Chapter XVI: When the War Is Over 247 (5)

It is not difficult for us to conceive that one can thus go back and see again the astral negative of an event that is no more; and retrospective clairvoyance appears to us a wonderful but not an impossible thing. It astonishes but does not stagger our reason. But, when it becomes a question of discovering the same picture in the future, the boldest imagination flounders at the first step. How are we to admit that there exists somewhere a representation or reproduction of that which has not yet existed? Nevertheless, some of the incidents which we have just been considering seem to prove in an almost conclusive manner not only that such representations are possible, but that we may arrive at them more frequently, not to say more conveniently, than at those of the past. Now, once this representation preexists, as we are obliged to admit in the case of a certain number of premonitions, the riddle remains the same whether the preexistence be one of a few hours, a few years or several centuries. It is therefore possible—for, in these matters, we must go straight to extremes or else leave them alone—it is therefore possible that a seer mightier than any of to-day, some god, demigod or demon, some unknown, universal or vagrant intelligence, saw that procession a million years ago, at a time when nothing existed of that which composes and surrounds it and when the very earth on which it moves had not yet risen from the ocean depths. And other seers, as mighty as the first, who from age to age contemplated the same spot and the same moment, would always have perceived, through the vicissitudes and upheavals of seas, shores and forests, the same procession going round the same little church that still lay slumbering in the oceanic ooze and made up of the same persons sprung from a race that was perhaps not yet represented on the earth.

27

It is obviously difficult for us to understand that the future can thus precede chaos, that the present is at the same time the future and the past, or that that which is not yet exists already at the same time at which it is no more. But, on the other hand, it is just as hard to conceive that the future does not preexist, that there is nothing before the present and that everything is only present or past. It is very probable that, to a more universal intelligence than ours, everything is but an eternal present, an immense _punctum stans_, as the metaphysicians say, in which all the events are on one plane; but it is no less probable that we ourselves, so long as we are men, in order to understand anything of this eternal present, will always be obliged to divide it into three parts. Thus caught between two mysteries equally baffling to our intelligence, whether we deny or admit the preexistence of the future, we are really only wrangling over words: in the one case, we give the name of “present,” from the point of view of a perfect intelligence, to that which to us is the future; in the other, we give the name of “future” to that which, from the point of view of a perfect intelligence, is the present. But, after all, it is incontestable in both cases that, at least from our point of view, the future preexists, since preexistence is the only name by which we can describe and the only form under which we can conceive that which we do not yet see in the present.

28

Attempts have been made to shed light on the riddle by transferring it to space. It is true that it there loses the greater part of its obscurity; but this apparently is because, in changing its environment, it has completely changed its nature and no longer bears any relation to what it was when it was placed in time. We are told, for instance, that innumerable cities distributed over the surface of the earth are to us as if they were not, so long as we have not seen them, and only begin to exist on the day when we visit them. That is true; but space, outside all metaphysical speculations, has realities for us which time does not possess. Space, although very mysterious and incomprehensible once we pass certain limits, is nevertheless not, like time, incomprehensible and illusory in all its parts. We are certainly quite able to conceive that those towns which we have never seen and doubtless never will see indubitably exist, whereas we find it much more difficult to imagine that the catastrophe which, fifty years hence, will annihilate one of them already exists as really as the town itself. We are capable of picturing a spot whence, with keener eyes than those which we boast to-day, we should see in one glance all the cities of the earth and even those of other worlds, but it is much less easy for us to imagine a point in the ages whence we should simultaneously discover the past, the present and the future, because the past, the present and the future are three orders of duration which cannot find room at the same time in our intelligence and which inevitably devour one another. How can we picture to ourselves, for instance, a point in eternity at which our little procession already exists, while it is not yet and although it is no more? Add to this the thought that it is necessary and inevitable, from the millenaries which had no beginning, that, at a given moment, at a given place, the little procession should leave the little church in a given manner and that no known or imaginable will can change anything in it, in the future any more than in the past; and we begin to understand that there is no hope of understanding.

29

We find among the cases collected by M. Bozzano a singular premonition wherein the unknown factors of space and time are continued in a very curious fashion. In August 1910, Cavaliere Giovanni de Figueroa, one of the most famous fencing-masters at Palermo, dreamt that he was in the country, going along a road white with dust, which brought him to a broad ploughed field. In the middle of the field stood a rustic building, with a ground-floor used for store-rooms and cow-sheds and on the right a rough hut made of branches and a cart with some harness lying in it.

A peasant wearing dark trousers, with a black felt hat on his head, came forward to meet him, asked him to follow him and took him round behind the house. Through a low, narrow door they entered a little stable with a short, winding stone staircase leading to a loft over the entrance to the house. A mule fastened to a swinging manger was blocking the bottom step; and the chevalier had to push it aside before climbing the staircase. On reaching the loft, he noticed that from the ceiling were suspended strings of melons, tomatoes, onions and Indian corn. In this room were two women and a little girl; and through a door leading to another room he caught sight of an extremely high bed, unlike any that he had ever seen before.

Here the dream broke off. It seemed to him so strange that he spoke of it to several of his friends, whom he mentions by name and who are ready to confirm his statements.

On the 12th of October in the same year, in order to support a fellow-townsman in a duel, he accompanied the seconds, by motor-car, from Naples to Marano, a place which he had never visited nor even heard of. As soon as they were some way in the country, he was curiously impressed by the white and dusty road. The car pulled up at the side of a field which he at once recognized. They alighted; and he remarked to one of the seconds:

“This is not the first time that I have been here. There should be a house at the end of this path and on the right a hut and a cart with some harness in it.”

As a matter of fact, everything was as he described it. An instant later, at the exact moment foreseen by the dream, the peasant in the dark trousers and the black felt hat came up and asked him to follow him. But, instead of walking behind him, the chevalier went in front, for he already knew the way. He found the stable and, exactly at the place which it occupied two months before, near its swinging manger, the mule blocking the way to the staircase. The fencing-master went up the steps and once more saw the loft, with the ceiling hung with melons, onions and tomatoes, and, in a corner on the right, the two silent women and the child, identical with the figures in his dream, while in the next room he recognized the bed whose uncommon height had so much impressed him.

It really looks as if the facts themselves, the extramundane realities, the eternal verities, or whatever we may be pleased to call them, have tried to show us here that time and space are one and the same illusion, one and the same convention and have no existence outside our little day-spanned understanding; that “everywhere” and “always” are exactly synonymous terms and reign alone as soon as we cross the narrow boundaries of the obscure consciousness in which we live. We are quite ready to admit that Cavaliere de Figueroa may have had by clairvoyance an exact and detailed vision of places which he was not to visit until later: this is a pretty frequent and almost classical phenomenon, which, as it affects the realities of space, does not astonish us beyond measure and, in any case, does not take us out of the world which our senses perceive. The field, the house, the hut, the loft do not move; and it is no miracle that they should be found in the same place. But, suddenly, quitting this domain where all is stationary, the phenomenon is transferred to time and, in those unknown places, at the foretold second, brings together all the moving actors of that little drama in two acts, of which the first was performed some two and a half months before, in the depths of some mysterious other life where it seemed to be motionlessly and irrevocably awaiting its terrestrial realization. Any explanation would but condense this vapour of petty mysteries into a few drops in the ocean of mysteries.

Let us note again, in passing, the strange freakishness of these premonitions. They accumulate the most precise and circumstantial details as long as the scene remains insignificant, but come to a sudden stop before the one tragic and interesting scene of the drama: the duel and its issue. We here once more recognize the inconsistent, impotent, ironical or humorous habits of our unknown guest.

30

But we will not prolong these somewhat vain speculations concerning space and time. We are merely playing with words that represent very badly ideas which we do not put into form at all. To sum up, while it is difficult for us to conceive that the future preexists, perhaps it is even more difficult for us to understand that it does not exist; moreover, a certain number of facts tend to prove that it is as real and definite and has, both in time and in 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 on every side, that we should not discover it oftener and more easily. It remains to be learnt what would become of our life if everything were foreseen in it, if we saw it unfolding beforehand, in its entirety, with its events which would have to be inevitable, because, if it were possible for us to avoid them, they would not exist and we could not perceive them. Suppose that, instead of being abnormal, uncertain, obscure, debatable and very unusual, prediction became, so to speak, scientific, habitual, clear and infallible: in a short time, having nothing more to foretell, it would die of inanition. If, for instance, it was prophesied to me that I must die in the course of a journey in Italy, I should naturally abandon the journey; therefore it could not have been predicted to me; and thus all life would soon be nothing but inaction, pause and abstention, a sort of vast desert where the embryos of still-born events would be gathered in heaps and where nothing would grow save perhaps one or two more or less fortunate enterprises and the little insignificant incidents which no one would trouble to avoid. But these again are questions to which there is no solution; and we will not pursue them further.

IX

HEROISM

1

One of the consoling surprises of the 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 idea 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 quitted forthwith, 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 less 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 wholehearted 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 the 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.

X

ON RE-READING 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 Lacedæmon 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, “with habits not of labour but of ease and courage not of art but of nature,” as Pericles said, “the double advantage of escaping the experience of hardships in anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as those who are never free from them.”[27]

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 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 Lacedæmon 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 Lacedæmon 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 felt 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.

XI

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 has 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 those who survive. 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 but represented under forms appropriate to the manners of their day the latent deep, instinctive truths, the 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 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 one 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.”[28]

There are many things which might be added to these lines, notably all that the most recent of our sciences, metaphysics, is engaged in discovering with regard to the miraculous faculties of our subconsciousness.

4

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.

XII

IN MEMORIAM

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 beautiful than birth and exhales a grace 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.

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 and 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.

XIII

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 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....”