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Title: The Wrack of the Storm
Author: Maurice Maeterlinck
Translator: Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
Release Date: February 26, 2006 [EBook #17861]
Language: English
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THE WRACK OF THE STORM
+----------------------------------------------+
| |
| THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK |
| |
| ESSAYS |
| |
| The Treasure of the Humble |
| Wisdom and Destiny |
| The Life of the Bee |
| The Buried Temple |
| The Double Garden |
| The Measure of the Hours |
| On Emerson, and Other Essays |
| Our Eternity |
| The Unknown Guest |
| The Wrack of the Storm |
| |
| PLAYS |
| |
| Sister Beatrice, and Ardiane and Barbe Bleue |
| Joyzelle, and Monna Vanna |
| The Blue Bird, A Fairy Play |
| Mary Magdalene |
| Pélléas and Mélisande, and Other Plays |
| Princess Maleine |
| The Intruder, and Other Plays |
| Aglavaine and Selysette |
| |
| HOLIDAY EDITIONS |
| |
| Our Friend the Dog |
| The Swarm |
| The Intelligence of the Flowers |
| Death |
| Thoughts from Maeterlinck |
| The Blue Bird |
| The Life of the Bee |
| News of Spring and Other Nature Studies |
| Poems |
+----------------------------------------------+
The
Wrack of the Storm
BY
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
_Translated by_
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
The reader taking up this volume will, for the first time in the work
of one who hitherto had cursed no man, find words of hatred and
malediction. I would gladly have avoided them, for I hold that he who
takes upon himself to write pledges himself to say nothing that can
derogate from the respect and love which we owe to all men. I have had
to utter these words; and I am as much surprised as saddened at what I
have been constrained to say by the force of events and of truth. I
loved Germany and numbered friends there, who now, dead or living, are
alike dead to me. I thought her great and upright and generous; and to
me she was ever kindly and hospitable. But there are crimes that
obliterate the past and close the future. In rejecting hatred I
should have shown myself a traitor to love.
I tried to lift myself above the fray; but, the higher I rose, the
more I saw of the madness and the horror of it, of the justice of one
cause and the infamy of the other. It is possible that one day, when
time has wearied remembrance and restored the ruins, wise men will
tell us that we were mistaken and that our standpoint was not lofty
enough; but they will say it because they will no longer know what we
know, nor will they have seen what we have seen.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK.
NICE, 1916.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
The present volume contains, in the chronological order in which they
were produced, all the essays published and all the speeches delivered
by M. Maeterlinck since the beginning of the war, upon which, as will
be perceived, each one of them has a direct bearing. They are printed
as written; and they throw an interesting light upon the successive
phases of the author's psychology during the Titanic and hideous
struggle that has affected the mental attitude of us all.
_In Italy_ forms the preface to M. Jules Destrée's book, _En Italie
avant la guerre, 1914-15_. Of the remaining essays, some have appeared
in various English and American periodicals; others are now printed in
translation for the first time.
I have also had M. Maeterlinck's leave to include in this volume his
first published work, _The Massacre of the Innocents_. This powerful
sketch in the Flemish manner saw the light originally in the
_Pléïade_, in 1886, and may at the present time, to use the author's
own words in a note to myself, be regarded as "a sort of vague
symbolic prophecy." An English version by Mrs. Edith Wingate Rinder
was printed in the _Dome_ in 1899; another has since been issued by an
English and by an American firm of publishers; but the only authorized
translation to appear in book form is that now added as an epilogue to
_The Wrack of the Storm_.
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS.
CHELSEA, 1916.
CONTENTS
PAGE
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 5
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 7
I AFTER THE VICTORY 11
II KING ALBERT 21
III THE HOSTAGE CITIES 31
IV TO SAVE FOUR CITIES 37
V PRO PATRIA: I 45
VI HEROISM 59
VII PRO PATRIA: II 75
VIII PRO PATRIA: III 89
IX BELGIUM'S FLAG DAY 109
X ON THE DEATH OF A LITTLE SOLDIER 117
XI THE HOUR OF DESTINY 131
XII IN ITALY 147
XIII ON REREADING THUCYDIDES 161
XIV THE DEAD DO NOT DIE 179
XV IN MEMORIAM 191
XVI SUPERNATURAL COMMUNICATIONS IN WAR-TIME 197
XVII EDITH CAVELL 217
XVIII THE LIFE OF THE DEAD 229
XIX THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS 241
XX THE WILL OF EARTH 257
XXI FOR POLAND 271
XXII THE MIGHT OF THE DEAD 279
XXIII WHEN THE WAR IS OVER 291
XXIV THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS 303
* * * * *
AFTER THE VICTORY
THE WRACK OF THE STORM
I
AFTER THE VICTORY[1]
1
At these moments of tragedy, none should be allowed to speak who
cannot shoulder a rifle, for the written word seems so monstrously
useless, so overwhelmingly trivial, in front of this mighty drama
which shall for a long time, it may be for ever, free mankind from the
scourge of war: the one scourge among all that cannot be excused, that
cannot be explained, since alone among all it issues entire from the
hands of man.
2
But it is while this scourge is upon us, while we have our being in
its very centre, that we shall do well to balance the guilt of those
who have committed this inexpiable crime. It is now, while we are in
the thick of the horror, undergoing it, feeling it, that we have the
energy, the clear-sightedness needed to judge it; from the depths of
the most fearful injustice justice is best perceived. When the hour
shall have come for settling accounts--and it will not long delay--we
shall have forgotten much of what we have suffered and a blameworthy
pity will creep over us and cloud our eyes. This is the moment,
therefore, for us to frame our inexorable resolution. After the final
victory, when the enemy is crushed--as crushed he will be--efforts
will be made to enlist our sympathy, to move us to pity. We shall be
told that the unfortunate German people were merely the victims of
their monarch and their feudal caste; that no blame attaches to the
Germany we know, which is so sympathetic and so cordial--the Germany
of quaint old houses and open-hearted greeting, the Germany that sits
under its lime-trees beneath the clear light of the moon--but only to
Prussia, hateful, arrogant Prussia; that the homely, peace-loving,
Bavarian, the genial and hospitable dwellers on the banks of the
Rhine, the Silesian and Saxon and I know not who besides--for all
these will suddenly have become whiter than snow and more inoffensive
than the sheep in an English fold--that they all have merely obeyed,
have been compelled to obey orders which they detested but were unable
to resist. We are face to face with reality now; let us look at it
well and pronounce our sentence; for this is the moment when we hold
the proofs in our hands, when the elements of crime are hot before us
and shout out the truth that soon will fade from our memory. Let us
tell ourselves now, therefore, now, that all that we shall be told
hereafter will be false; and let us unflinchingly adhere to what we
decide at this moment, when the glare of the horror is on us.
3
It is not true that in this gigantic crime there are innocent and
guilty, or degrees of guilt. They stand on one level, all those who
have taken part in it. The German from the North has no more special
craving for blood and outrage than he from the South has special
tenderness or pity. It is, very simply, the German, from one end of
his country to the other, who stands revealed as a beast of prey which
the firm will of our planet finally repudiates. We have here no
wretched slaves dragged along by a tyrant king who alone is
responsible. Nations have the government which they deserve, or
rather, the government which they have is truly no more than the
magnified and public projection of the private morality and mentality
of the nation. If eighty million innocent people select and support a
monstrous king, those eighty million innocent people merely expose the
inherent falseness and superficiality of their innocence; and it is
the monster they maintain at their head who stands for all that is
true in their nature, because it is he who represents the eternal
aspirations of their race, which lie far deeper than their apparent
and transient virtues. Let there be no suggestion of error, of having
been led astray, of an intelligent people having been tricked or
misled. No nation can be deceived that does not wish to be deceived;
and it is not intelligence that Germany lacks. In the sphere of
intellect such things are not possible; nor in the region of
enlightened, reflecting will. No nation permits herself to be coerced
to the one crime that man cannot pardon. It is of her own accord that
she hastens towards it; her chief has no need to persuade, it is she
who urges him on.
4
We have forces here quite different from those on the surface, forces
that are secret, irresistible and profound. It is these that we must
judge, these that we must crush under our heel, once and for all; for
they are the only ones that will not be improved or softened or
brought into line by experience or progress, or even by the bitterest
lesson. They are unalterable and immovable, their springs lie far
beneath hope or influence; and they must be destroyed as we destroy a
nest of wasps, since we know that these never can change into a nest
of bees. And, even though individually and singly the Germans were all
innocent and merely led astray, they would be none the less guilty in
the mass. This is the guilt that counts, that alone is actual and
real, because it lays bare, underneath their superficial innocence,
the subconscious criminality of all.
5
No influence can prevail on the unconscious or the subconscious. It
never evolves. Let there come a thousand years of civilization, a
thousand years of peace, with all possible refinements of art and
education, the subconscious element of the German spirit, which is its
unvarying element, will remain absolutely the same as it is to-day and
would declare itself, when the opportunity came, under the same
aspect, with the same infamy. Through the whole course of history, two
distinct willpowers have been noticed that would seem to be the
opposed, elemental manifestations of the spirit of our globe, the one
seeking only evil, injustice, tyranny and suffering, while the other
strives for liberty, the right, radiance and joy. These two powers
stand once again face to face; our opportunity is now to annihilate
the one that comes from below. Let us know how to be pitiless that we
may have no more need for pity. It is a measure of organic defence. It
is essential that the modern world should stamp out Prussian
militarism as it would stamp out a poisonous fungus that for half a
century had disturbed and polluted its days. The health of our planet
is in question. To-morrow the United States of Europe will have to
take measures for the convalescence of the earth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Translated by Alfred Sutro.]
* * * * *
KING ALBERT
II
KING ALBERT
1
Of all the heroes of this stupendous war, heroes who will live in the
memory of man, one assuredly of the most unsullied, one of those whom
we can never love enough, is the great young king of my little
country.
He was indeed at the critical hour the appointed man, the man for whom
every heart was waiting. With sudden beauty he embodied the mighty
voice of his people. He stood, upon the moment, for Belgium, revealed
unto herself and unto others. He had the wonderful good fortune to
realize and bestow a conscience in one of those dread hours of tragedy
and perplexity when the best of consciences waver.
Had he not been at hand, there is no doubt but that all would have
happened differently; and history would have lost one of her fairest
and noblest pages. Certainly Belgium would have been loyal and true to
her word; and any government would have been swept away, pitilessly
and irresistibly, by the indignation of a people that had never,
however far we probe into the past, played false. But there would have
been much of that confusion and irresolution inevitable in a host
suddenly threatened with disaster. There would have been vain talking,
mistaken measures, excusable but irreparable vacillations; and, above
all, the much-needed words, the precise and final words, would not
have been spoken and the deeds, than which we can picture none more
resolute, none greater, would not have been done at the right moment.
Thanks to the king, the peerless act shines forth and is maintained
complete, unfaltering; and the path of heroism is straight and
clearly defined and splendid as that of Thermopylæ indefinitely
extended.
2
But what he has suffered, what he suffers day by day only those can
understand who have had the privilege of access to this hero: the most
sensitive and the gentlest of men, silent and reserved; a man of
controlled emotions, modest with a timidity that is at once baffling
and delightful; loving his people less as a father loves his children
than as a son loves his adoring mother. Of all that cherished kingdom,
his pride and his joy, the seat of his happiness, the centre of his
love and his security, there is left intact but a handful of cities,
which are threatened at every moment by the foulest invader that the
world has ever borne.
All the others--so quaint or so beautiful, so bright, so serene, happy
to be there, so inoffensive--jewels in the crown of Peace, models of
pure and upright family life, homes of loyal and dutiful industry, of
ready, ever-smiling geniality, with the natural welcome, the
ever-proffered hand and the ever-open heart: all the others are dead
cities, of which not one stone is left upon another; and the very
country-side, one of the fairest in this world, with its gentle
pastures, is now no more than one vast field of horror.
Treasures have perished that were numbered among the noblest and
dearest possessions of mankind; monuments have disappeared which
nothing can replace; and the half of a nation, among all nations the
most attached to its old simple habits, its humble homes, is at
present wandering along the roads of Europe. Thousands of innocent
people have been massacred; and of those who remain nearly all are
doomed to poverty and hunger.
But that remainder has but one soul, which has taken refuge in the
spacious soul of its king. Not a murmur, not a word of reproach! But
yesterday a town of thirty thousand inhabitants received the order to
forsake its white houses, its churches, its ancient streets and
squares, the scene of a light-hearted and industrious life. The thirty
thousand inhabitants, women and children and old men, set forth to
seek an uncertain refuge in a neighbouring city, which is threatened
almost as directly as their own and which to-morrow, it may be, must
in its turn set forth, but whither none can say, for the country is so
small that its boundaries are quickly reached, its shelter soon
exhausted.
No matter: they obey in silence and one and all approve and bless
their sovereign. He did what had to be done, what every one in his
place would have done; and, though they are all suffering as no
people has suffered since the barbarous invasions of the earliest
ages, they know that he suffers more than any of them, for in him all
their sorrows find a goal; in him they are reflected and enhanced.
They do not even harbour the idea that they might have been saved by a
sacrifice of honour. They draw no distinction between duty and
destiny. To them that duty, with its frightful consequences, seems as
inevitable as a natural force against which we cannot even dream of
struggling, so great is it and so invincible.
3
Here is an example of the collective bravery of nameless heroes, an
ingenuous and almost unconscious courage, which rivals and at times
exceeds the most exalted deeds in legend and history, for since the
days of the great martyrs men have never suffered death more simply
for a simple idea.
And, if amid the anguish of our struggle it were seemly to speak of
aught but tears and lamentations, we should find a magnificent
consolation in the spectacle of the unexpected heroism that suddenly
surrounds us on every side. It may well be said that never in the
memory of mankind have men sacrificed their lives with such zest, such
self-abnegation, such enthusiasm; and that the immortal virtues which
to this day have uplifted and preserved the flower of the human race
have never shone more brilliantly, never manifested greater power,
energy or youth.
* * * * *
THE HOSTAGE CITIES
III
THE HOSTAGE CITIES
1
Thanks to the heroism of the Allies, the hour is approaching when the
hordes of William the Madman will quit the soil of afflicted Belgium.
After what they have done in cold blood, what excesses, what disasters
must we not expect of the last convulsions of their rage? Our anguish
is all the more poignant in that they are at this moment fighting in
the most ancient and most precious portion of Flanders. Above all
countries, this is historic and hallowed land. They have destroyed
Termonde, Roulers, Charleroi, Mons, Namur, Thielt and more besides;
happy, charming little towns, which will rise again from their ashes,
more beautiful than before. They have annihilated Louvain and
Malines; they have but lately levelled Dixmude; their torches, their
incendiary squirts and their bombs are about to attack Brussels,
Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres and Furnes, which are like so many
living museums, forming one of the most delightful, delicate and
fragile ornaments of Europe. The things which are beginning here and
which may be completed would be irreparable. They would mean a loss to
our race for which nothing could atone. A quite peculiar
aspect--familiar, kindly, racy of the soil and unique--of that beauty
which a long series of comely human lives is able to acquire and to
hoard would disappear for ever from the face of the earth; and we
cannot, in the trouble and confusion of these too tragic hours,
realize the extent, the meaning or the consequences of such a crime.
2
We have made every sacrifice without complaining; but this would
exceed all measure. What can be done? How are we to stop them? They
seem to be no longer accessible to reason or to any of the feelings
which men hold in honour; they are sensible only to blows. Very soon,
as they must know, we shall have the power to strike them shrewdly.
Why do not the Allies, this very day, swiftly, while yet there is
time, name so many hostage cities, which would be answerable, stone
for stone, for the existence of our own dear towns? If Brussels, for
example, should be destroyed, then Berlin should be razed to the
ground. If Antwerp were devastated, Hamburg would disappear. Nuremburg
would guarantee Bruges; Munich would stand surety for Ghent.
At the present moment, when they are feeling the wind of defeat that
blows through their tattered standard, it is possible that this
solemn threat, officially pronounced, would force them to reflect, if
indeed they are still at all capable of reflection. It is the only
expedient that remains to us and there is no time to be lost. With
certain adversaries the most barbarous threats are legitimate and
necessary, for these threats speak the only language which they can
understand. And our children must not one day be able to reproach us
with not having attempted everything--even that which is most
repugnant--to save the treasures which are theirs by right.
* * * * *
TO SAVE FOUR CITIES
IV
TO SAVE FOUR CITIES
1
First Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Lierre, Dixmude, Nieuport (and I am
speaking only of the disasters of Flanders); now Ypres is no more and
Furnes is half in ruins. By the side of the great Flemish cities,
Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges, those vast and incomparable
living museums which have been watchfully preserved by a whole people,
a people above all others attached to its traditions, they formed a
constellation of little towns, delightful and hospitable, too little
known to travellers. Each of them wore its own expression, of peace,
pleasantness, innocent mirth, or meditation. Each possessed its
treasures, jealously guarded: its belfries, its churches, its canals,
its old bridges, its quiet convents, its ancient houses, which gave
it a special physiognomy, never to be forgotten by those who had
beheld it.
But the indisputable queen of these beautiful forsaken cities was
Ypres, with its enormous market-place, bordered by little
dwelling-houses with stepped gables, and its prodigious
market-buildings, which occupied one whole side of the immense oblong.
This market-place haunted for ever the memory of those who had seen
it, were it but once, while waiting to change trains; it was so
unexpected, so magical, so dream-like almost, in its disproportion to
the rest of the town. While the ancient city, whose life had withdrawn
itself from century to century, was gradually shrinking all around it,
the Grand'Place itself remained an immovable, gigantic, magnificent
witness to the might and opulence of old, when Ypres was, with Ghent
and Bruges, one of the three queens of the western world, one of the
most strenuous centres of human industry and activity and the cradle
of our great liberties. Such as it was yesterday--alas, that I cannot
say, such as it is to-day!--this square, with the enormous but
unspeakably harmonious mass of those market-buildings, at once
powerful and graceful, wild, gloomy, proud, yet genial, was one of the
most wonderful and perfect spectacles that could be seen in any town
on this old earth of ours. While of a different order of architecture,
built of other elements and standing under sterner skies, it should
have been as precious to man, as sacred and as intangible as the
Piazza di San Marco at Venice, the Signoria at Florence or the Piazza
del Duomo at Pisa. It constituted a peerless specimen of art, which at
all times wrung a cry of admiration from the most indifferent, an
ornament which men hoped was imperishable, one of those things of
beauty which, in the words of the poet, are a joy forever.
2
I cannot believe that it no longer exists; and yet in this horrible
war we have to believe everything and, above all, the worst. Now,
fatally and inevitably, it will be the turn of the Belfry of Bruges;
and then the tide of barbarians will rise against Ghent and Antwerp
and Brussels; and there will forthwith disappear one of those portions
of the world's surface in which was hoarded the greatest wealth of
beauty and of memories and of the stuff of history. We did what we
could to preserve it; we could do no more. The most heroic of armies
are powerless to prevent the bandits whom they are driving back from
murdering the women and children or from deliberately and uselessly
destroying all that they find along their path of retreat. There is
only one hope left us: the immediate and imperious intervention of
the neutral powers. It is towards them that we turn our tortured gaze.
Two great nations notably--Italy and the United States--hold in their
hands the fate of these last treasures, whose loss would one day be
reckoned among the heaviest and the most irreparable that have been
suffered in the course of long centuries of human civilization. They
can do what they will; it is time for them to do that which it is no
longer lawful to leave undone. By its frantic lies, the beast from
over the Rhine, standing at bay and in peril of death, shows plainly
enough the importance which it attaches to the opinion of the only
nations which the execration of all that lives and breathes have not
yet armed against it. It is afraid. It feels that all is crumbling
under foot, that it is being shunned and abandoned. It seeks in every
direction a glance that does not curse it. It must not, it shall not
find that glance. It is not necessary to tell Italy what our
imperilled cities are worth; for Italy is preeminently the land of
noble cities.
Our cause is her cause; she owes us her support. When a work of beauty
is destroyed, her own genius and her own eternal gods are outraged. As
for America, she more than any other country stands for the future.
She should think of the days that will follow after this war. When the
great peace descends upon the earth, let not the earth be found desert
and robbed of all its jewels. The places at which the earth is
beautiful because of centuries of effort, because of the successful
zeal and patience and genius of a race, are not so many. This corner
of Flanders, over which death now hovers, is one of those consecrated
spots. Were it to perish, men as yet unborn, men who at last, perhaps,
will achieve happiness, would lack memories and examples which nothing
could replace.
* * * * *
PRO PATRIA: I
V
PRO PATRIA: I[2]
1
I need not here recall the events that hurled Belgium into the depths
of distress most glorious where she is struggling to-day. She has been
punished as never nation was punished for doing her duty as never
nation did before. She saved the world while knowing that she could
not be saved. She saved it by flinging herself in the path of the
oncoming barbarians, by allowing herself to be trampled to death in
order to give the defenders of justice time, not to rescue her, for
she was well aware that rescue could not come in time, but to collect
the forces needed to save our Latin civilization from the greatest
danger that has ever threatened it. She has thus done this
civilization, which is the only one whereunder the majority of men are
willing or able to live, a service exactly similar to that which
Greece, at the time of the great Asiatic invasions, rendered to the
mother of this civilization. But, while the service is similar, the
act surpasses all comparison. We may ransack history in vain for aught
to approach it in grandeur. The magnificent sacrifice at Thermopylæ,
which is perhaps the noblest action in the annals of war, is illumined
with an equally heroic but less ideal light, for it was less
disinterested and more material. Leonidas and his three hundred
Spartans were in fact defending their homes, their wives, their
children, all the realities which they had left behind them. King
Albert and his Belgians, on the other hand, knew full well that, in
barring the invader's road, they were inevitably sacrificing their
homes, their wives and their children. Unlike the heroes of Sparta,
instead of possessing an imperative and vital interest in fighting,
they had everything to gain by not fighting and nothing to lose--save
honour. In the one scale were fire and the sword, ruin, massacre, the
infinite disaster which we see; in the other was that little word
honour, which also represents infinite things, but things which we do
not see, or which we must be very pure and very great to see quite
clearly. It has happened now and again in history that a man standing
higher than his fellows perceives what this word represents and
sacrifices his life and the life of those whom he loves to what he
perceives; and we have not without reason devoted to such men a sort
of cult that places them almost on a level with the gods. But what had
never yet happened--and I say this without fear of contradiction from
whosoever cares to search the memory of man--is that a whole people,
great and small, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, deliberately
immolated itself thus for the sake of an unseen thing.
2
And observe that we are not discussing one of those heroic resolutions
which are taken in a moment of enthusiasm, when man easily surpasses
himself, and which have not to be maintained when, forgetting his
intoxication, he lapses on the morrow to the dead level of his
everyday life. We are concerned with a resolution that has had to be
taken and maintained every morning, for now nearly four months, in the
midst of daily increasing distress and disaster. And not only has this
resolution not wavered by a hair's breadth, but it grows as steadily
as the national misfortune; and to-day, when this misfortune is
reaching its full, the national resolution is likewise attaining its
zenith. I have seen many of my refugee fellow-countrymen: some used to
be rich and had lost their all; others were poor before the war and
now no longer owned even what the poorest own. I have received many
letters from every part of Europe where duty's exiles had sought a
brief instant of repose. In them there was lamentation, as was only
too natural, but not a reproach, not a regret, not a word of
recrimination. I did not once come upon that hopeless but excusable
cry which, one would think, might so easily have sprung from
despairing lips:
"If our king had not done what he did, we should not be suffering what
we are suffering to-day."
The idea does not even occur to them. It is as though this thought
were not of those which can live in that atmosphere purified by
misfortune. They are not resigned, for to be resigned means to
renounce the strife, no longer to keep up one's courage. They are
proud and happy in their distress. They have a vague feeling that this
distress will regenerate them after the manner of a baptism of faith
and glory and ennoble them for all time in the remembrance of men. An
unexpected breath, coming from the secret reserves of the human race
and from the summits of the human heart, has suddenly passed over
their lives and given them a single soul, formed of the same heroic
substance as that of their great king.
3
They have done what had never before been done; and it is to be hoped
for the happiness of mankind that no nation will ever again be called
upon for a like sacrifice. But this wonderful example will not be
lost, even though there be no longer any occasion to imitate it. At a
time when the universal conscience seemed about to bend under the
weight of long prosperity and selfish materialism, suddenly it raised
by several degrees what we may term the political morality of the
world and lifted it all at once to a height which it had not yet
reached and from which it will never again be able to descend, for
there are actions so glorious, actions which fill so great a place in
our memory, that they found a sort of new religion and definitely fix
the limits of the human conscience and of human loyalty and courage.
They have really, as I have already said and as history will one day
establish with greater eloquence and authority than mine, they have
really saved Latin civilization. They had stood for centuries at the
junction of two powerful and hostile forms of culture. They had to
choose and they did not hesitate. Their choice was all the more
significant, all the more instructive, inasmuch as none was so well
qualified as they to choose with a full knowledge of what they were
doing. You are all aware that more than half of Belgium is of Teutonic
stock. She was therefore, thanks to her racial affinities, better able
than any other to understand the culture that was being offered her,
together with the imputation of dishonour which it included. She
understood it so well that she rejected it with an outbreak of horror
and disgust unparalleled in violence, spontaneous, unanimous and
irresistible, thus pronouncing a verdict from which there was no
appeal and giving the world a peremptory lesson sealed with every drop
of her blood.
4
But to-day she is at the end of her resources. She has exhausted not
her courage but her strength. She has paid with all that she possesses
for the immense service which she has rendered to mankind. Thousands
and thousands of her children are dead; all her riches have perished;
almost all her historic memories, which were her pride and her
delight, almost all her artistic treasures, which were numbered among
the fairest in this world, are destroyed for ever. She is nothing more
than a desert whence stand out, more or less intact, four great towns
alone, four towns which the Rhenish hordes, for whom the epithet of
barbarians is in point of fact too honourable, appear to have spared
only so that they may keep back one last and monstrous revenge for the
day of the inevitable rout. It is certain that Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges
and Brussels are doomed beyond recall. In particular, the admirable
Grand'Place, the Hôtel de Ville and the Cathedral at Brussels are, I
know, undermined: I repeat, I know it from private and trustworthy
testimony against which no denial can prevail. A spark will be enough
to turn one of the recognized marvels of Europe into a heap of ruins
like those of Ypres, Malines and Louvain. Soon after--for, short of
immediate intervention, the disaster is as certain as though it were
already accomplished--Bruges, Antwerp and Ghent will suffer the same
fate; and in a moment, as I was saying the other day, there will
vanish from sight one of the corners of this earth in which the
greatest store of memories, of historic matter and artistic beauties
had been accumulated.
5
The time has come to end this foolery! The time has come for
everything that draws breath to rise up against these systematic,
insane and stupid acts of destruction, perpetrated without any
military excuse or strategic object. The reason why we are at last
uttering a great cry of distress, we who are above all a silent
people, the reason why we turn to your mighty and noble country is
that Italy is to-day the only European power that is still in a
position to stop the unchained brute on the brink of his crime. You
are ready. You have but to stretch out a hand to save us. We have not
come to beg for our lives: these no longer count with us and we have
already offered them up. But, in the name of the last beautiful things
that the barbarians have left us, we come with our prayers to the land
of all beautiful things. It must not be, it shall not be that, on the
day when at last we return, not to our homes, for most of these are
destroyed, but to our native soil, that soil is so laid waste as to
have become an unrecognizable desert. You know better than any others
what memories mean, what masterpieces mean to a nation, for your
country is covered with memories and masterpieces. It is also the
land of justice and the cradle of the law, which is simply justice
that has taken cognizance of itself. On this account, Italy owes us
justice. And she owes it to herself to put a stop to the greatest
iniquity in the annals of history, for not to put a stop to it when
one has the power is almost tantamount to taking part in it. It is for
Italy as much as for France that we have suffered. She is the source,
she is the very mother of the ideal for which we have fought and for
which the last of our soldiers are still fighting in the last of our
trenches.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: Delivered at the Scala Theatre, Milan, 30 November,
1914.]
* * * * *
HEROISM
VI
HEROISM
1
One of the consoling surprises of this war is the unlooked-for and, so
to speak, universal heroism which it has revealed among all the
nations taking part in it.
We were rather inclined to believe that courage, physical and moral
fortitude, self-denial, stoicism, the renunciation of every sort of
comfort, the faculty of self-sacrifice and the power of facing death
belonged only to the more primitive, the less happy, the less
intelligent nations, to the nations least capable of reasoning, of
appreciating danger and of picturing in their imagination the dreadful
abyss that separates this life from the life unknown. We were even
almost persuaded that war would one day cease for lack of soldiers,
that is to say, of men foolish enough or unhappy enough to risk the
only absolute realities--health, physical comfort, an unimpaired body
and, above all, life, the greatest of earthly possessions--for the
sake of an ideal which, like all ideals, is more or less invisible.
And this argument seemed the more natural and convincing because, as
existence grew gentler and men's nerves more sensitive, the means of
destruction by war showed themselves more cruel, ruthless and
irresistible. It seemed more and more probable that no man would ever
again endure the infernal horrors of a battlefield and that, after the
first slaughter, the opposing armies, officers and men alike, all
seized with insuppressible panic, would turn their backs upon one
another, in simultaneous, supernatural affright, and flee from
unearthly terrors exceeding the most monstrous anticipations of those
who had let them loose.
2
To our great astonishment the very opposite is now proclaimed.
We realize with amazement that until to-day we had but an incomplete
and inaccurate conception of man's courage. We looked upon it as an
exceptional virtue and one which is the more admired as being also the
rarer the farther we go back in history. Remember, for instance,
Homer's heroes, the ancestors of all the heroes of our day. Study them
closely. These models of antiquity, the first professors, the first
masters of bravery, are not really very brave. They have a wholesome
dread of being hit or wounded and an ingenuous and manifest fear of
death. Their mighty conflicts are declamatory and decorative but not
so very bloody; they inflict more noise than pain upon their
adversaries, they deliver many more words than blows. Their defensive
weapons--and this is characteristic--are greatly superior to their
arms of offence; and death is an unusual, unforeseen and almost
indecorous event which throws the ranks into disorder and most often
puts a stop to the combat or provokes a headlong flight that seems
quite natural. As for the wounds, these are enumerated and described,
sung and deplored as so many remarkable phenomena. On the other hand,
the most discreditable routs, the most shameful panics are frequent;
and the old poet relates them, without condemning them, as ordinary
incidents to be ascribed to the gods and inevitable in any warfare.
This kind of courage is that of all antiquity, more or less. We will
not linger over it, nor delay to consider the battles of the Middle
Ages or the Renascence, in which the fiercest hand-to-hand encounters
of the mercenaries often left not more than half-a-dozen victims on
the field. Let us rather come straight to the great wars of the
Empire. Here the courage displayed begins to resemble our own, but
with notable differences. In the first place, those concerned were
solely professionals. We see not a whole nation fighting, but a
delegation, a martial selection, which, it is true, becomes gradually
more extensive, but never, as in our time, embraces every man between
eighteen and fifty years of age capable of shouldering a weapon.
Again--and above all--every war was reduced to two or three pitched
battles, that is to say, two or three culminating moments; immense
efforts, but efforts of a few hours, or a day at most, towards which
the combatants directed all the vigour and all the heroism accumulated
during long weeks or months of preparation and waiting. Afterwards,
whether the result was victory or defeat, the fighting was over;
relaxation, respite and rest followed; men went back to their homes.
Destiny must not be defied more than once; and they knew that in the
most terrible affray the chances of escaping death were as twenty to
one.
3
Nowadays, everything is changed; and death itself is no longer what it
was. Formerly, you looked it in the face, you knew whence it came and
who sent it to you. It had a dreadful aspect, but one that remained
human. Its ways were not unknown: its long spells of sleep, its brief
awakenings, its bad days and dangerous hours. At present, to all these
horrors it adds the great, intolerable fear of mystery. It no longer
has any aspect, no longer has habits or spells of sleep and it is
never still. It is always ready, always on the watch, everywhere
present, scattered, intangible and dense, stealthy and cowardly,
diffuse, all-encompassing, innumerous, looming at every point of the
horizon, rising from the waters and falling from the skies,
indefatigable, inevitable, filling the whole of space and time for
days, weeks and months without a minute's lull, without a second's
intermission. Men live, move and sleep in the meshes of its fatal web.
They know that the least step to the right or left, a head bowed or
lifted, a body bent or upright is seen by its eyes and draws its
thunder.
Hitherto we had no example of this preponderance of the destructive
forces. We should never have believed that man's nerves could resist
so great a trial. The nerves of the bravest man are tempered to face
death for the space of a second, but not to live in the hourly
expectation of death and nothing else. Heroism was once a sharp and
rugged peak, reached for a moment but soon quitted, for
mountain-peaks are not inhabitable. To-day it is a boundless plain, as
uninhabitable as the peaks; but we are not permitted to descend from
it. And so, at the very moment when man appeared most exhausted and
enervated by the comforts and vices of civilization, at the moment
when he was happiest and therefore most selfish, when, possessing the
minimum of faith and vainly seeking a new ideal, he seemed least
capable of sacrificing himself for an idea of any kind, he finds
himself suddenly confronted with an unprecedented danger, which he is
almost certain that the most heroic nations of history would not have
faced nor even dreamed of facing, whereas he does not even dream that
it is possible to do aught but face it. And let it not be said that we
had no choice, that the danger and the struggle were thrust upon us,
that we had to defend ourselves or die and that in such cases there
are no cowards. It is not true: there was, there always has been,
there still is a choice.
4
It is not man's life that is at stake, but the idea which he forms of
the honour, the happiness and the duties of his life. To save his life
he had but to submit to the enemy; the invader would not have
exterminated him. You cannot exterminate a great people; it is not
even possible to enslave it seriously or to inflict great sorrow upon
it for long. He had nothing to be afraid of except disgrace. He did
not so much as see the infamous temptation appear above the horizon of
his most instinctive fears; he does not even suspect that it is able
to exist; and he will never perceive it, whatever sacrifices may yet
await him. We are not, therefore, speaking of a heroism that would be
but the last resource of despair, the heroism of the animal driven to
bay and fighting blindly to delay death's coming for a moment. No, it
is heroism freely donned, deliberately and unanimously hailed, heroism
on behalf of an idea and a sentiment, in other words, heroism in its
clearest, purest and most virginal form, a disinterested and
whole-hearted sacrifice for that which men regard as their duty to
themselves, to their kith and kin, to mankind and to the future. If
life and personal safety were more precious than the idea of honour,
of patriotism and of fidelity to tradition and the race, there was, I
repeat, and there is still a choice to be made; and never perhaps in
any war was the choice easier, for never did men feel more free, never
indeed were they more free to choose.
But this choice, as I have said, did not dare show its faintest shadow
on the lowest horizons of even the most ignoble consciences. Are you
quite sure that, in other times which we think better and more
virtuous than our own, men would not have seen it, would not have
spoken of it? Can you find a nation, even among the greatest, which,
after six months of a war compared with which all other wars seem
child's-play, of a war which threatens and uses up all that nation's
life and all its possessions, can you find, I say, in history, not an
instance--for there is no instance--but some similar case which allows
you to presume that the nation would not have faltered, would not at
least, were it but for a second, have looked down and cast its eyes
upon an inglorious peace?
5
Nevertheless, they seemed much stronger than we are, all those who
came before us. They were rude, austere, much closer to nature, poor
and often unhappy. They had a simpler and a more rigid code of
thought; they had the habit of physical suffering, of hardship and of
death. But I do not believe that any one dares contend that these men
would have done what our soldiers are now doing, that they would have
endured what is being endured all around us. Are we not entitled to
conclude from this that civilization, contrary to what was feared, so
far from enervating, depraving, weakening, lowering and dwarfing man,
elevates him, purifies him, strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him
capable of acts of sacrifice, generosity and courage which he did not
know before? The fact is that civilization, even when it seems to
entail corruption, brings intelligence with it and that intelligence,
in days of trial, stands for potential pride, nobility and heroism.
That, as I said in the beginning, is the unexpected and consoling
revelation of this horrible war: we can rely on man implicitly, place
the greatest trust in him, nor fear lest, in laying aside his
primitive brutality, he should lose his manly qualities. The greater
his progress in the conquest of nature and the greater his apparent
attachment to material welfare, the more does he become capable,
nevertheless, unconsciously, deep down in the best part of him, of
self-detachment and of self-sacrifice for the common safety and the
more does he understand that he is nothing when he compares himself
with the eternal life of his forbears and his children.
It was so great a trial that we dared not, before this war, have
contemplated it. The future of the human race was at stake; and the
magnificent response that comes to us from every side reassures us
fully as to the issue of other struggles, more formidable still, which
no doubt await us when it will be a question no longer of fighting our
fellow-men, but rather of facing the more powerful and cruel of the
great mysterious enemies that nature holds in reserve against us. If
it be true, as I believe, that humanity is worth just as much as the
sum total of latent heroism which it contains, then we may declare
that humanity was never stronger nor more exemplary than now and that
it is at this moment reaching one of its highest points and capable of
braving everything and hoping everything. And it is for this reason
that, despite our present sadness, we are entitled to congratulate
ourselves and to rejoice.
* * * * *
PRO PATRIA: II
VII
PRO PATRIA: II[3]
1
More than three months ago, I was in one of the grandest of your
cities, a city that welcomed in a manner which I shall never forget
the cause which I had come among you to represent. I was there, as I
told my hearers at the time, in the name of the last remnants of
beauty that the barbarians had left us, to plead with the land of
every kind of beauty. Those threatened beauties, our only cities yet
intact, the treasures and sanctuaries of our whole past and of all our
race, are still reeling on the brink of the same abyss and, failing a
miracle which we dare not hope for, they will suffer the fate of
Ypres, Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Dixmude and so many other less
illustrious victims. The danger in which they stand has no doubt
aroused the indignation of the civilized world; but not a hand has
armed itself to defend them. I blame no one; I reproach no one; the
morality of the nations is a virtue that has not yet emerged from the
state of infancy; and fortunately, by the hazard of war, it is not yet
too late to save four innocent cities.
To-day I have not come to speak of monuments, of historical relics,
nor even of the wrongs committed, of the violation of all the rights
and laws of warfare and every international convention, of
incendiarism, pillage and massacre; I have come simply to utter before
you the last distressful cry of a dying nation.
At this moment a tragedy is being enacted in Belgium such as has no
precedent in the history of civilized peoples, nor even in that of
the barbarians, for the barbarians, when committing their most
stupendous crimes, lacked the infernal deliberation and the
scientific, all-powerful means of working evil which to-day are in the
hands of those who profit by the resources and benefits of
civilization only to turn them against it and to seek the annihilation
of all its noblest and most generous characteristics. The despairing
rumours of this tragedy come to us only through the chinks of that
ensanguined well which isolates it from the rest of the world. Nothing
reaches our ears but the lies of the enemy. In reality, the whole of
Belgium is one huge Prussian prison, where every cry is cruelly and
methodically stifled and where no voices are heard save those of the
gaolers. Only now and again, after a thousand adventures, despite a
thousand perils, a letter from some kinsman or captive friend arrives
from the depths of that great living cemetery, bringing us a gleam of
authentic truth.
2
You are as familiar with this truth as I am. At the moment when her
soil was invaded, Belgium numbered seven million seven hundred
thousand inhabitants. It is estimated that between two hundred and
fifty and three hundred thousand have perished in battle or massacre,
or as the result of misery and privation; and I am not speaking of the
infant children, the sacrifice of whom, owing to the dearth of milk,
has, it appears, been frightful. Five or six hundred thousand
unfortunates have fled to Holland, France or England. There remain
therefore in the country nearly seven million inhabitants; and more
than half of these seven millions are living almost exclusively on
American charity. In what is above all an industrial country,
producing normally, in time of peace, less than a third part of the
wheat necessary for home consumption, the enemy has systematically
requisitioned everything, carried off everything, for the upkeep of
his armies, and has sent into Germany what he could not consume on the
spot. The result of so monstrous a proceeding may readily be divined:
on all that soil, once so happy and so rich, to-day taxed and pillaged
and pillaged again, ravaged and devastated by fire and the sword,
there is nothing left. And the situation of suffering Belgium is so
cruelly paradoxical that her best friends, her dearest allies, even
those whom she has saved, are powerless to succour her. Isolated as
she is from the rest of the world, she would have starved even though
nothing had been taken from her. Now she has been despoiled of all
that she possessed, while France and England can send her neither
money nor provisions, for they would fall into the hands of those
engaged in torturing her, so much so that every attempt on their part
to alleviate her sufferings would but retard her deliverance still
further. Did history ever witness a more poignant, a more desperate
tragedy? It is a fact that in the midst of this war we are constantly
finding ourselves confronted with events such as history hitherto has
never beheld. A people resembling an enormous beast of prey, in order
to punish a loyalty and heroism which, if it retained the slightest
notion of justice and injustice, the smallest sense of human dignity
and honour, it ought to worship on its knees: this vast predatory race
stealthily resolved to exterminate an inoffensive little nation whose
soul it felt was too great to be enslaved or reduced to the semblance
of its conqueror's. It was on the point of succeeding, amid the
silence, the impotence, or the terror of the world, when from beyond
the Atlantic a generous nation took that heroic little people under
its protection. It understood that what was involved was not merely an
act of justice and elementary pity, but also and more particularly a
higher duty towards the morality and the eternal conscience of
mankind. Thanks to this great nation's intervention, it will not be
said, in the days to come, that justice, loyalty, honesty and heroism
are no more than dangerous illusions and a fool's bargain, or that
evil must necessarily, at all times and places, conquer whenever it is
backed by force, or that the only reward which duty magnificently done
may hope to receive on this earth is every manner of grief and
disaster, ending in death by starvation. So immense and triumphant an
example of iniquity would strike the ideals of mankind a blow from
which they would not recover for centuries.
3
But already this help is becoming exhausted; it cannot be indefinitely
prolonged; and very soon it will be insufficient. It is, moreover, at
the mercy of the slightest diplomatic or political complication; and
its failure will be irreparable. It will mean utter famine, unexampled
extermination, which till the end of the world will cry to heaven for
vengeance. It is no longer a question of weeks or months, but one of
days. That is where we stand; and these are the last hours granted by
destiny to an inactive Europe wherein to expunge the shame of her
indifference.
These hours belong almost solely to you, for others have not your
power. Whatever may happen, however long you may postpone the issue,
one of these days you will be obliged to join in the fray. Everything
advises, everything orders you to do so; and I can see nothing on the
side of honour, justice or humanity, on the side of the will of the
centuries or the human race, nor even on the side of prudence and
self-interest, that allows you to avoid it. Is it not better and more
worthy of yourselves than all the subtleties, plottings and petty
bargainings of diplomacy?
The one hour, the peremptory hour has struck when your aid can break
the balance between the powers of good and evil which, for more than
two hundred days, have kept the future of Europe hanging over the
abyss.
Fate has granted you the magnificent boon, the all but divine
privilege, of saving from the most horrible of deaths four or five
millions of innocent human beings, four or five millions of martyrs
who have performed the finest action that a people could perform and
who are perishing because they defended the ideals which your fathers
taught them. I know that we are faced by duties which until to-day had
never entered into the morality of States; for it is but too true that
this morality still lags a thousand miles behind that of the meanest
peasant. But, if such a thing has never yet been done, it is all the
more glorious to be the first to do it, to make an effort that will
raise the life of nations to a level which the life of the individual
has long since attained. And no people is better qualified than the
Italian to make this effort which the world and the future are
awaiting as a deliverance.
But I will say no more. I have been reproached for speaking of matters
which, as a foreigner, I ought not to discuss. I believed that these
great questions of humanity interested the whole human race. Perhaps I
was wrong. I will respect the profound silence in which great actions
are developed; and I leave to the meditation of your hearts that which
I am constrained to leave unsaid. They will tell you very much better
than I could all that I had to say to you.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: Delivered in Rome, before the Associazione della Stampa,
13 March, 1915.]
* * * * *
PRO PATRIA: III
VIII
PRO PATRIA: III[4]
1
Although nothing entitles me to the honour of addressing you in the
name of my refugee countrymen, nevertheless it is only fitting, since
a kindly insistence brings me here, that I should in the first place
give thanks to England for the manner in which she welcomed them in
their distress. I am but a voice in the crowd; and, if my words exceed
the limits of this hall and lend to him who utters them an authority
which he himself does not possess, it is only because they are filled
with unbounded gratitude.
In this horrible war, whose stakes are the salvation and the future of
mankind, let us first of all salute our wonderful sister, France, who
is supporting the heaviest burden and who, for more than eleven
months, having broken its first and most formidable onslaught, has
been struggling, foot by foot, at closest quarters, without faltering,
without remission, with an heroic smile, against the most formidable
organization of pillage, massacre and devastation that the world or
hell itself has seen since man first learnt the history of the planet
on which he lives. We have here a revelation of qualities and virtues
surpassing all that we expected from a nation which nevertheless had
accustomed us to expect of her all that goes to make the beauty and
the glory of humanity. One must reside in France, as I have done for
many years, to understand and admire as it deserves the incomparable
lesson in courage, abnegation, firmness, determination, coolness,
conscious dignity, self-mastery, good-humour, chivalrous generosity
and utter charity and self-sacrifice which this great and noble
people, which has civilized more than half the globe, is at the
present moment teaching the civilized world.
Let us also salute boundless Russia, with her wonderful soldiers,
innocent and ingenuous as the saints of old, ignorant of fear as
children who do not yet know the meaning of death. Yonder, along a
formidable front running from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with silent
multitudinous heroism, amid defeats which are but victories delayed,
she is beginning the great work of our deliverance, Lastly let us
greet Servia, small but prodigious, whom we must one day place on the
summit of that monument of glory which Europe will raise to-morrow to
the memory of those who have freed her from her chains.
So much for them. They have a right to all our gratitude, to all our
admiration. They are doing magnificently all that had to be done. But
they occupy a place apart in duty's splendid hierarchy. They are the
protagonists of direct, material, tangible, undeniable, inevitable
duty. This war is their war. If they would not accept the worst of
disgraces, if they were not prepared to suffer servitude, massacre,
ruin and famine, they had to undertake it; they could not do
otherwise. They were attacked by the born enemy, the irreducible and
absolute enemy, of whom they knew enough to understand that they had
nothing to expect from him but total and unremitting disaster. It was
a question of their continued existence in this world. They had no
choice; they had to defend themselves; and any other nation in their
place would have done the same, only there are few who would have done
it with the same spirit of self-abnegation, the same devotion, the
same perseverance, the same loyalty and the same smiling courage.
2
But for us Belgians--and we may say as much for you English--it was
not a question of this kind of duty. The horrible drama did not
concern us. It demanded only the right to pass us by without touching
us; and, far from doing us any harm, it would have flooded us with the
unclaimed riches which armies on the march drag in their wake. We
Belgians in particular, peaceable, hospitable, inoffensive and almost
unarmed, should, by the very treaties which assured our existence,
have remained complete strangers to this war. To be sure, we loved
France, because we knew her as well as we knew ourselves and because
she makes herself beloved by all who know her. But we entertained no
hatred of Germany. It is true that, in spite of the virtues which we
believed her to possess but which were merely the mask of a spy, our
hearts barely responded to her obsequiously treacherous advances. For
the German, of all the inhabitants of our planet, has this one and
singular peculiarity, that he arouses in us, from the onset, a
profound, instinctive, intuitive feeling of antipathy. But, even so
and wherever our preferences may have lain, our treaties, our pledged
word, the very reason of our existence, all forbade us to take part in
the conflict. Then came the incredible ultimatum, the monstrous demand
of which you know, which gave us twelve hours to choose between ruin
and death or dishonour. As you also know, we did not need twelve hours
to make our choice. This choice was no more than a cry of indignation
and resolution, spontaneous, fierce and irresistible. We did not stay
for a moment to ponder the extenuating circumstances which our
weakness might have invoked. We did not for a moment consider the
absolution which history would have granted us later, on realizing
that a conflict between forces so completely disproportioned was
futile, that we must inevitably be crushed, massacred and annihilated
and that the sacrifice of a little people in its entirety could
prevent nothing, could barely cause delay and would have no weight in
the immense balance into which the world's destinies were about to be
flung. There was no question of all this; we saw one thing only: our
plighted word. For that word we must die; and since then we have been
dying. Trace the course of history as far back as you will; question
the nations of the earth; then name those who have done or who would
have done what we did. How many will you find? I am not judging those
whom I pass over in silence, for to do so would be to enter into the
secret of men's hearts which I have not the right to violate; but in
any case there is one which I can name aloud, without fear of being
mistaken; and that is the British nation. This people too entered into
the conflict, not through interest or necessity or inherited hatred,
but simply for a matter of honour. It has not suffered what we have
suffered; it has not risked what we have risked, which is all that we
possessed beneath the arch of heaven; but it owes this immunity only
to outside circumstances. The principle and the quality of the act are
the same. We stand on the same plane, one step higher than the other
combatants. While the others are the soldiers of necessity, we are the
volunteers of honour; and, without detracting from their merits, this
title adds to ours all that a pure and disinterested idea adds to the
noblest acts of courage. There is not a doubt but that in our place
you would have done precisely what we did. You would have done it with
the same simplicity, the same calm and confident ardour, the same good
faith. You would have thrown yourselves into the breach as
whole-heartedly, with the same scorn of useless phrases and the same
stubborn conscientiousness. And the reason why I do not shrink from
singing in your presence the praises of what we have done is that
these praises also affect yourselves, who would not have hesitated to
do the selfsame things.
3
In short, we have both the same conception of honour; and a like idea
must needs bear like fruits. In your eyes as in ours, a formal
promise, a word once given is the most sacred thing that can pass
between man and man. Now far more than the valour of a man--because it
rises to much greater heights and extends to much greater
distances--the valour of a people depends upon the conception of its
honour which that people holds and, above all, upon the sacrifices
which it is capable of making for the sake of that honour. We may
differ upon all the other ideas that guide the actions of mankind,
notably upon the religious idea; but those who do not agree on this
one point are unworthy of the name of man. It represents the purest
flame, the ever more ardent focus of all human dignity and virtue.
You have sacrificed yourselves wholly to this idea; and, in the name
of this idea, which is as vital and as powerful in your souls as in
ours, you came to our aid, as we knew that you would come, for we
counted on you as surely as you counted on us. You are ready to make
the same sacrifices; and already you are proudly supporting the
heaviest of sacrifices. Thus, in this stupendous struggle, we are
united by bonds even more fraternal than those which bind the other
Allies. Our union is more lofty and more generous, for it is based
wholly upon the noblest thoughts and feelings that can inspire the
heart. And this union, which is marked by a mutual confidence and
affection that grow hourly deeper and wider, is helping us both to go
even beyond our duty.
For we have gone beyond it; and we are exceeding it daily. We have
done and are doing far more than we were bound to do. It was for us
Belgians to resist, loyally, vigorously, to the utmost of our
strength, as we had promised. But the most sensitive honour would have
allowed us to lay down our arms after the immense and heroic effort of
the first few days and to trust to the victor's clemency when he
recognized that we were beaten. Nothing compelled us to immolate
ourselves entirely, to surrender, in succession, as a burnt-offering
to our ideals, all that we possessed on earth and to continue the
struggle after we were crushed, even in the last torments of
starvation, which to-day holds three millions of us in its grip.
Nothing compelled us to this course, other than the increasingly lofty
ideal of duty held by those who began by putting it into practice and
are now living in its fulfilment.
As for you English, you had to come to our assistance, that is to say,
to send us the troops which you had ready under arms; but nothing
compelled you either, after the first useless engagements, to devote
yourselves with unparalleled ardour and self-sacrifice, to hurl into
the mortal and stupendous battle the whole of your youth, the fairest
upon earth, and all your riches, the most prodigious in this world,
nor to conjure up from your soil, by a miracle which was thought
impossible, in fewer months than the years that would have seemed
needful, the most gallant, determined and tenacious armies that have
yet been marshalled in this war. Nothing compelled you, save the
spirit of emulation, the same mad love of duty, the same passion for
justice, the same idolatry of the given word which, that it may be
sure of doing all that it promised, performs far more than it would
have dared to promise.
4
Now, during the last few weeks, a new combatant has entered the lists,
one who occupies a place quite apart in the sacred hierarchy of duty
and honour and in the moral history of this war. I speak of Italy; and
I pay her the tribute of homage which is her due and which I well know
that you will render with me, for you of all nations are qualified to
do so.
Italy had no treaty except with our enemies. Her first act of
justice, when confronted with an iniquitous aggression, was to discard
this treaty, which was about to draw her into a crime which she had
the courage to judge and condemn from the outset, while her former
allies were still in the full flush of a might that seemed unshakable.
After this verdict, which was worthy of the land where justice first
saw the light, she found herself free; she now owed no obligations to
any one. There was nothing left to compel her to rush into this
carnage, which she could contemplate calmly from the vantage of her
delightful cities; and she had only to wait till the twelfth hour to
gather its first fruits. There was no longer any compact, any written
bond, signed by the hands of kings or peoples, that could involve her
destiny. But now, at the spectacle, unforeseen and daily more
abominable and disconcerting, of the barbarian invasion, words
half-effaced and secret treaties written by unknown hands on the
souls and consciences of all men revealed themselves and slowly
gathered life and radiance. To some extent I was a witness of these
things; and I was able, so to speak, to follow with my eyes the
awakening and the irresistible promulgation of those great and
mysterious laws of justice, pity and love which are higher and more
imperishable than all those which we have engraved in marble or
bronze. With the increase of the crimes, the power of these laws
increased and extended. We may regard the intervention of Italy in
many ways. Like every human action and, above all, like every
political action, it is due to a thousand causes, many of which are
trifling. Among them we may see the legitimate hatred and the eternal
resentment felt towards an hereditary enemy. We may discover an
interested intention to take part, without too much risk, in a
victory already certain and in its previously allotted spoils. We may
see in it anything that we please: the resolves of men contain factors
of all kinds; but we must pity those who are able to consider none but
the meaner sides of the matter, for these are the only sides which
never count and which are always deceptive. To find the real and
lasting truth, we must learn to view the great masses and the great
feelings of mankind from above. It is in them and in their great and
simple movements that the will of the soul and of destiny is asserted,
for these two form the eternal substance of a people. And, in the
present case, the movement of the great masses and the great feelings
of the people took the form of an immense impulse of sympathy and
indignation, which gradually increased, penetrating farther and
farther into the popular strata and gathering volume as it
progressed, until it urged a whole nation to assume the burden of a
war which it knew to be crushing and merciless, a war which each of
those who called for it knew to be a war which he himself must wage,
with his own hands, with his own body, a war which would wrest him
from the pleasant ways of peace, from his labours and his comforts,
which would weigh terribly upon all those whom he loved, which would
expose him for weeks, perhaps for months, to incredible sufferings and
which meant almost certain death to a third or a half of those who
demanded the right to brave it. And all this, I repeat, occurred
without any material necessity, from no other motive than a fine sense
of honour and a magnificent surge of admiration and pity for a small
foreign nation that was being unjustly martyred. We cannot repeat it
too often: here, as in the case of the sacrifice which Belgium and
England offered to the ideal of honour, is a new and unprecedented
fact in history.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 4: Delivered in London, at the Queen's Hall, 7 July, 1915.]
* * * * *
BELGIUM'S FLAG DAY
IX
BELGIUM'S FLAG DAY
1
To-day our flag will quiver in every French hand as a symbol of love
and gratitude. This day should be a day of hope and glory for all
Belgium.
Let us forget for a moment our terrible distress; let us forget our
plains and meadows, the fairest and most fertile in Europe, now
ravaged to such a degree that the utmost that one can say is powerless
to give any idea of a desolation which seems irremediable. Let us
forget--if to forget them be possible--the women, the children, the
old men, peaceable and innocent, who have been massacred in their
thousands, the tale of whom will amaze the world when once the grim
barrier is broken behind which so many secret horrors are being
committed. Let us forget those who are dying of hunger in our country,
a land without harvests and without homes, a land methodically taxed,
pillaged and crushed until it is drained of the last drop of its
life-blood. Let us forget those remnants of our people who are
scattered hither and thither, who have trodden the path of exile, who
are living on public charity, which, though it show itself full of
brotherhood and affection, is yet so oppressive to those supremely
industrious hands, which had never known the grievous burden of alms.
Let us forget even those last of our cities to be menaced, the
fairest, the proudest, the most beloved of our cities, which
constitute the very face of our country and which only a miracle could
now save. Let us forget, in a word, the greatest calamity and the most
crying injustice of history and think to-day only of our approaching
deliverance. It is not too early to hail it. It is already in all our
thoughts, as it is in all our hearts. It is already in the air which
we breathe, in all the eyes that smile at us, in all the voices that
welcome us, in all the hands outstretched to us, waving the laurels
which they hold; for what is bringing us deliverance is the wonder,
the admiration of the whole world!
2
To-morrow we shall go back to our homes. We shall not mourn though we
find them in ruins. They will rise again more beautiful than of old
from the ashes and the shards. We shall know days of heroic poverty;
but we have learnt that poverty is powerless to sadden souls upheld by
a great love and nourished by a noble ideal. We shall return with
heads erect, regenerated in a regenerated Europe, rejuvenated by our
magnificent misfortune, purified by victory and cleansed of the
littleness that obscured the virtues which slumbered within us and of
which we are not aware. We shall have lost all the goods that perish
but as readily come to live again. And in their place we shall have
acquired those riches which shall not again perish within our hearts.
Our eyes were closed to many things; now they have opened upon wider
horizons. Of old we dared not avert our gaze from our wealth, our
petty comforts, our little rooted habits. But now our eyes have been
wrested from the soil; now they have achieved the sight of heights
that were hitherto unnoticed. We did not know ourselves; we used not
to love one another sufficiently; but we have learnt to know ourselves
in the amazement of glory and to love one another in the grievous
ardour of the most stupendous sacrifice that any people has ever
accomplished. We were on the point of forgetting the heroic virtues,
the unfettered thoughts, the eternal ideas that lead humanity. To-day,
not only do we know that they exist: we have taught the world that
they are always triumphant, that nothing is lost while faith is left,
while honour is intact, while love continues, while the soul does not
surrender and that the most monstrous of powers will never prevail
against those ideal forces which are the happiness and the glory of
man and the sole reason for his existence.
* * * * *
ON THE DEATH OF A LITTLE SOLDIER
X
ON THE DEATH OF A LITTLE SOLDIER
1
When I speak of this little soldier who fell a few days ago, up there
in the Vosges, it is not that I may mourn him publicly. It behoves us
in these days to mourn our dead in secret. Personal sorrows no longer
count; and we must learn how to suppress them in the presence of that
greater sorrow which extends over all the world, the particular sorrow
of the mothers who are setting us an example of the most heroic
silence that human suffering has been taught to observe since
suffering first visited womankind. For the admirable silence of the
mothers is one of the great and striking lessons of this war. Amid
that tragic and sublime silence no regret dare make itself heard.
But, though my grief remains dumb, my admiration can still raise its
voice; and in speaking of this young soldier, who had not reached
man's estate and who died as the bravest of men, I speak of all his
brothers-in-arms and hail thousands like him in his name, which name
becomes a great and glorious symbol; for at this time, when a
prodigious wave of unselfishness and courage, surging up from the very
depths of the human race, uplifts the men who are fighting and giving
their lives for its future, they all resemble one another in the same
perfection.
2
My friend Raymond Bon was a sergeant in the 27th battalion of the
Chasseurs Alpins. He left for the front in August, 1914, with the
other recruits of the 1915 class, which means that he was hardly
twenty years of age; and he won his stripes on the battlefield, after
being twice named in dispatches. The second time was on returning from
a murderous assault at Thann, in Upper Alsace, in which he had greatly
distinguished himself. I quote the exact words:
"Corporal Bon is mentioned in the orders of the battalion
for his gallantry under fire and his indifference to danger.
When the leader of his section was killed, Bon took command,
rushed to the front and, shouting to his men to follow him,
gave proofs of the greatest initiative and courage. He was
the first in the enemy's trenches with his section."
That day he was promoted to sergeant and complimented by the general
in front of his battalion in the following terms:
"This is the second time, my friend, that I am told what
you have done; next time you shall be told what I have
done."
To-day men tell of his death, but also of the undying glory which
death alone confers.
"At Hartmannsviller," writes one of Bon's comrades,
"according to his captain's story, our friend's company was
held in reserve, waiting to support the attack delivered by
a regiment of infantry. The order came to support and
reinforce the attack. The company at once leapt from the
trenches, with the captain and Bon at its head. There was a
salvo of artillery; and the bursting of a great shell caught
Raymond almost full in the body, smashing his right leg and
his chest. The captain was hit in the right hand.
Notwithstanding his horrible wounds, Bon did not lose
consciousness; he was able to stammer out a few words and to
press the hand which the captain gave him. In less than two
minutes all was over."
And the captain adds:
"Always ready to sacrifice himself; a brave among the
brave."
These are modest and yet glorious details: modest because they are so
very common, because they are constantly being repeated in their noble
monotony and springing up from every side, numberless as the essential
actions of our daily life; and glorious because before this war they
seemed so rare and almost legendary and incomprehensible.
3
Raymond Bon was a child of the south, of that Provence which, day
after day, is shedding torrents of its blood to wipe out slanders
which we can no longer remember without turning pale with anger and
indignation. He was born at Avignon, the old city of the Popes and the
cicadas, where men have louder accents and lighter hearts than
elsewhere. He was a little boxing-master, who earned a livelihood at
Nice for himself and his destitute parents by giving lessons in the
noble art of self-defence with the good, ever-ready weapons which
nature has bestowed upon us. He boasted no other education than that
which a lad picks up at the primary school; but, almost illiterate as
he was, he possessed all the refinement, the innate culture, the
unconscious delicacy and tact, the kindliness of speech and feeling
and the beautiful heart of that comely race whose foremost sons seem
to be purified and spiritualized from their first childish steps by
the most radiant sunshine in the world. One would say that they were
directly related to those exquisite ephebes of ancient Greece who
sprang into existence ready to understand all things and to
experience life's purest emotions before they themselves had lived. My
reason for insisting upon the point is that, in this respect above
all, he represented thousands and thousands of young men from that
wonderful region where all the best and most lovable qualities of
mankind lie hidden all around beneath the indifferent surface of
everyday existence, only awaiting a favourable occasion to blossom
into astonishing flowers of grace and generosity and heroism.
4
When I heard that he had gone to the front, I felt a melancholy
certainty that I should never set eyes on him again. He was of those
whose fate there is no mistaking. He was one of those predestined
heroes whose courage marks them out beforehand for death and laurels.
I but too well knew his eagerness, his unbounded sincerity and
single-mindedness and his great heart: that admirable heart devoid of
all caution or ulterior motive or calculation, that heart turned, at
all times and with all its might, purely towards honour and duty. He
was bound to be in the trenches and in the bayonet-charge the same man
that I had so often seen in the ring, taking risks from the start,
taking them wholesale, unremittingly, blindly and cheerfully and
always ready with his pleasant smile, like that of a shy child, at any
time to face whatever giant might have challenged him.
I remember that one day in the year 1914, he was training Georges
Carpentier, who was to meet some negro heavy-weight or other. The
disproportion in the strength of the two men struck my friends and me
as rather alarming; and we took the champion of the world aside and
begged him not to hit too hard and to spare our little instructor as
much as he could. That good fellow Carpentier, who is full of
chivalrous gentleness, promised to do what we asked; but after the
first round he came back to us and said:
"I can't let him off just as lightly as I should like. The little chap
is too plucky and too sensitive; and I have to hit out in earnest.
Besides, he overheard you and what he says is, 'Never mind what the
gentlemen say; they are much too considerate and are always afraid of
my getting smashed up. There's no fear of that. You go for me hard,
else we sha'n't be doing good work.'"
5
"Good work." That is evidently what he did down at the front and what
all of them there are doing. It is indeed fine work, the most glorious
that a man can perform, to die like that for a cause whose triumph he
will not behold, for benefits which he does not reap and which will
accrue solely to his fellow-men whom he will never see again. For,
apart from those benefits, like so many other men, like almost all the
others, he had nothing to gain and nothing to lose by this war. All
that he possessed in the world was the strength of his two arms; and
that strength finds a country everywhere.
But we are no longer concerned with the personal and immediate
interests that guide nearly all the actions of everyday life. A
loftier ideal has visited men's minds and occupies them wholly; and
the least prepared, the humblest, the minds that seemed to understand
hardly anything of the existence that came before the tremendous
trial, now feel it and live it as thoroughly and with the same
infinite ampleness as do those minds which thought themselves alone
capable of grasping it, of considering it from above or contemplating
it from every side. Never did a sheer ideal sink so deeply into so
many hearts or abide there for so long without wavering or faltering.
And therefore, beyond a doubt, somewhere on high, in the heart of the
unknown powers that rule us, there is being piled up at this moment
the most wonderful treasure of immaterial forces that man has ever
possessed, one upon which he will draw until the end of time; for in
that superhuman treasure-house nothing is lost and we are still living
day by day on the virtues stored in it long centuries ago by the
heroes of Greece and Rome, by the saints and martyrs of the primitive
Church and by the flower of mediæval chivalry.
* * * * *
THE HOUR OF DESTINY
XI
THE HOUR OF DESTINY
1
We are already free to speak of this war as if it were ended and of
victory as if it were assured. In principle, in the region of moral
certainties, Germany has been beaten since the battle of the Marne;
and reality, which is always slower, because it goes burdened beneath
the weight of matter, must needs come obediently to join the ranks of
those certainties. The last agony may be prolonged for weeks and
months, for the animal is endowed with the stubborn and almost
inextinguishable vitality of the beasts of prey; but it is wounded to
the death; and we have only to wait patiently, weapon in hand, for the
final convulsions that announce the end. The historic event, the
greatest beyond doubt since man possessed a history, is therefore
accomplished; and, strange to say, it seems as though it had been
accomplished in spite of history, against its laws and contrary to its
wishes. It is rash, I know, to speak of such things; and it behoves us
to be very cautious in these speculations which pass the scope of
human understanding; but, when we consider what the annals of this
earth of ours have taught us, it seemed written in the book of the
world's destinies that Germany was bound to win. It was not only, as
we are too ready at the first glance to believe, the megalomania of an
autocrat drunk with vanity, the gross vanity of some brainless
buffoon; it was not the warlike impulses, the blind infatuation and
egoism of a feudal caste; it was not even the impatient and
deliberately fanned envy and covetousness of a too prolific race
close-cramped on a dreary and ungrateful soil: it was none of these
that let loose the hateful war. All these causes, adventitious or
fortuitous as they were, only settled the hour of the decision; but
the decision itself was taken and written, probably ages ago, in other
spheres which cannot be reached by the conscious will of man, spheres
in which dark and mighty laws hold sway over illimitable time and
space. The whole line, the whole huge curve of history showed to the
mind of whosoever tried to read its sacred and fearful hieroglyphics
that the day of a new, a formidable and inexorable event was at hand.
The theories built up on this point in the last sixty years by the
German professors, notably by Giesbrecht, the historian of the Ottos
and the Hohenstaufens, and Treitschke, the historian of the
Hohenzollerns, do not necessarily carry conviction but are at least
impressive; and the work of these two writers, which we do not know
as well as we should, and of Treitschke in particular possessed in
Germany an influence that sank deep into every mind, far exceeding
that of Nietzsche, which we looked upon as preponderant.
But let us ignore for the moment all that belongs to a remote past,
the study of which would call for more space than we have at our
disposal. Let us not question the empire of the Ottos, the
Hohenstaufens or the Hapsburgs, in which Germany, at least as a nation
and a race, played but a secondary part and was still unconscious of
her existence. Let us rather see what is happening nearer to us and,
so to speak, before our very eyes.
2
A hundred years ago, under Napoleon, France enjoyed her spell of
hegemony, which she was not able to prolong because this hegemony was
more the work of a prodigious but accidental genius than the fruit of
a real and intrinsic power. Next came the turn of England, who to-day
possesses the greatest empire that the world has seen since the days
of ancient Rome, that is to say, more than a fifth part of the
habitable globe. But this vast empire rests no more than did
Napoleon's upon an incontestible force, inasmuch as up to this day it
was defended only by an army less numerous and less well-equipped than
that of many a smaller nation, thus almost inevitably inviting war, as
Professor Cramb pointed out a year or two ago in his prophetic book,
_Germany and England_, which has only recently aroused the interest
which it deserves.
It seemed, therefore, as if between these two Powers, which were more
illusory than real, pending the advent of Russia, whose hour had not
yet struck; in this gap in history, between a nation on the verge of
its decline, or at least seemingly incapable of defending itself, and
a nation that was still too young and incapable of attack, fate
offered a magnificent place to whoso cared to take it. This is what
Germany felt, at first instinctively, urged by all the ill-defined
forces that impel mankind, and subsequently, in these latter years,
with a consciousness that became ever clearer and more persistent. She
grasped the fact that her turn had come to reign over the earth, that
she must take her chance and seize the opportunity that comes but
once. She prepared to answer the call of fate and, supported by the
mysterious aid which it lends to those whom it summons, she did
answer, we must admit, in an astonishing and most formidable manner.
She was within a hair's breadth of succeeding. A little less prolonged
and less gallant resistance on the part of Belgium, a suspicious
movement from Italy, a false step made upon the banks of the Marne;
and we can picture Paris falling; France overrun and fighting
heroically to her last gasp; Russia, not crushed, but weary of seeking
victory and making terms for good or ill with a conqueror impotent to
harm her; the neutral nations more or less reluctantly siding with the
strongest; England isolated, giving up her colonies to staunch the
wounds of her invaded isle; the fasces of justice broken asunder by a
separate peace here, a separate peace there, each equally humiliating;
and Germany, monstrous, ferocious, implacable, finally towering alone
over the ruins of Europe.
3
Now it seems that we have turned aside the inflexible decree. It seems
that we have averted the fate that was about to be accomplished. It
was bearing down upon us with the weight of the ages, with all the
weight of all the vague but irresistible aspirations of the past and,
perhaps, the future. Thanks to the greatest effort which mankind has
ever opposed to the unknown gods that rule it, we are entitled to
believe that the decree has broken down and that we have driven it
into the evil cave where never human force before had compelled it to
hide its defeat.
I say, "It seems;" I say, "We are entitled to believe." The fact is
that the ordeal is not yet past. Even on the day when the war is ended
and when victory is in our hands, destiny will not yet be conquered.
It has happened--seldom, it is true, but still it has happened twice
or thrice--that a nation has compelled the course of fate to turn
aside or to fall back. The nation congratulated herself, even as we
believe that we have the right to do. But events were not slow in
proving that she had congratulated herself too soon. Fatality, that is
to say, the enormous mass of causes and effects of which we have no
understanding, was not overcome; it was only delayed, it awaited its
revenge and its day, or at least what we call its day, which may
extend over a hundred years and more where nations are concerned, for
fatality does not reckon in the manner of men, but after the fashion
of the great movements of nature. It is important at this time to know
whether we shall be able to escape that revenge and that day. If men
and nations were swayed only by reason, if, after being so often the
absolute masters of their happiness and their future, they had not so
often destroyed that which they had just achieved, then we might
say--and indeed ought to say--that our escape depends only upon
ourselves. In point of fact, three-quarters of the risk are run and
the fourth is in our power; we have only to keep it so. Almost all the
chances of the fight are on our side at last; and, when the war is
over, there will be nothing but our wisdom and our will confronting a
destiny which from that time onward will be powerless to take its
course, unless it first succeed in blinding and perverting them.
In this hour all that lies hidden under that mysterious word will be
waiting on our decision, waiting to know if victory is with us or with
it. It is after we have won that we must really vanquish; it is in the
hour of peace that the actual war will begin against an invisible foe,
a hundred times as dangerous as the one of whom we have seen too much.
If at that hour we do not profit by all our advantages; if we do not
destroy, root and branch, the military power of an enemy who is in
secret alliance with the evil influences of the earth; if we do not
here and now, by an irrevocable compact, forearm ourselves against
our sense of pity and generosity, our weakness, our imprudence, our
future rivalries and discords; if we leave a single outlet to the
beast at bay; if, through our negligence, we give it a single hope, a
single opportunity of coming to the surface and taking breath, then
the vigilant fatality which has but one fixed idea will resume its
progress and pursue its way, dragging history with it and laughing
over its shoulder at man once more tricked and discomfited. Everything
that we have done and suffered, the ruins, the sacrifices, the
nameless tortures and the numberless dead, will have served no purpose
and will be lost beyond redemption. Everything will not have to be
done over again, for nothing is ever done over again and fortunate
opportunities do not occur twice; but everything except our woes and
all their consequences will be as though it had never been.
4
It will therefore be a matter of holding our own against the enemy
whom we do not see and mastering him until the turn or chance of the
accursed race is past. How long will that be? We cannot tell; but, in
the swift-moving history of to-day, it seems probable that the waiting
and the struggle will be much shorter than they would have been in
former times. Is it possible that fatality--by which I mean what
perhaps for a moment was the unacknowledged desire of the
planet--shall not regain the upper hand? At the stage which man has
reached, I hope and believe so. He had never conquered it before; but
also he had not yet risen to the height which he has now attained.
There is no reason why that which has never happened should not take
place one day; and everything seems to tell us that man is approaching
the day whereon, seizing the most glorious opportunity that has ever
presented itself since he acquired a consciousness, he will at last
learn that he is able, when he pleases, to control his whole fate in
this world.
* * * * *
IN ITALY
XII
IN ITALY
1
A few days before Italy formed her great resolve, the following lines
appeared in one of the leading Pangermanic organs of the peoples
beyond the Rhine, the _Kreuzzeitung_:
"We have already observed that it will not do to be too
optimistic as to Italy's decision; in point of fact, the
situation is very serious. If none but moderate
considerations had ruled Italy's intentions, there is little
doubt as to which path she would choose; but we know the
height which the wave of Germanophobia has attained in that
country, a significant mark of the popular sentiment being
the declaration of the Italian Socialists upon the reasons
of their inability to oppose the war. An equal source of
danger is the fact that the government feels that it no
longer controls the current of public opinion."
The whole drama of Italian intervention is summed up in these lines,
which explain it better than would the longest and most learned
commentaries.
The Italian government, restrained by a politic wisdom and prudence,
excessive, perhaps, but very excusable, did not wish for war. To the
utmost limits of patience, until its dignity and its sense of security
could bear no more, it did all that could be done to spare its people
the greatest calamity that can befall a land. It held out until it was
literally submerged and carried away by the flood of Germanophobia of
which the passage which I have quoted speaks. I witnessed the rising
of this flood. When I arrived in Milan, at the end of November, 1914,
to speak a few sentences at a charity-fête organized for the benefit
of the Belgian refugees, the hatred of Germany was already storing
itself up in men's hearts, but had not as yet come to the surface.
Here and there it did break out, but it was still fearful, circumspect
and hesitating. One felt it brewing, seething in the depths of men's
souls, but it seemed as yet to be feeling its way, to be reckoning
itself up, to be painfully attaining self-consciousness. When I
returned to Italy in March, 1915, I was amazed to behold the
unhoped-for height to which the invading flood had so swiftly risen.
That pious hatred, that necessary hatred, which in this case is merely
a magnificent passion for justice and humanity, had swept over
everything. It had come out into the full sunlight; it thrilled and
quivered at the least appeal, proud and happy to assert itself, to
manifest itself with the beautiful tumultuous ostentation of the
South; and it was the "neutrals" that now hid themselves after the
manner of unspeakable insects. That species had all but disappeared,
annihilated by the storm that was gathering on every hand. The Germans
themselves had gone to earth, no one knew where; and from that moment
it was certain that war was imminent and inevitable.
In the space of three months a stupendous work had been accomplished.
It is impossible for the moment to weigh and determine the part of
each of those who performed it. But we can even now say that in Italy,
which is governed preeminently by public opinion and which, more than
any other nation, has in its blood the traditions and the habits of
the forum and the ancient republics, it is above all the spoken word
that changes men's hearts and urges them to action.
2
From this point of view, the admirable campaign of agitation and
propaganda undertaken by M. Jules Destrée, author of _En Italie_, was
of an importance and possessed consequences which are beyond
comparison with anything else accomplished and which are difficult to
realize by those who were not present at one or other of the meetings
at which, for more than six months, indefatigably, travelling from
town to town, from the smallest to the most populous, he uttered the
distressful complaint of martyred Belgium, unveiling the lies, the
felonies, the monstrosities and the acts of devastation perpetrated by
the barbarian horde and making heard, with sovran eloquence, the
august voice of outraged justice and of baffled right.
I heard him more than once and was able to judge for myself of the
magical effect--the term is by no means too strong--which he produced
on the Italian crowd. It was a magnificent spectacle, which I shall
never forget. I then perceived for the first time in my life the
mysterious, incantatory, supernatural powers of great eloquence.
He would come forward wearing a languid, dejected and overburdened
air. The crowd, like all crowds awaiting their master, sat thronged at
his feet, silently humming, undecided, unshaped, not yet knowing what
it wanted or intended. He would begin; his voice was low, leisurely,
almost hesitating; he seemed to be painfully searching for his ideas
and expressions, but in reality he was feeling for the sensitive and
magnetic points of the huge and unknown being whose soul he wished to
reach. At the outset it was evident that he did not know exactly what
he was going to say. He swept his words across the assembly as though
they had been antennæ. They came back to him charged with sympathy
and strength and precise information. Then his delivery became more
rapid, his body drew itself erect, his stature and his very size
increased. His voice grew fuller; it became tremendous, seductive or
sarcastic, overwhelming like a hurricane all the ideas of his
audience, beating against the walls of the largest buildings, flowing,
through the doors and windows, out into the surging streets, there to
kindle the ardour and hatred which already thrilled the hall. His
face--tawny, brutal, ravaged, furrowed with shade and slashed with
light, powerful and magnificent in its ugliness--became the very mask,
the visible symbol of the furious and generous passions of the crowd.
At moments such as this, he truly merited the name which I heard those
about me murmuring, the name which the Italians gave him in that kind
of helpless fear and delight which men feel in the presence of an
irresistible force: he was "the Terrible Orator."
But all this power, which seemed so blindly released, was in reality
extremely circumspect, extremely subtle and marvellously disciplined.
The handling of those shy though excited crowds called for the utmost
prudence, as a certain French speaker, whom I will not name, but who
wished to make a like attempt, learnt to his cost. The Italian is
generous, courteous, hospitable, expansive and enthusiastic, but also
proud and susceptible. He does not readily allow another to dictate
his conduct, to reproach him with his shortcomings or to offer him
advice. He is conscious of his own worth; he knows that he is the
eldest son of our civilization and that no one has the right to
patronize him. It is necessary, therefore, beneath the appearance of
the most fiery and unbridled eloquence, to observe perfect
self-mastery, combined with infinite tact and discretion. It is often
essential to divine instantaneously the temper of the crowd, to bow
before the most varied and unexpected circumstances and to profit by
them. I remember, among others, a singularly prickly meeting at
Naples. The Neapolitans are hardly warlike people; but they none the
less felt on this occasion that they must not appear indifferent to
the generous movement which was thrilling the rest of Italy. At the
last moment, we were warned that we might speak of Belgium and her
misfortunes, but that any too pointed allusion to the war, any too
violent attack upon the Teutonic bandits would arouse protests which
might injure our cause. I, being no orator, had only my poor written
speech, which, as I could not alter it, became dangerous. It was
necessary to prepare the ground. Destrée mounted the platform and, in
a masterly improvisation, began by establishing a long, patient and
scholarly parallel between Flemish and Italian art, between the great
painters of Florence and Venice and those of Flanders and Brabant; and
thence, by imperceptible degrees, he shifted his ground to the present
distress in Belgium, to the atrocities and infamies committed by her
oppressors, to the whole story, to the whole series of injustices, to
the whole danger of this nameless war. He was applauded; the barriers
were broken down. Anything added to what he had said was superfluous;
but everything was permissible.
3
For the rest, it must be admitted that a wonderful impulse of pity and
admiration for Belgium sustained the orator and lent his every word a
range and a potency which it could not otherwise have possessed. This
unanimous and spontaneous sympathy assumed at times the most touching
and unexpected forms. All difficulties were smoothed away before us as
by magic; the sternest prohibitions were ingeniously evaded or
benevolently removed. From the towns which we were due to visit the
hotel-keepers telegraphed to us, begging as a favour permission to
give us lodging; and, when the time came to settle our account, it was
impossible to get them to accept the slightest remuneration; and the
whole staff, from the majestic porter to the humblest boot-boy,
heroically refused to be tipped. If we entered a restaurant and were
recognized, the customers would rise, take counsel together and order
a bottle of some famous wine; then one among them would come forward,
requesting, gracefully and respectfully, that we would do them the
honour of drinking with them to the deliverance of our martyred
motherland. At the memory of what that unhappy country had suffered
for the salvation of the world, a sort of discreet and affecting
fervour was visible in the looks of all; it may be said that nowhere
was the heroic sacrifice of Belgium more nobly and more affectionately
admired and understood; and it will be recognized one day, when time
has done its work, that, although other causes induced Italy to take
upon her shoulders the terrible burden of what was not an inevitable
war, the only causes that really, in the depths of her soul, liberated
her resolve were the admiration, the indignation and the heroic pity
inspired by the spectacle, incessantly renewed, of our unmerited
afflictions. You will not find in history a nobler sacrifice nor one
made for a nobler cause.
* * * * *
ON REREADING THUCYDIDES
XIII
ON REREADING THUCYDIDES
1
At moments above all when history is in the making, in these times
when great and as yet incomplete pages are being traced, pages by the
side of which all that had already been written will pale, it is a
good and salutary thing to turn to the past in search of instruction,
warning and encouragement. In this respect, the unwearying and
implacable war which Athens kept up against Sparta for twenty-seven
years, with the hegemony of Greece for a stake, presents more than one
analogy with that which we ourselves are waging and teaches lessons
that should make us reflect. The counsels which it gives us are all
the more precious, all the more striking or profound inasmuch as the
war is narrated to us by a man who remains, with Tacitus, despite the
striving of the centuries, the progress of life and all the
opportunities of doing better, the greatest historian that the earth
has ever known. Thucydides is in fact the supreme historian, at the
same time swift and detailed, scrupulously sifting his evidence but
giving free play to intuition, setting forth none but incontestable
facts, yet divining the most secret intentions and embracing at a
glance all the present and future political consequences of the events
which he relates. He is withal one of the most perfect writers, one of
the most admirable artists in the literature of mankind; and from this
point of view, in an entirely different and almost antagonistic world,
he has not an equal save Tacitus. But Tacitus is before everything a
wonderful tragic poet, a painter of foul abysses, of fire and blood,
who can lay bare the souls of monsters and their crimes, whereas
Thucydides is above all a great political moralist, a statesman
endowed with extraordinary perspicacity, a painter of the open air and
of a free state, who portrays the minds of those sane, ingenious,
subtle, generous and marvellously intelligent men who peopled ancient
Greece. The one piles on the gloom with a lavish hand, gathers dark
shadows which he pierces at each sentence with lightning flashes, but
remains sombre and oppressed on the very summits, whereas the other
condenses nothing but light, groups together judgments that are so
many radiant sheaves and remains luminous and breathes freely in the
very depths. The first is passionate, violent, fierce, indignant,
bitter, sincerely but pitilessly unjust and all made up of magnificent
animosities; the second is always even, always at the same high level,
which is that which the noblest endeavour of human reason can attain.
He has no passion but a passion for the public weal, for justice,
glory and intelligence. It is as though all his work were spread out
in the blue sky; and even his famous picture of the plague of Athens
seems covered with sunshine.
2
But there is no need to follow up this parallel, which is not my
object. I will not dwell any longer--though perhaps I may return to
them one day--upon the lessons which we might derive from that
Peloponnesian War, in which the position of Athens towards Lacedaemon
provides more than one point of comparison with that of France towards
Germany. True, we do not there see, as in our own case, civilized
nations fighting a morally barbarian people: it was a contest between
Greeks and Greeks, displaying however in the same physical race two
different and incompatible spirits. Athens stood for human life in
its happiest development, gracious, cheerful and peaceful. She took no
serious interest except in the happiness, the imponderous riches, the
innocent and perfect beauties, the sweet leisures, the glories and the
arts of peace. When she went to war, it was as though in play, with
the smile still on her face, looking upon it as a more violent
pleasure than the rest, or as a duty joyfully accepted. She bound
herself down to no discipline, she was never ready, she improvised
everything at the last moment, having, as Pericles said, "with habits
not of labour but of ease and courage not of art but of nature, the
double advantage of escaping the experience of hardship in
anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as
those who are never free from them."[5]
For Sparta, on the other hand, life was nothing but endless work, an
incessant strain, having no other objective than war. She was gloomy,
austere, strict, morose, almost ascetic, an enemy to everything that
excuses man's presence on this earth, a nation of spoilers, looters,
incendiaries and devastators, a nest of wasps beside a swarm of bees,
a perpetual menace and danger to everything around her, as hard upon
herself as upon others and boasting an ideal which may appear lofty,
if it can be man's ideal to be unhappy and the contented slave of
unrelenting discipline. On the other hand, she differed entirely from
those whom we are now fighting in that she was generally honest, loyal
and upright and showed a certain respect for the gods and their
temples, for treaties and for international law. It is none the less
true that, if she had from the beginning reigned alone or without
encountering a long resistance, Hellas would never have been the
Hellas that we know. She would have left in history but a precarious
trace of useless warlike virtues and of minor combats without glory;
and mankind would not have possessed that centre of light towards
which it turns to this day.
3
What was to be the issue of this war? Here begins the lesson which it
were well to study thoroughly. It would seem indeed as if, with the
first encounters in that conflict, as in our own, the inexplicable will
that governs nations was favourable to the less civilized; and in fact
Lacedaemon gained the upper hand, at least temporarily and sufficiently
to abuse her victory to such a degree that she soon lost its fruits.
But Athens held the evil will in check for seven-and-twenty years; for
twenty-seven summers and twenty-seven winters, to use Thucydides'
reckoning, she proved to us that it is possible, in defiance of
probability, to fight against what seems written in the book of heaven
and hell. Nay more, at a time when Sparta, whose sole industry, whose
sole training, whose only reason for existence and whose only ideal
was war, was hugging the thought of crushing in a few weeks, under the
weight of her formidable hoplites, a frivolous, careless and
ill-organized city, Athens, notwithstanding the treacherous blow which
fate dealt her by sending a plague that carried off a third of her
civil population and a quarter of her army, Athens for seventeen years
definitely held victory in her grasp.
During this period, she more than once had Lacedaemon at her mercy and
did not begin to descend the stony path of ruin and defeat until after
the disastrous expedition to Sicily, in which, carried away by her
rhetoricians and bitten with inconceivable folly, she hurled all her
fleet, all her soldiers and all her wealth into a remote,
unprofitable, unknown and desperate adventure. She resisted the
decline of her fortunes for yet another ten years, heaping up her sins
against wisdom and simple common sense and with her own hands drawing
tighter the knot that was to strangle her, as though to show us that
destiny is for the most part but our own madness and that what we call
unavoidable fatality has its root only in mistakes that might easily
be avoided.
4
To point this moral was again not my real object. In these days when
we have so many sorrows to assuage and so many deaths to honour, I
wished merely to recall a page written over two thousand years ago, to
the glory of the Athenian heroes who fell for their country in the
first battles of that war. According to the custom of the Greeks, the
bones of the dead that had been burnt on the battlefield were
solemnly brought back to Athens at the end of the year; and the people
chose the greatest speaker in the city to deliver the funeral oration.
This honour fell to Pericles, son of Xanthippus, the Pericles of the
golden age of human beauty. After pronouncing a well-merited and
magnificent eulogium on the Athenian nation and institutions, he
concluded with the following words:
"Indeed, if I have dwelt at some length upon the character
of our country, it has been to show that our stake in the
struggle is not the same as theirs who have no such blessing
to lose and also that the panegyric of the men over whom I
am now speaking might be by definite proofs established.
That panegyric is now in a great measure complete; for the
Athens that I have celebrated is only what the heroism of
these and their like have made her, men whose fame, unlike
that of most Hellenes, will be found to be only commensurate
with their deserts. And, if a test of worth be wanted, it is
to be found in their closing scene; and this not only in the
cases in which it set the final seal upon their merit, but
also in those in which it gave the first intimation of their
having any. For there is justice in the claim that
steadfastness in his country's battles should be as a cloak
to cover a man's other imperfections, since the good action
has blotted out the bad and his merit as a citizen more than
outweighed his demerits as an individual. But none of these
allowed either wealth with its prospect of future enjoyment
to unnerve his spirit, or poverty with its hope of a day of
freedom and riches to tempt him to shrink from danger. No,
holding that vengeance upon their enemies was more to be
desired than any personal blessings and reckoning this to be
the most glorious of hazards, they joyfully determined to
accept the risk, to make sure of their vengeance and to let
their wishes wait; and, while committing to hope the
uncertainty of final success, in the business before them
they thought fit to act boldly and trust in themselves. Thus
choosing to die resisting rather than to live submitting,
they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face
and, after one brief moment, while at the summit of their
fortune, escaped not from their fear but from their glory.
"So died these men as became Athenians. You, their
survivors, must determine to have as unfaltering a
resolution in the field, though you may pray that it may
have a happier issue. And, not contented with ideas derived
only from words of the advantages which are bound up with
the defence of your country, though these would furnish a
valuable text to a speaker even before an audience so alive
to them as the present, you must yourselves realize the
power of Athens and feed your eyes upon her from day to day,
till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her
greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was
by courage, sense of duty and a keen feeling of honour in
action that men were enabled to win all this and that no
personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to
deprive their country of their valour, but they laid it at
her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could
offer. For by this offering of their lives made in common by
them all they each of them individually received that renown
which never grows old and, for a sepulchre, not so much that
in which their bones have been deposited, but that noblest
of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be eternally
remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story shall
call for its commemoration. For heroes have the whole earth
for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the
column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in
every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve
it, except that of the heart. These take as your model and,
judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of
valour, never decline the dangers of war. For it is not the
miserable that would most justly be unsparing of their
lives: these have nothing to hope for; it is rather they to
whom continued life may bring reverses as yet unknown and to
whom a fall, if it came, would be most tremendous in its
consequences. And surely, to a man of spirit, the
degradation of cowardice must be immeasurably more grievous
than the unfelt death which strikes him in the midst of his
strength and patriotism!
"Comfort, therefore, not condolence, is what I have to offer
to the parents of the dead who may be here. Numberless are
the chances to which, as they know, the life of man is
subject; but fortunate indeed are they who draw for their
lot a death so glorious as that which has caused your
mourning and to whom life has been so exactly measured as to
terminate in the happiness in which it has been passed.
Still I know that this is a hard saying, especially when
those are in question of whom you will be constantly
reminded by seeing in the homes of others blessings of which
once you also boasted; for grief is felt not so much for the
want of what we have never known as for the loss of that to
which we have been long accustomed. Yet you who are still of
an age to beget children must bear up in the hope of having
others in their stead: not only will they help you to forget
those whom you have lost, but they will be to the state at
once a reinforcement and a security; for never can a fair or
just policy be expected of the citizen who does not, like
his fellows, bring to the decision the interests and
apprehensions of a father. While those of you who have
passed your prime must congratulate yourselves with the
thought that the best part of your life was fortunate and
that the brief span that remains will be cheered by the fame
of the departed. For it is only the love of honour that
never grows old; and honour it is, not gain, as some would
have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.
"And, now that you have brought to a close your lamentations
for your relatives, you may depart."
These words spoken twenty-three centuries ago ring in our hearts as
though they were uttered yesterday. They celebrate our dead better
than could any eloquence of ours, however poignant it might be. Let us
bow before their paramount beauty and before the great people that
could applaud and understand.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: This and the later passage from Pericles' funeral oration
I have quoted from the late Richard Crawley's admirable translation of
Thucydides' _Peloponnesian War_, now published in the _Temple
Classics_.--A. T. de M.]
* * * * *
THE DEAD DO NOT DIE
XIV
THE DEAD DO NOT DIE
1
When we behold the terrible loss of so many young lives, when we see
so many incarnations of physical and moral vigour, of intellect and of
glorious promise pitilessly cut off in their first flower, we are on
the verge of despair. Never before have the fairest energies and
aspirations of men been flung recklessly and incessantly into an abyss
whence comes no sound or answer. Never since it came into existence
has humanity squandered its treasure, its substance and its prospects
so lavishly. For more than twelve months, on every battlefield, where
the bravest, the truest, the most ardent and self-sacrificing are
necessarily the first to die and where the less courageous, the less
generous, the weak, the ailing, in a word the less desirable, alone
possess some chance of escaping the carnage, for over twelve months a
sort of monstrous inverse selection has been in operation, one which
seems to be deliberately seeking the downfall of the human race. And
we wonder uneasily what the state of the world will be after the great
trial and what will be left of it and what will be the future of this
stunted race, shorn of all the best and noblest part of it.
The problem is certainly one of the darkest that have ever vexed the
minds of men. It contains a material truth before which we remain
defenceless; and, if we accept it as it stands, we can discover no
remedy for the evil that threatens us. But material and tangible
truths are never anything but a more or less salient angle of greater
and deeper-lying truths. And, on the other hand, mankind appears to be
such a necessary and indestructible force of nature that it has
always, hitherto, not only survived the most desperate ordeals, but
succeeded in benefiting by them and emerging greater and stronger than
before.
2
We know that peace is better than war; it were madness to compare the
two. We know that, if this cataclysm let loose by an act of
unutterable folly had not come upon the world, mankind would doubtless
have reached ere long a zenith of wonderful achievement whose
manifestations it is impossible to foreshadow. We know that, if a
third or a fourth part of the fabulous sums expended on extermination
and destruction had been devoted to works of peace, all the iniquities
that poison the air we breathe would have been triumphantly redressed
and that the social question, the one great question, that matter of
life and death which justice demands that posterity should face,
would have found its definite solution, once and for all, in a
happiness which now perhaps even our sons and grandsons will not
realize. We know that the disappearance of two or three million young
existences, cut down when they were on the point of bearing fruit,
will leave in history a void that will not be easily filled, even as
we know that among those dead were mighty intellects, treasures of
genius which will not come back again and which contained inventions
and discoveries that will now perhaps be lost to us for centuries. We
know that we shall never grasp the consequences of this thrusting back
of progress and of this unprecedented devastation. But, granting all
this, it is a good thing to recover our balance and stand upon our
feet. There is no irreparable loss. Everything is transformed, nothing
perishes and that which seems to be hurled into destruction is not
destroyed at all. Our moral world, even as our physical world, is a
vast but hermetically sealed sphere, whence naught can issue, whence
naught can fall, to be dissolved in space. All that exists, all that
comes into being upon this earth remains there and bears fruit; and
the most appalling wastage is but material or spiritual riches flung
away for an instant, to fall to the ground again in a new form. There
is no escape or leakage, no filtering through cracks, no missing the
mark, not even waste or neglect. All this heroism poured out on every
side does not leave our planet; and the reason why the courage of our
fighters seems so general and yet so extraordinary is that all the
might of the dead has passed into the survivors. All those forces of
wisdom, patience, honour and self-sacrifice which increase day by day
and which we ourselves, who are far from the field of danger, feel
rising within us without knowing whence they come are nothing but the
souls of the heroes gathered and absorbed by our own souls.
3
It is well at times to contemplate invisible things as though we saw
them with our eyes. This was the aim of all the great religions, when
they represented under forms appropriate to the civilization of their
day, the latent, deep, instinctive, general and essential truths which
are the guiding principles of mankind. All have felt and recognized
that loftiest of all truths, the communion of the living and the dead,
and have given it various names designating the same mysterious
verity: the Christians know it as revival of merit, the Buddhists as
reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, and the Japanese as
Shintoism, or ancestor-worship. The last are more fully convinced than
any other nation that the dead do not cease to live and that they
direct all our actions, are exalted by our virtues and become gods.
Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has most closely studied and understood
that wonderful ancestor-worship, says:
"One of the surprises of our future will certainly be a
return to beliefs and ideas long ago abandoned upon the mere
assumption that they contained no truth--beliefs still
called barbarous, pagan, mediæval, by those who condemn them
out of traditional habit. Year after year the researches of
science afford us new proof that the savage, the barbarian,
the idolater, the monk, each and all have arrived, by
different paths, as near to some point of eternal truth as
any thinker of the nineteenth century. We are now learning
also, that the theories of the astrologers and of the
alchemists were but partially, not totally, wrong. We have
reason even to suppose that no dream of the invisible world
has ever been dreamed, that no hypothesis of the unseen has
ever been imagined--which future science will not prove to
have contained some germ of reality."[6]
There are many things which might be added to these lines, notably all
that the most recent of our sciences, metapsychics, is engaged in
discovering with regard to the miraculous faculties of our
subconsciousness.
But, to return more directly to what we were saying, was it not
observed that, after the great battles of the Napoleonic era, the
birth-rate increased in an extraordinary manner, as though the lives
suddenly cut short in their prime were not really dead and were eager
to be back again in our midst and complete their career? If we could
follow with our eyes all that is happening in the spiritual world that
rises above us on every side, we should no doubt see that it is the
same with the moral force that seems to be lost on the field of
slaughter. It knows where to go, it knows its goal, it does not
hesitate. All that our wonderful dead relinquish they bequeath to us;
and when they die for us, they leave us their lives not in any
strained metaphorical sense, but in a very real and direct way. Virtue
goes out of every man who falls while performing a deed of glory; and
that virtue drops down upon us; and nothing of him is lost and nothing
evaporates in the shock of a premature end. He gives us in one
solitary and mighty stroke what he would have given us in a long life
of duty and love. Death does not injure life; it is powerless against
it. Life's aggregate never changes. What death takes from those who
fall enters into those who are left standing. The number of lamps
grows less, but the flame rises higher. Death is in no wise the gainer
so long as there are living men. The more it exercises its ravages,
the more it increases the intensity of that which it cannot touch; the
more it pursues its phantom victories, the better does it prove to us
that man will end by conquering death.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: _Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Life_, chapter
xiv., "Some thoughts about Ancestor-Worship."]
* * * * *
IN MEMORIAM
XV
IN MEMORIAM
1
Those who die for their country should not be numbered with the dead.
We must call them by another name. They have nothing in common with
those who end in their beds a life that is worn out, a life almost
always too long and often useless. Death, which every elsewhere is but
the object of fear and horror, bringing naught but nothingness and
despair, this death, on the field of battle, in the clash of glory,
becomes more gracious than birth and exhales a beauty greater than
that of love. No life will ever give what their youth is offering us,
that youth which gives in one moment the days and the years that lay
before it. There is no sacrifice to be compared with that which they
have made; for which reason there is no glory that can soar so high
as theirs, no gratitude that can surpass the gratitude which we owe
them. They have not only a right to the foremost place in our
memories: they have a right to all our memories and to everything that
we are, since we exist only through them.
2
And now it is in us that their life, so suddenly cut short, must
resume its course. Whatever be our faith and whatever the God whom it
adores, one thing is almost certain and, in spite of all appearances,
is daily becoming more certain: it is that death and life are
commingled; the dead and the living alike are but moments, hardly
dissimilar, of a single and infinite existence and members of one
immortal family. They are not beneath the earth, in the depths of
their tombs; they lie deep in our hearts, where all that they once
were will continue to live to to act; and they live in us even as we
die in them. They see us, they understand us more nearly than when
they were in our arms; let us then keep a watch upon ourselves, so
that they witness no actions and hear no words but words and actions
that shall be worthy of them.
* * * * *
SUPERNATURAL COMMUNICATIONS IN WAR-TIME
XVI
SUPERNATURAL COMMUNICATIONS IN WAR-TIME
1
In a volume entitled _The Unknown Guest_, published not long ago,
among other essays I devoted one in particular[7] to certain phenomena
of intuition, clairvoyance or clairaudience, vision at great distance
and even vision of the future. These phenomena were grouped together
under the somewhat unsuitable and none too well-constructed title of
"psychometry," which, to borrow Dr. Maxwell's excellent definition, is
"the faculty possessed by certain persons of placing themselves in
relation, either spontaneously or, for the most part, through the
intermediary of some object, with unknown and often very distant
things and people."
The existence of this faculty is no longer seriously denied by any one
who has given some little attention to metapsychics; and it is easily
verified by those who will take the necessary trouble, for its
possessors, though few in number, are not inaccessible. It has been
the subject of many experiments and of a few treatises, among which I
will name one by M. Duchatel, _Enquête sur des cas de psychométrie_,
and Dr. Osty's recent book, _Lucidité et intuition_, which is the most
complete and searching work that we have had upon this question until
now.
Psychometry is one of the most curious faculties of our
subconsciousness and doubtless contains the clue to many of those
manifestations which appear to proceed from another world. Let us see,
with the aid of a living example, how it is employed.
One of the best mediums of this class is a lady to whom I referred in
_The Unknown Guest_ as Mme. M. Her visitor gives her an object of some
kind that has belonged to or been touched or handled by the person
about whom he proposes to question her. Mme. M. operates in a state of
trance; but there are other celebrated psychometers who retain all
their normal consciousness, so that the hypnotic or somnambulistic
state is not, generally speaking, by any means indispensable when we
wish to arouse this extraordinary clairvoyance.
After placing the object, usually a letter, in the medium's hands, you
say to her:
"I wish you to put yourself in communication with the writer of this
letter," or "the owner of this article," as the case may be.
Forthwith the medium not only perceives the person in question, his
physical appearance, his character, his habits, his interests, his
state of health, but also, in a series of swift and changing visions
that follow one another like the pictures of a cinematograph, sees and
describes exactly that person's environment, the surrounding country,
the rooms in which he lives, the people who live with him and who wish
him well or ill, the mentality and the most secret and unexpected
intentions of all the various characters that figure in his existence.
If by means of your questions you direct her towards the past, she
traces the whole course of the subject's history. If you turn her
towards the future, she seems often to discover it as clearly as the
past.
But here we must make certain reservations. We are entering upon
forbidden tracts; errors are almost the rule and proper supervision is
all but impossible. It is better therefore not to venture into those
dangerous regions. Pending fuller investigation of the question, we
may say that the foretelling of the future, when it claims to cover a
definite space of time, is nearly always illusory. There is scarcely
any accuracy of vision, except when the events concerned are very near
at hand, already developing or actually being consummated; and it then
becomes difficult to distinguish it from presentiments, which in their
turn are rarely true except where the immediate future is concerned.
To sum up, in the present state of our experience, we observe that
what the psychometers and clairvoyants foretell us possesses a certain
value and some chance of proving correct only in so far as they put
into words our own forebodings, forebodings which again may be quite
unknown to us and which they discover deep down in our subconsciousness.
They confine themselves--I speak of the genuine mediums--to bringing
to light and revealing to us our unconscious and personal intuition
of an event that is hanging over us. But, when they venture to predict
a general event, such as the result of a war, an epidemic, an
earthquake, which does not interest ourselves exclusively or which is
too remote to come within the somewhat limited scope of our intuition,
they almost invariably deceive themselves and us.
It is very difficult to fathom the nature of this intuition. Does it
relate to events partly or wholly realized, but still in a latent
state and perceived before the knowledge of them reaches us through
the normal channels of the mind or brain? Does our ever-watchful
instinct of self-preservation notice causes or traces which escape our
ever-inattentive and slumbering reason? Are we to believe in a sort of
autosuggestion that induces us to realize things which we have been
foretold or of which we have had presentiments? This is not the place
to examine so complex a problem, which brings us into contact with
all the mysteries of subconsciousness and the preexistence of the
future.
There remains another point to which it is well to draw attention in
order to avoid misunderstanding and disappointment. Experience shows
us that the medium perceives the person in question quite clearly, in
his present and usual state, but not necessarily in the exact
accidental state of the moment. She will tell you, for instance, that
she sees him ailing slightly, lying in a deck-chair in a garden of
such and such a kind, surrounded by certain flowers and petting a dog
of a certain size and breed. On enquiring, you will find that all
these details are strictly correct, with one exception, that at that
precise moment this person, who ordinarily spends his time in the
garden, was inside his house or calling on a neighbour. Mistakes in
time therefore are comparatively frequent and simultaneity between
action and vision comparatively rare. In short, the habitual often
masks the accidental action. This, I insist, is a point of which we
must not lose sight, lest we ask of psychometry more than it is
obviously able to give us.
2
Having said so much, is it open to us, amid all the mental anguish and
suffering which this terrible war has engendered, without profaning
the sorrow of our fellow-men and women, to give to those who are in
mortal fear as to the fate of some one whom they love the hope of
finding, among those extrahuman phenomena which have been unjustly and
falsely disparaged, a consoling gleam of light that shall not be a
mere mockery or delusion? I venture to declare--and I am doing so not
thoughtlessly, but after studying the problem with the conscientious
attention which it demands and after personally making a number of
experiments or causing them to be made under my supervision--I venture
to declare, without for a moment losing sight of the respect due to
grief, that we possess here, in these indisputable cases where no
normal mode of communication is possible, a strange but real and
serious source of information and comfort. I could mention a large
number of tests that have been made, so to speak, before my eyes by
absolutely trustworthy relatives or friends.
As my space is limited, I will relate only one, which typifies and
summarizes all the others very fairly. A mother had three sons at the
front. She was hearing pretty regularly from the eldest and the
second; but for some weeks the youngest, who was in the Belgian
trenches, where the fighting was very fierce, had given no sign of
life. Wild with anxiety, she was already mourning him as dead when
her friends advised her to consult Mme. M. The medium consoled her
with the first words that she spoke and told her that she saw her son
wounded, but in no danger whatever, that he was in a sort of shed
fitted up as a hospital, that he was being very well looked after by
people who spoke a different language, that for the time being he was
unable to write, which was a great worry to him, but that she would
receive a letter from him in a few days. The mother did, in fact,
receive a card from this son a few days later, worded a little stiffly
and curtly and written in an unnatural hand, telling her that all was
well and that he was in good health. Greatly relieved, she dismissed
the matter from her mind, merely said to herself that of course the
medium, like all mediums, had been wrong and thought no more of it.
But two or three messages following on the first, all couched in
short, stilted phrases that seemed to be hiding something, ended by
alarming her so much that she was unable to bear the strain any longer
and entreated her son to tell her the whole truth, whatever it might
be. He then admitted that he had been wounded, though not seriously,
adding that he was in a sort of shed fitted up as a hospital, where he
was being capitally looked after by English doctors and nurses, in
short, just as the medium had seen him.
I repeat, mediumistic experience can show other instances of this
kind. If it stood alone, it would be valueless, for it might well be
explained by mere coincidence. But it forms part of a very normal
series; and I could easily enumerate many others within my own
knowledge. This, however, would merely mean repeating, with
uninteresting variations, the essential features of the present case,
a proceeding for which there would be no excuse save in a technical
work.
Is success then practically certain? Yes, rash and surprising though
the statement may seem, mistakes upon the whole are very rare,
provided that the medium be carefully chosen and that the object
serving as an intermediary have not passed through too many hands, for
it will contain and reveal as many distinct personalities as it has
undergone contacts. It will be necessary, therefore, first to
eliminate all these accessory personalities, so as to fix the medium's
attention solely on the subject of the consultation. On the other
hand, we must beware of calling for details which the nature of the
medium's vision does not allow her to give us. If asked, for instance,
about a soldier who is a prisoner in Germany, she will see the soldier
in question very plainly, will perceive his state of health and mind,
the manner in which he is treated, his companions, the fortress or
group of huts in which he is interned, the appearance of the camp, of
the town, of the surrounding district; but she will very seldom indeed
be able to mention the name of the camp, town or district. In fact,
she can describe only what she sees; and, unless the town or camp have
a board bearing its name, there will be nothing to enable her to
identify it with sufficient accuracy. Let us add, lastly, that, with
mediums in a state of trance, who are not conscious of what they are
saying, we are exposed to terrible shocks. If they see death, they
announce the fact bluntly, without suspecting that they are in the
presence of a horror-stricken mother, wife or sister, so much so that,
in the case of Mme. M. particularly, it has been found necessary to
take certain precautions to obviate any such shock.
3
Now what is the nature of this strange and incredible faculty? In the
book which I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I tried to
examine the different theories that suggested themselves. The
argument, unfortunately, is infinitely too long to be republished
here, even if I were to compress it ruthlessly. I will give merely a
brief summary of the conclusions, or rather of the attempted
conclusions, for the mystery, like most of the world's mysteries, is
probably unfathomable. After dismissing the spiritualistic theory,
which implies the intervention of the dead or of discarnate entities
and is not as ridiculous as the profane would think, but which nothing
hitherto has adequately confirmed, we may reasonably ask ourselves
first of all whether this faculty exists in us or in the medium. Does
it simply decipher, as is probably the case where the future is
concerned, the latent ideas, knowledge and certainties which we bear
within us, or does it alone, of its own initiative and independently
of us, perceive what it reveals to us? Experience seems to show that
we must adopt the latter hypothesis, for the vision appears just as
distinctly when the illuminating object is brought by a third person
who knows nothing and has never heard of the individual to whom the
object once belonged. It seems therefore almost certain that the
strange virtue is contained solely in the object itself, which is
somehow galvanized by a complementary virtue in the medium. This being
so, we must presume that the object, having absorbed like a sponge a
portion of the spirit of the person who touched it, remains in
constant communication with him, or, more probably, that it serves to
track out, among the prodigious throng of human beings, the one who
impregnated it with his fluid, even as the dogs employed by the
police--at least so we are told--when given an article of clothing to
smell, are able to distinguish, among innumerable cross-trails, that
of the man who used to wear the garment in question. It seems more and
more certain that, as cells of one vast organism, we are connected
with everything that exists by an infinitely intricate network of
waves, vibrations, influences, currents and fluids, all nameless,
numberless and unbroken. Nearly always, in nearly all men, everything
transmitted by these invisible threads falls into the depths of the
subconsciousness and passes unperceived, which is not the same as
saying that it remains inactive. But sometimes an exceptional
circumstance, such as, in the present case, the marvellous sensibility
of a first-rate medium, suddenly reveals to us the existence of the
infinite living network by the vibrations and the undeniable operation
of one of its threads.
All this, I agree, sounds incredible, but really it is hardly any more
so than the wonders of radioactivity, of the Hertzian waves, of
photography, electricity or hypnotism, or of generation, which
condenses into a single particle all the physical, moral and
intellectual past and future of thousands of creatures. Our life would
be reduced to something very small indeed if we deliberately dismissed
from it all that our understanding is unable to embrace.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: Chap. ii.: "Psychometry."]
* * * * *
EDITH CAVELL
XVII
EDITH CAVELL[8]
1
To-day, in honouring the memory of Miss Edith Cavell, we honour not
only the heroine who fell in the midst of her labours of love and
piety, we honour also those, wherever they may be, who have
accomplished or will yet accomplish the same sacrifice and who are
ready, in like circumstances, to face a like death.
We are told by Thucydides that the Athenians of the age of
Pericles--who, to the honour of humanity be it said, had nothing in
common with the Athenians of to-day--were accustomed, each winter
during their great war, to celebrate at the cost of the State the
obsequies of those who had perished in the recent campaign. The bones
of the dead, arranged according to their tribes, were exhibited under
a tent and honoured for three days. In the midst of this host of the
known dead stood an empty bed, covered with tapestry and dedicated to
"the Invisible," that is, to those whose bodies it had been impossible
to recover. Let us too, before all else, in the quiet of this hall,
where none but almost religious words may be heard, raise in our midst
such an altar, a sacred and mysterious altar, to the invisible
heroines of this war, that is to say, to all those who have died an
obscure death and have left no traces and also to those who are yet
living, whose sacrifices and sufferings will never be told. Here, with
the eyes of the spirit, let us gaze upon all the heroic deeds of which
we know; but let us reserve an honoured place for those, incomparably
more numerous and perhaps more beautiful, of which we as yet know
nothing and, above all, for those of which we shall never know, for
glory has its injustices even as death has its fatalities.
2
Yet it is hardly probable that among these sacrifices we shall discern
any more admirable than that of Miss Edith Cavell. I need not recall
the circumstances of her death, for they are well-known to everybody
and will never be forgotten. Destiny left nothing undone for the
purest glory to emerge from the deepest shadow. In the depths of that
shadow it concentrated all imaginable hatred, horror, villainy,
cowardice and infamy, so that all pity, all innocent courage and
mercy, all well-doing and all sweet charity might shine forth above
it, as though to show us how low men may sink and how high a woman can
rise, as though its express and visible intention had been to trace,
with a single gesture, amid all the sorrows and the rare beauties of
this war, an outstanding and incomparable example which should at the
same time be an immortal and consoling symbol.
3
And one would say that destiny had taken pains to make this symbol as
truthful and as general as possible. It did not select a dazzling and
warlike heroine, as it would have done in the days of old: a Judith, a
Lucretia, nor even a Joan of Arc. There was no need of resounding
words, of splendid raiment, of tragic attitudes and accessories, of an
imposing background. The beauty which we find so touching has grown
simpler; it makes less stir and wins closer to our heart. And this is
why destiny sought out in obscurity a little hospital nurse, one of
many thousands of others. The sight of her unpretentious portrait does
not tell one whether she was rich or poor, a humble member of the
middle classes or a great lady. She would pass unnoticed anywhere
until the hour of trial, when glory recognizes its elect; and it seems
as though goodness had almost eliminated the individual contours of
her face, so that it might the more closely resemble the pensive and
sad smiling faces of all the good women in the world.
Beneath those features one might indeed have read the hidden devotion
and quiet heroism of all the women who do their duty, that is, of
those whom we see about us day by day, working, hoping, keeping vigil,
solacing and succouring others, wearing themselves out without
complaint, suffering in secret and mourning their dead in silence.
4
She passed like a flash of light which for one moment illumined that
vast and innumerable multitude, confirming our confidence and our
admiration. She has added a final beauty to the great revelations of
this war; for the war, which has taught us many things that will never
fade from our memory, has above all revealed us to ourselves. In the
first days of the terrible ordeal, we did not know for certain how men
and women would comport themselves. In vain did we interrogate the
past, hoping thereby to learn something of the future. There was no
past that would serve for a comparison. Our eyes were drawn back to
the present; and we closed them, full of uneasiness. In what condition
should we find ourselves facing duty, sacrifice, suffering and death,
after so many years of peace, well-being and pleasure, of heedlessness
and moral indifference? What had been the vast and invisible journey
of the human conscience and of those secret forces which are the
whole of man, during this long respite, when they had never been
called upon to confront fate? Were they asleep, were they weakened or
lost, would they respond to the call of destiny, or had they sunk so
deep that they would never recover the energy to ascend to the surface
of life? There was a moment of anguish and silence; and lo, suddenly,
in the midst of this anguish and silence, the most splendid response,
the most magnificent cry of resurrection, of righteousness, of heroism
and sacrifice that the earth has ever heard since it began to roll
along the paths of space and time! They were still there, the ideal
forces! They were mounting upward, on every side, from the depths of
all those swiftly-assembling souls, not merely intact but more than
ever radiant, more than ever pure, more numerous and mightier than
ever! To the amazement of all of us, who possessed them without
knowing it, they had increased in strength and stature while
apparently neglected and forgotten.
To-day there is no longer any doubt. We may expect all things and hope
all things from the men and the women who have surmounted this long
and grievous trial. If the heroism displayed by man on the battlefield
has never been comparable with that which is being lavished at this
moment, we may also say of the women that their heroism is even more
beyond comparison. We knew that a certain number of men were capable
of giving their lives for their country, for their faith or for a
generous ideal; but we did not realize that all would wrestle with
death for endless months, in great unanimous masses; and above all we
did not imagine, or perhaps we had to some extent forgotten, since the
days of the great martyrs, that woman was ready with the same gift of
self, the same patience, the same sacrifices, the same greatness of
soul and was about--less perhaps in blood than in tears, for it is
always on her that sorrow ends by falling--to prove herself the rival
and the peer of man.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 8: Delivered in Paris, at the Trocadéro, 18 December, 1915.]
* * * * *
THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
XVIII
THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
1
The other day I went to see a woman whom I knew before the war--she
was happy then--and who had lost her only son in one of the battles in
the Argonne. She was a widow, almost a poor woman; and, now that this
son, her pride and her joy, was no more, she no longer had any reason
for living. I hesitated to knock at her door. Was I not about to
witness one of those hopeless griefs at whose feet all words fall to
the ground like shameful and insulting lies? Which of us to-day is not
familiar with these mournful interviews, this dismal duty?
To my great astonishment, she offered me her hand with a kindly smile.
Her eyes, to which I hardly dared raise my own, were free of tears.
"You have come to speak to me of him," she said, in a cheerful tone;
and it was as though her voice had grown younger.
"Alas, yes! I had heard of your sorrow; and I have come...."
"Yes, I too believed that my unhappiness was irreparable; but now I
know that he is not dead."
"What! He is not dead? Do you mean that the news...? But I thought
that the body...."
"Yes, his body is down there; and I have even a photograph of his
grave. Let me show it to you. See, that cross on the left, the fourth
cross: that is where they have laid him. One of his friends, who
buried him, sent me this card, with all the details. He did not suffer
any pain. There was not even a death-struggle. And he has told me so
himself. He is quite astonished that death should be so easy, so
slight a thing.... You do not understand? Yes, I see what it is: you
are just as I used to be, as all the others are. I do not explain the
matter to the others; what would be the use? They do not wish to
understand. But you, you will understand. He is more alive than he
ever was; he is free and happy. He does just as he likes. He tells me
that one cannot imagine what a release death is, what a weight it
removes from you, nor the joy which it brings. He comes to see me when
I call him. He loves especially to come in the evening; and we chat as
we used to do. He has not altered; he is just as he was on the day
when he went away, only younger, stronger, handsomer. We have never
been happier, or more united, or nearer to one another. He divines my
thoughts before I utter them. He knows everything; he sees everything;
but he cannot tell me everything he knows. He says that I must be
wanting to follow him and that I must wait for my hour. And, while I
wait, we are living in happiness greater than that which was ours
before the war, a happiness which nothing can ever trouble again...."
Those about her pitied the poor woman; and, as she did not weep, as
she was gay and smiling, they believed her mad.
2
Was she as mad as they thought? At the present moment, the great
questions of the world beyond the grave are pressing upon us from
every side. It is probable that, since the world began, there have
never been so many dead as now. The empire of death was never so
mighty, so terrible; it is for us to defend and enlarge the empire of
life. In the presence of this mother, which are right or wrong, those
who are convinced that their dead are forever swept out of existence,
or those who are persuaded that their dead do not cease to live, who
believe that they see them and hear them? Do we know what it is that
dies in our dead, or even if anything dies? Whatever our religious
faith may be, there is at any rate one place where they cannot die.
That place is within ourselves; and, if this unhappy mother went
beyond the truth, she was yet nearer to it than those despairing ones
who nourish the mournful certainty that nothing survives of those whom
they loved. She felt too keenly what we do not feel keenly enough. She
remembered too much; and we do not know how to remember. Between the
two errors there is room for a great truth; and, if we have to choose,
hers is the error towards which we should lean. Let us learn to
acquire through reason that which a wise madness bestowed on her. Let
us learn from her to live with our dead and to live with them without
sadness and without terror. They do not ask for tears, but for a happy
and confident affection. Let us learn from her to resuscitate those
whom we regret. She called to hers, while we repulse ours; we are
afraid of them and are surprised that they lose heart and pale and
fade away and leave us forever. They need love as much as do the
living. They die, not at the moment when they sink into the grave, but
gradually as they sink into oblivion; and it is oblivion alone that
makes the separation irrevocable. We should not allow it to heap
itself above them. It would be enough to vouchsafe them each day a
single one of those thoughts which we bestow uncounted upon so many
useless objects: they would no longer think of leaving us; they would
remain around us and we should no longer understand what a tomb is;
for there is no tomb, however deep, whose stone may not be raised and
whose dust dispersed by a thought.
There would be no difference between the living and the dead if we but
knew how to remember. There would be no more dead. The best of what
they were dwells with us after fate has taken them from us; all their
past is ours; and it is wider than the present, more certain than the
future. Material presence is not everything in this world; and we can
dispense with it and yet not despair. We do not mourn those who live
in lands which we shall never visit, because we know that it depends
on us whether we go to find them. Let it be the same with our dead.
Instead of believing that they have disappeared never to return, tell
yourselves that they are in a country to which you yourself will
assuredly go soon; a country not so very far away. And, while waiting
for the time when you will go there once and for all, you may visit
them in thought as easily as if they were still in a region inhabited
by the living. The memory of the dead is even more alive than that of
the living; it is as though they were assisting our memory, as though
they, on their side, were making a mysterious effort to join hands
with us on ours. One feels that they are far more powerful than the
absent who continue to breathe as we do.
3
Try then to recall those whom you have lost, before it is too late,
before they have gone too far; and you will see that they will come
much closer to your heart, that they will belong to you more truly,
that they are as real as when they were in the flesh. In putting off
this last, they have but discarded the moments in which they loved us
least or in which we did not love at all. Now they are pure; they are
clothed only in the fairest hours of life; they no longer possess
faults, littlenesses, oddities; they can no longer fall away, or
deceive themselves, or give us pain. They care for nothing now but to
smile upon us, to encompass us with love, to bring us a happiness
drawn without stint from a past which they live again beside us.
* * * * *
THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS
XIX
THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS
At the end of an essay occurring in _The Unknown Guest_ and entitled,
_The Knowledge of the Future_, in which I examined a certain number of
phenomena relating to the anticipatory perception of events, such as
presentiments, premonitions, precognitions, predictions, etc., I
concluded in nearly the following terms:
"To sum up, if it is difficult for us to conceive that the
future preexists, perhaps it is just as difficult for us to
understand that it does not exist; moreover, many facts tend
to prove that it is as real and definite and has, both in
time and eternity, the same permanence and the same
vividness as the past. Now, from the moment that it
preexists, it is not surprising that we should be able to
know it; it is even astonishing, granted that it overhangs
us from every side, that we should not discover it oftener
and more easily."
Above all is it astonishing and almost inconceivable that this
universal war, the most stupendous catastrophe that has overwhelmed
humanity since the origin of things, should not, while it was
approaching, bearing in its womb innumerable woes which were about to
affect almost every one of us, have thrown upon us more plainly, from
the recesses of those days in which it was making ready, its menacing
shadow. One would think that it ought to have overcast the whole
horizon of the future, even as it will overcast the whole horizon of
the past. A secret of such weight, suspended in time, ought surely to
have weighed upon all our lives; and presentiments or revelations
should have arisen on every hand. There was none of these. We lived
and moved without uneasiness beneath the disaster which, from year to
year, from day to day, from hour to hour, was descending upon the
world; and we perceived it only when it touched our heads. True, it
was more or less foreseen by our reason; but our reason hardly
believed in it; and besides I am not for the moment speaking of the
inductions of the understanding, which are always uncertain and which
are resigned beforehand to the capricious contradictions which they
are accustomed daily to receive from facts.
2
But I repeat, beside or above these inductions of our everyday logic,
in the less familiar domain of supernatural intuitions, of divination,
prediction or prophecy properly so-called, we find that there was
practically nothing to warn us of the vast peril. This does not mean
that there was any lack of predictions or prophecies collected after
the event; these number, it appears, no fewer than eighty-three; but
none of them, excepting those of Léon Sonrel and the Rector of Ars,
which we will examine in a moment, is worthy of serious discussion. I
shall therefore mention, by way of a reminder, only the most widely
known; and, first of all, the famous prophecy of Mayence or Strasburg,
which is supposed to have been discovered by a certain Jecker in an
ancient convent founded near Mayence by St. Hildegard, of which the
original text could not be found and of which no one until lately had
ever heard. Then there is another prophecy of Mayence or Fiensberg,
published in the _Neue Metaphysische Rundschau_ of Berlin in February,
1912, in which the end of the German Empire is announced for the year
1913. Next, we have various predictions uttered by Mme. de Thèbes, by
Dom Bosco, by the Blessed Andrew Bobola, by Korzenicki, the Polish
monk, by Tolstoy, by Brother Hermann and so on, which are even less
interesting; and lastly the prophecy of "Brother Johannes," published
by M. Joséphin Peladan in the _Figaro_ of 16 September, 1914, which
contains no evidence of genuineness and must therefore meanwhile be
regarded merely as an ingenious literary conceit.
3
All these, on examination, leave but a worthless residuum; but the
prophecies of the Rector of Ars and of Léon Sonrel are more curious
and worthy of a moment's attention.
Father Jean-Baptiste Vianney, Rector of Ars, was, as everybody knows,
a very saintly priest, who appears to have been endowed with
extraordinary mediumistic faculties. The prophecy in question was
made public in 1862, three years after the miracle-worker's death, and
was confirmed by a letter which Mgr. Perriet addressed to the Very
Rev. Dom Gréa on the 24th of February, 1908. Moreover, it was printed,
as far back as 1872, in a collection entitled, _Voix prophétiques, ou
signes, apparitions et prédictions modernes_. It therefore has an
incontestable date. I pass over the part relating to the war of 1870,
which does not offer the same safeguards; but I give that which
concerns the present war, quoting from the 1872 text:
"The enemies will not go altogether; they will return again
and destroy everything upon their passage; we shall not
resist them, but will allow them to advance; and after that
we shall cut off their provisions and make them suffer great
losses. They will retreat towards their country; we shall
follow them and there will be hardly any who return home.
Then we shall take back all that they took from us and much
more."
As for the date of the event, it is stated definitely and rather
strikingly in these words:
"They will want to canonize me, but there will not be time."
Now the preliminaries to the canonization of Father Vianney were begun
in July, 1914, but abandoned because of the war.
I now come to the Sonrel prediction. I will summarize it as briefly as
possible from the admirable article which M. de Vesme devoted to it in
the _Annales des sciences psychiques_.[9]
On the 3rd of June, 1914--observe the date--Professor Charles Richet
handed M. de Vesme, from Dr. Amédée Tardieu, a manuscript of which
the following is the substance: on the 23rd or 24th of July, 1869, Dr.
Tardieu was strolling in the gardens of the Luxembourg with his friend
Léon Sonrel, a former pupil of the Higher Normal School and teacher of
natural philosophy at the Paris Observatory, when the latter had a
kind of vision in the course of which he predicted various precise and
actual episodes of the war of 1870, such as the collection on behalf
of the wounded at the moment of departure and the amount of the sum
collected in the soldiers' képis; incidents of the journey to the
frontier; the battle of Sedan, the rout of the French, the civil war,
the siege of Paris, his own death, the birth of a posthumous child,
the doctor's political career and so on: predictions all of which were
verified, as is attested by numerous witnesses who are worthy of the
fullest credence. But I will pass over this part of the story and
consider only that portion which refers to the present war:
"I have been waiting for two years," to quote the text of
Dr. Tardieu's manuscript of the 3rd of June, "for the sequel
of the prediction which you are about to read. I omit
everything that concerns my friend Léon's family and my
private affairs. Yet there is in my life at this moment a
personal matter, which, as always happens, agrees too
closely with general occurrences for me to doubt what
follows:
"'O my God! My country is lost: France is dead!... What a
disaster!... Ah, see, she is saved! She extends to the
Rhine! O France, O my beloved country, you are triumphant;
you are the queen of nations!... Your genius shines forth
over the world.... All the earth wonders at you....'"
These are the words contained in the document written at the Mont-Doré
on the 3rd and handed to M. de Vesme on the 13th of June 1914, at a
moment when no one was thinking of the terrible war which to-day is
ravaging half the world.
When questioned, after the declaration of war, by M. de Vesme on the
subject of the prophetic phrase, "I have been waiting for two years
for the sequel of the prediction which you are about to read," Dr.
Tardieu replied, on the 12th of August:
"I have been waiting for two years; and I will tell you why. My friend
Léon did not name the year, but the more general events are described
simultaneously with the events of my own life. Now the events which
concern me privately and which were doubtful two years ago became
certain in April or May last. My friends know that since May last I
have been announcing war as due before September, basing my prediction
on coincidences with events in my private life of which I do not
speak."
4
These, up to the present, are the only prophecies known to us that
deserve any particular attention. The prediction in both is timid and
laconic; but, in those regions where the least gleam of light assumes
extraordinary importance, it is not to be neglected. I admit, for the
rest, that there has so far been no time to carry out a serious
enquiry on this point, but I should be greatly surprised if any such
enquiry gave positive results and if it did not allowed us to state
that the gigantic event, as a whole, as a general event, was neither
foreseen nor divined. On the other hand, we shall probably learn, when
the enquiry is completed, that hundreds of deaths, accidents, wounds
and cases of individual ruin and misfortune, included in the great
disaster, were predicted by clairvoyants, by mediums, by dreams and by
every other manner of premonition with a definiteness sufficient to
eliminate any kind of doubt. I have said elsewhere what I think of
individual predictions of this kind, which seem to be no more than the
reading of the presentiments which we carry within us, presentiments
which themselves, in the majority of cases, are but the perception, by
the as yet imperfectly known senses of our subconsciousness, of
events, in course of formation or in process of realization, which
escape the attention of our understanding. However, it would still
remain to be explained how a wholly accidental death or wound could be
perceived by these subliminal senses as an event in course of
formation. In any case, it would once more be confirmed, after this
great test, that the knowledge of the future, so soon as it ceases to
refer to a strictly personal fact and one, moreover, not at all
remote, is always illusory, or rather impossible.
Apart then from these strictly personal cases, which for the moment we
will agree to set aside, it appears more than ever certain that there
is no communication between ourselves and the vast store of events
which have not yet occurred and which nevertheless seem already to
exist at some place where they await the hour to advance upon us, or
rather the moment when we shall pass before them. As for the
exceptional and precarious infiltrations which belong not merely to
the present that is still unknown, veiled or disguised, but really to
the future, apart from the two which we have just examined, which are
inconclusive, I for my part know of but four or five that appear to be
rigorously verified; and these I have discussed in the essay already
mentioned. For that matter, they have no bearing upon the present war.
They are, when all is said, so exceptional that they do not prove
much; at the most, they seem to confirm the idea that a store exists
filled with future events as real, as distinct and as immutable as
those of the past; and they allow us to hope that there are paths
leading thither which as yet we do not know, but which it will not be
for ever impossible to discover.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 9: August, September and October, 1915.]
* * * * *
THE WILL OF EARTH
XX
THE WILL OF EARTH
1
To-day's conflict is but a revival of that which has not ceased to
drench the west of Europe in blood since the historical birth of the
continent. The two chief episodes in the conflict, as we all know, are
the invasion of Roman Gaul, including the north of Italy, by the
Franks and the successive conquests of England by the Anglo-Saxons and
the Normans. Without delaying to consider questions of race, which are
complex, uncertain and always open to discussion, we may, regarding
the matter from another aspect, perceive in the persistency and the
bitterness of this conflict the clash of two wills, of which one or
the other succumbs for a moment, only to rise up again with increased
energy and obstinacy. On the one hand is the will of earth or nature,
which, in the human species as in all others, openly favours brute or
physical force; and on the other hand is the will of humanity, or at
least of a portion of humanity, which seeks to establish the empire of
other more subtle and less animal forces. It is incontestable that
hitherto the former has always won the day. But it is equally
incontestable that its victory has always been only apparent and of
brief duration. It has regularly suffered defeat in its very triumph.
Gaul, invaded and overrun, presently absorbs her victor, even as
England little by little transforms her conquerors. On the morrow of
victory, the instruments of the will of earth turn upon her and arm
the hand of the vanquished. It is probable that the same phenomenon
would recur once more to-day, were events to follow the course
prescribed by destiny. Germany, after crushing and enslaving the
greater part of Europe, after driving her back and burdening her with
innumerable woes, would end by turning against the will which she
represents; and that will, which until to-day had always found in this
race a docile tool and its favourite accomplices, would be forced to
seek these elsewhere, a task less easy than of old.
2
But now, to the amazement of all those who will one day consider them
in cold blood, events are suddenly ascending the irresistible current
and, for the first time since we have been in a position to observe
it, the adverse will is encountering an unexpected and insurmountable
resistance. If this resistance, as we can now no longer doubt,
maintains itself victoriously to the end, there will never perhaps
have been such a sudden change in the history of mankind; for man
will have gained, over the will of earth or nature or fatality, a
triumph infinitely more significant, more heavily fraught with
consequences and perhaps more decisive than all those which, in other
provinces, appear to have crowned his efforts more brilliantly.
Let us not then be surprised that this resistance should be
stupendous, or that it should be prolonged beyond anything that our
experience of wars has taught us to expect. It was our prompt and easy
defeat that was written in the annals of destiny. We had against us
all the force accumulated since the birth of Europe. We have to set
history revolving in the reverse direction. We are on the point of
succeeding; and, if it be true that intelligent beings watch us from
the vantage-point of other worlds, they will assuredly witness the
most curious spectacle that our planet has offered them since they
discovered it amid the dust of stars that glitters in space around
it. They must be telling themselves in amazement that the ancient and
fundamental laws of earth are suddenly being transgressed.
3
Suddenly? That is going too far. This transgression of a lower law,
which was no longer of the stature of mankind, had been preparing for
a very long time; but it was within an ace of being hideously
punished. It succeeded only by the aid of a part of those who formerly
swelled the great wave which they are to-day resisting by our side, as
though something in the history of the world or the plans of destiny
had altered, or rather as though we ourselves had at last succeeded in
altering that something and in modifying laws to which until this day
we were wholly subject.
But it must not be thought that the conflict will end with the
victory. The deep-seated forces of earth will not be at once disarmed;
for a long time to come the invisible war will be waged under the
reign of peace. If we are not careful, victory may even be more
disastrous to us than defeat. For defeat, indeed, like previous
defeats, would have been merely a victory postponed. It would have
absorbed, exhausted, dispersed the enemy, by scattering him about the
world, whereas our victory will bring upon us a twofold peril. It will
leave the enemy in a state of savage isolation in which, thrown back
upon himself, cramped, purified by misfortune and poverty, he will
secretly reinforce his formidable virtues, while we, for our part, no
longer held in check by his unbearable but salutary menace, will give
rein to failings and vices which sooner or later will place us at his
mercy. Before thinking of peace, then, we must make sure of the future
and render it powerless to injure us. We cannot take too many
precautions, for we are setting ourselves against the manifest desire
of the power that bears us.
This is why our efforts are difficult and worthy of praise. We are
setting ourselves--we cannot too often repeat it--against the will of
earth. Our enemies are urged forward by a force that drives us back.
They are marching with nature, whereas we are striving against the
great current that sweeps the globe. The earth has an idea, which is
no longer ours. She remains convinced that man is an animal in all
things like other animals. She has not yet observed that he is
withdrawing himself from the herd. She does not yet know that he has
climbed her highest mountain-peaks. She has not yet heard tell of
justice, pity, loyalty and honour; she does not realize what they are,
or confounds them with weakness, clumsiness, fear and stupidity. She
has stopped short at the original certitudes which were indispensable
to the beginnings of life. She is lagging behind us; and the interval
that divides us is rapidly increasing. She thinks less quickly; she
has not yet had time to understand us. Moreover, she does not reckon
as we do; and for her the centuries are less than our years. She is
slow because she is almost eternal, while we are prompt because we
have not many hours before us. It may be that one day her thought will
overtake ours; in the meantime, we have to vindicate our advance and
to prove to ourselves, as we are beginning to do, that it is lawful to
be in the right as against her, that our advance is not fatal and that
it is possible to maintain it.
4
For it is becoming difficult to argue that earth or nature is always
right and that those who do not blindly follow earth's impulse are
necessarily doomed to perish. We have learnt to observe her more
attentively and we have won the right to judge her. We have discovered
that, far from being infallible, she is continually making mistakes.
She gropes and hesitates. She does not know precisely what she wants.
She begins by making stupendous blunders. She first peoples the world
with uncouth and incoherent monsters, not one of which is capable of
living; these all disappear. Gradually she acquires, at the cost of
the life which she creates, an experience that is the cruel fruit of
the immeasurable suffering which she unfeelingly inflicts. At last she
grows wiser, curbs and amends herself, corrects herself, returns upon
her footsteps, repairs her errors, expending her best energies and her
highest intelligence upon the correction. It is incontestable that she
is improving her methods, that she is more skillful, more prudent,
less extravagant than at the outset. And yet the fact remains that, in
every department of life, in every organism, down to our own bodies,
there is a survival of bad workmanship, of twofold functions, of
oversights, changes of intention, absurdities, useless complications
and meaningless waste. We therefore have no reason to believe that our
enemies are in the right because earth is with them. Earth does not
possess the truth any more than we do. She seeks it, even as we do,
and discovers it no more readily. She seems to know no more than we
whither she is going nor whither she is being led by that which leads
all things. We must not listen to her without enquiry; and we need not
distress ourselves or despair because we are not of her opinion. We
are not dealing with an infallible and unchangeable wisdom, to oppose
which in our thoughts would be madness. We are actually proving to
her that it is she who is in the wrong; that man's reason for
existence is loftier than that which she provisionally assigned to
him; that he is already outstripping all that she foresaw; and that
she does wrong to delay his advance. She is, for that matter, full of
goodwill, is able on occasion to recognize her mistakes and to obviate
their disastrous results and by no means takes refuge in majestic and
inflexible self-conceit. If we are able to persevere, we shall be able
to convince her. This will take much time, for, I repeat, she is slow,
though in no wise obstinate. It will take much time because a very
long future is in question, a very great change and the most important
victory that man has ever hoped to win.
* * * * *
FOR POLAND
XXI
FOR POLAND
1
The Allies have entered into a solemn compact that none of them will
conclude a separate peace. They undertook recently, by an equally
irrevocable convention, that they would not lay down their arms until
Belgium was delivered. These two acts, one of prudence, the other of
elementary justice, appear at first sight superfluous. Yet they were
necessary. It is well that nations, even more than men, because their
conscience is less stable, should secure themselves against the
mistakes and weakness and ingratitude which too often accompany strife
and which even more often follow victory. To-morrow they will do for
Servia what they have done in the case of Belgium; but there is a
third victim, of whom too little is said, who has the same rights as
the other two; and to forget her would forever attaint the honour and
the justice of those who took up arms only in the name of justice and
honour.
2
I need not recall the fate of Poland. It is in certain respects more
tragic and more pitiful than that of Belgium or of Servia. She had not
even the opportunity to choose between dishonour and annihilation.
Three successive acts of injustice, which were, until to-day, the most
shameful recorded by history, deprived her of the glory of that heroic
choice which she would have made in the same spirit, for she had
already thrice made it in the past, a choice which this day sustains
and consoles her two martyred sisters in their profoundest
tribulations. It would be too unjust if an ancient injustice, which
even yet weighs upon the memory and the conscience of Europe, should
become the sole reason of yet a last iniquity, which this time would
be inexpiable.
3
True, the Grand-duke Nicolas made noble and generous promises to
Poland; and these promises were repeated at the opening of the Duma.
This is good and shows the irresistible force of the awakening
conscience of a great empire; but it is not enough. Such promises
involve only those who make them; they do not bind a nation. We will
not insult Russia by doubting her intentions; but among all the
certainties which history teaches us there is one that has been
acquired once and for all; and this is that in politics and
international morality intentions count for nothing and that a
promise, made by no matter what nations, will be kept only if those
who make it also render it impossible for themselves to do otherwise
than keep it. For the rest, the question at present is not one of
intentions, nor confidence, nor pity, nor even of interest. Others
have spoken and will speak again, better than I could, of Poland's
terrible distress and of the danger, which is far more formidable and
far more imminent than is generally believed, of those German
intrigues which are seeking to seduce from us and, despite themselves,
to turn against us twenty millions of desperate people and nearly a
million soldiers, who will die, perhaps, rather than join our enemies,
but who, in any case, cannot fight in our ranks as they would have
done had the word for which they are waiting in their anguish been
spoken before it was too late.
4
But, however grave the peril, we are, I repeat, far less concerned
with this at the present moment than with the question of justice.
Poland has an absolute and sacred right to be treated even as the
other two victims of this war of justice. She is their equal, she is
of the same rank and on the same level. She has suffered what they
have suffered, for the same cause, in the same spirit and with the
same heroism; and if she has not done what the two others have done it
is because only the ingratitude of all those whom she had more than
once saved, together with one of the greatest crimes in history,
prevented her from doing so.
It is time for the Europe of to-day to repair the iniquity committed
by the Europe of other days. We are nothing, we are no better than our
enemies, we have no title to deliver millions of innocent men to
death, unless we stand for justice. The idea of justice alone must
rule all that we undertake, for we are united, we have risen and we
exist only in its name. At this moment we occupy all the pinnacles of
this justice, to which we have brought such an impulse, such
sacrifices and such heroism as we shall perhaps never behold again. We
shall never rise higher; let us then form at this present time
resolutions which will forbid us to descend; and Europe would descend,
to a depth greater than was hers in the unpardonable hour of the
partition of Poland, did she not before all else repair the immense
fault which she committed when she had not yet discovered her
conscience and did not yet know what she knows to-day.
* * * * *
THE MIGHT OF THE DEAD
XXII
THE MIGHT OF THE DEAD
1
In _A Beleaguered City_, a little book which, in its curious way, is a
masterpiece, Mrs. Oliphant shows us the dead of a provincial town
suddenly waxing indignant over the conduct and the morals of those
inhabiting the town which they had founded. They rise up in rebellion,
invest the houses, the streets, the market-places and, by the pressure
of their innumerable multitude, all-powerful though invisible, repulse
the living, thrust them out of doors and, setting a strict watch,
permit them to return to their roof-trees only after a treaty of peace
and penitence has purified their hearts, atoned for their offences
and ensured a more worthy future.
There is undoubtedly a great truth beneath this fiction, which appears
too far-fetched because we perceive only material and ephemeral
realities. The dead live and move in our midst far more really and
effectually than the most venturesome imagination could depict. It is
very doubtful whether they remain in their graves. It even seems
increasingly certain that they never allowed themselves to be confined
there. Under the tombstones where we believe them to lie imprisoned
there are only a few ashes, which are no longer theirs, which they
have abandoned without regret and which, in all probability, they no
longer deign to remember. All that was themselves continues to have
its being in our midst. How and under what aspect? After all these
thousands, perhaps millions, of years, we do not yet know; and no
religion has been able to tell us with satisfying certainty, though
all have striven to do so; but we may, by means of certain tokens,
hope to learn.
Without further considering a mighty but obscure truth, which it is
for the moment impossible to state precisely or to render palpable,
let us concern ourselves with one which cannot be disputed. As I have
said elsewhere, whatever our religious faith may be, there is in any
case one place where our dead cannot perish, where they continue to
exist as really as when they were in the flesh and often more
actively; and this living abiding-place, this consecrated spot, which
for those whom we have lost becomes heaven or hell according as we
draw close to or depart from their thoughts and their desires, is in
us.
And their thoughts and their desires are always higher than our own.
It is, therefore, by uplifting ourselves that we approach them. It is
we who must take the first steps, for they can no longer descend,
whereas it is always possible for us to rise; for the dead, whatever
they have been in life, become better than the best of us. The least
worthy of them, in shedding the body, have shed its vices, its
littlenesses, its weaknesses, which soon pass from our memory as well;
and the spirit alone remains, which is pure in every man and able to
desire only what is good. There are no wicked dead because there are
no wicked souls. This is why, as we purify ourselves, we restore life
to those who were no more and transform our memory, which they
inhabit, into heaven.
2
And what was always true of all the dead is far more true to-day when
only the best are chosen for the tomb. In the region which we believe
to be under the earth, which we call the kingdom of the shades and
which in reality is the ethereal region and the kingdom of light,
there are at this moment perturbations no less profound than those
which we are experiencing on the surface of our earth. The young dead
are invading it from every side; and since the beginning of this world
they have never been so numerous, so full of energy and zeal. Whereas
in the customary sequence of the years the dwelling-place of those who
leave us receives only weary and exhausted lives, there is not one in
this incomparable host who, to borrow Pericles' expression, "has not
departed from life at the height of glory." Not one of them but has
gone up, not down, to his death clad in the greatest sacrifice that
man can make for an idea which cannot die. All that we have hitherto
believed, all that we have striven to attain beyond ourselves, all
that has lifted us to the level at which we stand, all that has
overcome the evil days and the evil instincts of human nature: all
this could have been no more than lies and illusions if such men as
these, such a mass of merit and of glory, were really annihilated, had
really forever disappeared, were forever useless and voiceless,
forever without influence in a world to which they have given life.
3
It is hardly possible that this could be so as regards the external
survival of the dead; but it is absolutely certain that it is not so
as regards their survival in ourselves. Here nothing is lost and no
one perishes. Our memories are to-day peopled by a multitude of heroes
struck down in the flower of their youth and very different from the
pale and languid cohort of the past, composed almost wholly of the
sick and the aged, who already had ceased to exist before leaving the
earth. We must tell ourselves that now, in each of our homes, both in
our cities and in the country-side, both in the palace and in the
meanest hovel, there lives and reigns a young dead man in the glory of
his strength. He fills the poorest, darkest dwelling with a splendour
of which it had never ventured to dream. His constant presence,
imperious and inevitable, diffuses through it and maintains a religion
and ideas which it had never known there before, hallows everything
around it, forces the eyes to look higher and the spirit to refrain
from descending, purifies the air that is breathed and the speech that
is held and the thoughts that are mustered there and, little by
little, ennobles and uplifts a whole people on a scale of unexampled
vastness.
4
Such dead as these have a power as profound, as fruitful as life and
less precarious. It is terrible that this experience should have been
made, for it is the most pitiless and the first in such enormous
masses that mankind has ever undergone; but, now that the ordeal is
almost over, we shall soon derive from it the most unexpected fruits.
It will not be long before we see the differences increase and the
destinies diverge between the nations which have acquired all these
dead and all this glory and those which were deprived of them; and we
shall perceive with amazement that those nations which have lost the
most are those which have kept their riches and their men. There are
losses which are inestimable gains; and there are gains whereby the
future is lost. There are dead whom the living cannot replace and the
mere thought of whom accomplishes things which their bodies could not
perform. There are dead whose energy surpasses death and recovers
life; and we are almost every one of us at this moment the mandataries
of a being greater, nobler, graver, wiser and more truly living than
ourselves. With all those who accompany him, he will be our judge, if
it is the fact that the dead weigh the soul of the living and that on
their verdict our happiness depends. He will be our guide and our
protector, for it is the first time, since history has revealed its
misfortunes to us, that man has felt so great a host of such mighty
dead soaring above his head and speaking within his heart.
5
We shall live henceforward under their laws, which will be more just
but not more severe nor more cheerless than ours; for it is a mistake
to suppose that the dead love nothing but gloom; they love only the
justice and the truth which are the eternal forms of happiness. From
the depths of this justice and this truth in which they are all
immersed, they will help us to destroy the great falsehoods of
existence: for war and death, if they sow innumerable miseries and
misfortunes, have at least the merit of destroying as many lies as
they occasion evils. And all the sacrifices which they have made for
us will have been in vain--and this is not possible--if they do not
first of all bring about the fall of the lies on which we live and
which it is not necessary to name, for each of us knows his own and is
ashamed of them and will be eager to make an end of them. They will
teach us, before all else, from the depths of our hearts which are
their living tombs, to love those who outlive them, since it is in
them alone that they wholly exist.
* * * * *
WHEN THE WAR IS OVER
XXIII
WHEN THE WAR IS OVER
1
Before closing this book, I wish to weigh for the last time in my
conscience the words of hatred and malediction which it has made me
speak in spite of myself. We have to do with the strangest of enemies.
He has knowingly and deliberately, while in the full possession of his
faculties and without necessity or excuse, revived all the crimes
which we supposed to be forever buried in the barbarous past. He has
trampled under foot all the precepts which man had so painfully won
from the cruel darkness of his beginnings; he has violated all the
laws of justice, humanity, loyalty and honour, from the highest, which
are almost godlike, to the simplest, the most elementary, which still
belong to the lower worlds. There is no longer any doubt on this
point: it has been proved over and over again until we have attained a
final certitude.
But on the other hand, it is no less certain that he has displayed
virtues which it would be unworthy of us to deny; for we honour
ourselves in recognizing the valour of those whom we are fighting. He
has gone to his death in deep, compact, disciplined masses, with a
blind, hopeless, obstinate heroism of which no such lurid example had
ever yet been known, a heroism which has many times compelled our
admiration and our pity. He has known how to sacrifice himself, with
unprecedented and perhaps unequalled abnegation, to an idea which we
know to be false, inhuman and even somewhat mean, but which he
believes to be just and lofty; and a sacrifice of this kind, whatever
its object, is always the proof of a force which survives those who
devote themselves to making it and must command respect.
I know very well that this heroism is not like the heroism which we
love. For us, heroism must before all be voluntary, freed from any
constraint, active, ardent, eager and spontaneous; whereas with them
it has mingled with it a great deal of servility, passiveness,
sadness, gloomy, ignorant, massive submission and rather base fears.
It is nevertheless the fact that, in the moment of supreme peril,
little remains of all these distinctions and that no force in the
world can drive to its death a people which does not bear within
itself the strength to confront it. Our soldiers make no mistake upon
this point. Question the men returning from the trenches: they detest
the enemy, they abhor the aggressor, the unjust and arrogant
aggressor, uncouth, too often cruel and treacherous; but they do not
hate the man: they do him justice; they pity him; and, after the
battle, in the defenceless wounded soldier or disarmed prisoner they
recognize, with astonishment, a brother in misfortune who, like
themselves, is submitting to duties and laws which, like themselves,
he too believes lofty and necessary. Under the insufferable enemy they
see an unhappy man who also is bearing the burden of life. They forget
the things that divide them to recall only those which unite them in a
common destiny; and they teach us a great lesson. Better than
ourselves, who are removed from danger, at the contact of profound and
fearful verities and realities they are already beginning to discern
something that we cannot yet perceive; and their obscure instinct is
probably anticipating the judgment of history and our own judgment,
when we see more clearly. Let us learn from them to be just and to
distinguish that which we are bound to despise and loathe from that
which we may pity, love and respect.
Setting aside the unpardonable aggression and the inexpiable violation
of treaties, this war, despite its insanity, has come near to being a
bloody but magnificent proof of greatness, heroism and the spirit of
sacrifice. Humanity was ready to rise above itself, to surpass all
that it had hitherto accomplished. It has surpassed it. Never before
had nations been seen capable, for months on end, perhaps for years,
of renouncing their repose, their security, their wealth, their
comfort, all that they possessed and loved down to their very life, in
order to accomplish what they believed to be their duty. Never before
had nations been seen that were able as a whole to understand and
admit that the happiness of each of those who live in this time of
trial is of no consequence compared with the honour of those who live
no more or the happiness of those who are not yet alive. We stand on
heights that had not been attained before. And if, on the enemies'
side, this unexampled renunciation had not been poisoned at its
source; if the war which they are waging against us had been as fine,
as loyal, as generous, as chivalrous as that which we are waging
against them, we may well believe that it would have been the last and
that it would have ended, not in battle, but, like the awakening from
an evil dream, in a noble and fraternal amazement. They have made that
impossible; and this, we may be sure, is the disappointment which the
future will find it most difficult to forgive them.
2
What are we to do now? Must we hate the enemy to the end of time? The
burden of hatred is the heaviest that man can bear upon this earth;
and we should faint under the weight of it. On the other hand, we do
not wish once more to be the dupes and victims of confidence and love.
Here again our soldiers, in their simplicity, which is so clear-seeing
and so close to the truth, anticipate the future and teach us what to
admit and what to avoid. We have seen that they do not hate the man;
but they do not trust him at all. They discover the human being in him
only when he is unarmed. They know, from bitter experience, that, so
long as he possesses weapons, he cannot resist the frenzy of
destruction, treachery and slaughter; and that he does not become
kindly until he is rendered powerless.
Is he thus by nature, or has he been perverted by those who lead him?
Have the rulers dragged the whole nation after them, or has the whole
nation driven its rulers on? Did the rulers make the nation like unto
themselves, or did the nation select and support them because they
resembled itself? Did the evil come from above or below, or was it
everywhere? Here we have the great and obscure point of this terrible
adventure. It is not easy to throw light upon it and still less easy
to find excuses for it. If our enemies prove that they were deceived
and corrupted by their masters, they prove, at the same time, that
they are less intelligent, less firmly attached to justice, honour and
humanity, less civilized, in a word, than those whom they claimed the
right to enslave in the name of a superiority which they themselves
have proved not to exist; and, unless they can establish that their
errors, perfidies and cruelties, which can no longer be denied, should
be imputed only to those masters, then they themselves must bear the
pitiless weight. I do not know how they will escape from this
predicament, nor what the future will decide, that future which is
wiser than the past, even as, in the words of an old Slav proverb, the
dawn is wiser than the eve. In the meanwhile, let us copy the prudence
of our soldiers, who know what to believe far better than we do.
* * * * *
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS
XXIV
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS
_The Massacre of the Innocents_ appeared for the first time
in 1886, in a little periodical called _La Pléïade_ which
some friends and I had founded in the Latin Quarter and
which died of inanition after its sixth number. My reason
for making room in the present volume for these pages
marking a very modest start--they were the first that found
their way into print--is not that I am under any delusion as
to the merits of this youthful work, in which I had simply
aimed at reproducing as best I could the different episodes
of a picture in the Brussels Museum, painted in the
sixteenth century by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. But it
appeared to me that circumstances had made of this humble
literary effort a sort of prophetic vision; for it is but
too likely that similar scenes must have been repeated in
more than one of our unhappy Flemish or Brabant villages and
that to describe them as they were lately enacted we should
have only to change the name of the butchers and probably,
alas, to accentuate their cruelty, their injustice and their
hideousness!--M. M.
It was close upon supper-time, that Friday the twenty-sixth day of the
month of December, when a little shepherd-lad came into Nazareth,
sobbing bitterly.
Some peasants drinking ale in the Blue Lion opened the shutters to
look into the village orchard and observed the child running over the
snow. They saw that he was Korneliz' boy and cried from the window:
"What's the matter? Get home with you to bed!"
But he replied in terror that the Spaniards were come, that they had
set fire to the farm, hanged his mother among the walnut-trees and
bound his nine little sisters to the trunk of a big tree.
The peasants rushed out of the inn, gathered round the child and plied
him with questions. Then he also told them that the soldiers were on
horseback and wore mail, that they had driven away the cattle of his
uncle Petrus Krayer and that they would soon be entering the forest
with the cows and sheep.
All ran to the Golden Sun, where Korneliz and his brother-in-law were
also drinking their pot of ale; and the inn-keeper sped into the
village, shouting that the Spaniards were at hand.
Then there was a great din in Nazareth. The women opened the windows
and the peasants left their houses with lights which they put out as
soon as they reached the orchard, where it was bright as midday,
because of the snow and the full moon.
They crowded round Korneliz and Krayer in the market-place, in front
of the two inns. Several had brought their pitchforks and their rakes
and consulted one another, terror-stricken, under the trees.
But, as they knew not what to do, one of them went to fetch the
parish-priest, who owned Korneliz' farm. He came out of his house with
the sacristan, bringing the keys of the church. All followed him into
the churchyard; and he shouted to them from the top of the tower that
he could see nothing in the fields nor in the forest, but that there
were red clouds in the neighbourhood of his farm, though the sky was
blue and full of stars over all the rest of the country.
After deliberating for a long time in the churchyard, they decided to
hide in the wood through which the Spaniards would have to pass and to
attack them if they were not too many, so as to recover Petrus
Krayer's cattle and the plunder which they had taken from the farm.
They armed themselves with pitchforks and spades; and the women
remained near the church with the priest.
Seeking a suitable spot for their ambuscade, they came to a mill on
the skirt of the forest and saw the farm burning amid the starlight.
Here, under some huge oaks, in front of a frozen pool, they took up
their position.
A shepherd whom they called the Red Dwarf went up the hill to warn the
miller, who had stopped his mill when he saw the flames on the
horizon. He invited the fellow in, however; and the two of them placed
themselves at a window to watch the distance.
In front of them the moon was shining over the burning farm; and they
saw a long host marching over the snow. When they had taken stock of
it, the Dwarf went down to those in the forest; and presently they
descried four horsemen above a herd of animals that seemed to be
cropping the grass.
As the men, in their blue hose and their red cloaks, were looking
around them on the edge of the pool and under the snow-lit trees, the
sacristan pointed to a box-hedge; and they went and hid behind it.
The cattle and the Spaniards came over the ice; and the sheep on
reaching the hedge were already beginning to nibble at the leaves,
when Korneliz broke through the bushes; and the others followed with
their pitchforks into the light. Then there was a great slaughter on
the pond, while the huddled sheep and the cows gazed at the battle in
their midst and at the moon above them.
When the men and the horses had been killed, Korneliz ran into the
meadows towards the flames; and the others stripped the dead. Then
they went back to the village with the herds. The women watching the
gloomy forest from behind the walls of the churchyard saw them
approaching through the trees and, with the priest, hurried to meet
them; and they returned dancing gleefully all amongst the children and
the dogs.
While they made merry under the pear-trees in the orchard, where the
Red Dwarf hung up lanterns as a sign of kermis, they consulted the
priest as to what they were to do.
They at last resolved to put a horse to a cart and fetch the bodies of
the woman and her nine little daughters to the village. The dead
woman's sisters and the other peasant-women of her family climbed into
it, as did the priest, who was not well able to walk, being advanced
in years and very stout.
They entered the forest once more and arrived in silence at the
dazzling white plain, where they saw the naked men and the horses
lying on their backs upon the gleaming ice among the trees. Then they
went on to the farm, which they could see burning in the distance.
When they came to the orchard and to the house all red with flames,
they stopped at the gate to mark the great misfortune that had
befallen the farmer in his garden. His wife was hanging all naked from
the branches of a great walnut-tree; he himself was mounting a ladder
to climb the tree, around which the nine little girls were waiting
for their mother on the grass. Already he was walking among the huge
boughs, when suddenly he saw the crowd, black against the snow,
watching him. Weeping, he made signs to them to help him; and they
went into the garden. Then the sacristan, the Red Dwarf, the landlord
of the Blue Lion and he of the Golden Sun, the parish-priest, with a
lantern, and many other peasants climbed into the snow-laden
walnut-tree to cut down the corpse, which the women of the village
received in their arms at the foot of the tree, even as at the descent
from the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The next day they buried her; and nothing else out of the common
happened at Nazareth that week. But, on the following Sunday, hungry
wolves ran through the village after high mass and it snowed until
noon; then the sun suddenly shone in the sky; and the peasants went
in to dinner, as was their wont, and dressed for benediction.
At that moment there was no one in the market-place, for it was
freezing cruelly. Only the dogs and hens remained under the trees,
where some sheep were nibbling at a three-cornered patch of grass,
while the priest's maid-servant swept away the snow from the
presbytery-garden.
Then a troop of armed men crossed the stone bridge at the end of the
village and halted in the orchard. Some peasants came out of their
houses; but, on recognizing the Spaniards, they retreated in terror
and went to their windows to see what would happen.
There were some thirty horsemen, clad in armour, around an old man
with a white beard. Behind them they carried red and yellow
foot-soldiers, who jumped down and ran over the snow to shake off
their stiffness, while several of the men in armour also alighted and
eased themselves against the trees to which they had fastened their
horses.
Then they turned to the Golden Sun and knocked at the door. It was
opened hesitatingly; and they warmed themselves at the fire and called
for ale.
Next they came out of the inn, carrying pots and jugs and wheaten
loaves for their comrades, who sat ranked around the man with the
white beard, waiting in the midst of the lances.
As the street was empty, the commander sent horsemen to the back of
the houses, to guard the village on its open side, and ordered the
foot-soldiers to bring to him all the children of two years old and
under, to be massacred, as is written in the Gospel according to St.
Matthew.
The soldiers went first to the inn of the Green Cabbage and to the
barber's cottage, which stood side by side, midway in the street.
One of them opened a stable-door; and a litter of pigs escaped and
scattered over the village. The inn-keeper and the barber came out and
humbly asked the soldiers what they wanted; but the men knew no
Flemish and went in to look for the children.
The inn-keeper had one, which sat crying in its little shirt on the
table where they had just had dinner. A man took the child in his arms
and carried it away under the apple-tree, while the father and mother
followed him with cries of lamentation.
The soldiers also threw open the cooper's shed and the blacksmith's
and the cobbler's; and the calves, cows, asses, pigs, goats and sheep
strayed about the market-place. When the men broke the glass of the
carpenter's windows, several of the peasants, including the oldest and
richest farmers in the parish, assembled in the street and went
towards the Spaniards. They doffed their hats and caps respectfully to
the leader in his velvet cloak and asked him what he was going to do;
but even he did not understand their language; and some one went to
fetch the priest.
He was making ready for benediction and putting on a gold cope in the
sacristy. The peasant called out:
"The Spaniards are in the orchard!"
Horrified, the priest ran to the church-door, accompanied by the
serving-boys carrying tapers and censer.
Then he saw the animals released from their sheds roaming on the snow
and the grass, the horsemen in the village, the soldiers outside the
doors, the horses tied to the trees along the street and the men and
women entreating him who was holding the child in its shirt.
He rushed to the churchyard; and the peasants turned anxiously to
their priest, coming through the pear-trees like a god robed in gold,
and stood around him and the man with the white beard.
He spoke in Flemish and Latin; but the commander shrugged his
shoulders slowly up and down to show that he did not understand.
His parishioners asked him under their breath:
"What does he say? What is he going to do?"
Others, on seeing the priest in the orchard, came timidly from their
farms; the women hurried up and stood whispering among the groups;
while some soldiers who were besieging an inn ran back at the sight of
the great crowd that was forming in the market-place.
Then the man who was holding by one leg the child of the landlord of
the Green Cabbage cut off its head with his sword.
The head fell before their eyes and the body fell after it and lay
bleeding on the grass. The mother picked it up and carried it away,
leaving the head behind her. She ran towards the house, but stumbled
against a tree and fell flat on the snow, where she lay in a swoon,
while the father struggled between two soldiers.
Some of the younger peasants threw stones and blocks of wood at the
Spaniards, but the horsemen all lowered their lances together, the
women fled and the priest began to cry out in horror with his
parishioners, all among the sheep, the geese and the dogs.
However, as the soldiers were once more moving down the street, the
folk stood silent to see what they would do.
The band entered the shop kept by the sacristan's sisters and then
came out quietly, without harming the seven women, who knelt on the
doorstep praying.
Next they went to the inn owned by the Hunchback of St. Nicholas. Here
also the door was opened directly, to appease them; but they
reappeared amid a great outcry, with three children in their arms and
surrounded by the Hunchback, his wife and his daughters, clasping
their hands in token of entreaty.
On reaching the old man, the soldiers put down the children at the
foot of an elm, where they remained, sitting on the snow in their
Sunday clothes. But one of them, who wore a yellow frock, rose and
toddled towards the sheep. A man ran after it with his naked sword;
and the child died with its face in the grass, while the others were
killed not far from the tree.
All the peasants and the inn-keeper's daughters took to flight,
shrieking as they went, and returned to their homes. The priest, left
alone in the orchard, besought the Spaniards with loud cries, going on
his knees from horse to horse, with his arms crossed upon his breast,
while the father and mother, sitting in the snow, wept piteously for
the dead children that lay in their laps.
As the soldiers ran along the street, they remarked a big blue
farm-house. They tried to break down the door, but it was of oak and
studded with nails. Then they took some tubs that were frozen in a
pool in front of the house and used them to climb to the upper
windows, through which they made their way.
There had been a kermis at this farm; and kinsfolk had come to eat
waffles, ham and custards with their family. At the sound of the
broken panes, they had assembled behind the table covered with jugs
and dishes. The soldiers entered the kitchen and, after a desperate
struggle, in which many were wounded, they seized the little boys and
girls, as well as the hind, who had bitten a soldier's thumb. Then
they left the house, locking the door behind them to prevent the
inmates from going with them.
Those of the villagers who had no children slowly left their homes and
followed them from afar. When the soldiers carrying their victims came
to the old man, they threw them on the grass and deliberately killed
them with their spears and their swords, while all along the front of
the blue house the men and women leant out of the windows of the upper
floor and the loft, cursing and rocking wildly in the sunshine at the
sight of the red, pink and white frocks of their little ones lying
motionless on the grass among the trees. Then the soldiers hanged the
hind from the sign of the Half Moon on the other side of the street;
and there was a long silence in the village.
The massacre now began to spread. Mothers ran out of the houses and
tried to escape to the open country through the gardens and
kitchen-plots; but the horsemen scoured after them and drove them back
into the street. Peasants, holding their caps in their clasped hands,
followed upon their knees the men who were dragging away their
children, among the dogs which barked deliriously amid the din. The
priest, with his arms raised aloft, ran along the houses and under the
trees, praying desperately, like a martyr; and soldiers, shivering
with cold, blew on their fingers as they moved about the road, or,
with their hands in the pockets of their trunks and their swords
tucked under their arms, waited beneath the windows of the houses that
were being scaled.
On seeing the grief-stricken terror of the peasants, they entered the
farm-houses in little bands; and in like fashion they acted throughout
the length of the street.
A woman who sold vegetables in the old red-brick cottage near the
church seized a chair and ran after two men who were carrying off her
children in a wheel-barrow. When she saw them die, a sickness overcame
her; and she suffered the folk to press her into the chair, against a
tree by the road-side.
Other soldiers climbed up the lime-trees in front of a house painted
lilac and removed the tiles in order to enter the house. When they
came out again upon the roof, the father and mother, with outstretched
arms, also appeared in the opening; and they pushed them down
repeatedly, cutting them over the head with their swords, before they
could descend into the street.
One family, which had locked itself into the cellar of a rambling
cottage, cried through the grating, where the father stood madly
brandishing a pitchfork. An old, bald-headed man was sobbing all alone
on a dung-heap; a woman in yellow had fainted in the market-place and
her husband was holding her under her arms and moaning in the shadow
of a pear-tree; another, in red, was kissing her little girl, who had
lost her hands, and lifting first one arm and then the other to see if
she would not move. Yet another ran into the country and the soldiers
pursued her through the hayricks that bounded the snow-clad fields.
Beneath the inn of the Four Sons of Aymon there was a tumult as of a
siege. The inhabitants had barred the door; and the soldiers went
round and round the house without being able to make their way in.
They were trying to clamber up to the sign by the fruit-trees against
the front wall, when they caught sight of a ladder behind the
garden-door. They set it against the wall and mounted one after the
other. Thereupon the landlord and all his household hurled tables,
chairs, dishes and cradles at them from the windows. The ladder upset
and the soldiers fell down.
In a wooden hut, at the end of the village, another band found a
peasant-woman bathing her children in a tub by the fire. Being old and
almost deaf, she did not hear them come in. Two soldiers took the tub
and carried it off; and the dazed woman went after them, with the
children's clothes, wanting to dress them. But, when she came to the
door and suddenly saw the splashes of blood in the village, the swords
in the orchard, the cradles over-turned in the street, women on their
knees and women waving their arms around the dead, she began to cry
out with all her strength and to strike the soldiers, who put down the
tub to defend themselves. The priest also came hastening up and,
folding his hands across his vestment, entreated the Spaniards before
the naked children, who were whimpering in the water. Other soldiers
then came up and pushed him aside and bound the raving peasant-woman
to a tree.
The butcher had hidden his little daughter and, leaning against his
house, looked on in unconcern. A foot-soldier and one of the men in
armour went in and discovered the child in a copper cauldron. Then the
butcher, in desperation, took one of his knives and chased them down
the street; but a band that was passing struck the knife from his
grasp and hanged him by the hands to the hooks in his wall, among the
flayed carcases, where he twitched his legs and jerked his head and
cursed and swore till evening.
Near the churchyard, a crowd had assembled outside a long green
farm-house. The farmer stood on his threshold weeping bitter tears; as
he was very fat, with a face made for smiling, the hearts of the
soldiers softened in some measure as they sat in the sun with their
backs to the wall, listening to him and patting his dog the while. But
the one who was dragging the child away by the hand made gestures as
though to say:
"You may save your tears! It is not my fault!"
A peasant who was being hotly pursued sprang into a boat moored to the
stone bridge and pushed across the pond with his wife and children.
The soldiers, not daring to venture on the ice, strode angrily through
the reeds. They climbed into the willows on the bank, trying to reach
them with their spears; and, when they failed, continued for a long
time to threaten the family, where they all sat cowering in the middle
of the water.
Meanwhile, the orchard was still full of people, for it was there that
most of the children were slain, in front of the man with the white
beard who directed the massacre. The little boys and girls who were
big enough to walk alone also collected there and, munching their
bread-and-butter, stood looking on curiously to see the others die or
gathered round the village idiot, who lay upon the grass playing a
whistle.
Then suddenly a movement ran through the length of the village. The
peasants were turning their steps toward the castle, standing on a
high mound of yellow earth at the end of the street. They had caught
sight of the lord of the village leaning on the battlements of his
tower, watching the massacre. And the men, women and old folk
stretched out their arms to him where he sat in his cloak of purple
velvet and cap of gold and entreated him as though he were a king in
heaven. But he threw up his arms and shrugged his shoulders, to show
his helplessness; and, when they implored him in ever-increasing
anguish and knelt bareheaded in the snow, uttering loud cries, he
turned back slowly into the tower; and in the hearts of the peasants
all hope died.
When all the children were killed, the tired soldiers wiped their
swords on the grass and supped under the pear-trees. Then the
foot-soldiers mounted behind the others and they all rode out of
Nazareth together, by the stone bridge, as they had come.
The setting sun lit the forest with a red light and painted the
village a new colour. Weary with running and entreating, the priest
had sat down in the snow in front of the church; and his servant-maid
stood near him, looking around. They saw the street and the orchard
filled with peasants in their holiday attire, moving about the
market-place and along the houses. Outside the doors, families, with
their dead children on their knees, whispered in amazement and horror
of the fate wherewith they had been assailed. Others were still
mourning the child where it had fallen, near a cask, under a barrow or
at a puddle's edge, or were carrying it away in silence. Several were
already washing the benches, chairs, tables and shirts all smirched
with blood and picking up the cradles that had been flung into the
street. But nearly all the mothers were kneeling on the grass under
the trees, before the dead bodies, which they knew by their woollen
frocks. Those who had no children were roaming about the market-place,
stopping to gaze at the afflicted groups. The men who had done weeping
took the dogs and started in pursuit of their strayed beasts, or
mended their broken windows or gaping roofs, while the village grew
hushed and still beneath the light of the moon as it rose slowly in
the sky.
THE END
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes
The following typographical errors have been corrected from the
original book:
Page 083: inquity changed to iniquity
(example of iniquity would strike the ideals of mankind)
Page 113: magnificnt " " magnificent
(rejuvenated by our magnificent misfortune,)
Page 126: alwas " " always
(and always ready with his pleasant smile,)
Page 174: man " " men
("So died these men as became Athenians.)
Page 178: centuies " " centuries
(These words spoken twenty-three centuries ago)
Page 183: catacylsm " " cataclysm
(if this cataclysm let loose by an act of unutterable)
Page 232: sorsow " " sorrow
(Alas, yes! I had heard of your sorrow;)
Page 236: Then " " They
(They need love as much as do the living.)
Page 247: (section number) 2 " " 3
(3 All these, on examination, leave but a worthless residuum;)
Page 305: Breughel " " Brueghel
(painted in the sixteenth century by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.)
Page 327: missing ending quotes were added
("You may save your tears! It is not my fault!")
Other spelling variations, for example, Renascence (pg. 64) and
behoves (pg. 119), have been retained.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Wrack of the Storm, by Maurice Maeterlinck
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