Chapter I: Part 1

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MOUNTAIN PATHS

THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK

ESSAYS

THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE
WISDOM AND DESTINY
THE LIFE OF THE BEE
THE BURIED TEMPLE
THE DOUBLE GARDEN
THE MEASURE OF THE HOURS
ON EMERSON, AND OTHER ESSAYS
OUR ETERNITY
THE UNKNOWN GUEST
THE WRACK OF THE STORM
MOUNTAIN PATHS

PLAYS

SISTER BEATRICE, AND ARDIANE AND BARBE BLEUE
JOYZELLE, AND MONNA VANNA
THE BLUE BIRD, A FAIRY PLAY
MARY MAGDALENE
PÉLLÉAS AND MÉLISANDE, AND OTHER PLAYS
PRINCESS MALEINE
THE INTRUDER, AND OTHER PLAYS
AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE
THE MIRACLE OF SAINT ANTHONY
THE BETROTHAL; A SEQUEL TO THE BLUE BIRD POEMS

HOLIDAY EDITIONS

OUR FRIEND THE DOG
THE SWARM
DEATH
THOUGHTS FROM MAETERLINCK
THE BLUE BIRD
THE LIFE OF THE BEE
NEWS OF SPRING AND OTHER NATURE STUDIES
THE LIGHT BEYOND

Mountain Paths

BY
MAURICE MAETERLINCK

_Translated by_
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1919

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I THE POWER OF THE DEAD 3

II MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE 15

III BAD NEWS 31

IV THE SOUL OF NATIONS 41

V THE MOTHERS 51

VI THREE UNKNOWN HEROES 59

VII WASTED BEAUTIES 77

VIII THE INSECT WORLD 87

IX EVIL-SPEAKING 123

X OF GAMBLING 133

XI THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS 165

XII THE TWO LOBES 179

XIII HOPE AND DESPAIR 191

XIV MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM 201

XV HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE 213

XVI THE GREAT REVELATION 229

XVII THE NECESSARY SILENCE 271

XVIII KARMA 281

THE POWER OF THE DEAD

MOUNTAIN PATHS

THE POWER OF THE DEAD

In that curious little masterpiece _A Beleagured City_, Mrs. Oliphant shows us the dead of a provincial town suddenly waxing indignant over the conduct and the morals of those inhabiting the town which they founded. They rise up in rebellion, invest the houses, the streets, the market-places and, by the pressure of their innumerable multitude, all-powerful though invisible, repulse the living, thrust them out of doors and, setting a strict watch, permit them to return to their roof-trees only after a treaty of peace and penitence has purified their hearts, atoned for their offences and ensured a more worthy future.

Undoubtedly a great truth underlies this fiction, which appears to us far-fetched because we perceive only material and ephemeral realities. The dead life and move in our midst far more really and effectually than the most venturesome imagination could depict. It is very doubtful whether they remain in their graves. It even seems increasingly certain that they never allowed themselves to be confined there. Under the tombstones where we believe them to lie imprisoned there are only a few ashes, which are no longer theirs, which they have abandoned without regret and which in all probability they no longer deign to remember. All that was themselves continues to have its being in our midst. How and under what aspect? After all these thousands, perhaps millions of years, we do not yet know; and no religion has been able to tell us with satisfying certainty, though all have striven to do so; but we may, by means of certain tokens, hope to learn.

Without further considering a mighty but obscure truth, which it is for the moment impossible to state precisely or to render palpable, let us concern ourselves with one which cannot be disputed. As I have said elsewhere, whatever our religious faith may be, there is at any rate one place where our dead cannot perish, where they continue to exist as really as when they were in the flesh and often more actively; and this living abiding-place, this consecrated spot, which for those whom we have lost becomes Heaven or Hell according as we draw nearer to or travel farther from their thoughts and their desires, is within ourselves.

And their thoughts and their desires are always higher than our own. It is, therefore, by uplifting ourselves that we approach them. It is we who must take the first steps, for they can no longer descend, whereas it is always possible for us to rise; for the dead, whatever they may have been in life, become better than the best of us. The least worthy of them, in shedding the body, have shed its vices, its littlenesses, its weaknesses, which soon pass from our memory as well; and the spirit alone remains, which is pure in every man and able to desire only what is good. There are no wicked dead, because there are no wicked souls. This is why, as we purify ourselves, we restore life to those who were no more and transform our memory, which they inhabit, into Heaven.

And what was always true of all the dead is far more true to-day, when only the best are chosen for the tomb. In the region which we believe to be under the earth, which we call the Kingdom of the Shades and which in reality is the ethereal region and the Kingdom of Light, there are at this moment disturbances no less profound than those which we have experienced on the surface of the earth. The young dead have invaded it from every side; and since the beginning of this world they have never been so numerous, so full of energy and zeal. Whereas in the customary sequence of the years the dwelling-place of those who leave us receives only weary and exhausted lives, there is not one in this incomparable host who, to borrow Pericles’ expression, “has not departed from life at the height of glory.” Not one of them but has gone up, not down, to his death clad in the greatest sacrifice that man can make for an idea that cannot die. All that we have hitherto believed, all that we have striven to attain beyond ourselves, all that has lifted us to the level at which we stand, all that has overcome the evil days and the evil instincts of human nature: all this could have been no more than lies and illusions if such men as these, such a mass of merit and of glory, were really annihilated, had for ever disappeared, were for ever useless and voiceless, for ever without influence in a world to which they have given life.

It is hardly possible that this could be so as regards the external survival of the dead; but it is absolutely certain that it is not so as regards their survival in ourselves. Here nothing is lost and no one perishes. Our memories are to-day peopled by a multitude of heroes struck down in the flower of their youth and very different from the pale and languid cohort of the past, composed almost wholly of the sick and the old, who had already ceased to exist before leaving the earth. We must tell ourselves that now, in every one of our homes, both in our cities and in the country-side, both in the palace and in the meanest hovel, there lives and reigns a young dead man in the glory of his strength. He fills the poorest, darkest dwelling with a splendour of which it had never ventured to dream. His constant presence, imperious and inevitable, diffuses and maintains a religion and ideas which it had never known before, hallows everything around it, makes the eyes look higher, prevents the spirit from descending, purifies the air that is breathed and the speech that is held and the thoughts that are mustered there and, little by little, ennobles and uplifts the whole people on a scale of unexampled vastness.

Such dead as these have a power as profound, as fruitful as life and less precarious. It is terrible that this experience should have been made, for it is the most pitiless and the first in such enormous masses that mankind has undergone; but, now that the ordeal is over, we shall soon gather the most unexpected fruits. It will not be long before we see the differences widen and the destinies diverge between the nations which have acquired all these dead and all this glory and those which were deprived of them; and we shall perceive with amazement that the nations which have lost the most are those which have kept their riches and their men. There are losses which are inestimable gains; and there are gains whereby the future is lost. There are dead whom the living cannot replace and the mere thought of whom accomplishes things which our bodies cannot perform. There are dead whose energy surpasses death and recovers life; and we are almost every one of us at this moment the mandataries of a being greater, nobler, graver, wiser and more truly living than ourselves. With all those who accompany him, he will be our judge, if it be true that the dead weigh the soul of the living and that our happiness depends on their verdict. He will be our guide and our protector, for it is the first time, since history has revealed its misfortunes to us, that man has felt so great a host of such mighty dead soaring above his head and speaking within his heart.

We shall live henceforward under their laws, which will be more just but not more severe nor more cheerless than ours; for it is a mistake to suppose that the dead love nothing but gloom: they love only that justice and that truth which are the eternal forms of happiness.

From the depths of this justice and this truth in which they are all immersed, they will help us to destroy the great falsehoods of existence; for war and death, if they sow innumerable miseries and misfortunes, have at least the merit of destroying as many lives as they occasion evils. And all the sacrifices which they have made for us will have been in vain--and this is not possible--if they do not first of all bring about the fall of the lies on which we live and which it is not necessary to name, for each of us knows his own and is ashamed of them and will be eager to make an end of them.

They will teach us, before all else, from the depths of our hearts which are their living tombs, to love those who outlive them, since it is in them alone that they wholly exist.

MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

Sir Oliver Lodge is one of the most distinguished men of learning in our day. He is also one of the oldest, most active and most prominent members of that well-known Society for Psychical Research which, founded in 1882, has ever since striven to study with irreproachable scientific precision all the wonderful, inexplicable, occult and supernatural phenomena which have always baffled and still elude the comprehension of mankind. In addition to his purely scientific works, of which, not being qualified to judge, I do not speak, he is the author of some extremely remarkable books, such as _Man and the Universe_, _The Ether of Space_ and _The Survival of Man_, in which the loftiest and most daring metaphysical speculations are constantly controlled by the most prudent, wise and steadfast common sense.

Sir Oliver Lodge, therefore, is at the same time a philosopher and a practical, working scientist, accustomed to scientific methods which do not readily allow him to go astray; he has, in a word, one of the best-balanced brains that we could hope to meet; and he is convinced that the dead do not die and that they are able to communicate with us. He has tried to make us share his conviction in _The Survival of Man_. I am not sure that he has quite succeeded. True, he gives us a certain number of extraordinary facts, but they are facts which, in the last resort, can be explained by the unconscious intervention of intelligences other than those of the dead. He does not bring us the irrefutable proof, such as we should consider, for instance, the revelation of an incident, a detail, a piece of information so absolutely unknown to any living creature that it could come only from a spirit no longer of this world. We must admit, however, that such a proof is, as he says, as difficult to conceive as to provide.

Sir Oliver’s youngest son, Raymond, was born in 1889, became an engineer and enlisted for the duration of the war in September, 1914. He was sent out to Flanders early in the spring of 1915; and, on the 14th of September of the same year, before Ypres, while the company under his command was leaving the front-line trench, he was hit in the left side by a splinter of a shell; and he died a few hours later.

He was, as a photograph shows us, one of those admirable young British soldiers who are the perfect type of a robust, fresh, joyous humanity, clean and bright, and whose death seems the more cruel and the more incredible as it annihilates a greater aggregate of strength, hope and beauty.

His father has dedicated to his memory a volume entitled, _Raymond, or Life and Death_; and we are at first somewhat bewildered at seeing that it is not, as one might expect, a book of lamentation, regrets and tears, but the accurate, deliberately impassive and at times almost cheerful report of a man of learning who thrusts aside his sorrow so that he may see clearly before him, wrestles with the thought of death and beholds the rising dawn of an immense and very strange hope.

I will not linger over the first part of the volume, which aims at making us acquainted with Raymond Lodge. It contains some forty letters written in the trenches, the testimony of his brother-officers’ devotion to him, details of his death and so on. The letters, I may say in passing, are charmingly vivid and marked by a delicate and delightful humour whose only object is to reassure those who are not themselves in danger. I have not time to dwell upon them; and they are not what most interests us here.

But the second part, which Sir Oliver Lodge calls _Supernormal Portion_, passes from the life that exists on the surface of our earth and introduces us into a very different world.

In the very first lines, the author reminds us that he has “made no secret of his conviction, not merely that personality persists, but that its continued existence is more entwined with the life of every day than has been generally imagined; that there is no real breach of continuity between the dead and the living; and that methods of intercommunion across what has seemed to be a gulf can be set going in response to the urgent demand of affection; that in fact, as Diotima told Socrates (_Symposium_, 202 and 203), ‘Love bridges the Chasm.’”

Sir Oliver Lodge, then, is persuaded that his son, though dead, has not ceased to exist and that he has not gone far from those who love him. Raymond, in fact, seeks to communicate with his father as early as eleven days after his death. We know that these communications or so-called communications from beyond the grave--let us not prejudge the issue for the moment--are made through the agency of a medium who is or believes himself to be inspired or possessed by the deceased or by a familiar spirit speaking in his name and repeating what the latter reveals to him. The medium conveys his information either orally or by automatic writing, or again, although this is very rare in the present instance, by table-turning. But I will pass over these preliminaries, which would carry us too far, and come straight to the communication which is, I think, the most astonishing of all and perhaps the only one that cannot be explained, or at least is exceedingly difficult to explain, by the intervention of the living.

About the end of August, 1915, that is to say, not many days before his death, Raymond, who, as we have seen, was near Ypres, had been photographed with the officers of his battalion by a travelling photographer. On the 27th of September following, in the course of a sitting with the medium Peters, the spirit speaking by Peters’ mouth said, suddenly:

“You have several portraits of this boy. Before he went away you had a good portrait of him--two, no, three. Two where he is alone and one where he is in a group of other men. He is particular that I should tell you of this. In one you see his walking-stick.”

Now at that time the members of Sir Oliver Lodge’s family did not know of the existence of this group. They attached no great importance, however, to the revelations but in subsequent sittings, notably on the 3rd of December, before the photographs had arrived, before they were seen, more detailed information was received. According to the spirit’s statements, the photograph was of a dozen officers or more, taken out of doors, in front of a sort of shelter (the medium kept drawing vertical lines in the air). Some were sitting down and some were standing up at the back. Raymond was sitting; somebody was leaning on him. There were several photographs taken.

On the 7th of December, the photographs arrived at Mariemont, Sir Oliver’s house near Edgbaston. There were three copies, all differing slightly, of the same group of twenty-one officers, those in the back row standing up, the others seated. The group was taken outside a sort of temporary wooden structure, such as might be a hospital shed, with six conspicuous nearly vertical lines on the roof. Raymond was one of those sitting on the ground in front; his walking-stick, mentioned in the first revelation, was lying across his feet. And a striking piece of evidence is that his is the only instance where one man is leaning or resting his hand on the shoulder of another, in two of the photographs, or, in the third, his leg.

This manifestation is one of the most remarkable that have hitherto been obtained, because it eliminates almost entirely any telepathic interference, that is to say, any subconscious intercommunication between the persons present at the sitting, all of whom were absolutely unaware of the existence of the photographs. If we refuse to admit the intervention of the deceased--which should, I agree, be admitted only in the last resort--we must, in order to explain the revelation, suppose that the subconsciousness of the medium or of one of those present entered into communication, through the vast mazes and deserts of space and amid millions of strange souls, with the subconsciousness of one of the officers or of one of the people who had seen these photographs whose existence there was no reason for suspecting. This is possible; but it is so fortuitous, so prodigious that the survival and intervention of the deceased would, in the circumstances, seem almost less supernatural and more probable.

I will not enter into the details of the numerous sittings which preceded or followed this one; nor will I even undertake to summarize them. To share the emotion aroused, we must read the reports which faithfully reproduce these strange dialogues between the living and the dead. We receive the impression that the departed son comes daily closer and closer to life and converses more and more easily, more and more familiarly with all those who loved him before he was overtaken by the shadows of the grave. He recalls to each of them a thousand little forgotten incidents. He remains among his own kindred as though he had never left them. He is always present and prepared to answer. He mingles so completely in their whole life that no one any longer thinks of mourning his loss. They question him about his present state, ask him where he is, what he is, what he is doing. He needs no pressing; he at once declares himself astonished at the incredible reality of that new world. He is very happy there, reforming himself, condensing himself, so to speak, and gradually finding himself again. The existence of the intelligence and of the will, disencumbered of the body, is freer, lighter, of greater range and diffusion, but continues very like what it was in the flesh. The environment is no longer physical but spiritual; and there is a translation to another plane rather than the break, the complete overthrow, the extraordinary transitions which we are pleased to imagine. After all, is it not fairly plausible? And are we not wrong in believing that death changes everything, from one day to the next, and that there is a sudden and inconceivable abyss between the hour which precedes decease and that which follows it? Is it in conformity with the habits of nature? Is the life-force which we carry within ourselves and which doubtless cannot be extinguished, is that force to so great a degree crippled and cramped by our body that, when it leaves this body, it becomes, then and there, entirely different and unrecognizable?

But I must set a limit to speculation and, lest I exceed the limits of this essay, I must pass by two or three revelations less striking than that of the photograph, but pretty strange notwithstanding. Obviously, it is not the first time that such manifestations have occurred; but these are really of a higher quality than those which crowd several volumes of the _Proceedings_. Do they furnish the proof for which we ask? I do not think so; but will any one ever be able to supply us with that compelling proof? What can the discarnate spirit do when trying to establish that it continues to exist? If it speak to us of the most secret, the most private incidents of a common past, we reply that it is we who are reviving those memories within ourselves. If it aim at convincing us by its description of the world beyond the grave, not all the most glorious and unexpected pictures of that world which it might trace are worth anything as evidence, for they cannot be controlled. If we seek a proof by asking it to foretell the future, it confesses that it does not know the future much better than we do, which is likely enough, seeing that any knowledge of this kind implies a sort of omniscience and consequently omnipotence which can hardly be acquired in a moment. All that remains to it, therefore, is such little snatches of evidence and uncertain attempts at proof as we find here. It is not enough, I admit; for psychometry, that is to say, a similar manifestation of clairvoyance between one living subconsciousness and another, gives almost equally astonishing results. But here as there these results show at least that we have around us wandering intelligences, already enfranchised from the narrow and burdensome laws of space and matter, that sometimes know things which we do not know or no longer know. Do they emanate from ourselves, are they only manifestations of faculties as yet unknown, or are they external, objective and independent of ourselves? Are they merely alive in the sense in which we speak of our bodies, or do they belong to bodies which have ceased to exist? That is what we cannot yet decide; but it must be acknowledged that, once we admit their existence, which at this date is hardly contestable, it becomes much less difficult to agree that they belong to the dead.

This at least may be said: if experiments such as these do not demonstrate positively that the dead are able directly, manifestly and almost materially to mingle with our existence and to remain in touch with us, they prove that they continue to live in us much more ardently, profoundly, personally and passionately than had hitherto been believed; and that in itself is more than we dared hope.

BAD NEWS

III

BAD NEWS

For more than four years, evil tidings passed night and day over almost half the world of men. Never since our earth came into being were they known to spread in crowds so dense and busy and commanding. In the happy days of peace, we would come upon the gloomy visitants here and there, travelling over hill and dale, nearly always alone, sometimes in couples, rarely in companies of three, timid and shy, seeking to pass unnoticed and humbly undertaking the smallest messages of sorrow that destiny confided to their charge. Now they go with heads erect; they are almost arrogant; and swollen with their importance, they neglect any misfortunes that are not deathly. They encumber the roads, cross the seas and rivers, invade the streets, do not forget the by-ways and climb the most rugged and stony tracks. There is not a hovel cowering in the dingiest and most obscure suburb of a great city, not a cottage hidden in the recesses of the poorest hamlet of the most inaccessible mountain, which escapes their search and towards which one of them, detached from the sinister band, does not hasten with its little footstep, eager, pitiless and sure. Each has its goal whence nothing can divert it. Through time and space, over rocks and walls they press onward, swift and determined, blind and deaf to all that would retard them, thinking only of fulfilling their duty, which is to announce as soon as may be to the most sensitive and defenceless heart the greatest sorrow that can fall upon it.

We watch them pass as emissaries of destiny. To us they seem as fatal as the very misfortune of which they are but the heralds; and no one dreams of barring the way before them. So soon as one of them arrives, all unexpected, in our midst, we leave everything, we rush forward, we gather round it. Almost a religious fear compasses it about; we whisper reverently; and we should bow no lower in the presence of a messenger of God. Not only would no one dare to contradict it, or advise it, or beg it to be patient, to grant a few hours of respite, to hide in the darkness or to arrive by a longer road; on the contrary, all compete in offering it zealous if humble service. The most compassionate, the most pitiful are the most assiduous and obsequious, as though there were no duty more unmistakable, no act of charity more meritorious than to lead the dark envoy by the shortest and the quickest way to the heart which it is to strike.

Once again, we are here confounding that which belongs to destiny with that which belongs to ourselves. The misfortune was perhaps not to be avoided; but a great part of the sorrows that attend it remain in our power. It is for us to be careful of them, to direct them, to subdue them, disarm them, delay them, turn them aside and sometimes even to stop them altogether.

In effect, we hardly yet know the psychology of sorrow, which is as deep, as complex and as worthy of study as the passions to which we devote so much of our time. In everyday life, it is true, great sorrows, though not so rare as we could have wished, were nevertheless too widely scattered for us to study them easily, step by step. To-day, alas, they are the ground of all our thoughts; and we are learning at last that, even as love or happiness or vanity, they have their secrets, their habits, their illusions, their sophistries, their dark corners, their baffling mazes and their unforeseen abysses; for man, whether he love or rejoice or weep, remains ever constant to himself!

It is not true, as we too willingly agree, that, since unhappiness must be known sooner or later, our only duty is to reveal it at the earliest moment, for the sorrow that is yet green is very different from the sorrow that is already fading. It is not true, as we admit without question, that anything is better than ignorance or uncertainty and that there is a sort of cowardice in not forthwith announcing the bad news which we know to those whom it must prostrate in the dust. On the contrary, cowardice lies in ridding ourselves of the bad news as quickly as we may and in not bearing its whole burden, secretly and alone, as long as we are able. When the bad news arrives, our first duty is to set it apart, to prevent it from spreading, to master it as we would a malefactor or a stalking pestilence, to close all means of escape, to mount guard over it, so that it cannot break forth and do harm. Our duty is not merely, as the best of us and the most prudent seem to believe, to usher in the bad news with a thousand precautions, with short and muffled, sidelong and measured steps, by the back-door, into the dwelling which it is to devastate; rather is it our duty definitely to forbid its entrance and to have the courage to chain it in our own dwelling, which it will fill with unjust and insupportable reproaches and upbraidings. Instead of making ourselves the easy echo of its cries, we should think only of stifling its voice. Each hour that we thus pass in restless and painful intimacy with the hateful prisoner is an hour of suffering which we accept for ourselves and which we spare the victim of fate. It is almost certain that the malignant recluse will end by escaping our vigilance; but here the very minutes have their value and there is no gain, however small, that we are entitled to neglect. The hour-glass that measures the phases of sorrow is much finer and truer than that which marks the stages of pleasure. The time that passes between the death of one whom we love and the moment when we hear of his death is as full of pain as it is of days. Most to be feared of all is the first blow of misfortune; it is then that the heart is smitten and torn with a wound that will never heal. But this blow has not its shattering and sometimes mortal force unless it strike its victim at once and, so to speak, fresh from the event. Every hour that is interposed deadens the sting and lessens its virulence. A death already some weeks old no longer wears the same face as that which is made known on the very day when it occurs; and, if a few months have covered it, it is no longer a death, it has become a memory. The days that divide us from it have almost the same value whether they pass before we hear of it or afterwards. They remove beforehand from the eyes and heart the blinding horror of the loss; they step forward and draw it out of the clutch of madness into a past like that which softens regret. They weave a sort of retrospective memory which stretches into the past and grants straightway all that true memory would have given little by little, hour by hour, during the long months that part the first despair from the sorrow which grows wise and reconciled and ready to hope anew.

THE SOUL OF NATIONS

In the admirable and touching pages in which Octave Mirbeau bequeaths his last thoughts to us, the great friend whose loss is mourned by all who in this world hunger and thirst after justice expresses his surprise at finding how in the supreme moments of its life the collective soul of the French nation differs from the soul of each of the individuals of which it is composed.

He had devoted the best part of his work to examining, dissecting, presenting in a blinding and sometimes unbearable light and stigmatizing with unequalled eloquence and bitterness the weaknesses and selfishness, the folly and meannesses, the vanity and sordid money-sense, the lack of conscience, honesty, charity, dignity, the shameful stains on the life of his fellow-countrymen. And behold, in the hour of insistent duty, there arises suddenly, as in a fairy scene, out of the quagmire which he had so long stirred with rough and generous disgust, the purest, noblest, most patient, fraternal and whole-hearted spirit of heroism and sacrifice that the world has ever known, not only in the most glorious days of its history, but even in the time of its most romantic legends, which were but glorious dreams which it never hoped to realize.

I could say as much of another nation, which I know well, since it lives in the land where I was born. The Belgians, in the guise in which we saw them daily, appeared to give us no promise of a noble soul. They seemed to us narrow and limited, a little commonplace, honest in a mean, inglorious way, without ideals or generous aspirations, wholly absorbed by their petty material welfare, their petty local wrangles. Yet, when the same hour of duty sounded for them, more menacing and formidable than those of the other nations, because it preceded all of them in a terrible mystery; while there was everything to gain and nothing to lose, save honour, if they proved faithless to a plighted word; at the first call of their conscience aroused as by a thunderbolt, without hesitating or glancing at what they had to meet or undergo, with an unanimous and irresistible impulse, they astonished mankind by a decision such as no other people had ever taken and saved the world, well knowing that themselves could not be saved. And this assuredly is the noblest sacrifice that the heroes and martyrs who have hitherto appeared to be the professed exponents of sublime courage are able to achieve upon this earth of ours.

On the other hand, to those of us who had had occasion to mix with Germans, who had lived in Germany and believed that they knew German manners and letters, it seemed beyond doubt that the Bavarians, Saxons, Hanoverians and Rhinelanders, notwithstanding some defects of education rather than character which grated upon us a little, also possessed certain qualities, notably a genial kindness, a gravity, a laboriousness, a steadiness, an uncomplaining temper, a simplicity in their domestic life, a sense of duty and a habit of taking life conscientiously, which we had never known or had succeeded in losing. So, despite the warnings of history, we were struck dumb with amazement and at first refused to believe the early tales of atrocities which were not incidental, as in every war, but deliberate, premeditated, systematic and perpetrated with a light heart by an entire people setting itself of sober purpose and with a sort of perverse pride outside the pale of humanity, transforming itself of a sudden into a pack of devils more formidable and destructive than all those which Hell had hitherto belched forth into our world.

We knew already and Dr. Gustave Le Bon had demonstrated to us in a curious way that the soul of a crowd does not resemble the soul of any of its component members. According to the leaders and the circumstances that control it, the collective soul is sometimes loftier, juster, more generous and most often more impulsive, more credulous, more cruel, more barbarous and blind. But a crowd has only a provisional, momentary soul, which does not survive the short-lived and nearly always violent event that calls it into being; and its contingent and transitory psychology is hardly able to tell us how the profound, lasting and, so to speak, immortal soul of a nation takes shape.

It is quite natural that a nation should not know itself at all and that its acts should plunge it into a state of bewilderment from which it does not recover until history has explained them to a greater or lesser degree. None of the men who make up a nation knows himself; still less does any of them know his fellows. Not one of us really knows who or what he is; not one of us can say what he will do in unexpected circumstances which are a trifle more serious than those which form the customary tissue of life. We spend our existence in questioning and exploring ourselves; our acts are as much a revelation to ourselves as to others; and, the nearer we draw to our end, the farther stretches the vista of that which still remains for us to discover. We own but the smallest part of ourselves; the rest, which is almost the whole, does not belong to us at all, but merges in the past and the future and in other mysteries more unknown than the future or the past.

What is true of each one of us is very much more true of a great nation composed of millions of men. That represents a future and a past stretching incomparably farther than those of a single human life. We admit and constantly repeat that a nation is guided by its dead. It is certain that the dead continue to live in it a far more active life than is generally believed and that they control it unknown to itself, even as, at the other end of the ages, the men of the future, that is to say, all those who are not yet born, all those whom it carries within itself as it does its dead, play no less important a part in a nation’s decisions. But in its very present, at the moment when it is living and putting forth its activity on this earth, in addition to the power of those who no longer are and those who are not yet, there is outside the nation, outside the aggregate of bodies and brains that make it up, a host of forces and faculties which have not found or have not wished to take their place, or which do not abide in the nation consistently, and which nevertheless belong to it as essentially and direct it as effectively as those which are comprised within it. What our body contains when we believe ourselves circumscribed is little in comparison with what it does not contain; and it is in what the body does not contain that the highest and most powerful part of our being seems to dwell. We must not forget that it grows stronger each day that we neither die nor come into being, in a word, that we are not wholly incarnate, and that, on the other hand, our flesh comprises much more than ourselves. It is this that constitutes all the floating forces which make up the real soul of a people, forces very much deeper and more numerous than those which seem fixed in the body and the spirit. They do not show themselves in the petty incidents of daily life, which concern only the mean and narrow covering in which a nation goes sheltered; but they unite, join forces and reveal their passionate ardour at the grave and tragic hours when everlasting destiny is at stake. They then lay down decisions which history inscribes on her records, decisions whose grandeur, generosity and heroism astonish even those who have taken them more or less unknown to themselves and often in spite of themselves, decisions which are manifested in their own eyes as an unexpected, magnificent and incomprehensible revelation of themselves.

THE MOTHERS

It was they who bore the main burden of suffering in this war.

In our streets and open spaces and all along the roads, in our churches, in our towns and villages, in every house, we come into contact with mothers who have lost their son or are living in an anguish more cruel than the certainty of death.

Let us try to understand their loss. They know what it means, but they do not tell the men.

Their son is taken from them at the fairest moment of his life, when their own is in its decline. When a child dies in infancy, it is as though his soul had hardly gone, as though it were lingering near the mother who brought it into the world, awaiting the time when it may return in a new form. The death which visits the cradle is not the same as that which spreads terror over the earth; but a son who dies at the age of twenty does not come back again and leaves not a gleam of hope behind him. He carries away with him all the future that his mother had remaining to her, all that she gave to him and all his promise: the pangs, anguish and smiles of birth and childhood, the joys of youth, the reward and the harvest of maturity, the comfort and the peace of old age.

He carries away with him something much more than himself: it is not his life only that comes to an end, it is numberless days that finish suddenly, a whole generation that becomes extinct, a long series of faces, of little fondling hands, of play and laughter, all of which fall at one blow on the battle-field, bidding farewell to the sunshine and reentering the earth which they will not have known. All this the eyes of our mothers perceive without understanding; and this is why, at certain times, the weight and sadness of their glance are more than any of us can bear.

And yet they do not weep as the mothers wept in former wars. All their sons disappear one by one; and we do not hear them complain or moan as in days gone by, when great sufferings, great massacres and great catastrophes were surrounded by the clamours and lamentations of the mothers.

They do not gather in the public places, they do not utter recriminations, they rail at no one, they do not rebel. They swallow their sobs and stifle their tears, as though obeying a command which they have passed from one to the other, unknown to the men.

We do not know what it is that sustains them and gives them the strength to endure the remnant of their lives. Some of them have other children; and we can understand that they transfer to these the love and the future which death has shattered. Many of them have never lost or are striving to recover their faith in the eternal promises; and here again we can understand that they do not despair, for the mothers of the martyrs did not despair either. But thousands of others, whose home is for ever deserted and whose sky is peopled by none but pale phantoms, retain the same hope as those who keep on hoping. What gives them this courage which astonishes whenever we behold it?

When the best, the most compassionate, the wisest among us meet one of these mothers who has just stealthily wiped her eyes, so that the sight of her unhappiness may not offend others who are happier, when we seek for words which, uttered amid the glaring directness of the most awful sorrow that can strike a human heart, shall not sound like odious or ridiculous lies, we can hardly find anything to say to her. We speak to her of the justice and the beauty of the cause for which her hero fell, of the immense and necessary sacrifice, of the remembrance and gratitude of mankind, of the irreality of life, which is measured not by the length of days but by the lofty height of duty and glory. We add perhaps that the dead do not die, that there are no dead, that those who are no more live nearer to our souls than when they were in the flesh and that all that we loved in them lingers in our hearts so long as it is visited by our memory and revived by our love.

But, even while we speak, we feel the emptiness of what we say. We are conscious that all this is true only for those whom death has not hurled into the abyss where words are nothing more than childish babble; that the most ardent memory cannot take the place of a dear reality which we touch with our hands or lips; and that the most exalted thought is as nothing compared with the daily going out and coming in, the familiar presence at meals, the morning and evening kiss, the fond embrace at the departure and the intoxicating delight at the return. The mothers know and feel this better than we do; and that is why they do not answer our attempts at consolation and why they listen to them in silence, finding within themselves other reasons for living and hoping than those which we, vainly searching the whole horizon of human certainty and thought, try to bring them from the outside. They resume the burden of their days without telling us whence they derive their strength or teaching us the secret of their self-sacrifice, their resignation and their heroism.

THREE UNKNOWN HEROES

The Belgian government published last year a _Reply to the German White Book of 10 May 1915_.

This reply gives peremptory and categorical denials to all the allegations in the White Book on the subject of _francs-tireurs_, of attacks by civilians and of the Belgian women’s cruelty to the German prisoners and wounded. It contains a body of authentic and overwhelming evidence upon the massacres at Andenne, Dinant, Louvain and Aerschot which enables history here and now to pronounce its verdict with even greater certainty than the most scrupulous jury of a criminal court.

Among the most frightful incidents reported in these accounts by eye-witnesses, I would linger to-day upon only two of those which marked the sack of Aerschot; not that they are more odious or cruel than the others--on the contrary, beside the unprovoked murders and wholesale executions at Andenne, Dinant and Louvain, which are of unsurpassable horror, they seem almost kindly--but I select them for the very reason that they display more clearly than in its most violent excesses what we may call the normal mentality of the German army and the abominable things which it did when it believed itself to be acting with justice, moderation and humanity. I select them above all because they show us the admirable and touching state of mind, as displayed amidst a terrible ordeal, of a little Belgian city, the most innocent of all the victims of this war, and offer for our contemplation instances of simple and heroic self-sacrifice which have escaped notice and which it is well to bring to light, for they are as beautiful as the most splendid examples in the fairest pages of Plutarch.

Aerschot is a humble and happy little town in Flemish Brabant, one of those modest unknown clusters of habitations which, like Dinant, for ever to be regretted and buried in the past, nobody used to visit, because they contained no buildings of note, but which retained and represented all the more, in the depths of their silence and their placid isolation, Flemish life in its most special, intimate, intense, traditional, suave and peaceable aspect. In these half-rustic little cities we find hardly any industries, at most a malt-kiln or two, a corn-mill, an oil-works, a chicory-factory. Their life is almost agricultural; and the well-to-do inhabitants live on the produce or the rents of their fields, their meadows and their woods. The houses in the church-square are substantial-looking, more or less cubical in shape and painted virgin white; their carriage-gates are adorned with glittering brasses. All through the week the square is almost deserted and wakens into life only on market-days and on Sunday mornings, at the hour of high mass. In a word, it is a picture of tranquillity, of placid waiting for meals and repose, of drowsy, easy existence and perhaps of happiness, if happiness consists in being happy in a half-slumber free of remote ambitions, exaggerated passions or over-eager dreams.

It was here, in this peaceful sojourn of immemorial restfulness, which not even the war had hitherto disturbed below the surface, that, on the 19th of August, 1914, at nine o’clock in the morning, after the retreat of the last Belgian soldiers, the square was suddenly invaded by a dense and endless stream of German troops. The burgomaster’s son, a lad of fifteen, hurried to close the Venetian shutters of his father’s house and was wounded in the leg by one of the bullets which the victors fired at random through the windows.

At ten o’clock, the German officer in command sent for the burgomaster, M. Tielemans, to appear at the Town-hall. He was received with insults, hustled and abused for a _Schweinhund_, or pig-dog, a species of animal which appears to be indigenous to Germany.

Next, Colonel Stenger, commanding the 8th infantry brigade, and his two aides-de-camp took up their quarters in the burgomaster’s house in the church-square and, I may add in passing, forthwith broke open all the drawers in their rooms, after which they went to the balcony and watched the march-past of their troops.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, obsessed by the delusion of _francs-tireurs_, some soldiers, seized with panic, began to fire shots in the streets. The colonel, standing on the balcony, was hit by a German bullet and fell. One of the aides-de-camp rushed downstairs shouting:

“The colonel is dead! I want the burgomaster!”

M. Tielemans felt that his time was come:

“This is a serious matter for me,” he said to his wife.

She squeezed his hand and urged him to keep courage. The burgomaster was arrested and ill-treated by the soldiers. In vain his wife remarked to the captain that her husband and son could not have fired, since they possessed no weapons.

“That makes no difference,” replied the bully in uniform; “he’s responsible. Also,” he added, “I want your son.”

This son was the boy of fifteen who had been wounded in the leg. As he had a difficulty in walking, because of his wound, he was brutally jostled before his mother’s eyes and escorted with kicks to the Town-hall, there to join his father.

Meanwhile this same captain, persisting in his contention that his men had been fired upon, compelled Madame Tielemans to go through the house with him, from cellar to attic. He was obliged to observe that all the rooms were empty and all the windows closed. Throughout this inspection, he threatened the poor woman with his revolver. Her daughter placed herself between her mother and their sinister visitor, who did not understand. When they returned to the hall downstairs, the mother asked him:

“What is to become of us?”

Coldly, he replied:

“You will be shot; so will your daughter and your servants.”

The pillage and the methodical setting on fire of the town now began. All the houses on the right-hand side of the square were in flames. From time to time, the soldiers apostrophized the women, shouting:

“You’re going to be shot, you’re going to be shot!”

* * * * *

“At that moment,” says Madame Tielemans, in her sworn deposition, “the soldiers were leaving our house, their arms filled with bottles of wine. They opened the windows and removed all the contents of our rooms. I turned away so as not to behold the pillage. By the lurid light of the burning houses, my eyes fell upon my husband, my son and my brother-in-law, accompanied by some other gentlemen who were being led to execution. Never shall I forget the sight nor the look on the face of my husband seeking his house for the last time and asking himself what had befallen his wife and daughter, while I, lest I should sap his courage, could not call out, ‘I am here!’”

* * * * *

The hours passed. The women were driven out of the town and led like a herd of cattle, along a road strewn with corpses, to a distant meadow, where they were penned until morning. The men were arrested and their hands tied behind their backs with copper wire so cruelly tightened as to draw blood. They were gathered into groups and made to lie down so that their heads touched the ground and they were unable to make any movement. The night was spent in this way, with the town burning and the pillage and orgy continuing.

Between five and six in the morning, the military authorities decided that the executions should begin and that one of the largest groups of prisoners, composed of about a hundred civilians, should be present at the death of the burgomaster, his son and his brother. An officer informed the burgomaster that his hour had come. On hearing these words, a citizen of Aerschot, Claes van Nuffel by name, went up to the officer, begged him to spare the chief magistrate’s life and offered to die in his stead. He added that he was the burgomaster’s political adversary, but that he considered that, at this moment, M. Tielemans was essential to the town.

“No,” replied the officer, harshly, “we must have the burgomaster.”

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Mountain PathsChapter I: Part 1

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