“the soldiers were leaving our house, their arms filled with bottles
of wine. They opened the windows and removed all the contents of our
rooms. I turned away so as not to behold the pillage. By the lurid
light of the burning houses, my eyes fell upon my husband, my son and
my brother-in-law, accompanied by some other gentlemen who were being
led to execution. Never shall I forget the sight nor the look on the
face of my husband seeking his house for the last time and asking
himself what had befallen his wife and daughter, while I, lest I should
sap his courage, could not call out, ‘I am here!’”
* * * * *
The hours passed. The women were driven out of the town and led like a
herd of cattle, along a road strewn with corpses, to a distant meadow,
where they were penned until morning. The men were arrested and their
hands tied behind their backs with copper wire so cruelly tightened as
to draw blood. They were gathered into groups and made to lie down so
that their heads touched the ground and they were unable to make any
movement. The night was spent in this way, with the town burning and
the pillage and orgy continuing.
Between five and six in the morning, the military authorities decided
that the executions should begin and that one of the largest groups
of prisoners, composed of about a hundred civilians, should be present
at the death of the burgomaster, his son and his brother. An officer
informed the burgomaster that his hour had come. On hearing these
words, a citizen of Aerschot, Claes van Nuffel by name, went up to the
officer, begged him to spare the chief magistrate’s life and offered
to die in his stead. He added that he was the burgomaster’s political
adversary, but that he considered that, at this moment, M. Tielemans
was essential to the town.
“No,” replied the officer, harshly, “we must have the burgomaster.”
M. Tielemans stood up, thanked M. van Nuffel and said that he would
die with an easy mind, as he had spent his existence doing all the
good in his power, and that he would not beg for mercy. He entreated,
however, that the lives of his fellow-citizens and of his son, a boy of
fifteen and his mother’s last consolation, might be spared. The officer
grinned and made no reply. The burgomaster’s brother next asked for
mercy, not for himself but for his brother and his nephew. His request
fell on deaf ears. The lad then got up and took his place between his
father and his uncle. Six soldiers took aim at ten yards’ distance; the
officer lowered his sword; and, as the widow of the heroic burgomaster
says, “the best man in this world had ceased to exist.”
3
I will now quote from the evidence of M. Gustave Nys, an eye-witness of
the horrible drama which nearly numbered him among its victims:
“The other civilians were thereupon placed in rows of three. The
third in each row was to leave it and fall out behind the dead
bodies, in order to be shot. All the civilians had their hands tied
behind their backs. My brother and I stood next to each other: I was
number two; my brother Omer, twenty years of age, was number three.
I asked the officer, ‘May I change places with my brother? It makes
no difference to you who falls under your bullets; but it does to my
mother, who is a widow, for my brother has finished his studies and
is more useful to her than I am.’ Once again he refused to listen
to my prayer. ‘Fall out, number three!’ My brother and I embraced;
and he joined the others. There were thirty of them, drawn up in
line. Then a horrible scene took place: the German soldiers, walking
slowly along the row, killed three at each discharge of their rifles,
waiting between the volleys for the officer’s word of command.”
4
Incidents such as these would pass unperceived if one did not take the
trouble to seek them out and to collect them piously amid the huge
mass of tragedies which for more than four years upset and ravaged
the unhappy country tortured by its invaders. Had they occurred in
the history of Greece or Rome, they would have found a place among
the great deeds that honour our earth and deserve to live for ever
in the memory of man. It is our duty to make them known for a moment
and to engrave in our recollection the names of those who were their
heroes. Thus set down, simply and plainly, as befits historic truth,
in depositions sworn under oath before a nameless registrar who has
stripped them of any literary or sentimental embellishment, they give
at first but a very faint idea of the intensity of the tragedy and
the value of the sacrifice. There is here no question of a glorious
death faced amid the excitement of the fighting, on a vast field of
battle. Nor are we considering an indefinite or overhanging menace, or
an uncertain, remote and perhaps avoidable danger. We have to do with
an obscure, solitary, horrible and imminent death in a ditch; and the
six rifle-barrels are there, aimed almost point-blank, ready, upon a
sign of the officer who accepts your offer, to change you, in a second,
into a heap of bleeding flesh and to send you to the unknown, terrible
region which man dreads all the more when he is still full of strength
and life. There is not a moment’s interval nor a gleam of hope between
question and answer, between existence with all its joys and death
with all its horrors. There is no encouragement, no word or gesture
of stimulation or support, no reward; in an instant, all is given in
exchange for nothing; it is sheer self-sacrifice standing naked and so
pure that we are surprised that not even Germans were conquered by its
beauty.
There was but one manner in which they could have extricated themselves
without dishonour and that was to pardon the two victims; or else,
supposing the thing which was not, which never is the case, that a
death was absolutely necessary, there was a second solution, which was
to accept the offer and to kill the martyr whom they ought to have
worshipped on their knees. In this way they would only have acted as
the worst of savages. But they discovered a third, which doubtless,
before them, the Carthaginians alone would have invented and adopted.
For that matter, they exceeded the fiercest savagery and equalled the
abominable Punic morality in another case which brings to mind that of
Regulus and which will be the third instance of heroism that I intend
to recall.
5
A few days after the events which I have narrated, on the 23rd of
August, 1914, Dinant became the scene of wholesale massacres which
involved exactly six hundred and six victims, including eleven children
under five years old, twenty-eight of ages between ten and fifteen and
seventy-one women.
Nothing can give an idea of the horror and infamy of these massacres,
which form one of the most disgraceful and terrible pages in the long
and monstrous history of Teuton shame. But it is not my purpose to
speak of this for the moment. There would be too much to tell. I wish
to-day only to separate from the mass an episode in which the hero
of Dinant-la-Wallone is worthy of a place beside his two brethren of
Aerschot in Flanders.
Just outside Dinant, near the famous Roche à Bayard, the legendary
glory of the fair and smiling little township, the Germans occupied the
right bank of the Meuse and were beginning to build a bridge of boats.
The French, hidden in the bushes and the windings of the left bank,
were firing on the engineers. Their fire was not very well-sustained;
and the Germans, without the least justification, drew the conclusion
that it was due to _francs-tireurs_, who, for that matter, throughout
this Belgian campaign, never existed except in their imagination. At
that moment, eighty hostages, taken from among the inhabitants of
Dinant, were collected and kept in sight at the foot of the rock. The
German officer sent one of them, M. Bourdon, a clerk attached to the
law-courts, to the left bank, to inform the enemy that, if the firing
continued, all the hostages would be instantly shot. M. Bourdon
crossed the Meuse, fulfilled his mission and pluckily returned to
reconstitute himself a prisoner. He assured the officer that he had
convinced himself that there were no _francs-tireurs_ and that only
French soldiers of the regular army were taking part in the defence of
the other bank. A few more bullets fell; and the officer caused the
eighty hostages to be shot, beginning, that he might be punished as he
deserved for his heroic faithfulness to his pledged word, with the poor
clerk, his wife, his daughter and his two sons, one of whom was a mere
child of fifteen.
WASTED BEAUTIES
VII
WASTED BEAUTIES
1
Under the grey skies and the disheartening rains of this autumnal July,
I think of the light which I have left behind me. I have left it down
there, on the now empty shores of the Mediterranean, and I ask myself
in vain why I parted from it. Yet I was one of the last to tear myself
away. All the others leave in the early days of April, recalled by
legendary memories of the deceitful spring-tides of the north, nor do
they realize that they are losing a great happiness.
It is good, it is wise to escape, amid the blue of sea and sky, the
icy months of our winters, dismal as punishment; but, although in the
south these months are warmer and above all more luminous than ours,
they do not quite make up to us for the darkness and the frost of our
native climes. The brightest and warmest hours, in spite of all,
retain an after-taste of cloud and snow; they are beautiful, but timid;
swiftly and fearfully they hasten towards the night. Now man, who is
born of the sun, like all things, has need of his hereditary portion of
primitive heat and all-pervading light. He has within him numberless
deep-seated cells which retain the memory of the resplendent days of
the prime and become unhappy when they cannot reap their harvest of
rays. Man can live in the gloom, but at long last he loses the smile
and the confidence that are so essential. Because of our twilit summers
it becomes indispensable to restore the balance between darkness and
light and sometimes to drive away, by superb excesses of sunshine, the
cold and the dark that invade our very souls.
2
It reigns at a few hours’ distance from us, the incomparable steady sun
which we no longer see. Those who leave before mid-June do not know
what happens when they are gone. Lo and behold, the real actors in this
wonderful fairyland spring up on every side as though they had been
awaiting the departure of intruding and mocking witnesses. During the
winter, in the presence of the official visitors, they have played but
a tempered prologue, a little colourless, a little slow, a little timid
and restrained. But now of a sudden the great lyrical acts blaze forth
upon the intoxicated earth.
The heavens open their vistas to the uttermost limits of the blue, to
the supreme heights where the glory and rapture of God are outspread;
and all the flowers rend the gardens, the rocks and the heaths, to
uplift themselves and leap towards the gulf of gladness which draws
them into space. The camomiles have gone mad; for six weeks they
hold outstretched, to invisible lovers, their great round clusters
like shields of glowing snow. The scarlet, tumultuous mantle of the
Bougainvilleas blinds the houses whose dazzled windows blink amid
the flames. The yellow roses cover the hills with a saffron-coloured
cloak; the pink roses, of the lovely, innocent pink of maiden blushes,
flood the valleys, as though the divine well-springs of the dawn, which
elaborate the ideal flesh of women and angels, had overflowed the
earth. Others climb the trees, scale pillars, columns, house-fronts,
porches, leap up and fall, rise again and multiply, jostle one
another, lie one on top of the other, forming so many bunches of
effervescing delight, so many silent swarms of impassioned petals.
And the innumerable, diverse and imperious scents that flow through
this ocean of mirth, like rivers which do not mingle, rivers whose
source we recognize at every breath! Here is the cold, green torrent
of the rose-geranium, the trickle of clove-carnations, the bright,
limpid stream of lavender, the resinous eddy of the pine-barren and
the wide, still, luscious lake, of an all but dizzy sweetness, of the
orange-blossom, which drowns the country-side in the vast, unmeasured
fragrance of the azure heavens, recognized at last.
3
I do not believe that the world contains anything more beautiful
than those gardens and valleys of the Provençal coast during the six
or seven weeks when departing spring still mingles its verdure with
the first warmth of advancing summer. But what gives this wonderful
exultation of nature a melancholy which we do not find in any other
spot is the inhuman and almost painful solitude in which it is
revealed. Here, amid this desert, this silence, this emptiness, from
the vine-arbours to the terraces and from the terraces to the porches
of a thousand abandoned villas, reigns a rivalry of beauty which
reaches a poignant agony of intensity, exhausting every energy, form
and colour. There is here a sort of magic password, as though all the
powers of grace and splendour that nature holds concealed had united
to give at the same moment, to a spectator unknown to men, one great,
decisive proof of the blessings and the glories of the earth. There is
here a sort of unparalleled expectation, awful and unendurable, which
over the hedges, the gates and the walls watches for the coming of a
mighty god; an ecstatic silence which demands a supernatural presence;
a wild, exasperated impatience pouring from every side over the roads
where nothing now passes save the mute and diaphanous procession of the
hours.
4
Alas, how many beauties are wasted in this world! Here is enough to
feed our eyes till death! Here is the wherewithal to gather memories
which would support our souls even to the tomb! Here is that which
would provide thousands of hearts with the supreme sustenance of life!
In the main, when we come to think of it, all that is best in us, all
that is pure, happy and limpid in our intelligence and our feelings,
has its origin in a few beautiful spectacles. If we had never seen
beautiful things, we should possess only poor and ugly images
wherewith to clothe our ideas and emotions, which would perish of cold
and wretchedness like those of the blind. The great highway which
climbs from the plains of existence to the radiant heights of human
consciousness would be so gloomy, so bare and so deserted that our
thoughts would very soon lack the strength and courage to tread it; and
where our thoughts no longer pass it is not long before the briars and
the cruel horrors of the forest return. A beautiful spectacle which we
might have seen, which was ours, which seemed to call us and from which
we fled can never be replaced. Nothing more can grow in the spot where
it awaited us. It leaves in our soul a great barren area, in which we
shall find naught but thorns on the day when we most need roses. Our
thoughts and our actions derive their energy and their shape from the
things which our eyes have beheld. Between the heroic deed, the duty
accomplished, the sacrifice generously accepted and the beautiful
landscape which we have seen in the past there is very often a closer
and more vital connection than that which our memory has retained. The
more we see of beautiful things the better fitted we become to perform
good actions. If our inner life is to thrive, we need a magnificent
store of wonderful spoils.
THE INSECT WORLD
VIII
THE INSECT WORLD
1
Henri Fabre, as all the world now knows, is the author of half a
score of well-filled volumes in which, under the title of _Souvenirs
entomologiques_,[1] he set down the results of fifty years of
observation, study and experiment on the insects that seem to us the
best-known and the most familiar: different species of wasps and wild
bees, a few gnats, flies, beetles and caterpillars; in a word, all
those vague, unconscious, rudimentary and almost nameless little lives
which surround us on every side and which we contemplate with eyes that
are amused, but already thinking of other things, when we open our
window to welcome the first hours of spring, or when we go into the
gardens or the fields to bask in the blue summer days.
2
We take up at random one of these great volumes and naturally expect to
find first of all the very learned and rather dry lists of names, the
very fastidious and exceedingly quaint specifications of those huge,
dusty graveyards of which all the entomological treatises that we have
read so far seem almost wholly to consist. We therefore open the book
without zest and without unreasonable expectations; and forthwith,
from between the open leaves, there rises and unfolds itself, without
hesitation, without interruption and almost without remission to the
end of the four thousand pages, the most extraordinary of tragic fairy
plays that it is possible for the human imagination, not to create or
to conceive, but to admit and to acclimatize within itself.
Indeed, there is no question here of the human imagination. The insect
does not belong to our world. The other animals, the plants even,
notwithstanding their dumb life and the great secrets which they
cherish, do not seem wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel
a certain earthly brotherhood in them. They often surprise and amaze
our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There is something, on
the other hand, about the insect that does not seem to belong to the
habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined
to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous,
more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our
own. One would think that it was born of some comet that had lost its
course and died demented in space. In vain does it seize upon life with
an authority, a fecundity unequalled here below: we cannot accustom
ourselves to the idea that it is a thought of that nature of whom we
fondly believe ourselves to be the privileged children and probably
the ideal to which all the earth’s efforts tend. Only the infinitely
small disconcerts us still more greatly; but what really is the
infinitely small, other than an insect which our eyes do not see? There
is, no doubt, in this astonishment and lack of understanding a certain
instinctive and profound uneasiness inspired by those existences
incomparably better-armed, better-equipped than our own, by those
creature made up of a sort of compressed energy and activity in which
we suspect our most mysterious adversaries, our ultimate rivals and,
perhaps, our successors.
3
But it is time, under the conduct of an admirable guide, to penetrate
behind the scenes of our fairy play and to study at close quarters the
actors and supernumeraries, loathsome or magnificent, as the case may
be, grotesque or sinister, heroic or appalling, gifted or stupid and
almost always improbable and unintelligible.
And here, to begin with, taking the first that comes, is one of those
individuals, frequent in the South, where we can see it prowling
around the abundant manna which the mule scatters heedlessly along
the white roads and the stony paths: I mean the Sacred Scarab of
the Egyptians, or, more simply, the Dung-beetle, the brother of our
northern Geotrupes, a big Coleopteron all clad in black, whose mission
in this world is to shape the more savoury parts of his find into an
enormous ball which he must next roll to the underground dining-room
where the incredible digestive adventure is to take its course. But
destiny, jealous of all undiluted bliss, before admitting him to that
abode of sheer delight, imposes upon the grave and probably sententious
beetle tribulations without number, which are nearly always complicated
by the arrival of an untoward parasite.
Hardly has he begun, by dint of great efforts of his forehead and his
bandy legs, to roll the toothsome sphere backwards, when an indelicate
colleague, who has been awaiting the completion of the work, appears
and hypocritically offers his services. The other well knows that, in
this case, help and services, besides being quite unnecessary, will
soon mean partition and dispossession; and he accepts the enforced
collaboration without enthusiasm. But, so that their respective
rights may be clearly marked, the lawful owner invariably retains his
original place, that is to say, he pushes the ball with his forehead,
whereas the compulsory guest pulls it towards him on the other side.
And thus it jogs along between the two gossips, amid interminable
vicissitudes, flurried falls, ludicrous tumbles, till it reaches the
place chosen to receive the treasure and to become the banqueting-hall.
On arriving, the owner sets about digging out the refectory, while
the sponger pretends to go innocently to sleep on the top of the
bolus. The excavation becomes visibly wider and deeper; and soon the
first Dung-beetle dives bodily into it. This is the moment for which
the cunning auxiliary was waiting. He nimbly scrambles down from the
blissful eminence and, pushing it with all the energy that a bad
conscience gives, strives to gain the offing. But the other, who is
rather distrustful, interrupts his laborious digging, looks over the
edge, sees the sacrilegious rape and leaps out of the hole. Caught in
the act, the shameless and dishonest partner makes untold efforts to
play upon the other’s credulity, turns round and round the inestimable
orb and, embracing it and propping himself against it, with mock heroic
exertions, pretends to be frantically supporting it on a non-existent
slope. The two expostulate with each other in silence, gesticulate
wildly with their mandibles and tarsi and then, with one accord, bring
back the ball to the burrow.
It is pronounced sufficiently spacious and comfortable. They introduce
the treasure, they close the entrance to the corridor; and now in the
propitious darkness and the warm damp, where the magnificent stercoral
globe alone holds sway, the two reconciled messmates sit down face
to face. Then, far from the light and the cares of day and in the
great silence of the subterranean shade, solemnly commences the most
fabulous banquet whereof abdominal imagination ever evoked the absolute
beatitudes.
For two whole months, they remain cloistered; and, with their paunches
gradually hollowing out the inexhaustible sphere, definite archetypes
and sovereign symbols of the pleasures of the table and the delights of
the belly, they eat without stopping, without interrupting themselves
for a second, day or night. And, while they gorge, steadily, with a
movement perceptible and constant as that of a clock, at the rate of
three millimetres a minute, an endless, unbroken ribbon unwinds and
stretches itself behind them, fixing the memory and recording the
hours, days and weeks of the prodigious feast.
4
After the Dung-beetle, that dolt of the company, let us greet, also
in the order of the Coleoptera, the model household of _Minotaurus
typhaeus_, who is pretty well-known and extremely gentle, in spite of
his dreadful name. The female digs a huge burrow which is often more
than a yard and a half deep and which consists of spiral staircases,
landings, passages and numerous chambers. The male loads the rubbish
on the three-pronged fork that surmounts his head and carries it to
the entrance of the conjugal dwelling. Next, he goes into the fields
in quest of the harmless droppings left by the sheep, takes them down
to the first story of the crypt and reduces them to flour with his
trident, while the mother, right at the bottom, collects the flour and
kneads it into huge cylindrical loaves, which will presently be food
for the little ones. For three whole months, until the provisions are
deemed sufficient, the unfortunate husband, without taking nourishment
of any kind, exhausts himself in this gigantic work. At last, his task
accomplished, feeling his end at hand, so as not to encumber the house
with his wretched remains, he spends his last strength in leaving
the burrow, drags himself laboriously along and, lonely and resigned,
knowing that he is henceforth good for nothing, goes and dies far away
among the stones.