Unfortunately both he and they had to bear the results of the archaic caste system; injurious as it is and fatal to the community not less than to the individual, raising between the pretended equals of our so-called "democracies" the excessive inequality of fortune, education, and life. Journalists supply the only means of communication between caste and caste, and they form a caste by themselves, representing neither the one side nor the other. The voice of the newspapers alone now broke the silence that surrounded Clerambault, and nothing could stop their "Brekekekex, coax, coax."

The disastrous results of a new offensive found them, as always, bravely at their post. Once more the optimist oracles of the pontiffs of the rear-guard were proved to be wrong, but no one seemed to notice it. Other prophecies succeeded, and were given out and swallowed with the same assurance. Neither those who wrote, nor those who read, saw that they had deceived themselves; in all sincerity they did not know it; they did not remember what they had written the day before. What can you expect from such feather-headed creatures who do not know if they are on their heads or their heels? But it must be allowed that they know how to fall on their feet after one of their somersaults. One conviction a day is enough for them; and what does the quality matter, since they are fresh every hour?

Towards the end of the autumn, in order to keep up the morale which sank before the sadness of the coming winter, the press started a new propaganda against German atrocities; it "went across" perfectly, and the thermometer of public opinion rose to fever heat. Even in the placid Berry village for several weeks all sorts of cruel things were said; the cure took part and preached a sermon on vengeance. Clerambault heard this from his wife at breakfast and said plainly what he thought of it before the servant who was waiting at table. The whole village knew that he was a boche before night; and every morning after that he could read it written up on his front door. Madame Clerambault's temper was not improved by this, and Rosine, who had taken to religion in the disappointment of her young love, was too much occupied with her unhappy soul and its experiences to think of the troubles of others. The sweetest natures have times when they are simply and absolutely selfish.



Left to himself alone, deprived of the means of action, Clerambault turned his heated thoughts back on himself. Nothing now held him from the path of harsh truth; there was nothing between him and its cold light. His soul was shrivelled like those fuorusciti who, thrown from the walls of the cruel city, gaze at it from without with faithless eyes. It was no longer the sad vision of the first night of his trials, when his bleeding wounds still linked him with other men; all ties were now broken, as with open eyes his spirit sank down whirling into the abyss; the slow descent into hell, from circle to circle, alone in the silence.

"I see you, you myriads of herded peoples, hugging together perforce in shoals to spawn and to think! Each group of you, like the bees, has a special sacred odour of its own. The stench of the queen-bee makes the unity of the hive and gives joy to the labour of the bees. As with the ants, whosoever does not stink like me, I kill! O you bee-hives of men! each of you has its own peculiar smell of race, religion, morals and approved tradition; it impregnates your bodies, your wax, the brood-comb of your hives; it permeates your entire lives from birth to death; and woe to him who would wash himself clean of it.

"He who would sense the mustiness of this swarm-thinking, the night-sweat of a hallucinated people, should look back at the rites and beliefs of ancient history. Let him ask the quizzical Herodotus to unroll for him the film of human wanderings, the long panorama of social customs, sometimes ignoble or ridiculous, but always venerated; of the Scythians, the Gatae, the Issedones, the Gindares, the Nasamones, the Sauromates, the Lydians, the Lybians, and the Egyptians; bipeds of all colours, from East to West and from North to South. The Great King, who was a man of wit, asked the Greeks, who burn their dead, to eat them; and the Hindoos, who eat them, to burn them, and was much amused by their indignation. The wise Herodotus who doffs his cap, though he may grin behind it, will not judge them himself and does not think it fair to laugh at them. He says: 'If it were proposed to all men to choose between the best laws of different nations, each one would give the preference to his own; so true it is that every man is convinced that his own country is the best. Nothing can be truer than the words of Pindar: Custom is the Sovereign of all men.'

"It is true everyone must drink out of his own trough, but you would at least think that we would allow others to do likewise; but not at all, we cannot enjoy our own without spitting in that of our neighbours. It is the will of God,—for a god we must have in some shape, in that of man or beast, or even of a thing, a black or red line as in the Middle Ages,—a blackbird, a crow, a blazon of some kind; we must have something on which to throw the responsibility of our insanities.

"Now that the coat-of-arms has been superseded by the flag, we declare that we are freed from superstitions! But at what time were they darker than they are now? Under our new doctrine of equality we are all obliged to smell exactly alike. We are not even free to say that we are not free; that would be sacrilege! With the pack on our back we must bawl out: 'Liberty forever!' Under the orders of her father, the daughter of Cheops made herself a harlot that she might contribute by her body to the building of the pyramid. And now to raise the pyramids of our massive republics, millions of citizens prostitute their consciences and themselves, body and soul, to falsehood and hate. We have become past masters in the great art of lying. True, it was always known, but the difference between us and our forefathers is that they knew themselves to be liars, and were not far from admitting it in their simple way; it was a necessity of nature—they relieved themselves before the passers-by, as you see men do today in the South.... 'I shall lie,' said Darius, innocently. One should not be too scrupulous when it is useful to tell a lie. Those who speak the truth want the same thing as those who tell falsehoods. We do so in the hope of gaining some advantage, and we are truthful for the same reason and that people may feel confidence in us. Thus, though we may not follow the same road, we are all aiming at the same thing, for if there were naught to gain, a truth-teller would be equally ready to lie, and a liar to tell the truth.'—We, my dear contemporaries, are more modest; we do not look on at each other telling falsehoods on the curb. It must be done behind four walls. We lie to ourselves, and we never confess it, not even to our innermost selves. No, we do not lie, we 'idealise.' ... Come, let us see your eyes, and let them see clearly, if you are free men!

"Free! What are you free from, and which of you is free in your countries today? Are you free to act? No, since the State disposes of your life, so that you must either assassinate others or be yourselves assassinated. Are you free to speak or to write? No, for they imprison you if you dare to speak your mind. Can you even think for yourselves? Not unless it is sub rosa—and the bottom of a cellar is none too secure.

"Be silent and wary, for there are sharp eyes on you.... To keep you from action there are sentries, corporals with stripes on their arms, and sentries, too, over your minds; churches and universities that prescribe what you may believe, and what you may not.... What do you complain of, they say, even if you are not complaining. You must not fatigue your mind by thinking; repeat your catechism!

"Are we not told that this catechism was freely agreed to by the sovereign people?—A fine sovereignty, truly! Idiots, who puff out your cheeks over the word Democracy! Democracy is the art of usurping the people's place, of shearing their wool off closely, in this holy name, for the benefit of some of Democracy's good apostles. In peace times the people only know what goes on through the press, which is bought and told what to say by those whose interest it is to hoodwink the public, while the truth is kept under lock and key. In war time it is even better, for then it is the people themselves who are locked up. Allowing that they have ever known what they wanted, it is no longer possible for them to speak above their breath. Obey. Perinde ac cadaver.... Ten millions of corpses.... The living are hardly better off, depressed as they are by four years of sham patriotism, circus-parades, tom-toms, threats, braggings, hatreds, informers, trials for treason, and summary executions. The demagogues have called in all the reserves of obscurantism to extinguish the last gleams of good sense that lingered in the people, and to reduce them to imbecility.

"It is not enough to debase them; they must be so stupefied that they wish to be debased. The formidable autocracies of Egypt, Persia, and Syria, made playthings of the lives of millions of men; and the secret of their power lay in the supernatural light of their pseudo-divinity. From the extreme limit of the ages of credulity, every absolute monarchy has been a theocracy. In our democracies, however, it is impossible to believe in the divinity of humbugs, shaky and discredited, like some of our moth-eaten Ministers; we are too close to them, we know their dirty tricks, so they have invented the idea of concealing God behind their drop-curtain; God means the Republic, the Country, Justice, Civilisation; the names are painted up on the outside. Each booth at the fair displays in huge many-coloured posters, the picture of its Beautiful Giantess; millions crowd around to see it, but they do not tell us what they think when they come out. Perhaps they found it difficult to think at all! Some stay inside and others have seen nothing. But those who stand in front of the stage gaping, they know God is there for they have seen His picture. The wish that we have to believe in Him—that is the god of each one of us.

"Why does this desire flame up so furiously? Because we do not want to see the truth—and therefore because we do see it. Therein lies the tragedy of humanity; it refuses to see and know. As a last resort, it is forced to find divinity in the mire. Let us, on our part, dare to look the truth in the face.

"The instinct of murder is deeply engraved in the heart of nature. It is a truly devilish instinct, since it seems to have created beings not only to eat, but to be eaten. One species of cormorants eats fishes. The fishermen exterminate the birds. And the fish disappear, because they fed on the excrement of the birds who devoured them. Thus the chain of beings is like a serpent eating his own tail.... If only we were not sentient beings, did not witness our own tortures, we might escape from this hell. There are two ways only: that of Buddha, who effaced within himself the painful illusion of life; and the religious way, which throws the veil of a dazzling falsehood over crime and sorrow. Those who devour others are said to be the chosen people who work for God. The weight of sin, thrown into one of the scales of life, finds its counterpoise beyond in the dream where all wounds and sorrows are to be cured. The form of the beyond varies from people to people and from time to time, and these variations are called Progress, though it is always the same need of illusion. Our terrible consciousness insists on seeing and reckoning with the unjust law; for if we do not give it something to bite on, fill its maw somehow, it will howl with hunger and fear, crying out: 'I must have belief or death!' And that is why we go in flocks; for security, to make a common certainty out of our individual doubts.

"What have we to do with truth? Most men think that truth is the Adversary. Of course they do not say this, but by a tacit agreement what they call truth is a sickening mixture of much falsehood and very little truth, which serves to paint over the lie so that we get deceit and eternal slavery. Not the monuments of faith and love are the most durable, those of servitude last much longer. Rheims and the Parthenon fall to ruins, but the Pyramids of Egypt defy the ages; all about them is the desert, its mirages and its moving sand. When I think of the millions of souls swallowed up by the spirit of slavery in the course of centuries—heretics, revolutionists, rebels lay and clerical,—I am no longer surprised at the mediocrity that spreads like greasy water over the world.

"We who have so far kept our heads above the gloomy surface, what are we to do in face of the implacable universe, where the stronger eternally crushes the weaker, and is crushed by a stronger yet, in his turn? Shall we resign ourselves to a voluntary sacrifice through pity or weariness? Or shall we join in and cut the throats of the weak, without the shadow of an illusion as to the blind cosmic cruelty? What choice is left, but to try to keep out of the struggle through selfishness—or wisdom, which is another form of the same thing?"

In the crisis of acute pessimism which had seized upon Clerambault during these months of inhuman isolation, he could not contemplate even the possibility of progress; that progress in which he had once believed, as men do in God. The human species now appeared to him as devoted to a murderous destiny. After having ravaged the planet and exterminated other species, it was now to be destroyed by its own hands. It is the law of justice. Man only became ruler of the world by treachery and force (above all by treachery). Those more noble than he have perhaps—or certainly—fallen under his blows; he has destroyed some, degraded and brutalised others. During the thousands of years in which he has shared life with other beings, he has feigned—falsely—not to comprehend them, not to see them as brothers, suffering, loving, and dreaming like himself. In order to exploit them, to torture them without remorse, his men of thought have told him that these creatures cannot think, that he alone possesses this gift. And now he is not far from saying the same thing of his fellow-men whom he dismembers and destroys. Butcher, murderer, you have had no pity, why should you implore it for yourself today?...



Of all the old friendships that had once surrounded Clerambault, one only remained, his friendship with Madame Mairet, whose husband had been killed in the Argonne.

Francois Mairet was not quite forty years old when he met with an obscure death in the trenches. He was one of the foremost French biologists, an unpretending scholar and hard worker, a patient spirit. But celebrity was assured to him before long, though he was in no haste to welcome the meretricious charmer, as her favours have to be shared with too many wire-pullers. The silent joys that intimacy with science bestows on her elect were sufficient for him, with only one heart on earth to taste them with him. His wife shared all his thoughts. She came of a scholarly family, was rather younger than he; one of those serious, loving, weak, yet proud hearts, that must give but only give themselves once. Her existence was bound up in Mairet's interests. Perhaps she would have shared the life of another man equally well, if circumstances had been different, but she had married Mairet with everything that was his. Like many of the best of women, her intelligence was quick to understand the man whom her heart had chosen. She had begun by being his pupil, and became his partner, helping in his work and in his laboratory researches. They had no children and had every thought in common, both of them being freethinkers, with high ideals, destitute of religion, as well as of any national superstition.

In 1914 Mairet was mobilised, and went simply as a duty, without any illusions as to the cause that he was called upon to serve by the accidents of time and country. His letters from the front were clear and stoical; he had never ceased to see the ignominy of the war. But he felt obliged to sacrifice himself in obedience to fate, which had made him a part of the errors, the sufferings, and the confused struggles of an unfortunate animal species slowly evolving towards an unknown end.

His family and the Clerambaults had known each other in the country, before either of them were transplanted to Paris; this acquaintance formed the basis of an amicable intercourse, solid rather than intimate—for Mairet opened his heart to no one but his wife—but resting on an esteem that nothing could shake.

They had not corresponded since the beginning of the war; each had been too much absorbed by his own troubles. Men who went to fight did not scatter their letters among their friends, but generally concentrated on one person whom they loved best, and to whom they told everything. Mairet's wife, as always, was his only confidante. His letters were a journal in which he thought aloud; and in one of the last he spoke of Clerambault. He had seen extracts from his first articles in some of the nationalist papers which were the only ones allowed at the front, where they were quoted with insulting comments. He spoke of them to his wife, saying what comfort he had found in these words of an honest man driven to speak out, and he begged her to let Clerambault know that his old friendship for him was now all the warmer and closer. He also asked Madame Mairet to send him the succeeding articles, but he died before they could reach him.

When he was gone the woman, who had lived only for him, tried to draw nearer to the people who had been near to him in the last days of his life. She wrote to Clerambault, and he, who was eating his heart out in his provincial retreat, lacking even the energy to get away, welcomed her letter as a deliverance. He returned at once to Paris; and they both found a bitter joy in evoking together the image of the absent. They formed the habit of meeting on one evening in the week, when they would, so to speak, immerse themselves in recollections of him. Clerambault was the only one of his friends who could understand the tragedy, hidden under a sacrifice gilded by no patriotic illusion.

At first Madame Mairet seemed to find comfort in showing all that she had received; she read his letters, full of disenchanted confidences; they reflected on them with deep emotion, and she brought them into the discussion of the problems that had caused the death of Mairet and of millions of others. In this keen analysis, nothing stopped Clerambault; and she was not a woman to hesitate in the search for truth. But nevertheless....

Clerambault soon became aware that his words made her uneasy, though he was only saying aloud things that she knew well and that were strongly confirmed by Mairet's letters, namely, the criminal futility of these deaths, and the sterility of all this heroism. She tried to take back her confidences, or even to minimise the meaning of them, with an eagerness that did not seem perfectly sincere. She brought to mind sayings of her husband's which apparently showed him more in sympathy with general opinion, and implied that he approved of it. One day Clerambault was listening while she read a letter which she had read to him before. He noticed that she skipped a phrase in which Mairet expressed his heroic pessimism, and when he remarked on it she appeared vexed. After this her manner became more distant, her annoyance passed into coldness, then irritation, till it even grew into a sort of smothered hostility, and finally she avoided him, though without an open rupture. Clerambault felt that she had a grudge against him and that he should see no more of her.

The truth was that, at the same time that Clerambault pursued his relentless analysis which struck at the foundations of current beliefs, an inverse process of reconstruction and idealisation was going on in the mind of Madame Mairet. Her grief longed to convince itself that after all there had been a holy cause, and the dead man was no longer there to help her to bear the truth. Where two stand together there may be joy in the most terrible truths, but when one is alone they are mortal.

Clerambault understood it all, and his quick sympathies warned him of the pain he caused and shared; for he made the suffering of this woman his own. He nearly reached the point of approving her revolt against himself, for he knew her deep hidden sorrow, and that the truth that he brought was powerless to help it—still worse, it added one evil more....

Insoluble problem! Those who are bereaved cannot dispense with the murderous delusions of which they are the victims, and if these are torn away their suffering becomes intolerable. Families that have lost sons, husbands, and fathers, must needs believe that it was for a just and holy cause, and statesmen are forced to continue to deceive themselves and others. For if this were to cease, life would be insupportable to themselves and to those whom they govern. How unfortunate is Man; he is the prey of his own ideas, has given up everything to them, and finds that each day he must continue to give more, lest the gulf open under his feet and he be swallowed up in it. After four years of unheard-of pain and ruin, can we possibly admit that it was all for nothing? That not only our victory will be more ruinous still, but that we ought not to have expected anything else; that the war was absurd, and we, self-deceivers?... Never! we would rather die to the last man. When one man finds that he has thrown away his life, he sinks down in despair. What would it be in the case of a nation, of ten nations, or of civilisation as a whole?...

Clerambault heard the cry that went up from the multitude: "Life, at any cost! Save us, no matter how!"

"But, you do not know how to save yourselves. The road you follow only leads on to fresh catastrophes, to an infinite mass of suffering."

"No matter how frightful they are, not as bad as what you offer us. Let us die with our illusions, rather than live without them. Such a life as that, is a death in life!"

* * * * *

"He who has deciphered the secret of life and found the answer," says the disenchanted, but harmonious voice of Amiel, "is no longer bound on the great wheel of existence, he has quitted the world of the living. When illusion vanishes, nothingness resumes its eternal reign, the bright bubble has burst in infinite space, and our poor thought is dissolved in the immutable repose of the limitless void."

* * * * *

Unluckily this repose in the void is the worst torture for a man of the white race. He would rather endure any torment that life may bring. "Do not tear them from me," he cries, "you kill me when you destroy the cruel falsehoods by which I live."

Clerambault bitterly adopted the name that a nationalist paper had given him in derision: "The one against all." Yes, he was the common enemy, the destroyer of our life-giving illusions.

He could not bear this; the thought of making others suffer was too painful to him. How then was he to get out of this tragic no-thoroughfare? Wherever he turned, he found the same insolvable dilemma; either a fatal illusion, or death without it.

"I will accept neither the one nor the other."

"Whether you accept it or no, you must yield—for the way is barred."

"Nevertheless, I shall pass through...."



PART FOUR



Clerambault was passing through a new danger-zone. His solitary journey was like a mountain ascension, where a man finds himself suddenly enveloped in fog, clinging to a rock, unable to advance a step. He could see nothing in front of him, and, no matter to which side he turned, he could hear beneath him the roar of the torrent of suffering. Even so, he could not stand still; though he hung over the abyss and his hold threatened to give way.

He had reached one of these dark turnings, and to make it worse, the news that day, as barked out by the press, made the heart ache by its insanity. Useless hecatombs, which the induced egotism of the world behind the lines thought natural; cruelties on all sides, criminal reprisals for crimes—for which these good people clamoured, and loudly applauded. The horizon that surrounded the poor human creatures in their burrow had never seemed so dark and pitiless.

Clerambault asked himself if the law of love that he felt within himself had not been designed for other worlds, and different humanities. The mail had brought him letters full of fresh threats; and knowing that, in the tragic absurdity of the time, his life was at the mercy of the first madman who happened to turn up, he hoped secretly that he might not have long to wait. But being of good stock, he kept on his way, his head up as usual, working steadily and methodically at his daily task so as to gain the end, no matter what that might be, of the path whereon he had set his feet.

He remembered that on this day he had promised to go and see his niece Aline, who had just been confined. She was the daughter of a sister who had died, and who had been very dear to him. A little older than Maxime, she had been brought up with him. As she grew into girlhood she developed a complicated character. Restless and discontented, always thinking of herself, she wanted to be loved and to tyrannise. She had also too much curiosity; dangerous experiences were an attraction to her, and with all this she was rather dry, but emotional, vindictive and high-tempered. Still, when she chose she could be tender and attractive. Maxime and she had played the game together, and carried it pretty far; so that it had been necessary to watch them closely. In spite of his irony, Maxime had been caught by the dark eyes that pierced through him with their electric thrill; and Aline was irritated and attracted by Maxime's mockery. They had loved and quarrelled furiously, and then they had both gone on to something else. She had shot arrows into several other hearts; and then, when she thought the right time had come,—there is always a time for everything,—she had married, in the most reasonable way, a successful, prosperous man of business, head of a firm which sold artistic and ecclesiastical furniture in the Rue Bonaparte. She was about to have a child when her husband was ordered to the front. There could be no doubt of her ardent patriotism; for self-love includes one's country. Clerambault would never have expected to find any sympathy in her for his theories of fraternal pity. She had little enough for her friends, but none at all for her enemies. She would have ground them in a mortar with the same cold satisfaction that she felt when she tormented hearts or teased insects because something or somebody had vexed her.

As the fruit within her ripened, her attention was concentrated upon it; all the strength of her heart seemed to flow inward. The war receded; the cannon of Noyon sounded no longer in her ears. When she spoke of the war,—which she did less and less every day,—you would have thought that she was talking of some distant colonial expedition. Of course she remembered the dangers that threatened her husband, and pitied him naturally:—"Poor dear boy!" with a little smile as much as to say, "He has not much luck. Not very clever, you know." ... But she did not dwell on the subject, and, thank Heaven! it left no traces on her mind. She had paid her score, she thought, and her conscience was at rest; now she was in haste to go back to the world's most serious task. One really would have supposed that the whole world hung on the egg that she was about to lay.

Clerambault had been so absorbed by his struggles that he had not seen Aline for months, and had therefore been unable to follow the change in her mood. Rosine might have spoken of it before him, but he had paid no attention. Within the last twenty-four hours he had heard in quick succession of the birth of the baby and of the fact that Aline's husband was missing, like Maxime, and he immediately pictured to himself the suffering of the young mother. He thought of her as he had always known her—vibrating between pleasure and pain, but always feeling the latter more keenly, giving herself up to it, and even when she was happy, finding reasons for distress. She was violent too, bitter, agitated, fighting against fate, and apt to be vexed with everyone around her. He was not sure that she was not angry with him personally, on account of his ideas about reconciliation now that she must be breathing out vengeance. He knew that his attitude was a scandal in the family, and that no one would be less disposed to tolerate it than Aline. But no matter how she received him, he felt that he must go to her and help her in any way that his affection could suggest. Expecting a storm, but resigned to it, he climbed up the stairs and rang the bell at his niece's door.

He found her lying in bed with the infant, which she had had placed by her side. She looked calm and young, with a sweet expression of beaming happiness on her face. She was like the blooming older sister of the tiny baby, at whom she looked with adoring laughter, as he lay there waving his little spidery legs, his mouth open, hardly alive as yet, still dreaming of the dark warm place from which he had come. She greeted Clerambault with a cry of triumph:

"Oh, Uncle dear, how sweet of you to come! Do look at him! Did you ever see such a darling?"

She was so proud of her wonderful masterpiece that she was positively grateful to anyone who would look at him. Clerambault had never seen her so pretty and so sweet. He hardly saw the child, though he went through all the antics that politeness required, making inarticulate admiring noises which the mother expected and snapped up like a bird. He saw only her happy face, her lovely smiling eyes, and heard her charming childish laughter. How good it is to see anyone so happy! All the things that he had come prepared to say to her went clean out of his head—all useless and out of place. The only thing necessary was to gaze on the infant wonder, and share the delight of the hen over her chick, joining in her delicious cluck of innocent vanity.

The shadow of the war, however, did pass before his eyes for a moment, the thought of the brutal, useless carnage, the dead son, the missing husband; and as he bent over the child he could not help thinking with a sad smile:

"Why bring children into the world, if it is to butcher them like this? I wonder what will happen to this poor little chap twenty years hence?"

Thoughts like these did not trouble the mother. They could not dim her sunshine. All cares seemed far away. She could see nothing but the "joy that a man was born into the world."

This man-child is to each mother in turn the incarnation of all the hope of humanity. The sadness and folly of the present day, what do they matter? It is he perhaps who will put an end to them. He is for every mother the miracle, the promised Messiah!...

Just as he was going, Clerambault ventured a word of sympathy as to her husband. She sighed deeply:

"Poor Armand! I'm sure that he was taken prisoner."

"Have you had any news?" asked Clerambault.

"No, no, but it is more than probable.... I am almost certain. If not, you know, I should have heard...."

She seemed to brush away the disagreeable thought, as if it were a fly. (Go away! How did it get in here?)

Then she added, the smile coming back into her eyes:

"It will be much better for him, he can rest. I am easier about him there, than when he was in the trenches...." And then, her mind springing back to her world's wonder:

"Won't he be glad when he sees the treasure the good God has sent me?"...

It was when Clerambault stood up to go that she condescended to remember that there were sorrows still in the world. She thought of Maxime's death, and did drop a word of pretty sympathy. But how clear it was that at bottom she was completely indifferent! Absolutely so ... though full of good-will, which was something with her. More surprising still, softened by her new happiness, she had a glimpse of the tired face and sad heart of the old man. She had a vague recollection that he had done something foolish, and had trouble in consequence. And instead of scolding him as he deserved, she forgave him tacitly, with a magnanimous smile, like a little princess. "Dear Uncle," she said, with an affectionate if slightly patronising tone: "you must not worry yourself, it will all come out right.... Give me a kiss!"

As Clerambault went away he was amused by the consolation he had received from her whom he had gone to console. He realised how slight our suffering must appear in the eyes of indifferent Nature. All her concern is for the bloom of the coming spring. Let the dead leaves fall now to the ground, the tree will grow all the better and put forth fresh foliage in due season.... Lovely, beloved Spring!



Those who can never bloom again find you very cruel, gentle Spring! Those who have lost all that they loved, their hopes, their strength, their youth—everything that made life worth living to them....

The world was full of mutilated bodies and souls; some bitterly lamenting their lost happiness, and some, yet more miserable, sorrowing for what had been denied them, the cup dashed from their lips, in the full bloom of love, and of their twenty years.

* * * * *

Clerambault came home one evening at the end of January, wet and chilled through with the fog, after standing at a wood-yard. He had stood for hours in line waiting his turn in the crowd, and after all they had been told that there would be no distribution that day. As he came near the house where he lived he heard his name, and a young man who was talking to the janitor turned and held out a letter, looking rather embarrassed as Clerambault came forward. The right sleeve of his coat was pinned up to the shoulder, and there was a patch over his right eye; he was pale, and evidently had been laid up for months. Clerambault spoke pleasantly to him and tried to take the letter, but the man drew it back quickly, saying that it was of no consequence now. Clerambault then asked if he would not come up and talk to him a little while, but the other hesitated, and the poet might have perceived that he was trying to get away, but not being very quick at seeing into other people's minds, he said good-naturedly: "My flat is rather high up...."

This seemed to touch the visitor on a tender point, and he answered: "I can get up well enough," and turned towards the staircase. Clerambault now understood that besides his other wounds, the heart within him had been wounded to the quick.

They sat down in the fireless study, and like the room, it was some time before the conversation thawed out. All that Clerambault could get out of the man were short stiff answers, not very clear, and given in rather an irritated tone. He learned that his name was Julian Moreau, that he had been a student at the Faculty of Letters, and had just passed three months at Val-de-Grace. He was living alone in Paris, in a room over in the Latin Quarter, though he had a widowed mother and some other relations in Orleans; he did not explain at first why he was not with them.

All at once after a short silence he decided to speak, and in a low voice, hoarse at first, but softening as he went on, he told Clerambault that his articles had been brought into his trench by a man just back from leave, and handed about from one to the other; to him they had been a real blessing. They answered to the cry of his inmost soul: "Thou shalt not lie." The papers and reviews made him furious; they had the impudence to show the soldier a false picture of the armies, trumped-up letters from the front, a cheap comedy style of courage, and inappropriate joking; all the abject boasting of actors safe at home, speechifying over the death of others. It was an insult to be slobbered over with the disgusting kisses of these prostitutes of the press. As if their sufferings were a mockery!

Clerambault's writings found an echo in their hearts; not that he understood them, no one could understand who had not shared their hardships. But he pitied them, and spoke humanely of the unfortunates in all camps. He dared to speak of the injustices, common to all nations, which had led to the general suffering. He could not take away their trouble, but he did raise it into an atmosphere where it could be borne.

"If you only knew how we crave a word of real sympathy; it is all very well to be hardened, or old,—there are grey-haired, bent men among us—but after what we have seen, suffered, and done to others, there are times when we are like lost children, looking for their mother to console them. Even our mothers seem far away. At times we get strange letters from home, as if we were deserted by our own flesh and blood."

Clerambault hid his face in his hands with a groan.

"What is the matter?" said Moreau, "are you ill?"

"You remind me of all the harm that I did."

"You? No, it was other people that did the harm."

"Yes, I, as much as the others. You must try to forgive us all."

"You are the last who ought to say so."

"If the truth were known, I should be among the first. For I am one of the few who see clearly how wicked I was." He began to inveigh against his generation, but broke off with a discouraged gesture:

"None of that does any good.... Tell me about yourself."

His voice was so humble that Moreau was really touched to see the older man blame himself so severely. All his distrust melted away, and he threw wide the door of his bitter, wounded spirit, confessing that he had come several times as far as the house, but could not make up his mind to leave his letter. He never did consent to show it. Since he came out of the hospital he had not been able to talk to anyone; these people back here sickened him with their little preoccupations, their business, their pleasures, the restrictions to their pleasures, their selfishness, their ignorance and lack of comprehension. He felt like a stranger among them, more than if he were with African savages. Besides,—he stopped, the angry words seemed to stick in his throat—it was not only these people—he felt a stranger to all the world, cut off from normal life, from the pleasures and work of other men by his infirmities. He was a mere wreck, blind and maimed. The poor fellow was absurdly ashamed of it; he blushed at the pitying glances that people threw at him in passing—like a penny that you give, turning away your head at the same time from the unpleasant sight. For in his sensitiveness he exaggerated his ugliness and was disgusted by his deformity. He dwelt on his lost joys and ruined youth; when he saw couples in the street, he could not help feeling jealous; the tears would come into his eyes.

Even this was not all, and when he had poured out the bitterness of his heart—and Clerambault's compassion encouraged him to speak further—he got down to the worst of the trouble, which he and his comrades felt like a cancer that one does not dare to look at. Through his obscure, violent, and miserable talk, Clerambault at last made out what it was that tore the hearts of these young men. It is easy enough for dried-up egotists, withered intellectuals, to sneer at this love of life in the young, and their despair at the loss of it; but it was not alone their ruined, blasted youth that pressed on these poor soldiers,—though that was terrible enough—the worst was not to know the reason for this sacrifice, and the poisonous suspicion that it was all in vain. The pain of these victims could not be soothed by the gross appeal of a foolish racial supremacy, nor by a fragment of ground fought for between States. They knew now how much earth a man needs to die on, and that the blood of all races is part of the same stream of life.

Clerambault felt that he was a sort of elder brother to these young men; the sense of this and his duty towards them gave him a strength that he would not otherwise have had, and he charged their messenger with words of hope and consolation.

"Your sufferings are not thrown away," he said. "It is true that they are the fruit of a cruel error, but the errors themselves are not all lost. The scourge of today is the explosion of evils which have ravaged Europe for ages; pride and cupidity. It is made up of conscienceless States, the disease of capitalism, and is become the monstrous machine called Civilisation, full of intolerance, hypocrisy, and violence. Everything is breaking up; all must be done over again; it is a tremendous task, but do not speak of discouragement, for yours is the greatest work that has ever been offered to a generation. The fire of the trenches and the asphyxiating gases that blind you come as much from agitators in the rear as from the enemy; you must strive to see clearly, to see where the real fight lies. It is not against a people but against an unhealthy society founded on exploitation and rivalry between nations, on the subordination of the free conscience to the Machine-State. The peoples, resigned or sceptical, would not have seen this with the tragical clearness in which it now appears, without the painful disturbance of the war. I do not bless this pain; leave that to the bigots of our old religions! We do not love sorrow and we all want happiness, but if sorrow must come, at least let it be of some use! Do not let your sufferings add to those of others. You must not give way. You are taught in the army that when the order to advance is once given in a battle it is more dangerous to fall back than to go on; so do not look back; leave your ruins behind you, and march on towards the new world."

As he spoke the eyes of his young auditor seemed to say: "Tell me more, more yet, more even than hopes, give me certainties, tell of the victory which will come soon."

Men need to be tempted and decoyed, even the best of them. In exchange for any sacrifice they make for an ideal, you have to promise them, if not immediate realisation, at least an eternal compensation, as all the religions do. Jesus was followed because they thought that He would give them victory here or hereafter.—But he who would speak the truth cannot promise or assure men of victory; the risks are not to be ignored; perhaps it will never come, in any case it will be a long time. To disciples, such a thought is crushingly pessimistic; not so for the master, who has the serenity of a man who, having reached the mountain top, can see over all the surrounding country, while they can only see the steep hill-side which they must climb. How is he to communicate his calm to them? If they cannot look through the eyes of the master, they can always see his eyes from which are reflected the vision denied to them; there they can read the assurance that he who knows the truth (as they believe) is delivered from all their trials.

The eyes of Julian Moreau sought in Clerambault's eyes for this security of soul, this inward harmony; and poor anxious Clerambault had it not. But was he sure that it was not there?... Looking at Julian humbly, he saw,... he saw that Julian had found it in him. And as a man climbing up through a fog suddenly finds himself in the light, he saw that the light was in him, and that it had come to him because he needed it to shine upon another.

After the wounded man had gone away, somewhat comforted, Clerambault felt slightly dazed, and sat drinking in the strange happiness that the heart feels when, however unfortunate itself, it has been able to help another now or in the future. How profound is the instinct for happiness, the plenitude of being! All aspire to it, but it is not the same for all. There are some that wish only to possess; to others, sight is possession, and to others yet, faith is sight. We are links of a chain and this instinct unites us; from those who only seek their own good, or that of their family, or their country, up to the being which embraces millions of beings and desires the good of all. There are those who, having no joy of their own, can almost unconsciously bestow it on others, as Clerambault had done; for they can see the light on his face while his own eyes are in shadow.

The look of his young friend had revealed an unknown treasure to poor Clerambault, and the knowledge of the divine message with which he was entrusted re-established his lost union with other men. He had only contended with them because he was their hardy pioneer, their Christopher Columbus forcing his way across the desert ocean, that he might open the road to the New World. They deride, but follow him; for every true idea, whether understood or not, is a ship under weigh, and the souls of the past are drawn after in its wake.

From this day onward he averted his eyes from the irreparable present of the war and its dead, and looked towards the living, and the future which is in our hands. We are hypnotised, obsessed by the thought of those that we have lost, and the morbid temptation to bury our hearts in their graves, but we must tear ourselves away from the baleful vapours that rise, as in Rome, from The Way of the Tombs. March on! This is no time to halt. We have not yet earned the right to rest with them, for there are others who need us. There, like the wrecks of the Grand Army, you can see in the distance those who drag themselves along, searching on the dreary plain for the half-effaced path.

The thought of the sombre pessimism which threatened to overwhelm these young men after the war was a grave anxiety to Clerambault. The moral danger was a serious one, of which the Governments took no notice at all. They were like bad coachmen who flog their horses up a steep hill at a gallop; it is true that the horse reaches the top, but as the road goes on he stumbles and falls, foundered for life. With what a gallant spirit our young men rushed to the assault in the beginning of the war! And then their ardour gradually diminished. But the horse was still in harness, and the shafts held him up. A factitious excitement was kept up all around him, his daily ration was seasoned with glittering hopes; and though the strength went out of it little by little, the poor creature could not fall down, could not even complain, he had not the strength to think. The countersign all about these victims was to hear nothing, to stop the ears and to lie.

Day after day the battle-tide ebbed, and left wrecks on the sand, men wounded and maimed; and through them the depths of this human ocean were brought to the light. These poor wretches, ruthlessly torn from life, moved helplessly in the void, too feeble to cling to the passions of yesterday or dreams of tomorrow. Some asked themselves blindly, and others with a cruelly clear insight, why they had been born, what life meant....

"Since he who is destroyed, suffers, and he who destroys has no pleasure, and is shortly destroyed himself, tell me what no philosopher can explain; whom does it please, and to whose profit is this unfortunate life of the universe, which is only preserved by the injury or death of all the creatures which compose it?"[1] ...

[Footnote 1: Leopardi.]

It is necessary to answer these men, to give them a reason for living, but there is no such need for a man of Clerambault's age; his life is over, and all he requires is to free his conscience as a sort of public bequest.

To young people who have all their life before them, it is not enough to contemplate truth across a heap of corpses; whatever the past may have been, the future alone counts for them. Let us clear away the ruins!

What causes them the most pain? Their own suffering?

No, it is their lack of faith in the altar on which this suffering was laid—(does a man regret if he sacrifices himself for the woman he loves, or for his child?)—This doubt poisons them, takes away the courage to pursue their way, because they fear to find only despair at the end. This is why people say to you: "Never shake the ideal of Country, it ought rather to be built up." What a derision! As if it were possible to restore a lost faith by force of will! We deceive ourselves; we know it in the bottom of our hearts, and this consciousness kills courage and joy.

Let us be brave enough to reject that in which we no longer believe. The trees drop their leaves in the autumn in order that they may put forth new leaves in the spring. Out of your past illusions, make fires as the peasants do with the fallen leaves; the fresh grass, the new faith, will grow all the more thickly, for it is there waiting. Nature does not die, it changes shape continually; like her, let us cast off the garment of the past.

Look carefully, and reckon up these hard years. You have fought and suffered for your country, and what have you gained by it? You have discovered the brotherhood of the men who fight and suffer. Is the price too high? No, if you will listen to your heart, if you will dare to open it to the new faith which has come to you when you least expected it.

The thing that disappoints and drives us to despair is that we cling to what we had at the beginning; and when we no longer trust that, we feel that all is lost. A great nation has never reached the object sought; and so much the better, for almost always what is reached is superior to what was sought, though different. It is not wise to start out with our wisdom ready made, but to gather it sincerely as we go along.

You are not the same men that you were in 1914. If you dare admit it, then dare to act it also! That will be the chief gain—perhaps the only one—of the war. But do you really care? So many things conspire to intimidate you; the weariness of these years, old habits, dread of the effort needed to examine yourself, to throw away what is dead, and stand for what is living. We have, we do not know what respect for the old, a lazy preference for what we are accustomed to, even if it is bad, fatal. Then there is the indolent need for what is easy which makes us take a trodden path rather than hew out a new one for ourselves. Is it not the ideal of most Frenchmen to accept their plan of life ready-made in childhood and never change it? If only this war, which has destroyed so many of your hearths, could force you to come out from your ashes, to found other healths, to seek other truths!



The wish to break with the past, and adventure themselves in unknown regions was not lacking to these young men. They would rather have preferred to go ahead without stopping, and they had scarcely left the Old World when they expected to take possession of the New.—No hesitation, no middle course; they wanted absolute solutions, either the docile servitude of the past, or revolution.

These were Moreau's views; he looked upon Clerambault's hope of social revolution as a certainty, and in the exhortation to win truth patiently step by step he heard an appeal to violent action which would conquer it at once.

He introduced Clerambault to two or three groups of young intellectuals with revolutionary tendencies. They were not very numerous, for here and there you would see the same faces, but they gained an importance which they would not otherwise have had, from the watch which was kept on them by the authorities. Silly people in power, armed to the teeth with millions of bayonets, police and courts of justice at their command, yet uneasy and afraid to let a dozen freethinkers meet to discuss them!

These circles had not the air of conspiracies, and though they rather invited persecution, their activities were confined to words. What else was there for them to do but talk? They were separated from the mass of their fellow thinkers, who had been drawn into the army or the war-machine, which would only give them up when they were past service. What of the youth of Europe remained behind the lines? There were the slackers, who often descended to the lowest depths of meanness to make others fight, so that it should be forgotten that they did not fight themselves. Setting these aside, the representatives—rari nantes—of the younger generation in civil life were those discharged from the army for physical incapacity, and a few broken-down wrecks of the war, like Moreau. In these mutilated or diseased bodies the spirit was like a candle lighted behind broken windows. Twisted and smoky, it seemed as if a breath would extinguish it. But it was all the more ardent for knowing what to expect from life.

Sudden changes from extreme pessimism to an equally extreme optimism would occur, and these violent oscillations of the barometer did not always correspond with the course of events. Pessimism was easily explained, but its contrary was more remarkable, and it would have been difficult to account for it. They were just a handful of people without means of action, and every day seemed to give the lie to their ideas, but they appeared more contented as things grew worse. Their hope was in the worst, that mad belief proper to fanatical and oppressed minorities; Anti-Christ was to bring back Christ; the new order would rise when the crimes of the old had brought it to ruin; and it did not disturb them that they and their dreams might be swept away also. These young irreconcilables wished above all to prevent the partial realisation of their dreams in the old order of things. All or nothing! How foolish to try to make the world better; let it be perfect, or go to pieces. It was a mysticism of the Great Overturning, of the Revolution, and it affected the minds of those least religious; they even went farther than the churches. Foolish race of man! Always this faith in the absolute, which leads ever to the same intoxication, but the same disasters. Always mad for the war between nations, for the war of classes, for universal peace. It seems as if when humanity stuck its nose out of the boiling mud of the Creation, it had a sun-stroke from which it has never recovered, and which, at intervals, subjects it to a recurrence of delirium.

Perhaps these mystical revolutionaries are forerunners of mutations that are brooding in the race—which may brood for centuries and perhaps never burst forth. For there are millions of latent possibilities in nature, for one realised in the time allotted to our humanity. And it is perhaps this obscure sentiment of what might be, but will not come to pass, which sometimes gives to this sort of mysticism another form, rarer, more tragical—an exalted pessimism, the dangerous attraction of sacrifice. How many of these revolutionists have we seen secretly convinced of the overwhelming force of evil, and the certain defeat of their cause, and yet transported with love for a lost cause "... sed victa Catoni" ... and filled with the hope of dying for her, destroying or being destroyed. The crushed Commune gave rise to many aspirations, not for its victory, but for a similar annihilation!—In the hearts of the most materialistic there burns forever a spark of that eternal fire, that hope so often buffeted and denied, but still maintained, of an imperishable refuge for all the oppressed in some better Hereafter.

These young people welcomed Clerambault with great affection and esteem, hoping to make him one of themselves. Some of them read in his ideas a reflection of their own, while others saw in him just a sincere old bourgeois whose heart had been hitherto his only guide—a rather insufficient, though generous one. They hoped that he would let himself be taught by their science, and like them, would follow to their extreme limits the logical consequences of the principles laid down. Clerambault resisted feebly, for he knew that nothing can be done to convince a young man who has made himself part of a system. Discussion is hopeless at that age. Earlier there is some chance to act on him, when, as it were, the hermit-crab is looking for his shell; and later something may be done when the shell begins to wear and be uncomfortable; but when the coat is new, the only thing is to let him wear it while it fits him. If he grows, or shrinks, he will get another. We will force no one, but let no one try to put force on us!

No one in this circle, at least in the early days, thought of constraining Clerambault, but sometimes it seemed to him that his ideas were strangely habited in the fashion of his hosts. What unexpected echoes he heard on their lips! He let his friends talk, while he himself said but little, but when he had left them, he would feel troubled and rather ironical. "Are those my thoughts?" he would say to himself. It is terribly difficult for one soul to communicate with another, impossible perhaps, and who knows?... Nature is wiser than we ... it may be that this is for our good.

Is it right, is it even possible for us to utter all our thoughts? We reach a conclusion slowly, painfully, through a series of trials; it is the formula of the delicate equilibrium between the inward elements. Change the elements, their proportions, their nature, the formula is no longer accurate and will produce different results, and if you suddenly communicate your whole thought to another, you run the risk of alarming, not helping him. There are cases in which, if he had understood, it might have killed him. Nature, however, is prudent and takes precautions. Your friend does not comprehend you, because he cannot, his instinct will not let him; all that he gets from your thought is the shock when it touches his; the ball glances off, but it is not so easy to tell in what direction.

Men do not listen with their brains alone, but with their dispositions and their passions, and out of what you offer them, each chooses his own and rejects the rest, through a deep instinct of self-defence. Our minds do not throw open the door to every new idea, but rather keep a wary eye on new-comers through a peep-hole. The lofty thoughts of the sages, of Jesus, of Socrates; how were they received? In those days men who spoke such things were killed; twenty years later they were treated as gods—another way of killing them, in fact, by placing their thoughts at a distance, in the kingdom of heaven. The world would indeed come to an end if such ideas were to be put in practice here and now; and their authors knew this well. Perhaps they showed the greatness of their souls more by what they did not say than by what they did; how eloquent were the pathetic silences of Jesus! The golden veil of the ancient symbols and myths, made to shield our weak timid sight! Too often, what is for one the breath of life, is for another death, or worse, murder!

What are we to do, if our hands are full of verities? Shall we spread them broadcast?—Suppose the seed of thought may spring up in weeds or poisonous plants ...?

Poor thinker, there is no need to tremble, you are not the master of Fate, but you form part of it, you are one of its voices. Speak, then; that is the law of your being. Speak out your whole thought, but with kindness; be like a good mother. It may not be given to her to make men of her children, but she can patiently teach them how to make men of themselves if they will.

You cannot set others free, in spite of them, and from the outside; and even if it were possible, what good would it do? If they do not free themselves, tomorrow they will fall back into slavery. All you can do is to set a good example, and say: "There is the road, follow it and you will find Freedom." ...



In spite of his resolution to do the best he could and leave the rest to the gods, it was fortunate for Clerambault that he could not see all the consequences of his ideas. His thought aspired to the reign of Peace; and very probably it would contribute in some degree to the stirring up of social struggles, like all true pacifism, however paradoxical this may seem. For true pacifism is a condemnation of the present.

Clerambault had no suspicion of the terrible forces that would one day make use of his name. With a wholly opposite effect, his spirit produced a harmony among his young associates by reacting against their violence. He felt the value of life all the more, because they held it in such light esteem; and in this respect they were not different from the Nationalists whom he opposed. Very few prefer life to their ideals—which is, we are told, one of Man's noblest qualities.

In spite of all this, it was a pleasure to Clerambault when he met a man who loved life for its own sake. This was a comrade of Moreau's, who had also been severely wounded. His name was Gillot, and in civil life he had been an industrial designer. A shell had plastered him from head to foot; he had lost a leg and his ear-drum was broken, but he had re-acted more energetically against his fate than Moreau. He was small and dark, with bright eyes full of gaiety, in spite of all that he had gone through. Though he agreed with Moreau in general as to the war and the crimes of the social order, he viewed the same events and the same men with different eyes; from which arose many discussions between the two young men.

One day Moreau had just been telling Clerambault of some gloomy experience of the trenches: "Yes," said Gillot, "it did happen like that and the worst of it was, that it had no effect on us, not the least little bit." And when Moreau protested indignantly: "Well, perhaps you, and one or two more may have minded a little,—but most of them did not even notice it." He kept on to stop further remonstrances from his friend: "I am not trying to make out that you were better than the rest, old man, there is no need for that; I only say it because it is so. Look here," he added, turning to Clerambault, "those who have come back and written about all this, they tell us, of course, what they felt. But they felt more than ordinary mortals because they were artists, and naturally everything got on their nerves, while the rest of us were tougher. Now that I think of it, that makes it more terrible; when you read these stories that sicken you, and make the hair stand up on your head, you don't get the full effect. Think of fellows looking on, smoking, chaffing, busy with something else. You have to, you know, or you would go all to pieces.... All the same, it is astonishing what human creatures can get used to! I believe they could make themselves comfortable at the bottom of a sewer. It really disgusts a man, for I was just the same myself. You mustn't suppose that I was like this chap here, always staring at a death's head. Like everybody else, I thought the whole thing was idiotic; but life is like that, as far as I can see! ... We did what we had to do, and let it go at that;—the end? Well, one is as good as another, whether you lose your own skin or the war comes to an end, it finishes it up all the same; and in the meantime you are alive, you eat, you sleep, your bowels—excuse me, one must tell things as they are!... Do you want to know what is at the bottom of it all, Sir? The real truth is that we do not care for life, or not enough. In one of your articles you say very truly that life is the great thing;—only you wouldn't think so to see most people at this minute! Not much life about them; they all seem drowsy, waiting for the last sleep; it looks as if they said to themselves: 'We are flat on our backs now, no need to stir an inch.' No, we don't make enough out of life. And then people are always trying to spoil it for you. From the time you are a child they keep on telling you about the beauty of death, or about dead folks. In the catechism, in the history books, they are always shouting: 'Mourir pour la Patrie!' It is either popery or patriotism, whichever you please; and then this life of the present day is a perfect nuisance; it looks as if it was made expressly to take the backbone out of a man. There is no more initiative. We are all nothing but machines, but with no real system; we only do pieces of work, never knowing where our work will fit in; most often it doesn't fit at all. It is all a mess, with no good in it for anyone; we are thrown in on top of one another like herrings in a barrel, no one knows why;—but then we don't know either why we live at all; it is not life, we are just there.

"They tell us about some time in the dark ages when our grandfathers took the Bastille. Well, you would think to hear the fakers talk who run things now that there was nothing left to do, that we were all in heaven; you can see it carved on the monuments. We know that it is not so; there is another pot boiling, another revolution on the way; but the old one did not do such great things for us after all! It's hard to see plain, hard to trust anybody; there is no one to show us the way, to point to something grand and fine above all these swamps full of toads.... People are always doing something to confuse the issue, nowadays; talking about Right, Justice, Liberty. But that trick is played out. Good enough to die for, but you can't live for things like that."

"How about the present?" asked Clerambault.

"Now? There is no going, back, but I often think that if I had to begin over again—"

"When did you change your mind about all these things?"

"That was the funniest thing of all. It was as soon as I was wounded. It was like getting out of bed in the morning. I had hardly slipped a leg out of life than I wanted to draw it in again. I had been so well off, and never thought of it, ass that I was! I can still see myself, as I came to. The ground was all torn up around me, worse even than the bodies themselves lying in heaps, mixed pell-mell like a lot of jack-straws; the ground simply reeked, as if it was itself bleeding. It was pitch dark, and at first I did not feel anything but the cold, except that I knew I was hit, all right.... I didn't know exactly what piece of me was missing, but I was not in a hurry to find out; I was afraid to know, afraid to stir, there was only one thing I was sure of, that I was alive. If I had only a minute left, I meant to hold on to it.... There was a rocket in the sky; I never thought what it meant, I didn't care, but the curve it made, and the light, like a bright flower.... I can't tell you how lovely it seemed. I simply drank it in.... I remembered when I was a child, one night near La Samaritaine. There were fireworks on the river. That child seemed to be someone else, who made me laugh, and yet I was sorry for him; and then I thought that it was a good thing to be alive, and grow up, and have something, somebody, no matter who to love ... even that rocket; and then the pain came on, and I began to howl, and didn't know any more till I found myself in the ambulance. There wasn't much fun in living then; it felt as if a dog was gnawing my bones ... might as well have stayed at the bottom of the hole ... but even then how fine it seemed to live the way I used to, just live on every day without pain ... think of that! and we never notice it,—without any pain at all ... none!... it seemed like a dream, and when it did let up for a second, just to taste the air on your tongue, and feel light all over your body—God Almighty! to think that it was like that all the time before, and I thought nothing of it.... What fools we are to wait till we lose a thing before we understand it! And when we do want it, and ask pardon because we did not appreciate it before, all we hear is: 'Too late!'"

"It is never too late," said Clerambault.

Gillot was only too ready to believe this; as an educated workman he was better armed for the fray than Moreau or Clerambault himself. Nothing depressed him for long; "fall down, pick yourself up again, and try once more," he would say, and he always believed he could surmount any obstacle that barred his way. He was ready to march against them on his one leg, the quicker the better. Like the others, he was devoted to the idea of revolution and found means to reconcile it with his optimism; everything was to pass off quietly according to him, for he was a man without rancour.

It would not have been safe, however, to trust him too much in this respect; there are many surprises in these plebeian characters, for they are very easily moved and apt to change. Clerambault heard him one day talking with a friend named Lagneau on leave from the front; they said the poilus meant to knock everything to pieces when the war was over, maybe before. A man of the lower classes in France is often charming, quick to seize on your idea before you have had a chance to explain it thoroughly; but good Lord! how soon he forgets. He forgets what was said, what he answered, what he saw, what he believed, what he wanted; but he is always sure of what he says, and sees, and thinks now. When Gillot was talking to Lagneau, his arguments were exactly contrary to those he had advanced on the previous day to Clerambault. It was not only that his ideas had changed, but apparently his whole disposition. One morning there would be nothing violent enough for his thirst for action and destruction, and the next he would talk about going into a little business with lots of money, the best of food, a tribe of children to bring up, and to hell with the rest! Though they all called themselves sincere internationalists, there were few among these poilus who had not preserved the old French prejudice of superiority of race over the rest of the world, enemies or friends; and even in their own country over the other provinces, or if they were Parisians, over the rest of France. This idea was firmly embedded in their minds, and they boasted of it, not maliciously but by way of a joke. Uncomplaining, willing, always ready to go, like Gillot, they were certainly capable of making a revolution and then un-making it, starting another, and so on—tra-la-la—till all was upset and they were ready to be the prey of the first adventurer who happened along. Our political foxes know well enough that the best way to check a revolution is, at the right moment, to let it blow over while the people are amused.

It looked then as if the hour was at hand. A year before the end of the war in both camps there were months and weeks when the infinite patience of the martyrised people seemed on the point of giving way; when a great cry was ready to go up, "Enough." For the first time there was the universal impression of a bloody deception. It is easy to understand the indignation of the people seeing billions thrown away on the war when before it their leaders had haggled over a few hundred thousand for social betterments. There were figures that exasperated them more than any speeches on the subject. Someone had calculated that it cost 75,000 francs to kill a man; that made ten millions of corpses, and for the same sum we could have had ten millions of stockholders. The stupidest could see the immense value of the treasure, and the horrible, the shameful, waste for an illusion. There were things more abject still; from one end of Europe to the other, there were vermin fattening on death, war-profiteers, robbers of corpses.

"Do not talk to us any more," said these young men to themselves, "of the struggle of democracies against autocracies;—they are all tarred with the same brush. In all countries the war has pointed out the leaders to the vengeance of the people; that unworthy middle class, political, financial, intellectual, that in a single century of power has heaped on the world more exactions, crimes, ruins and follies, than kings and churches had inflicted in ten centuries."

This is why when the axes of those heroic woodsmen, Lenine and Trotzky, were heard in the forest, many oppressed hearts thrilled with joy and hope, and in every country there was sharpening of hatchets. The leading classes rose up against the common danger, all over Europe, in both opposing camps. There was no negotiation needed for them to reach an agreement on this subject, for their instinct spoke loudly. The fiercest enemies of Germany, through the organs of the bourgeoisie, tacitly gave a free hand to the Kaiser to strangle Russian liberty which struck at the root of that social injustice on which they all lived. In the absurdity of their hatred, they could not conceal their delight when they saw Prussian Militarism—that monster who afterwards turned on them—avenge them on these daring rebels. Naturally this only increased the admiration for these excommunicated defiers of the world, on the part of the down-trodden masses and the small number of independent spirits.

The pot began to boil with a vengeance, and to stop it the governments of Europe shut down the lid and sat on it. The stupid class in control kept throwing fuel on the flame, and then wondered at the alarming rumblings. This revolt of the elements was attributed to the wicked designs of some free speakers, to mysterious intrigues, to the enemy's gold, to the pacifists; and none of them saw—though a child would have known it—that, if they wanted to prevent an explosion, the first thing to do was to put out the fire. The god of all these powers was force; no matter what they were called, empires, or republics, it was the mailed fist, disguised, gloved but hard and sure of itself. It became also, like a rising tide, the law of the oppressed, a dark struggle between two contrary pressures. Where the metal had worn thin—in Russia first—the boiler had burst. Where there were cracks in the cover—as in neutral countries—the hissing steam escaped, but a deceitful calm reigned over the countries at war, kept down by oppression. To the oppressors this calm was reassuring; they were armed equally against the enemy or their own citizens. The machine of war is double-ended, the cover strong, made of the best steel, and firmly screwed down; that, at least, cannot be torn off—no, but suppose the whole thing blows up together!

Repressed, like everyone else, Clerambault saw rebellion gathering around him. He understood it, thought it inevitable; but that was not a reason for loving it. He did not believe in the Amor Fati. It was enough to understand; the tyrant has no claim to be loved.



Clerambault's young friends were not sparing of their ideas, and it surprised them to see how little warmth he showed towards the new idol from the North: the rule of the proletariat. They had no timorous scruples or half-measures, they meant to make the world happy in their way—perhaps not in its own. At one stroke they decreed the suppression of all liberties in opposition to theirs; the fallen middle classes were not to be allowed to meet, or to vote, or to have the freedom of the press.

"This is all very well," said Clerambault, "but at this rate they will be the new proletariat, tyranny will merely change places."

"Only for a time," was the answer, "the last oppression, which will kill tyranny."

"Yes, the same old war for right and liberty; which is always going to be the war to end war; but in the meantime it is stronger than ever, and rights like liberty are trampled under foot."

Of course they all protested indignantly against this comparison; in their eyes war and those who waged it were equally infamous.

"None the less," said Clerambault gently, "many of you have fought, and nearly all of you have believed in it ... no, do not deny it! Besides, the feeling that inspired you had its noble side; a great wickedness was shown to you, and you threw yourselves upon it to root it out, in a very fine spirit. Only you seem to think that there is only one wickedness in the world, and, that when that has been purged away, we shall all return to the Golden Age. The same thing happened at the time of the Dreyfus Case; all the well-meaning people of Europe—I among them—seemed never to have heard before of the condemnation of an innocent man. They were terribly upset by it, and they turned the world inside out to wash off the impurity. Alas! this was done, but both washers and washed grew discouraged in the process, and when it was all over, lo,—the world was just as black as ever! It seems as if man were incapable of grasping the whole of human misery; he dreads to see the extent of the evil, and in order not to be overwhelmed by it, he fixes on some one point, where he localises all the trouble, and will see nothing further. All this is human nature, and easy enough to understand, my friends; but we should have more courage, and acknowledge the truth that the evil is everywhere; among ourselves, as well as with the enemy. You have found this out little by little in our own country, and seeing the tares in the wheat, you want to throw yourselves against your governments with the same fury that made you see incarnate evil in the person of the enemy. But if ever you recognise that the tares are in you also, then you may turn on yourselves in utter despair. Is not this much to be feared, after the revolutions we have seen, where those who came to bring justice found themselves, without knowing why, with soiled hands and hearts? You are like big children. When will you cease to insist on the absolute good?"

They might have replied that you must will the absolute, in order to arrive at the real; the mind can dally with shades of meaning, which are impossible to action, where it must be all or nothing. Clerambault had the choice between them and their adversaries; there was no other.

Yes, he knew it well enough; there was no other choice in the field of action, where all is determined in advance. Just as the unjust victory leads inevitably to the revenge which in its turn will be unjust, so capitalistic oppression will provoke the proletarian revolution, which will follow the bad example and oppress, when it has the power—an endless chain. Here is a stern Greek justice which the mind can accept and even honour as the rule of the universe. But the heart cannot submit, cannot accept it. Its mission is to break the law of universal warfare. Can it ever come to pass? Who can tell! But in any case it is clear that the hopes and wishes of the heart are outside the order of nature; her mission is rather above nature, and in its essence religious.

Clerambault, who was filled with this spirit, did not as yet dare to avow it; or at least he did not venture to use the word "religious," that word which the religions, that have so little of its spirit, have discredited in the eyes of today.



If Clerambault himself could not see clearly into his own thought, it was hardly to be expected that his young friends should do so, and even if they had seen, they would never have understood. They could not bear the idea that a man who condemned the present state of things as bad and destructive, should hesitate at the most energetic methods for its suppression. They were not wrong from their point of view, which was that of immediate action, but the field of the mind is greater, its battles cover a wider space; it does not waste its energies in bloody skirmishes. Even admitting the methods advocated by his friends, Clerambault could not accept their axiom, that "the end justifies the means." For, on the contrary, he believed that the means are even more important to real progress than the end ... what end? Will there ever be such a thing?

This idea was irritating and confusing to these young minds; it served to increase a dangerous hostility, which had arisen in the last five years among the working class, against the intellectuals. No doubt the latter had richly deserved it; how far away seemed the time when men of thought marched at the head of revolutions! Whereas now they were one with the forces of reaction. Even the limited number of those who had kept aloof, while blaming the mistakes of the ring, were, like Clerambault, unable to give up their individualism, which had saved them once, but now held them prisoners, outside the new movement of the masses. This conclusion once reached by the revolutionists, it was but one step to a declaration that the intellectuals must fall, and not a very long step. The pride of the working class already showed itself in articles and speeches, while waiting for the moment when, as in Russia, it could pass to action; and it demanded that the intellectuals should submit servilely to the proletarian leaders. It was even remarkable how some of the intellectuals were among the most eager in demanding this lowering of the position of their group. One would have thought that they did not wish it to be supposed that they belonged to it. Perhaps they had forgotten that they did.

Moreau, however, had not forgotten it; he was all the more bitter in repudiating this class, whose shirt of Nessus still clung to his skin, and it made him extremely violent.

He now began to display singularly aggressive sentiments towards Clerambault; during a discussion he would interrupt him rudely, with a kind of sarcastic and bitter irritation. It almost seemed as if he meant to wound him.

Clerambault did not take offence; he rather felt great pity for Moreau; he knew what he suffered, and he could imagine the bitterness of a young life spoiled like his. Patience and resignation, the moral nourishment on which stomachs fifty years old subsist, were not suited to his youth.

One evening Moreau had shown himself particularly disagreeable, and yet he persisted in walking home with Clerambault, as if he could not make up his mind to leave him. He walked along by his side, silent and frowning. All at once Clerambault stopped, and putting his hand through Moreau's arm with a friendly gesture said with a smile:

"It's all wrong, isn't it, old fellow?"

Moreau was somewhat taken aback, but he pulled himself together and asked drily what made anyone think that things were "all wrong."

"I thought so because you were so cross tonight," said Clerambault good naturally, and in answer to a protesting murmur. "Yes, you certainly were trying to hurt me,—just a little ... I know of course that you would not really,—but when a man like you tries to inflict pain on others it is because he is suffering himself ... isn't that true?"

"Yes, it is true," said Moreau, "you must forgive me, but it hurts me when I see that you are not in sympathy with our action."

"And are you?" demanded Clerambault. Moreau did not seem to understand. "You yourself," repeated Clerambault, "do you believe in it?"

"Of course I do! What a question!" said Moreau indignantly.

"I doubt it," said Clerambault gently. Moreau seemed to be on the point of losing his temper, but in a moment he said more quietly: "You are mistaken." Clerambault turned to walk on. "All right," said he, "you know your own thoughts better than I do."

For some minutes they continued in silence; then Moreau seized his old friend's arm, and said excitedly:

"How did you know it?"—and his resistance having broken down, he confessed the despair hidden under his aggressive determination to believe and act. He was eaten up with pessimism, a natural consequence of his excessive idealism which had been so cruelly disappointed. The religious souls of former times were tranquil enough; they placed the kingdom of God so far away that no event could touch it; but those of today have established it on earth, by the work of human love and reason, so that when life deals a blow at their dream all life seems horrible to them. There were days when Moreau was tempted to cut his throat! Humanity seemed made of rotteness; he saw with despair the defeats, failures, flaws carved on the destiny of the race from the very beginning—the worm in the bud—and he could not endure the idea of this absurd and tragic fate, which man can never escape. Like Clerambault, he recognized the poison which is in the intelligence, since he had it in his veins, but unlike his elder, who had passed the crisis and only saw danger in the irregularity of thought and not in its essence, Moreau was maddened by the idea that the poison was a necessary part of intelligence. His diseased imagination tortured him by all sorts of bugbears; thought appeared to him as a sickness, setting an indelible mark on the human race; and he pictured to himself in advance all the cataclysms to which it led. Already, thought he, we behold reason staggering with pride before the forces that science has put at her disposal—demons of nature, obedient to the magical formulas of chemistry and distracted by this suddenly-acquired power, turning to self-destruction.

Nevertheless Moreau was too young to remain in the grip of these terrors. He wanted action at any price, anything sooner than to be left alone with them. Why not urge him to act, instead of trying to hold him back?

"My dear boy," said Clerambault, "it is not right to urge another man to a dangerous act, unless you are ready to share it. I have no use for agitators, even if they are sincere, who send others to the stake and do not set the example of martyrdom themselves. There is but one truly sacred type of revolutionary, the Crucified; but very few men are made for the aureole of the cross. The trouble is that we always assign duties to ourselves which are superhuman or inhuman. It is not good for the ordinary man to strive after the "Uebermenschheit," and it can only prove to him a source of useless suffering; but each man can aspire to shed light, order, peace, and kindness around him in his little circle; and that should be happiness enough."

"Not quite enough for me," said Moreau. "Doubt would creep in; it must be all or nothing."

"I know. Your revolution would leave no place for doubt. Your hearts are hard and burning; your brains like geometric patterns. Everything or nothing. No shading! But what would life be without it? It is its greatest charm and its chief merit as well; fragile beauty and goodness, weakness everywhere. We must offer love and help; day by day, and step by step. The world is not transformed by force, or by a miracle, in the twinkling of an eye; but second by second it moves forward in infinity and the humblest who feels it partakes of infinity. Patience, and let us not think that one wrong effaced will save humanity; it will only make one day bright, but other days and more light will come; each will bring its sun. You would not wish to stay its course?"

"We have not the time to wait for all this," said Moreau. "Every day brings us frightful problems which must be decided on the spot. If we are not to be the masters, then we shall be victims; ... we, do I say? Not ourselves alone, we are already victimised, but all that is dear to us, all that holds us to life, hope in the future, the salvation of humanity. See the things that press upon us, the agonising questions as to those who will come after us, and those who have children. This war is not yet over, and it is only too evident that its crimes and falsehoods have sown the seeds of new wars, near at hand. Why do we have children? For what do they grow up? To be butchered like this? Look where you will, there is no answer. Are we to leave these crazy countries, this old continent, and emigrate? But where? Are their fifty acres of ground on the globe where independent honest people can take refuge? We must be on one side or the other; you see well enough that we have to choose between patriotism and revolution. If not, what remains? Non-resistance? Is that what you would have? But there is nothing in that unless you have religious faith; otherwise it is only the resignation of the lamb led to the slaughter. Unfortunately, the greater number decide on nothing, prefer not to think, turn their eyes away from the future, blinded by the hope that what they have seen and suffered will not recur. That is why we must decide for them, whether they want it or not, make them quicken their step, save them in spite of themselves. Revolution means a few men who will for all humanity."

"I do not think that I should like it," said Clerambault, "if another decided for me. And on the other hand, I should not want to usurp another man's will; I should prefer to leave each one free, and not interfere with the liberty of others. But I know that I am asking too much."

"Only what is impossible," said Moreau. "When you begin to will, you cannot stop halfway. There are just two sorts of men, those who have too great will-power—like Lenine, and a couple of dozen men in the whole course of history—and those who have too little, who can decide nothing, like us, me, if you like. It is clear enough, despair is all that drives me to will anything...."

"Why despair?" said Clerambault. "A man's fate is made every day by himself, and none knows what it will be; it is what we are. If you are cast down, so also is your fate."

"We shall never have strength enough," answered Moreau sadly. "Don't you believe that I see what infinitely small chances of success a revolution would have now in our country, under present conditions? Think of all the destruction, the economic losses, the demoralisation, the fatal lassitude caused by the war." And he added: "It was not true what I told you the first time we met, about all my comrades feeling as I did, rebelling against the suffering. Gillot told you there are only a few of us, and the others are good fellows for the most part but weak as water! They can see how things are, clearly enough, but sooner than run their heads against a wall they would rather not think about it, or pass it off with a joke. We French are always ready to laugh, it is our treasure and our ruin. It is a fine thing, but what a hold it gives to our oppressors. 'Let them sing as long as they are willing to pay,' as the Italian said. 'Let us laugh, so long as we are ready to die.' ... we might say. And then this terrible force of habit, that Gillot was talking about. A man will get used to no matter what ridiculous or painful conditions, provided they last long enough, and that he has company. He becomes habituated to cold, to heat, to death, and to crime. His whole force for resistance is used in adapting himself; and then he curls up in his corner and does not dare to stir, for fear that any change will bring back the pain. We are all so terribly tired! When the soldiers come back, they will have only one thought—to sleep and forget."

"How about the excitable Lagneau, who talks about blowing everything to pieces?"

"I have known Lagneau since the beginning of the war, and he has been in succession, royalist, "revanchard," annexationist, internationalist, socialist, anarchist, bolshevist, and I-don't-give-a damnist. He will finish as a reactionary, and will be sent to make food for cannon against the enemy that our government will pick out among our adversaries or our friends of today. Do you suppose that the people are of our way of thinking? Perhaps, or they may agree with the others. They will take up all opinions one after the other."

"You are a revolutionary then because you are discouraged?" said Clerambault, laughing.

"There are plenty like that among us."

"Gillot came out of the war more optimistic than he went in."

"Gillot is the forgetful sort, but I don't envy him that," said Moreau bitterly.

"But you ought not to upset him," said Clerambault.

"Gillot needs all the help you can give him."

"Help from me?" said Moreau incredulously.

"He is not naturally strong, and if you would make him so, you must let him see that you believe in him."

"Do you think belief comes by willing to have it?"

"You know whether that is true! No, I think, is the answer. Belief comes through love."

"By love of those who believe?"

"Is it not always through love, and only in that way, that we learn to trust?"

Moreau was touched; he had been a clever youth, eaten up by the craving for knowledge, and like the rest of his class, he had suffered for lack of brotherly affection. True human intercourse is banished from the education of today, but this vital sentiment, hitherto repressed, had revived in the trenches, filled with living, suffering flesh thrown together. At first it was hard to let oneself go; the general hardening, the fear of sentimentality or of ridicule, tended to put barriers between hearts; but when Moreau was laid up, his sheath of pride began to give way, and Clerambault had little difficulty in breaking through it. The best thing about this man was that false pride melted before him, for he had none of his own; people showed to him as he to them their real selves, their weakness and their troubles, which we are taught to hide from a silly idea of self-respect. Moreau had unconsciously learned to recognise at the front the superiority of men who were his social inferiors, brother-soldiers or "Non-Coms." Among these he had been much drawn to Gillot. He was glad that Clerambault should have appealed to him on behalf of his friend, for his secret wish always was to be of some use to another man.

At the next opportunity Clerambault whispered to Gillot that he ought to be optimistic for two, and cheer Moreau up; and thus each found help in the need of helping the other, according to the great principle of life: "Give, and it shall be given unto you."

No matter in what time one lives, nor what misfortunes overtake one, all is not lost as long as there remains in the heart of the race a spark of manly friendship. Blow it into a flame! Draw closer these cold solitary hearts! If only one of the fruits of this war of nations could be the fusion of the best among all classes, the union of the youth of many countries—of the manual labourers and the thinkers—the future would be re-born through their mutual aid.