reason that they display more clearly than in its most violent
excesses what we may call the normal mentality of the German army and
the abominable things which it did when it believed itself to be acting
with justice, moderation and humanity. I select them above all because
they show us the admirable and touching state of mind, as displayed
amidst a terrible ordeal, of a little Belgian city, the most innocent
of all the victims of this war, and offer for our contemplation
instances of simple and heroic self-sacrifice which have escaped notice
and which it is well to bring to light, for they are as beautiful as
the most splendid examples in the fairest pages of Plutarch.
2
Aerschot is a humble and happy little town in Flemish Brabant, one of
those modest unknown clusters of habitations which, like Dinant, for
ever to be regretted and buried in the past, nobody used to visit,
because they contained no buildings of note, but which retained and
represented all the more, in the depths of their silence and their
placid isolation, Flemish life in its most special, intimate, intense,
traditional, suave and peaceable aspect. In these half-rustic little
cities we find hardly any industries, at most a malt-kiln or two,
a corn-mill, an oil-works, a chicory-factory. Their life is almost
agricultural; and the well-to-do inhabitants live on the produce or
the rents of their fields, their meadows and their woods. The houses
in the church-square are substantial-looking, more or less cubical in
shape and painted virgin white; their carriage-gates are adorned with
glittering brasses. All through the week the square is almost deserted
and wakens into life only on market-days and on Sunday mornings, at
the hour of high mass. In a word, it is a picture of tranquillity,
of placid waiting for meals and repose, of drowsy, easy existence
and perhaps of happiness, if happiness consists in being happy in
a half-slumber free of remote ambitions, exaggerated passions or
over-eager dreams.
It was here, in this peaceful sojourn of immemorial restfulness, which
not even the war had hitherto disturbed below the surface, that, on
the 19th of August, 1914, at nine o’clock in the morning, after the
retreat of the last Belgian soldiers, the square was suddenly invaded
by a dense and endless stream of German troops. The burgomaster’s
son, a lad of fifteen, hurried to close the Venetian shutters of his
father’s house and was wounded in the leg by one of the bullets which
the victors fired at random through the windows.
At ten o’clock, the German officer in command sent for the burgomaster,
M. Tielemans, to appear at the Town-hall. He was received with
insults, hustled and abused for a _Schweinhund_, or pig-dog, a species
of animal which appears to be indigenous to Germany.
Next, Colonel Stenger, commanding the 8th infantry brigade, and his
two aides-de-camp took up their quarters in the burgomaster’s house in
the church-square and, I may add in passing, forthwith broke open all
the drawers in their rooms, after which they went to the balcony and
watched the march-past of their troops.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, obsessed by the delusion of
_francs-tireurs_, some soldiers, seized with panic, began to fire
shots in the streets. The colonel, standing on the balcony, was hit by
a German bullet and fell. One of the aides-de-camp rushed downstairs
shouting:
“The colonel is dead! I want the burgomaster!”
M. Tielemans felt that his time was come:
“This is a serious matter for me,” he said to his wife.
She squeezed his hand and urged him to keep courage. The burgomaster
was arrested and ill-treated by the soldiers. In vain his wife remarked
to the captain that her husband and son could not have fired, since
they possessed no weapons.
“That makes no difference,” replied the bully in uniform; “he’s
responsible. Also,” he added, “I want your son.”
This son was the boy of fifteen who had been wounded in the leg. As
he had a difficulty in walking, because of his wound, he was brutally
jostled before his mother’s eyes and escorted with kicks to the
Town-hall, there to join his father.
Meanwhile this same captain, persisting in his contention that his
men had been fired upon, compelled Madame Tielemans to go through
the house with him, from cellar to attic. He was obliged to observe
that all the rooms were empty and all the windows closed. Throughout
this inspection, he threatened the poor woman with his revolver. Her
daughter placed herself between her mother and their sinister visitor,
who did not understand. When they returned to the hall downstairs, the
mother asked him:
“What is to become of us?”
Coldly, he replied:
“You will be shot; so will your daughter and your servants.”
The pillage and the methodical setting on fire of the town now began.
All the houses on the right-hand side of the square were in flames.
From time to time, the soldiers apostrophized the women, shouting:
“You’re going to be shot, you’re going to be shot!”
* * * * *