The Forerunners
by Romain Rolland · English · Gutenberg #31313 · 407,604 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Forerunners
Author: Romain Rolland
Translator: Cedar Paul
Eden Paul
Release date: February 17, 2010 [eBook #31313]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FORERUNNERS ***
Produced by D Alexander, Chuck Greif and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
THE FORERUNNERS
BY
ROMAIN ROLLAND
TRANSLATED BY
EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE
NEW YORK 1920
TO
THE MEMORY OF
THE MARTYRS OF THE NEW FAITH
IN THE HUMAN INTERNATIONAL.
TO
JEAN JAURÈS,
KARL LIEBKNECHT, ROSA LUXEMBURG,
KURT EISNER, GUSTAV LANDAUER,
THE VICTIMS OF BLOODTHIRSTY STUPIDITY
AND MURDEROUS FALSEHOOD,
THE LIBERATORS OF THE MEN
WHO KILLED THEM.
R. R.
_August, 1919._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
DEDICATION 5
INTRODUCTION 9
I. ARA PACIS 11
II. UPWARDS, ALONG A WINDING ROAD 15
III. TO THE MURDERED PEOPLES 23
IV. TO THE UNDYING ANTIGONE 32
V. A WOMAN'S VOICE FROM OUT THE TUMULT 34
VI. FREEDOM 37
VII. FREE RUSSIA, THE LIBERATOR 39
VIII. TOLSTOY: THE FREE SPIRIT 41
IX. TO MAXIM GORKI 45
X. TWO LETTERS FROM MAXIM GORKI 47
XI. TO THE WRITERS OF AMERICA 51
XII. FREE VOICES FROM AMERICA 55
XIII. ON BEHALF OF E. D. MOREL 67
XIV. YOUNG SWITZERLAND 69
XV. UNDER FIRE 86
XVI. AVE, CÆSAR, MORITURI TE SALUTANT 95
XVII. AVE, CÆSAR, THOSE WHO WISH TO LIVE SALUTE THEE 101
XVIII. MEN IN BATTLE 106
XIX. VOX CLAMANTIS 121
XX. A GREAT EUROPEAN, G. F. NICOLAI 140
XXI. REFLECTIONS ON READING AUGUSTE FOREL 175
XXII. ON BEHALF OF THE INTERNATIONAL OF THE MIND 185
XXIII. A CALL TO EUROPEANS 195
XXIV. OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT WILSON 204
XXV. AGAINST VICTORIOUS BISMARCKISM 207
XXVI. DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE MIND 209
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE TO CHAPTER XX 217
INTRODUCTION
This book is a sequel to _Above the Battle_. It consists of a number of
articles written and published in Switzerland between the end of 1915
and the beginning of 1919. As collective title for the work, I have
chosen "The Forerunners," for nearly all the essays relate to the
dauntless few who, the world over, amid the tempests of war and
universal reaction, have been able to keep their thoughts free, their
international faith inviolate. The future will reverence the names of
these great harbingers, who have been flouted, reviled, threatened,
found guilty, and imprisoned. I speak of such as Bertrand Russell, E. D.
Morel, Maxim Gorki, G. F. Nicolai, Auguste Forel, Andreas Latzko, Henri
Barbusse, Stefan Zweig, and the choice spirits of France, America, and
Switzerland, who have fought for freedom.
To these essays I have prefixed an ode, "Ara Pacis," written during the
first days of the war. It is an act of faith in Peace and Concord.
Another act of faith will comprise the final chapter. This time it will
be faith in action; the faith which, in the face of the brute force of
states and of tyrannical opinion, proclaims the invincible independence
of Thought.
I was half inclined to add to this collection a meditation upon
_Empedocles of Agrigentum and the Reign of Hatred_.[1] But it was
somewhat too long, and its inclusion would have impaired the symmetry of
the volume.
In republishing the articles, I have not kept to a strictly
chronological order. It appeared preferable to group them in accordance
with the nature of their contents or under the guidance of artistic
considerations. But at the close of each essay I have mentioned the
date of original publication, and, wherever possible, the date of
composition.
A few more words of explanation will help the reader to understand my
general design.
_Above the Battle_ and _The Forerunners_ are no more than a part of my
writings on the war, writings composed during the last five years. The
volumes contain those essays only which I have published in Switzerland.
Even so, the collection is far from complete, for I have not been able
to gather together all these writings. Moreover, the most important
materials at my disposal, as to scope and permanent value, are a
register made day by day of the letters, the confidences, the moral
confessions, which I have uninterruptedly received throughout these
years from the free spirits and the persecuted of all nations. Here,
likewise, as soberly as possible, I have recorded my own thoughts and my
own part in the struggle. Unus ex multis. The register is, as it were, a
picture of the untrammelled souls of the world wrestling with the
unchained forces of fanaticism, violence, and falsehood. A long time
must doubtless elapse before it will be judicious to publish this
record. Enough that the documents in question, of which several copies
have been made, will serve in times to come as a witness of our efforts,
our sufferings, our unconquerable faith.
ROMAIN ROLLAND.
PARIS, _June, 1919._
THE FORERUNNERS
I
ARA PACIS
De profundis clamans, out of the abyss of all the hates,
To thee, Divine Peace, will I lift up my song.
The din of the armies shall not drown it.
Imperturbable, I behold the rising flood incarnadine,
Which bears the beauteous body of mutilated Europe,
And I hear the raging wind which stirs the souls of men.
Though I stand alone, I shall be faithful to thee.
I shall not take my place at the sacrilegious communion of blood.
I shall not eat my share of the Son of Man.
I am brother to all, and I love you all,
Men, ephemerals who rob yourselves of your one brief day.
Above the laurels of glory and above the oaks,
May there spring from my heart upon the Holy Mount,
The olive tree, with the sunlight in its boughs, where the cicadas sing.
* * * * *
Sublime Peace who holdest,
Beneath thy sovran sway,
The turmoil of the world,
And who, from out the hurtling of the waves,
Makest the rhythm of the seas;
Cathedral established
Upon the perfect balance of opposing forces;
Dazzling rose-window,
Where the blood of the sun
Gushes forth in diapered sheaves of flame
Which the harmonising eye of the artist has bound together;
Like to a huge bird
Which soars in the zenith,
Sheltering the plain beneath its wings,
Thy flight embraces,
Beyond what is, that which has been and will be.
Thou art sister to joy and sister to sorrow,
Youngest and wisest of sisters;
Thou holdest them both by the hand.
Thus art thou like a limpid channel linking two rivers,
A channel wherein the skies are mirrored betwixt two rows of pale poplars.
Thou art the divine messenger,
Passing to and fro like the swallow
From bank to bank,
Uniting them.
To some saying,
"Weep not, joy will come again";
To others,
"Be not over-confident, happiness is fleeting."
Thy shapely arms tenderly enfold
Thy froward children,
And thou smilest, gazing on them
As they bite thy swelling breast.
Thou joinest the hands and the hearts
Of those who, while seeking one another, flee one another;
And thou subjectest to the yoke the unruly bulls,
So that instead of wasting
In fights the passion which makes their flanks to smoke,
Thou turnest this passion to account for ploughing in the womb of the land
The furrow long and deep where the seed will germinate.
Thou art the faithful helpmate
Who welcomest the weary wrestlers on their return.
Victors or vanquished, they have an equal share of thy love.
For the prize of battle
Is not a strip of land
Which one day the fat of the victor
Will nourish, mingled with that of his foe.
The prize is, to have been the tool of Destiny,
And not to have bent in her hand.
O my Peace who smilest, thy soft eyes filled with tears,
Summer rainbow, sunny evening,
Who, with thy golden fingers,
Fondlest the besprinkled fields,
Carest for the fallen fruits,
And healest the wounds
Of the trees which the wind and the hail have bruised;
Shed on us thy healing balm, and lull our sorrows to sleep!
They will pass, and we also.
Thou alone endurest for ever.
Brothers, let us unite; and you, too, forces within me,
Which clash one upon another in my riven heart!
Join hands and dance along!
We move forward calmly and without haste,
For Time is not our quarry.
Time is on our side.
With the osiers of the ages my Peace weaves her nest.
* * * * *
I am like the cricket who chirps in the fields.
A storm bursts, rain falls in torrents, drowning
The furrows and the chirping.
But as soon as the flurry is over,
The little musician, undaunted, resumes his song.
In like manner, having heard, in the smoking east,
on the devastated earth,
The thunderous charge of the Four Horsemen,
Whose gallop rings still from the distance,
I uplift my head and resume my song,
Puny, but obstinate.
Written August 15 to 25, 1914.[2]
"Journal de Genève" and "Neue Zürcher Zeitung,"
December 24 and 25, 1915; "Les Tablettes,"
Geneva, July, 1917.
II
UPWARDS, ALONG A WINDING ROAD
If I have kept silence for a year, it is not because the faith to which
I gave expression in _Above the Battle_ has been shaken (it stands
firmer than ever); but I am well assured that it is useless to speak to
him who will not hearken. Facts alone will speak, with tragical
insistence; facts alone will be able to penetrate the thick wall of
obstinacy, pride, and falsehood with which men have surrounded their
minds because they do not wish to see the light.
But we, as between brothers of all the nations; as between those who
have known how to defend their moral freedom, their reason, and their
faith in human solidarity; as between minds which continue to hope amid
silence, oppression, and grief--we do well to exchange, as this year
draws to a close, words of affection and solace. We must convince one
another that during the blood-drenched night the light is still burning,
that it never has been and never will be extinguished.
In the abyss of suffering into which Europe is plunged, those who wield
the pen must be careful never to add an additional pang to the mass of
pangs already endured, and never to pour new reasons for hatred into the
burning flood of hate. Two ways remain open for those rare free spirits
which, athwart the mountain of crimes and follies, are endeavouring to
break a trail for others, to find for themselves an egress. Some are
courageously attempting in their respective lands to make their
fellow-countrymen aware of their own faults. This is the course adopted
by the valiant Englishmen of the Independent Labour Party and of the
Union of Democratic Control, and by those fine men of untrammelled mind
Bertrand Russell, E. D. Morel, Norman Angell, Bernard Shaw; this is the
path taken by certain persecuted Germans, too few in number; this is the
path taken by the Italian socialists, by the Russian socialists, by
Gorki, the master of Sorrow and of Pity; and this is the path taken by
certain free Frenchmen.
My own task is different, for it is to remind the hostile brethren of
Europe, not of their worst aspects but of their best, to recall to them
reasons for hoping that there will one day be a wiser and more loving
humanity.
What we now have to contemplate may, indeed, well incline us to despair
of human reason. For those, and they were many, who were blissfully
slumbering upon their faith in progress, a progress from which there was
to be no looking back, the awakening has been rude. Without transition,
such persons have passed from the absurd excesses of slothful optimism
to the vertigo of unplumbed pessimism. They are not used to looking at
life except from behind a parapet. A barrier of comfortable illusions
has hidden from them, hitherto, the chasm above which, clinging to the
face of the precipice, winds the narrow path along which man is
marching. Here and there the wall has crumbled. The footing is
treacherous. But we must pass, nevertheless. We shall pass. Our fathers
had to make their way across many such places. We have been too ready to
forget. Save for a few shocks, the years of our own lives have been
spent in a sheltered age. But in the past, epochs of disturbance have
been commoner than epochs of calm. What is taking place to-day is
horribly abnormal for those alone who were drowsing in the abnormal
peace of a society equally devoid of foresight and of remembrance. Let
us call to mind those whom the past has known. Let us think of Buddha,
the liberator; of the Orphics worshipping Dionysos-Zagreus, god of the
innocent who suffer and will be avenged; of Xenophanes of Elea who had
to witness the devastation of his fatherland by Cyrus; of Zeno tortured;
of Socrates put to death by poison; of Plato dreaming during the rule of
the Thirty Tyrants; of Marcus Aurelius, sustaining the empire whose
decline was at hand. Let us think of those who watched the ruin of the
old world; of the bishop of Hippo dying when his city was about to fall
before the onslaught of the Vandals; of the monks who, in a Europe
peopled with wolves, worked as illuminators, builders, musicians. Let us
think of Dante, Copernicus, and Savonarola; of exiles, persecutions,
burnings at the stake; of Spinoza, frail in health, writing his immortal
_Ethics_ by the light of the burning villages of his invaded country.
Let us think of our own Michel de Montaigne, in his defenceless castle,
softly pillowed, waking from his light sleep to hear the bells pealing
from the church towers of the countryside, or asking himself in his
dreams if he was to be murdered that very night.... Man is not fond of
reviving the memory of disagreeable occurrences; he dislikes to think of
things which disturb his tranquillity. But in the history of the world,
tranquillity has been rare; nor is it in a tranquil environment that the
greatest souls have been fashioned. Let us without a shudder contemplate
the raging flood as it passes. For those whose ears are attuned to the
rhythm of history, all contributes to the same work, evil no less than
good. Those of impulsive temperament, carried away by the flood, move
along blood-stained roads, and are none the less moving, willy-nilly,
whither fraternal reason beckons. Were we compelled to depend upon men's
common sense, upon their goodwill, upon their moral courage, upon their
kindliness, there would be ample reason for despairing of the future.
But those who will not or cannot march, pushed onward by blind forces, a
bleating flock, move towards the goal: Unity.
* * * * *
The unity of our own France was forged by agelong struggles between the
separate provinces. At one time every province, even every village, was
a fatherland. For more than a hundred years the Armagnacs and the
Burgundians (my ancestors) went on breaking one another's heads, to
discover in the end that they were men of one blood. The war which is
now mingling the blood of France and of Germany, is leading the French
and the Germans to drink from the same cup to their future union, like
the barbaric heroes of the epic age. Struggle and bite as they may,
their very grapple binds them together. These armies which are
endeavouring to destroy one another, have become more akin in spirit
than they were before they faced one another in battle. They can kill
one another, but at least they now know one another, whereas ignorance
is the nethermost circle of death. Numerous testimonies from the
opposing fronts have borne clear witness to the mutual desire of the
soldiers, though still fighting, to understand one another. Men who from
trench to enemy trench watch one another while taking aim, may remain
foes, but they are no longer strangers. At no distant day a union of the
nations of the west will form a new fatherland, which itself will be but
a stage upon the road leading to a still greater fatherland, that of
Europe. Do we not already see the dozen states of Europe, divided into
two camps, unwittingly attempting to build a federation wherein war
between nations will be no less sacrilegious than would now be war
between provinces; a federation in which the duty of to-day will be the
crime of to-morrow? Has not the need for this future union been affirmed
by the most conflicting voices: by William II, who spoke of the "United
States of Europe";[3] by Hanotaux, with his "European Confederation";[4]
by Ostwald, and Haeckel of lamentable memory, with their "Society of
States"? Each one, doubtless, worked for his own saint; but all these
saints served the same master!...
Nay more, the gigantic chaos wherein, as if amid the throes that
occurred when the earth was still molten, all the human elements from
the three continents of the Old World are clashing one against another,
is a racial alchemy preparing, alike by force and by spiritual factors,
alike by war and by peace, the coming fusion of the two halves of the
world, of the two hemispheres of thought, of Europe and Asia. I do not
talk utopia. For some years this drawing together has been preluded by a
thousand signs, by mutual attraction in the realms of thought and of
art, in the realms of politics and of commerce. The war has merely
accelerated the movement; and while the war yet rages, men are at work
on behalf of this cause. Two years ago, in one of the belligerent
states, there were founded great institutes for the comparative study of
the civilisations of Europe and of Asia, and to promote their mutual
penetration.
"The most striking phenomenon of our day," thus runs the program of one
of these institutes,[5] "is the formation of a universal civilisation,
issuing from a number of distinct civilisations handed down from earlier
days.... No past epoch has ever beheld a more powerful impetus animating
the human race than that which mankind has known during recent centuries
and the one we have now entered. There has been nothing comparable to
this torrential confluence of all the forces to form a resultant, the
achievement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the state, in
science, and in art, everywhere, there is now being elaborated the great
individuality of universal mankind; everywhere there is uprising the new
life of the universal human spirit.... The three spiritual and social
worlds, the three mankinds (that of Europe and the Near East, that of
Hindustan, and that of the Far East) are beginning to be assembled to
form a single mankind.... Until two generations ago, the individual man
was member of a single branch of mankind, of one distinct great form of
life. Now he participates in a vast vital flux constituted by the whole
of mankind; he must direct his actions in accordance with the laws of
that flux, and must find his own place in it. Should he fail to do this,
he will lose the best part of himself.--Doubtless, the most significant
features of the past, of its religions, of its art, of its thought, are
not in question. These remain, and will remain. But they will be raised
to new altitudes, dug to new depths. A wider circle of life is opening
around us. We need not be surprised that many become giddy and imagine
that the greatness of the past is decaying. But the helm must be
entrusted to those who are competent, calmly and firmly, to make things
ready for the new age.... The completest happiness which can accrue to
man henceforward, will be derived from the intelligence of mankind as a
whole, and from the multiple ways which man has discovered of attaining
happiness.... For a long time to come the intensest joy which man can
know on earth will derive from supplementing the ideals of Europe by the
ideals of Asia."
Researches of this nature, characterised by universality and
objectivity, "formally exclude," continues the program, "everything that
tends to foster hatred among nations, classes, and races; everything
that induces disintegration and useless struggle.... Those who are
engaged in such researches have to fight one thing above all, to fight
hatred, ignorance, and lack of understanding.... Their splendid and
urgent task is to bring to light the beauty which exists in every human
individuality and every nation; their task is the practical one of
discovering the scientific means of adjusting differences between
nations, classes, and races. Science, and science alone, is competent,
by strenuous labour, to win peace...."
Thus amid the warfare of the nations are being laid the foundations of
spiritual peace between the nations, like a lighthouse which reveals to
widely separated vessels the distant haven where they will anchor side
by side. The human mind has reached the gateway leading into a new road.
The gateway is too narrow, and people are crushing one another as they
endeavour to get through. But beyond it I see stretching the broad
highway along which they will move and where there is room for all. Amid
the encircling horrors, the vision comforts me. My heart suffers, but my
spirit sees the light.
* * * * *
Take courage, brothers! Despite all, there are good reasons for hope.
Willy-nilly, men are advancing towards our goal; even those who think
they have turned their backs on it. In 1887, when the ideas of democracy
and international peace bade fair to triumph, I was talking to Renan,
who uttered these prophetic words: "You will live to see another great
reaction. It may seem to you then that all we are defending has been
destroyed. But rest easy in your mind. Humanity's road is a mountain
path, winding to and fro among the spurs, so that at times we fancy that
we are going away from the summit. But we never cease to climb."
Everything is working on behalf of our ideal; even those are working for
it whose blows are directed towards its ruin. Everything makes for
unity, the worst no less than the best. Let no one interpret me as
implying that the worst is as good as the best! Between the misguided
ones who (poor innocents!) preach the war that will end war (those whom
we may name the "bellipacifists"), and the unqualified pacifists, those
who take their stand upon the gospels, there is a difference like that
between madmen who, desiring to get quickly from the attic into the
street, would throw furniture and children out of the window--and those
who walk down the stairs. Progress is achieved; but nature does not
hurry, and her methods are wasteful. The most trifling advance is
secured by a terrible squandering of wealth and of lives.[6] When
Europe, moving reluctantly, haltingly, like a sorry screw, comes at
length to the conviction that she must unify her forces, the union,
alas, will be a union of the blind and the paralytic. She will reach the
goal, but will be bloodless and exhausted.
For our part, however, we have long been awaiting you there; long ago we
achieved unity, we, the free spirits of all the ages, all the classes,
and all the races. Those belonging to the remote civilisations of Egypt
and the east; the Socrates' and the Lucians of the modern age, such as
Thomas More, Erasmus, and Voltaire; those belonging to a distant future,
a future which will perchance (looping the loop of time) return to the
thought of Asia--the great and the simple, but all free spirits and all
brothers, we are but one people. The centuries of the persecutions, the
wide world round, have linked us heart and hand. It is this unbreakable
chain, encompassing the clay image we term civilisation, which keeps the
frail structure from falling to pieces.
"Le Carmel," Geneva, December, 1916.
III
TO THE MURDERED PEOPLES
The horrors that have taken place during the last two and a half years
have given a rude spiritual shock to the western world. No one can ever
forget the martyrdom of Belgium, Serbia, Poland, of all the unhappy
lands of the west and of the east trampled by invaders. Yet these
iniquitous deeds, by which we are revolted because we ourselves are the
sufferers--for half a century or more, European civilisation has been
doing them or allowing them to be done.
Who will ever know at what a price the Red Sultan has purchased from his
mutes of the European press and European diplomacy their silence
concerning the slaughter of two hundred thousand Armenians during the
first massacres, those of 1894 to 1896? Who will voice the sufferings of
the peoples delivered over to rapine during colonial enterprises? When a
corner of the veil has been lifted, when in Damaraland or the Congo we
have been given a glimpse of one of these fields of pain, who has been
able to bear the sight without a shudder? What "civilised" man can think
without a blush of the massacres of Manchuria and of the expedition to
China in 1900 and 1901, when the German emperor held up Attila as an
example to his soldiers, when the allied armies of the "civilised world"
rivalled one another in acts of vandalism against a civilisation older
and nobler than that of the west?[7] What help has the western world
given to the persecuted races of eastern Europe, to the Jews, the
Poles, the Finns, etc.?[8] What aid to Turkey and to China in their
efforts towards regeneration? Sixty years ago, China, poisoned by Indian
opium, wished to free herself from the deadly vice. But after two wars
and a humiliating peace, she had to accept from England this poison,
which is said during a century to have brought to the East India Company
profits amounting to £440,000,000. Even in our own day, when China, by a
heroic effort, had within ten years cured herself of this disastrous
sickness, the sustained pressure of public opinion was requisite to
compel the most highly civilised of the European states to renounce the
profits derived from the poisoning of a nation. The facts need hardly
surprise us, seeing that this same western state continues to draw
revenues from the poisoning of its own subjects.
"On the Gold Coast," writes M. Arnold Porret, "a missionary once told me
how the negroes account for the European's white skin. God Almighty
asked him, 'What hast thou done with thy brother?' And he turned white
with fear."[9]
European civilisation stinks of the dead-house. "Jam foetet...." Europe
has called in the grave-diggers. Asia is on the watch.
On June 18, 1916, at the Imperial University of Tokyo, Rabindranath
Tagore, the great Hindu, spoke as follows: "The political civilisation
which has sprung from the soil of Europe and is overrunning the whole
world, like some prolific weed, is based upon exclusiveness. It is
always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate them. It is
carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the
resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future. It
is always afraid of other races achieving eminence, naming it as a
peril, and tries to thwart all symptoms of greatness outside its own
boundaries, forcing down races of men who are weaker, to be eternally
fixed in their weakness.... This political civilisation is scientific,
not human. It is powerful because it concentrates all its forces upon
one purpose, like a millionaire acquiring money at the cost of his soul.
It betrays its trust, it weaves its meshes of lies without shame, it
enshrines gigantic idols of greed in its temples, taking great pride in
the costly ceremonials of its worship, calling this patriotism. And it
can safely be prophesied that this cannot go on...."[10]
"This cannot go on." Do you hear, Europeans? Are you stopping your ears?
Listen to the voice within! We ourselves must question ourselves. Let us
not resemble those who ascribe to their neighbour all the sins of the
world, and think themselves blameless. For the curse under which we are
labouring to-day, each one of us must bear his share of responsibility.
Some have erred by deliberate choice, others through weakness, and it is
not the weak who are the least guilty. The apathy of the majority, the
timorousness of the well-meaning, the selfishness and scepticism of
listless rulers, the ignorance or cynicism of the press, the rapacity of
profiteers, the faint-hearted servility of the thinkers who make
themselves the apostles of devastating prejudices which it should be
their mission to uproot; the ruthless pride of intellectuals who value
their own ideas more than they value the lives of their fellow-men, and
who will send millions to death to prove themselves in the right; the
counsels of expediency of a church that is too Roman, a church in which
St. Peter the fisherman has become the ferryman of diplomacy; pastors
with arid souls, with souls keen-edged as a knife, immolating their
flocks in the hope of purifying them; the blind submission of the silly
sheep.... Who among us is free from blame? Who among us can wash his
hands of the blood of a butchered Europe? Let each one admit his fault
and endeavour to expiate it!--But let us turn to the most immediate
task.
Here is the outstanding fact: EUROPE IS NOT FREE. The voice of the
nations is stifled. In the history of the world, these years will be
looked upon as the years of the great Slavery. One half of Europe is
fighting the other half, in the name of liberty. That they may fight the
better, both halves of Europe have renounced liberty. An appeal to the
will of the nations is fruitless. As individual entities, THE NATIONS NO
LONGER EXIST. A handful of politicians, a few score journalists, have
the audacity to speak in the name of this nation or of that. They have
no right to speak. They represent no one but themselves. They do not
even represent themselves. As early as 1905, Maurras, denouncing the
tamed intelligentsia which claims to lead opinion and to represent the
nation, spoke of it as "ancilla plutocratiae." ... The nation! Who has
the right to call himself the representative of a nation? Who knows the
soul, who has ever dared to look into the soul, of a nation at war? It
is a monster, composed of many myriads of conglomerated lives, of lives
that are distinct and conflicting, lives that move in all directions and
are yet joined at the base like the tentacles of an octopus.... It is a
confused mingling of all the instincts, and of all the reasons, and of
all the unreasons.... Blasts of wind from the abyss; sightless and
raging forces issuing from the seething depths of animalism; a mad
impulse towards destruction and self-destruction; the crude appetites of
the herd; distorted religion; mystical erections of the soul enamoured
of the infinite, and seeking the morbid assuagement of joy through
suffering, through its own suffering, and through the suffering of
others; the pretentious despotism of reason, claiming the right to
impose on others the unity it lacks yet desires; romanticist flashes of
an imagination kindled by memories of the past; the academic
phantasmagoria of official history, of the patriotic history which is
ever ready to brandish the "Vae Victis" of Brennus, or the "Gloria
Victis," as circumstances may dictate.... Helter-skelter there surge
upon the tide of passion all the lurking fiends which, in times of peace
and order, society spurns.... Every one of us is entangled in the
tentacles of the octopus. Every one of us discovers in himself the same
confusion of good and of bad impulses, knotted and intertwined. A
tangled skein. Who shall unravel it?... Thence comes the feeling of
inexorable fate by which, in such crises, men are overwhelmed.
Nevertheless this feeling derives merely from their own despondency in
face of the efforts necessary to free themselves, efforts manifold and
prolonged, but within the compass of their powers. If each one did what
he could (no more would be required!) fate would not prove inexorable.
The apparent fatality results from the universal abdication. By
abandoning himself to fate, each one incurs a share of the guilt.
But the shares in the guilt are unequal. Honour to whom honour is due!
In the loathsome stew which European politics constitute to-day, money
is the tit-bit. Society is enchained, and the hand holding the chain is
the hand of Plutus. He is the real master, the real ruler, of the
states. It is he who makes of them fraudulent firms, swindling
enterprises.[11] The reader must not suppose that we wish to fix the
whole responsibility for the ills we are now enduring upon this or that
social group, upon this or that individual. We are not such innocents;
we have no wish to make a scapegoat of anyone! This would be too easy a
solution. We shall not even say, "Is fecit cui prodest." We shall not
say that those desired the war who are now shamelessly profiting by the
war. All that they want is profit, and how the profit is made is of no
moment to them. They accommodate themselves equally well to war and to
peace, to peace and to war, for all is grist which comes to their mill.
Let us give one example among a thousand to show how indifferent these
men of money become to everything but money. It is a matter of recent
history that a group of great German capitalists bought mines in
Normandy and gained possession of a fifth part of the mineral wealth of
France. Between 1908 and 1913, developing for their own profit the iron
industry of our country, they helped in the production of the cannons
whose fire is now sweeping the German lines. Such a man was the fabled
Midas of antiquity, King Midas of the golden touch.... Do not suppose
them to entertain hidden but far-reaching designs. They are men of short
views. Their aim is to pile up as much wealth as they can, as quickly as
possible. In them we see the climax of that anti-social egoism which is
the curse of our day. They are merely the most typical figures in an
epoch enslaved to money. The intellectuals, the press, the politicians,
the very members of the cabinets (preposterous puppets!), have, whether
they like it or not, become tools in the hands of the profiteers, and
act as screens to hide them from the public eye.[12] Meanwhile the
stupidity of the peoples, their fatalistic submissiveness, the mysticism
they have inherited from their primitive ancestors, leave them
defenceless before the hurricane of lying and frenzy which drives them
to mutual slaughter....
There is a wicked and cruel saying that nations always have the
governments they deserve. Were this true, we should have reason to
despair of mankind, for where can we find a government with which a
decent man would shake hands? It is all too clear that the masses,
those who work, are unable to exercise due control over the men who rule
them. Enough for the masses that they invariably have to pay for the
errors or the crimes of their rulers. It would be too much, in addition,
to make those who are ruled responsible. The men of the people,
sacrificing themselves, die for ideas. Those who send others to the
sacrifice, live for interests. Thus it comes to pass that the interests
live longer than the ideas. Every prolonged war, even a war which at the
outset was in a high degree idealistic, tends more and more, as it is
protracted, to become a business matter, to become, as Flaubert wrote,
"a war for money."--Let me repeat, there is no suggestion that the war
is undertaken for money. But as soon as the war is afoot, the milking
begins; blood flows, money flows, and no one is in a hurry to stop the
flow. A few thousands of privileged persons, belonging to all castes and
all nations, a few thousands, men of family, parvenus, junkers,
ironmasters, syndicated speculators, army contractors, untitled and
irresponsible kings--hidden in the wings, surrounded by and nourishing a
swarm of parasites--are able, for the sordid motive of gain, to turn to
their own account the best and the worst instincts of mankind. They
profit by human ambition and by human pride; by men's grudges and men's
hates. They draw equal gains from the bloodthirsty imaginings and from
the courage of their fellow-mortals; from the thirst for self-sacrifice,
from the heroism which makes men eager to spill their own blood, from
the inexhaustible wealth of faith!...
Unhappy peoples! Is it possible to imagine a more tragical destiny than
theirs? Never consulted, always immolated, thrust into war, forced into
crimes which they have never wished to commit. Any chance adventurer or
braggart arrogantly claims the right to cloak with the name of the
people the follies of his murderous rhetoric or the sordid interests he
wishes to satisfy. The masses are everlastingly duped, everlastingly
martyred; they pay for others' misdeeds. Above their heads are exchanged
challenges for causes of which they know nothing and for stakes which
are of no interest to them. Across their backs, bleeding and bowed,
takes place the struggle of ideas and of millions, while they themselves
have no more share in the former than in the latter. For their part,
they do not hate. They are the sacrifice; and those only hate who have
ordered the sacrifice. Peoples poisoned by lies, by the press, by
alcohol, and by harlots. Toiling masses, who must now unlearn the lesson
of labour. Generous-hearted masses, who must now unlearn the lesson of
brotherly love. Masses deliberately demoralised, given over to
corruption while still alive, slain. Beloved peoples of Europe, dying
for the last two years on your dying land. Have you at length plumbed
the depths of woe? Alas, the worst is yet to come. After so much
anguish, I dread the fatal day when, no longer buoyed by false hopes,
realising the fruitlessness of their sacrifices, the masses, worn out
with misery, will blindly wreak their vengeance where they may. They,
likewise, will then fall into injustice, and through a surfeit of
misfortune they will forfeit even the sombre halo of self-sacrifice.
Then, from one end of the chain to the other, all alike will be plunged
in the same sea of pain and error. Poor crucified wretches, struggling
on your crosses on either side of the Master's! Betrayed more cruelly
than He, instead of floating, you will sink like a stone in the ocean of
your agony. Will no one save you from your two foes, slavery and hatred?
We wish to, we wish to! But you, too, must wish it. Do you wish it? For
centuries your reason has been bridled in passive obedience. Are you
still capable of achieving freedom?
Who is able to-day to stop the war in its progress? Who can recapture
the wild beast and put it back into its cage? Perhaps not even those who
first loosed it, the beast-tamers who know that soon will come their
turn to be devoured. The cup has been filled with blood and must be
drained to the last drop. Carouse, Civilisation!--But when thou art
glutted, when peace has come again across ten million corpses and thou
hast slept off thy drunken debauch, wilt thou be able to regain mastery
of thyself? Wilt thou dare to contemplate thy own wretchedness stripped
of the lies with which thou hast veiled it? Will that which can and must
go on living, have the courage to free itself from the deadly embrace of
rotten institutions?... Peoples, unite! Peoples of all races, more
blameworthy or less, all bleeding and all suffering, brothers in
misfortune, be brothers in forgiveness and in rebirth. Forget your
rancours, which are leading you to a common doom. Join in your mourning,
for the losses affect the whole great family of mankind. Through the
pain, through the deaths, of millions of your brethren, you must have
been made aware of your intimate oneness. See to it that after the war
this unity breaks down the barriers which the shamelessness of a few
selfish interests would fain rebuild more solidly than ever.
If you fail to take this course, if the war should not bring as its
first fruit a social renascence in all the nations, then farewell
Europe, queen of thought, guide of mankind. You have lost your way; you
are marking time in a cemetery. The cemetery is the right place for you.
Make your bed there. Let others lead the world!
ALL SOULS' DAY, 1916.
"demain," Geneva, November and December, 1916.
IV
TO THE UNDYING ANTIGONE
The most potent action within the competence of us all, men and women
alike, is individual action, the action of man on man, of soul on soul,
action by word, by example, by the whole personality. Women of Europe,
you fail to use this power as you should. You are now attempting to
extirpate the plague which afflicts the world, to wage war against the
war. You do well, but your action comes too late. You could have fought,
you ought to have fought, against this war before it broke out; to have
fought it in the hearts of men. You do not realise your power over us.
Mothers, sisters, helpmates, friends, sweethearts, you are able, and you
will, to mould man's soul. The soul of the child is in your hands; and
in relation to a woman whom he respects and loves, a man is ever a
child. Why do you not guide his footsteps? If I may give a personal
example, let me say that to certain among you I owe what is best or what
is least bad in my own nature. If, during this whirlwind, I have been
able to maintain unshaken my faith in human brotherhood, my love of
love, and my scorn of hate, I owe this to a few women. To name but two
among them: I owe it to my mother, a true Christian, who in early
childhood inspired me with a passion for the eternal; and I owe it to
the great European, Malvida von Meysenbug, the sublime idealist, who in
her serene old age was the friend of my youth. If a woman can save one
man's soul, why do not you women save all men's souls? The reason,
doubtless, is that too few among you have as yet saved your own souls.
Begin at the beginning! Here is a matter more urgent than the conquest
of political rights (whose practical importance I am far from
under-rating). The most urgent matter is the conquest of yourselves.
Cease to be man's shadow; cease to be the shadow of man's passions, of
his pride and of his impulse towards destruction. Gain a clear vision of
the brotherly duty of sympathy, of mutual aid, of the community of all
beings; these make up the supreme law prescribed to Christians by the
voice of Christ, and to free spirits by the free reason. Yet how many of
you in Europe to-day are carried away by the gusts of passion which have
overpowered the minds of men; how many of you, instead of enlightening
men, add their own fever to the universal delirium!
Begin by making peace within yourselves. Rid yourselves of the spirit of
blind combativeness. Do not allow yourselves to be embroiled in the
struggle. You will not make an end of the war by making war on the war;
your first step should be to save your own hearts from the war, by
saving from the general conflagration the FUTURE WHICH IS WITHIN YOU. To
each word of hatred uttered by the combatants, make answer by an act of
kindness and love toward all the victims. Let your simple presence show
a calm disavowal of errant passions; make of yourselves onlookers whose
luminous and compassionate gaze compels us to blush at our own unreason.
Amid war, be the living embodiment of peace. Be the undying Antigone,
who renounces hatred, and who makes no distinction between her suffering
and warring brethren.
"Jus Suffragii," London, May, 1915; "demain," Geneva,
January, 1916.
V
A WOMAN'S VOICE FROM OUT THE TUMULT[13]
A woman with compassion and who dares to avow it; _a woman who dares to
avow her horror of war, her pity for the victims, for all the victims_;
a woman who refuses to add her voice to the chorus of murderous
passions; a woman genuinely French who does not endeavour to ape the
heroines of Corneille. What a solace!
I wish to avoid saying anything which could hurt wounded souls. I know
how much grief, how much suppressed tenderness, are hidden, in thousands
of women, beneath the armour of a dogged enthusiasm. They stiffen their
sinews for fear of falling. They walk, they talk, they laugh, with an
open wound in the side through which the heart's blood is gushing. _No
prophetic faculty is needed to foresee that the time is at hand when
they will throw off this inhuman constraint, and when the world,
surfeited with bloody heroism, will not hesitate to proclaim its disgust
and its execration._
From childhood onwards our minds are distorted by a state education
which instills into us a rhetorical ideal, a compost of fragments torn
from the vast field of classical thought, revivified by the genius of
Corneille and the glories of the revolution. It is an ideal which
exultantly sacrifices the individual to the state, _which sacrifices
common sense to crazy ideas_. For the minds of those who have undergone
this discipline, life becomes a pretentious and cruel syllogism, whose
premises are obscure but whose conclusion is remorseless. Every one of
us, in his time, has been subjected to its sway. No one has better
reason to know than myself how terrible a struggle is required to free
the spirit from this second nature which tends to stifle the first. The
history of these struggles is the history of our contradictions. God be
thanked, this war--nay, it is more than a war, this convulsion of
mankind--will clear away our doubts, put an end to our hesitations,
compel us to choose.
Marcelle Capy has chosen. The strength of her book is to be found in
this, that through her _Woman's Voice from out the Tumult_ there
breathes the common sense of the French people, which has shaken off the
sophisms of ideology and rhetoric. This free vision, living, thrilling,
never deceived, is sensitive to every hint of suffering or ridicule. For
in the sightless epic which racks the nations of Europe, every type of
experience abounds: great exploits and great crimes, sublime acts of
devotion and sordid interests, heroes and grotesques. If to laugh be
permissible, if it be French to laugh amid the worst trials, how much
more justifiable is laughter when it becomes a weapon against hypocrisy,
a weapon employed for the vindication of stifled common sense! Never was
hypocrisy more widespread and more disastrous than in these days, when
in every land it is a mask assumed by force. Hypocrisy, it has been
said, is the homage vice pays to virtue. Well and good; but the homage
is excessive. Charming comedy, in which instincts, interests, and
private revenges take shelter beneath the sacred cloak of patriotism.
These Tartufes of heroism, prepared to offer up a splendid holocaust--of
others! These poor Orgons, duped and sacrificed, eager to destroy those
who would defend them and who seek to enlighten them! What a spectacle
for a Molière or a Ben Jonson. Marcelle Capy's book presents us with a
fecund collection of these perennial types which teem in our epoch, much
as poisonous toadstools of unclassified species teem on rotting wood.
Yet the old stumps on which they batten throw out green shoots. We
perceive that the heart of the French forest is still sound; that the
poison has not eaten into our vitals.[14]
Take courage, good friends, all who love France. Rest assured that the
best way of doing honour to France is to maintain her reputation for
good sense, geniality, and humour. Let the voice of Marcelle Capy's
book, tender and valiant, be an example and a guide. Use your eyes, let
your heart speak. Be not fooled by big words. _Peoples of Europe, throw
off this herd mentality, the mentality of sheep who would ask the
shepherds and the sheep-dogs to tell them where to feed._ Take heart!
Not all the furies in the universe shall prevent the world from hearing
the cry of faith and hope uttered by a single free spirit, from hearing
the song of the Gallic lark winging its way heavenward!
_March 21, 1916._
VI
FREEDOM
The war has shown us how fragile are the treasures of our civilisation.
Of all our goods, freedom, on which we prided ourselves most, has proved
the frailest. It had been won by degrees through centuries of sacrifice,
of patient effort, of suffering, of heroism, and of stubborn faith; we
inhaled its golden atmosphere; our enjoyment of it seemed as natural as
our enjoyment of the fresh air which sweeps across the surface of the
earth and floods our lungs. A few days were enough to steal from us this
jewel of life; within a few hours, the world over, the quivering wings
of liberty were enmeshed as in a net. The peoples had delivered her up.
Nay more, they hailed their own enslavement with acclamations. We have
relearned the old truth. "No conquest is ever achieved once for all.
Conquest is a continued action which must be sustained day by day under
penalty of forfeiture."
Betrayed liberty, take sanctuary in the hearts of the faithful, fold
your wounded pinions! In days to come you will resume your splendid
flight. Then you will again be the idol of the multitude. Those who now
oppress you, will then sing your praises. But in my eyes never have you
seemed more beautiful than in this time of trial, when you are poor,
despoiled, and stricken. You have nothing left to offer those who love
you, nothing but danger and the smile of your undaunted eyes.
Nevertheless, not all the wealth of the world can be compared with this
gift. The lackeys of public opinion, the worshippers of success, will
never compete with us for it. But we shall be true to you, Christ
despised and rejected, for we know that you will rise again from the
tomb.
"Avanti," Milan, May 1, 1916.
VII
FREE RUSSIA, THE LIBERATOR!
Russian brothers, who have just achieved your great revolution, we have
not merely to congratulate you; we have in addition to thank you. In
your conquest of freedom, you have not been working for yourselves
alone, but for us likewise, for your brothers of the old west.
Human progress has been a secular evolution. Quickly getting out of
breath, flagging again and again, progress slackens, jibs at obstacles,
or lies down in the road like a lazy mule. To bring about a fresh start,
to ensure movement from stage to stage, there must be renewed awakenings
of energy, vigorous revolutionary outbursts, which stimulate the will,
brace the muscles, and blow the obstacle to smithereens. Our revolution
of 1789 was one of these outbursts of heroic energy, dragging mankind
out of the rut wherein it had become wedged, and compelling a fresh
start. But as soon as the effort has been made and the chariot set in
motion, mankind has been only too ready to stick fast in the mire again.
Long ago, the French revolution brought all that it could bring to
Europe. A time comes when ideas which were once fertilising, ideas which
were once the forces of renewed life, are no longer anything more than
idols of the past, forces tending to drag us backwards, additional
obstacles. Such has been the lesson of the world war, in which the
jacobins of the west have often proved the worst enemies of liberty.
For new times, new paths and new aspirations! Russian brothers, your
revolution has come to awaken this Europe of ours, drowsing over the
arrogant memories of whilom revolutions. March onward! We will follow
in your footsteps. The nations take it in turn to lead humanity. It is
for you, whose youthful vitality has been hoarded during centuries of
enforced inactivity, to pick up the axe where we have let it fall. In
the virgin forest of social injustice and social untruth, the forest in
which mankind has lost its way, make for us clearings and sunlit glades.
Our revolution was the work of the great bourgeois, of the men whose
race is now extinct. They had their rude vices and their rude virtues.
Contemporary civilisation has inherited their vices alone, their
fanaticism and their greed. It is our hope that your revolution will be
the uprising of a great people, hale, brotherly, humane, avoiding the
excesses into which we fell.
Above all, remain united! Learn from our example. Remember how the
French Convention, like Saturn, devoured its own children. Be more
tolerant than we proved. Your whole strength will barely suffice for the
defence of the sacred cause you represent; for its defence against the
fierce and crafty enemies who at this hour perchance are arching their
backs and purring like cats, but who are lurking in the jungle, awaiting
the moment when you will stumble if you should be alone.
Last of all remember, Russian brothers, that you are fighting our
battles as well as your own. Our fathers of 1792 wished to bring freedom
to the whole world. They failed; and it may be that they did not choose
the best way. But they had lofty ambitions. May these ambitions be yours
likewise. Bring to Europe the gifts of peace and liberty!
"demain," Geneva, May 1, 1917.
VIII
TOLSTOY: THE FREE SPIRIT
In his diary, of which the first French translation has just been issued
by Paul Biriukov,[15] Tolstoy gives utterance to the fantasy that in an
earlier life his personality had been a complex of loved beings. Each
successive existence, he suggested, enlarged the circle of friends and
the range and power of the soul.[16]
Speaking generally, we may say that a great personality comprehends
within itself more souls than one. All these souls are grouped around
one among them, much as, in a company of friends, the one with the
strongest character will establish an ascendancy.
In Tolstoy there are more men than one: there is the great artist; there
is the great Christian; there is the being of uncontrolled instincts and
passions. But in Tolstoy, as his days lengthened and his kingdom
extended, it became plain and yet more plain that there was one ruler.
This ruler was the free reason. It is to the free reason that I wish to
pay homage here, for it is this above everything that we all need
to-day.
Our epoch is not poor in the other energies, those energies which
Tolstoy possessed in so full a measure. Our age is surfeited with
passions and with heroism; in artistic capacity it is not lacking; the
fire of religion, even, has not been withheld. God--all the gods there
be--have cast burning brands into the vast conflagration that rages
among the nations. Christ not excepted. There is not one among the
countries, belligerent or neutral, including the two Switzerlands, the
German and the Romance, which has failed to discover in the gospels
justification for cursing or for slaughter.
Rarer to-day than heroism, rarer than beauty, rarer than holiness, is a
free spirit. Free from constraint, free from prejudices, free from every
idol; free from every dogma, whether of class, caste, or nation; free
from every religion. A soul which has the courage and the
straightforwardness to look with its own eyes, to love with its own
heart, to judge with its own reason; to be no shadow, but a man.
To a surpassing degree, Tolstoy set such an example. He was free.
Invariably, with steadfast gaze, he looked events and men in the face
without blinking. His free judgment was unperturbed even by his
affections. Nothing shows this more plainly than his independence
towards the one whom he valued the most, towards Christ. This great
Christian was not a Christian through obedience to Christ. Though he
devoted a considerable part of his life to studying, expounding, and
diffusing the gospels, he never said, "This or that is true because the
gospels say so." Tolstoy's outlook was, "The gospels are true because
they say this or that." You yourself must be the judge, your free reason
must be the judge, of truth.
There is a writing known to few, for I believe it is still unpublished.
It is the _Relation by Mihail Novikov the Peasant, concerning the Night
of October 21, 1910, spent by him at Yasnaya Polyana_. The date was a
week before Tolstoy fled from his home. We read how Tolstoy conversed at
Yasnaya Polyana with a number of peasants. Among these were two village
lads who had just been called up for military service, and military
service was the topic of discussion. One of the young men, a social
democrat, said that he was going to serve, not throne and altar, but
state and nation. (We see that Tolstoy was fortunate in that he did not
die before making the acquaintance of the "socialist patriots," before
hearing a disquisition on "the art of turning the coat.") Some of the
other peasants protested. Tolstoy enquired what were the limits of the
state, declaring that for himself the whole world was his fatherland.
The other conscript quoted texts from the Bible, texts in defence of
killing. These did not convince Tolstoy, seeing that texts can be found
apt for every occasion. He spoke as follows:
"Not because Moses or Christ has forbidden us to do ill to our neighbour
or to ourselves, not for such a reason must we refrain from doing ill.
It is our duty to refrain because it is contrary to the nature of man to
do this ill either to himself or to his neighbour. Be careful to note
that I say it is contrary to the nature of man. I am not speaking of
beasts.... In yourself you must find God, that he may enable you to see
what is good and what is evil, what is possible and what is impossible.
But as long as we allow ourselves to be guided by an external authority,
be it that of Moses and Christ for one man, that of Mohammed for
another, and that of the socialist Marx for another, we shall not cease
to be at enmity one with another."
I wish to make these words of power widely known. As I have repeatedly
declared, the worst evil with which the world is afflicted is not the
power of the wicked but the weakness of the good. Now this weakness is
largely due to the inertia of the will, to the dread of independent
judgment, to moral cowardice. The boldest, directly they have shaken off
their chains, are only too ready to assume fresh bonds. Hardly have they
been freed from one social superstition, than we see them deliberately
harnessed to the chariot of a new superstition. It is so much easier to
allow oneself to be guided than it is to think for oneself. This
abdication is the kernel of the mischief. It is the duty of each one of
us to refrain from leaving to others, to the best of men, to the most
trustworthy, to the most dearly loved, the decision of what it is or is
not good for us to do. We ourselves must seek the solution, seek it all
through life if needs must, seek it with untiring patience. A half truth
which we have won for ourselves is worth more than a whole truth learned
from others, learned by rote as a parrot learns. A truth which we
accept with closed eyes, submissively, deferentially, servilely--such a
truth is nothing but a lie.
Stand erect! Open your eyes and look about you! Be not afraid! The
modicum of truth which you can secure by your own efforts is your safest
light. Your essential need is not the acquisition of vast knowledge. The
essential is that the knowledge you gain, be it little or be it much,
shall be your own, nourished with your own blood, outcome of your own
untrammelled effort. Freedom of the spirit is the supreme treasure.
Throughout the ages, free men have been few in number. With the
continued spread of herd mentality the number seems not unlikely to grow
smaller yet. No matter! For the sake of these very multitudes who
surrender to the slothful intoxication of collective passion, we must
cherish the flame of liberty. Let us seek truth everywhere; let us cull
it wherever we can find its blossom or its seed. Having found the seed
let us scatter it to the winds of heaven. Whencever it may come,
whithersoever it may blow, it will be able to germinate. There is no
lack, in this wide universe, of souls that will form the good ground.
But these souls must be free. We must learn not to be enslaved even by
those whom we admire. The best homage we can pay to men like Tolstoy is
to be free, as Tolstoy was free.
"Les Tablettes," Geneva, May 1, 1917.
IX
TO MAXIM GORKI
At Geneva, in January, 1917, A. V. Lunacharski delivered a lecture
on the life and works of Maxim Gorki. The following tribute to
Gorki was read before the lecture.
About fifteen years ago, in Paris, Charles Péguy, myself, and a few
others, used to meet in a little ground-floor shop in the rue de la
Sorbonne. We had just founded the "Cahiers de la Quinzaine." Our
editorial office was poorly furnished, neat and clean; the walls were
lined with books. A photograph was the only ornament. It showed Tolstoy
and Gorki standing side by side in the garden at Yasnaya Polyana. How
had Péguy got hold of it? I do not know, but he had had several
reproductions made, and each of us had on his desk the picture of these
two distant comrades. Under their eyes part of _Jean Christophe_ was
written.
One of the two men, the veteran apostle, has gone, on the eve of the
European catastrophe whose coming he foretold and in which his voice has
been so greatly needed. The other, Maxim Gorki, is at his post, and his
free-spirited utterances help to console us for Tolstoy's silence.
Gorki has not proved one of those who succumbed to the vertigo of
events. Amid the distressing spectacle of the thousands of writers,
artists, and thinkers who, within a few days, laid down their role as
guides and defenders of the masses, to follow the maddened herds, to
drive these herds yet more crazy by their own cries, to hasten the rush
into the abyss, Maxim Gorki was one of the rare exceptions, one of those
whose reason and whose love of humanity remained unshaken. He dared to
speak on behalf of the persecuted, on behalf of the gagged and enslaved
masses. This great artist, who shared for so long the life of the
unfortunate, of the humble, of the victims, of the outcasts of society,
has never denied his sometime companions. Having become famous, he turns
back to them, throwing the powerful light of his art into the dark
places where wretchedness and social injustice are hidden away. His
generous soul has known suffering; he does not close his eyes to the
sufferings of others.
Haud ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco....
Consequently, in these days of trial (trial which we greet, because it
has taught us to take stock of ourselves, to estimate the true value of
hearts and of thoughts), in these days when freedom of the spirit is
everywhere oppressed, we must cry aloud our homage to Maxim Gorki.
Across the battlefields, across the trenches, across a bleeding Europe,
we stretch forth our hands to him. Henceforward, in face of the hatred
which rages among the nations, we must affirm the union of New Europe.
To the fighting "Holy Alliances" of the governments, we counterpose the
brotherhood of the free spirits of the world!
_January 30, 1917._
"demain," Geneva, June, 1917.
X
TWO LETTERS FROM MAXIM GORKI
PETROGRAD, _end of December, 1916._
MY DEAR AND VALUED COMRADE ROMAIN ROLLAND,
Will you be good enough to write a biography of Beethoven, suitable for
children? I am simultaneously writing to H. G. Wells, whom I ask to let
me have a life of Addison; Fridtjof Nansen will do the life of
Christopher Columbus; I shall myself deal with the life of Garibaldi;
the Hebrew poet Bialik will write the life of Moses. With the aid of the
leading authors of our day I hope to produce a number of books for
children, containing biographies of the leaders of mankind. The whole
series will be issued under my editorship....
You know that in these days nothing needs our attention so much as young
people. We grown-ups, we whose course is nearly run, are leaving a poor
inheritance to our children, are bequeathing to them a sad life. This
foolish war is a striking proof of our moral weakness, of the decay of
civilisation. Let us, then, remind our children that men have not always
been so weak and so bad as we are. Let us remind them that in all the
nations there have been and still are great men, fine spirits. Now,
above all, should we do this, when savagery and brutality are rife.... I
beseech you, my dear Romain Rolland, to pen this biography of Beethoven,
for I am convinced that no one can do it better than yourself....
I have read and reread the articles you have published during the war,
and I take this opportunity of telling you that they have inspired me
with profound respect and love for you. You are one of the rare persons
whose soul has remained unaffected by the madness of this war. It is a
delight to me to know that you have continued to cherish the best
principles of humanity.... Allow me, from a great distance, to clasp you
by the hand, dear comrade.
MAXIM GORKI.
* * * * *
At the end of January, Romain Rolland replied, accepting the
proposal that he should rewrite the life of Beethoven for young
people, and asking Gorki to indicate the length and the method of
treatment. Was the book to be a causerie, or a plain statement of
facts? Rolland suggested additional names for the series of
biographies: Socrates; Francis of Assisi; representative figures of
Asia.
...Will you permit me to make a friendly remark? I am a trifle uneasy as
to some of the names mentioned in your letter, uneasy as to the effect
upon children's minds. You propose to put before them such formidable
examples as that of Moses. Your aim, obviously, is to impress on them
the importance of moral energy, which is the source of all light. But it
is not a matter of indifference whether this light be turned towards the
past or towards the future. There is no lack of moral energy to-day. The
quality abounds, but it is devoted to the service of an obsolete ideal,
an ideal which oppresses and kills. I must admit that I am somewhat
estranged from the great men of the past, considered as examples for the
conduct of life. For the most part I am disappointed in them. I admire
them on aesthetic grounds, but I cannot endure the intolerance and the
fanaticism they so often display. Many of the gods whom they worshipped
have to-day become dangerous idols. Mankind, I fear, will fail to fulfil
its lofty destiny unless it can transcend these earlier ideals, unless
it prove able to offer wider horizons to the coming generations. In a
word, I love and admire the past; but I wish the future to excel the
past. It can; it must....
* * * * *
Maxim Gorki answered as follows:--
PETROGRAD, _March 18 to 21, 1917._
I hasten to reply, dear Romain Rolland. The book on Beethoven should be
written for young people from thirteen to eighteen years of age. It
should be an objective and interesting account of the life of a man of
genius, of the development of his mind, of the chief incidents in his
career, of the difficulties he overcame and of the triumphs he achieved.
It should contain as much as can be learned concerning Beethoven's
childhood. In young folk we wish to inspire love for life and trust in
life; to adults we wish to teach heroism. Man has to learn that he is
the creator and the master of the world; that his is the responsibility
for all its misfortunes; that his, too, is the credit for all that is
good in life. We must help man to break the chains of individualism and
nationalism. Propaganda on behalf of universal union is absolutely
essential.
I am delighted with your idea of writing the life of Socrates, and I
hope you will carry it out. I suppose your description of Socrates will
be placed on a background of classical life, on the background of the
life of Athens?
Most penetrating are your observations on the question of a life of
Moses. I am entirely with you as far as concerns the disorganising
influence which religious fanaticism exercises upon life. But I choose
Moses simply as a social reformer. This will be the theme of his
biography. I had thought of Joan of Arc. But I am afraid that the
treatment of this topic would lead the writer to talk of "the mystical
soul of the people," and of similar matters, which pass my
understanding, and which are particularly unwholesome for Russians.
The life of Francis of Assisi is another story. It would be excellent,
it would be extremely useful, if the writer of this biography were to
aim at displaying the profound difference between Francis of Assisi and
the holy men of the east, the saints of Russia. The east is pessimist;
it is passive. The Russian saints do not love life; they repudiate it
and execrate it. Francis is an epicure of religion; he is a Hellene; he
loves God as the work of his own creation, as the fruit of his own soul.
He is filled with love for life, and he is free from a humiliating fear
of God. A Russian is a man who does not know how to live, but knows how
to die.... I am afraid that Russia is even more oriental than China. We
have a superabundant wealth of mysticism.... What we chiefly need to
inspire men with is the love of action; we must awaken in them respect
for the intelligence, for man, for life.
My sincerest thanks for your cordial letter. It is a great solace to
know that somewhere, afar off, there is one who suffers the same
sufferings as oneself, a man who loves the same things. It is good to
know this in these days of violence and madness.... Warmest greetings.
MAXIM GORKI.
_PS._--This letter has been delayed by recent happenings in Russia. Let
us rejoice, Romain Rolland, let us rejoice with all our hearts, for
Russia is no longer the mainspring of reaction in Europe. Henceforward
the Russian people is wedded to liberty, and I trust that this union
will give birth to many great souls for the glory of mankind.
"demain," Geneva, July, 1917.
XI
TO THE WRITERS OF AMERICA
_Letter to "The Seven Arts," New York, October, 1916._
I am delighted to learn of the creation of a magazine in which the
American soul will become fully aware of its own individuality. I
believe in the lofty destinies of America, and the events of the hour
render the realisation of that destiny urgently necessary. In the Old
World, civilisation is imperilled. America must cherish the flickering
flame.
You possess one great advantage over us in Europe. You are free from
traditions; free from the burdens of thought, of sentiments, from
agelong follies, from the obsessions in the spheres of the intellect, of
art, and of politics; you are free from all these things which crush the
Old World. Contemporary Europe is sacrificing her future to quarrels,
ambitions, rancours, revived again and again. Every endeavour to bring
these troubles to an end serves but to add a few meshes to the net
wherein a murderous destiny has snared us. Our fate resembles that of
the Atrides, vainly awaiting, as in the _Eumenides_, a god's word of
power which may break the bloody spell. In art, if our writers owe their
perfection of form and their clarity of thought to the strength of our
classical traditions, these advantages have been gained at the cost of
great sacrifices. Too few among our artists are awakened to the manifold
life of the world. Their minds are mewed within a closed garden. They
display little interest concerning the spacious regions through which,
after leaving that garden, the river, a swelling flood, pursues its
torrential course, watering all the world.
You have been born in a land which is neither encumbered nor enclosed by
the artificial constructions of the mind. Profit by the fact. Be free.
Do not enslave yourselves to foreign examples. Your model is in
yourselves. Begin by knowing yourselves.
This is the first duty. The differing individualities which combine to
make up your country must not be afraid to express themselves in art; to
express themselves freely, honestly, integrally; without straining for
originality, but regardless of what expression may have been found by
those who have gone before, and fearless of the tyranny of opinion.
Above all, let them dare to look into their own souls, to look well and
long, to plumb the depths in silent meditation. Those who do so, must
then dare to reveal what they have seen. This self-communing is not a
self-incarceration within an egoistic personality. Those who engage in
it will strike deep roots in the essential being of the nation to which
they belong. I urge on you the endeavour to participate to the full in
its sufferings and its aspirations. Be the light lightening the darkness
of the great social masses whose mission it is to renew the world. The
men and women of the common people, those whose want of interest in
artistic matters is often a trial to you, are mutes. Lacking power of
expression, they are ignorant of themselves. Become a voice for them. As
they hear you speak, they will grow aware of themselves. In giving
expression to your own souls, you will create the soul of your nation.
Your second task, vaster and more distant, will be to form a fraternal
link between these free individualities, to build a rose window that
shall concentre their multiple trends, to compose a symphony from out
their various voices. The United States is made up of elements drawn
from all the nations of the world. Let the richness of the structure
help you to understand the essence of all these nations, to realise the
harmony of their intellectual energies!--To-day, in the Old World, we
witness the deplorable and foolish antagonism displayed by national
individualities, near neighbours and close kin, distinguished only by
trifling shades like France and Germany, repudiating one another,
longing for one another's destruction. Parochial disputes about which
the human mind is eager to achieve self-mutilation! For my part I cry
aloud, not merely that the intellectual ideal of a single nation is too
narrow for me; I declare that the ideal of a reconciled western world
would be too narrow for me; I declare that the ideal of a united Europe
would still be too narrow for me. The hour has come in which man, truly
healthy and truly alive, must deliberately turn his footsteps towards
the ideal of a universal humanity, wherein the European races of the Old
World and of the New will join hands with the representatives of the
ancient and now rejuvenescent civilisations of Asia--of India and of
China. A universal humanity with a common spiritual treasury. All these
splendid types of mankind are mutually complementary. The thought of the
future must be a synthesis of the great thoughts of the entire universe.
America lies between the two oceans which lave the two continents;
America is at the centre of the life of the world. Let it be the mission
of all that is best in America to cement this fecund union!
To sum up, we ask of you two things, writers and thinkers of America. We
ask, first of all, that you should defend freedom, that you should
safeguard its conquests and extend them: political freedom and mental
freedom, an unceasing renewal of life through freedom, through this
great and ever-flowing river of the mind.
In the second place, we await from you that you should bring to pass, on
behalf of the world, a harmony of diverse liberties; a symphonic
expression of associated individualities, of associated races, of
associated civilisations, of mankind at once integral and free.
You have splendid opportunities: you have an exuberant young life; you
have wide areas of virgin land. Your day has just begun. You are not
wearied by the toil of a previous day. You are unencumbered by the
heritage of the past. All that comes down to you from the past is a
voice like the sound of many waters, the voice of a great herald whose
work seems a homeric foreshadowing of the task that awaits you. I speak
of the American master, Walt Whitman.--Surge et age.
"Revue mensuelle," Geneva, February, 1917.
XII
FREE VOICES FROM AMERICA
I have often deplored that during the war the Swiss press has failed to
play the great part which was assigned to it. I have not hesitated to
express my regret to Swiss journalists of my acquaintance. I do not
reproach the Swiss periodicals for their lack of impartiality. It is
natural, it is human, to have preferences, and to show them
passionately. We have all the less reason to complain seeing that (at
least among the Latin Swiss) the preferences are in our favour.
My chief grievance is that, since the beginning of the war, our Swiss
friends have failed to keep us fully informed of what is going on around
us. We do not ask a friend to judge for us; when we are carried away by
passion, we do not ask him to be wiser than we are. But if he is in a
position to see and know things that are hidden from us, we have a right
to reproach him if he leaves us in ignorance. He does us wrong, for
through his fault we are likely to fall into errors of judgment and are
likely to act wrongly.
Neutral countries enjoy an inestimable advantage. They can look the
problems of the war in the face, in a way that is utterly impossible to
the belligerent nations. Above all, the neutrals enjoy the advantage of
being able to speak freely, a piece of good fortune which they fail to
esteem at its true value. Switzerland, in the very centre of the
battlefield, between the fighting camps, with inhabitants drawn from
three of the belligerent stocks, is peculiarly favoured. I have had
occasion to perceive and to profit by the wealth of information at the
disposal of the Swiss. Hither, from all parts of Europe, comes an
abundance of news, evidence, printed matter.
Yet the Swiss press makes little use of this abundance. With few
exceptions, Swiss periodicals are content to reproduce the official
bulletins from the armies, and the semi-official statements issued by
agencies that are open to suspicion, statements inspired by the
governments or by the occult forces which to-day have far more governing
power than the nominal heads of governments. Rarely do we find that the
Swiss papers subject these interested statements to critical discussion.
Hardly ever do we find contrasted views; hardly ever are we enabled to
listen to independent voices from the opposing trenches.[17] Thus
official truth, dictated by the powers that be, is imposed upon the
masses with the potency of a dogma. Thought concerning the war has a
catholicity which will not permit heresy to exist. Such a development is
strange in Switzerland, and above all in this republic of Geneva, whose
historic origins and whose reasons for existence were free opposition
and fertilising heresy.
I do not propose to study the psychological causes of the suppression of
thoughts which conflict with official dogma. I am inclined to think that
partisan feeling is of less effect in this matter than, in some,
ignorance of the facts and lack of critical faculty, and in others,
really well-informed persons, failure to verify alleged facts, or an
unwillingness to correct the errors of an overwrought public
opinion--errors which, quite unknown to themselves, they really desire
to believe. It is easier, and at the same time it is safer, to rest
content with the news supplied from house to house by the great
purveyors, rather than put oneself to the pains of going to the fountain
head in order to revise or to supplement current information.
These errors and these lacunae are serious, however they originate, as
the public is beginning to realise.[18] It is perfectly natural that the
ideas of this or that social or political party, in one or other of the
belligerent nations, should conflict with the ideas of this or that
journal in a neutral land. No one need be surprised that such a neutral
journal should openly express its dissent. Vigilant criticism would be
equally in place. But it is not permissible that a neutral journal
should ignore or distort everything of which it disapproves.
Is it not intolerable, for example, that we should know nothing about
the Russian revolution except from news items issued from governmental
sources (non-russian for the most part), or from hostile partisans eager
to calumniate all the forward groups? Is it not intolerable that the
great Swiss periodicals should never give an open platform to the
persons thus vilified, not even in the case of such a man as Maxim
Gorki, whose genius and intellectual candour are the glory of European
letters? Once more, is it not intolerable that the French socialist
minority should be systematically left out of the picture, should be
regarded as non-existent by the journals of French-speaking Switzerland?
Is it not monstrous that these same journals, during the last three
years, have maintained absolute silence concerning the British
opposition, or, if they have referred to it at all, have done so in the
most contemptuous terms? For we have to remember that those who voice
this opposition bear some of the greatest names in British thought, such
as Bertrand Russell, Bernard Shaw, Israel Zangwill, Norman Angell, and
E. D. Morel; we have to remember that its views find expression in
vigorous periodicals, in numerous pamphlets, and in books some of which
excel in value anything that during the same period has been written in
Switzerland and in France!
Nevertheless, in the long run, the staying powers of the British
opposition have got the better of national barriers; the thought of this
opposition has made its way into France, where some of the leading
spirits are now fully aware of this English work and of these English
struggles. With regret I have to record that the Swiss press has played
no part in promoting the mutual understanding, and I imagine that
neither the French nor the British will forget the fact.
The same thing has happened in the United States of America. The Swiss
periodicals have been delighted to publish whatever the powers that be
have sent them for publication; but, as usual, the opposition has been
forgotten or scoffed at. When by chance a semi-official telegram from
New York, meticulously reproduced (unless it has been obligingly
paraphrased and provided with a sensational headline), makes some
reference to the opposition, it is only that we may be inspired with
contempt. It would appear that any one on the other side of the Atlantic
who proclaims himself a pacifist, even if it be on Christian grounds, is
looked upon as a traitor, as working in the hire of the enemy. This no
longer arouses our surprise. The experiences of the last three years
have been such that nothing can now surprise us. But we have likewise
lost all power of trust. Having learned that those who desire truth will
vainly wait for it to come to them, we set out to seek truth for
ourselves wherever it may be found. When there is no drinking water in
the house, we must e'en go to the well.
To-day let us listen to the words of the opposition in America, as
expressed by one of the boldest of the periodicals serving that
movement, "The Masses" of New York.[19]
Here expression is given to non-official truth, and this, also, is no
more than part of the truth. But we have the right to know the whole
truth, be it pleasant or unpleasant. It is even our duty to know it,
unless we are poltroons who fear to look reality in the face. You need
not search the files of "The Masses" for records of greatness that has
been lavished in the war! We know all about this, anyhow, from the
official reports with which we are deluged. What we do not sufficiently
know, what people do not wish to know, is the material and moral
unhappiness, the injustice, the oppression which, as Bertrand Russell
points out, are for each nation the obverse of every war, however
just.--That is why, as far as America is concerned, we must consult the
uncompromising periodical which I am about to quote.
* * * * *
Max Eastman, the editor, is the soul of "The Masses." He fills it with
his thought and his energy. The two last issues to reach me, those of
June and July, 1917, contain no less than six articles from his pen. All
wage implacable warfare against militarism and blind nationalism. Nowise
duped by official declamations, Eastman declares that this war is not a
war for democracy. The real struggle for liberty will come after the
war.[20] In the United States, as in Europe, the war has been the work
of capitalists, and of a group of intellectuals, clerical and lay.[21]
Max Eastman insists on the part played by the intellectuals, whilst his
collaborator John Reed emphasises the part played by the capitalists.
Similar economic and moral phenomena have been apparent in the Old World
and in the New. In the United States, as in Europe, many socialists
support the war. A number of them (notably Upton Sinclair, with whom I
am personally acquainted, and whose moral sincerity and idealist spirit
I fully appreciate) have adopted this strange militarism. They champion
universal conscription, in the hope that after the "war for democracy"
"the socialist movement will know how to 'employ such a disciplined
army' in building the co-operative commonwealth."[22]
As for the men of religion, they have rushed headlong into the fray. At
a meeting of Methodist ministers in New York, one of them, a pastor from
Bridgeport, Connecticut, straightforwardly declared, "If I must choose
between my country and my God, I have made up my mind to choose God." He
was hooted and threatened by the other members of the assembly, five
hundred in number; was denounced as a traitor. Newel Dwight Hillis,
preaching in the Henry Ward Beecher church, said: "All God's teachings
concerning forgiveness must be abrogated as far as Germany is concerned.
When the Germans have been shot I will forgive them their atrocities.
But if we agree to forgive Germany after the war, I shall think that the
world has gone mad."
Billy Sunday, a sort of howling dervish, sprung from heaven knows where,
brays to huge crowds a militarist gospel. He spouts his sermons like a
sewer disgorging filth; he calls upon the Good Old God (who is
apparently to be found in other places besides Berlin), buttonholes him,
enrols him willy-nilly. A cartoon of Boardman Robinson's shows Billy
Sunday arrayed as a recruiting sergeant, dragging Christ by a halter and
shouting: "I got him! He's plumb dippy over going to war." Fashionable
folk, ladies included, are infatuated with this preacher; they delight
to debase themselves in God's company. The ministers of religion, too,
are on Billy Sunday's side. The exceptions may be counted on the fingers
of one hand. Most notable among the exceptions is the pastor of the
church of the Messiah in New York, John Haynes Holmes by name, from whom
I had the honour of receiving a magnificent letter in February, 1917,
just before the United States entered the war. In its July number "The
Masses" published an admirable declaration issued by Holmes to his
flock. It was entitled, What shall I do? He refuses to exclude any
nation from the human community. The church of the Messiah will not
respond to any militarist appeal. His conscience constrains him to
refuse conscription. He will obey his conscience at any cost. "God
helping me, I can no otherwise."--Those who resist the war madness
constitute a little Church where persons of all parties make common
cause, Christians, atheists, Quakers, artists, socialists, etc. Hailing
from all points of the compass, and holding the most conflicting ideas,
they share only one article of faith, that of the war against war. This
common creed suffices to bring them into closer association than the
associations they had with their friends of yesterday, with their
brothers by blood, by religion, or by profession.[23] Thus did Christ
pass to and fro among the men of Judea, detaching those who believed in
him from their families, from their class, from all their past life.--In
the United States, as in Europe, young men are far less possessed with
the war spirit than their elders. A striking example comes from Columbia
University. Here, while the professors were conferring on General Joffre
the degree of doctor of literature, the students assembled to pass a
unanimous resolution against answering the call of military
conscription.[24] This exposed the voters to the penalty of
imprisonment. For they manage things with a heavy hand in the classic
land of liberty. Many American citizens have been thrown into gaol, and
others, we are informed, have been immured in lunatic asylums, for
having expressed their disapproval of the war. The recruiting sergeants
go wherever they please, even forcing their way into meetings of the
workers and maltreating all who resist them.[25] Under the rubric A
Week's War "The Masses" records all the brutalities, all the blows,
wounds, and murders, to which the war has already led in America. We may
well ask to what extremes of violence these antipacifist repressions
will some day be carried. The alleged freedom of speech in the United
States would appear to be pure humbug. "In actual fact," exclaims Max
Eastman, "freedom of speech has never existed." It is by law
established. "But in practice there reigns a contempt for law, to the
advantage of the strong and to the detriment of the weak." We have long
known this through the revelations of the Italian and Russian socialist
press, in connection with the scandalous sentences passed on working
men. Do pacifists give trouble? They are arrested as anarchists! Does a
periodical refuse to bow to the opinion of the state? It is suppressed
without parley; or sometimes, by a more refined procedure, it is
prosecuted for obscenity![26] And so on.
Max Eastman's chief collaborator, John Reed, endeavours to throw light
on the preponderating role played by American capitalism in the war. In
an article which adopts as title that of Norman Angell's book _The Great
Illusion_, Reed declares that the pretence of fighting kings is maudlin,
and that Money is the true king. Putting his finger on the sore spot, he
adduces figures showing the colossal profits made by the great American
companies. Under the bizarre title _The Myth of American Fatness_,[27]
he shows that it is not, as Europe fancies, the American nation which
battens on the war, but only two per cent of the population.
Ninety-eight per cent of the inhabitants of the States are thin folk,
and grow thinner daily. During the years 1912 to 1916, wages increased
nine per cent, whilst the cost of food increased seventy-four per cent
during the years 1915 and 1916. From 1913 to 1917, the general rise in
prices was 85.32 per cent (flour 69 per cent, eggs 61 per cent, potatoes
224 per cent! Between January 1915 and January 1917, the rise in the
price of coal was from $5 to $8.75 per ton). The bulk of the population
has suffered cruelly, and serious hunger strikes have taken place in New
York. Of course the European press has either said nothing about these
or has ascribed them to German plots.
During the years 1914 to 1916, there occurred an increase of five
hundred per cent in the dividends paid by twenty-four of the largest
companies (steel, cast iron, leather, sugar, railways, electricity,
chemical products, etc.). The dividend of the Bethlehem Steel
Corporation rose from $5,122,703 in 1914 to $43,593,968 in 1916. The
dividend of the United States Steel Corporation rose from $81,216,985 in
1914 to $281,531,730 in 1916. During the years 1914 and 1915, the number
of wealthy persons in the United States increased as follows: From 60 to
120 in the case of those with a private income exceeding one million
dollars; from 114 to 209 in the case of those with a private income
ranging from half a million to one million dollars; while the number of
those whose income ranged from one hundred thousand to half a million
dollars was doubled.[28] In incomes below one hundred thousand dollars,
there has been no notable increase. John Reed adds: "There are limits to
the patience of the common people. Beware revolts!"
The first article in the July number of "The Masses" is a message to the
citizens of the United States entitled _War and Individual Liberty_,
penned by Bertrand Russell, the distinguished English philosopher and
mathematician. It is dated February 21, 1917, prior to the U.S.
declaration of war, but could not be published before July. Russell
recalls the self-sacrifice of the conscientious objectors in Britain,
and the persecutions to which they have been exposed. He extols their
faith (a faith for which he himself suffered). The cause of individual
liberty is, he declares, the highest of all. Since the middle ages, the
power of the state has grown unceasingly. It is now maintained that the
state is entitled to dictate opinions to all, men and women. Prisons,
emptied of criminals, who have been sent to the front in uniform to take
part in the killing, are filled with honest men who refuse to be
soldiers and to kill. A tyrannical society which has no place for rebels
is a society condemned in advance. First of all its progress will be
arrested, and then it will become retrogressive. The medieval church at
least had, as counterpoise, the resistance of the Franciscans and of the
reformers. The modern state has broken everything that resists its
power; it has made around itself a void, an abyss wherein it will
perish. Militarism is the modern state's instrument of oppression, just
as dogma was the instrument of the church.--What is this state, before
which all cringe? How absurd to speak of it as an impersonal authority,
to invest it with a quasi-sacred character! The state consists of a few
elderly gentlemen, for the most part of less than average ability, for
they are cut off from the new life of the masses. Hitherto, the United
States has been the freest of the nations. She has reached a critical
hour, not for herself merely, but for the world at large, which regards
her with tense anxiety. Let America beware. Even a just war may give
rise to all possible iniquities. Vestiges of ancient fierceness linger
within us; the human animal licks its chops as it watches the
gladiatorial combats. We veil these cannibal appetites under
highsounding names, speaking of Right and of Liberty. The last hope of
our day lies in youth. Let youth claim for the future the individual's
prerogative to judge good and evil for himself, to be the arbiter of his
own conduct.
Side by side with these serious words, a large place, in the combat of
thought, is given to humour, that bright and beauteous weapon. Charles
Scott Wood writes amusing Voltairian dialogues. Here we see Billy Sunday
in heaven, filling the place with clamour. He preaches a sermon full of
Billingsgate, a sermon addressed to God, represented as an old gentleman
with suave and distinguished manners, a little tired, speaking softly.
St. Peter is instructed to enforce a new divine ordinance, for God,
weary of the insipid company of simple souls, has decided that only
persons of intelligence are to be admitted to paradise in future.
Consequently no one killed in the war will pass the gate, except the
Poles, who claim no merit for being sacrificed, but say they were
sacrificed against their will.
Louis Untermeyer contributes poems. A number of excellent book reviews
and several columns of theatrical criticism deal with questions of the
hour. Among the works referred to, I may mention two of great
originality: a book filled with bold paradox by Thorstein Veblen,
entitled _Peace? An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace_; a Russian play in
four acts by Artsibashev, _War_, depicting the cycle of the war in a
family and the wastage of souls which it involves.
Finally we have vigorous drawings, the work of satirists of the pencil.
R. Kempf, Boardman Robinson, and George Bellows, enliven the magazine
with their pungent visions and their cutting words. Kempf shows us War
crushing in his embrace France, England, and Germany, crying out: "Come
on in, America, the blood's fine!" The four linked figures are dancing
on a sea of blood in which corpses are floating.--A few pages further
on, Boardman Robinson shows Liberty in the background weeping. In front
stands Uncle Sam, wearing handcuffs (censorship) and leg-irons, the
cannon-ball of conscription drags at the chain. He is described as being
"All ready to fight for Liberty."--George Bellows' design depicts a
chained Christ in prison. He is "incarcerated for the use of language
calculated to dissuade citizens from entering the United States
armies."--Finally, upon a heap of dead, the two sole survivors are seen
savagely cutting one another to pieces. They are Turkey and Japan. The
legend runs: "1920: still fighting for civilisation." This design is by
H. R. Chamberlain.
* * * * *
Thus fight, across the seas, a few independent spirits. Freedom,
clearness, courage, and humour, are rare virtues. Still more rarely do
we find them united, in days of folly and enslavement. In the American
opposition, these virtues take the palm.
I do not pretend that the opposition is impartial. It, likewise, is
influenced by passion, so that it fails to recognise the moral forces
animating the other side. The combined wretchedness and greatness of
these tragical days lies in the fact that both parties are drawn to the
fight by lofty, though conflicting ideals, which endeavour to slay one
another while volleying abuse at one another like Homer's heroes. We, at
least, claim the right of doing justice even to our adversaries, even to
the champions of the war which we loath. We know how much idealism, how
much intense moral feeling, have been poured out on behalf of this
sinister cause. We are aware that in this respect the United States has
been no less spendthrift than Britain and France. But we wish people to
give respectful hearing to the voices from the other side, from the
peace party. Since the apostles of peace are few in number, since they
are oppressed, they have all the more right to demand the esteem of the
world. Everything rages against these bold men: the formidable power of
the armed states; the baying of the press; the frenzy of blinded and
drunken public opinion.
The world may howl as it pleases, may stop its ears as much as it likes;
we shall compel the world to listen to these voices. We shall compel the
world to pay homage to this heroic struggle, which recalls that of the
early Christians against the Roman empire. We shall compel it to respect
the brotherly greeting of such a man as Bertrand Russell, a new apostle
Paul, "ad Americanos"; we shall compel the world to respect these men
whose souls have remained free, these men who from their prisons in
Europe and their prisons in America, clasp hands across the sea, and
across the ocean that is yet wider than the Atlantic, the ocean of human
folly.
_August, 1917._
"demain," September, 1917.
XIII
ON BEHALF OF E. D. MOREL
E. D. Morel, secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, was
arrested in London during August, 1917, and was sentenced to six
months' imprisonment in the second division, upon the ridiculous
(and incorrect) charge of having _attempted_ to send to Romain
Rolland in Switzerland one of his own political pamphlets which was
being freely circulated in England.[29] The "Revue mensuelle" of
Geneva asked R. R. what he thought of this affair, concerning which
at that time little was known on the continent, for all the
information hitherto published had been in the form of defamatory
articles, attacks upon Morel manufactured in England and
disseminated in various tongues. R. R. replied as follows:--
You ask what I think of the arrest of E. D. Morel.
I am not personally acquainted with E. D. Morel. I do not know whether,
as is asserted, he has sent me some of his works during the war. I never
received them.
But from all that I know of him, of his activities prior to the war, of
his crusade against the crimes of civilisation in Africa, of his
writings upon the war (few of which have been reproduced in Swiss or in
French journals), I consider him to be a man of high courage and
vigorous faith. He has always dared to serve truth, to serve truth
alone, scorning danger, regardless of all the animus he was arousing.
These things would be little. Morel has displayed rarer qualities, has
achieved a more difficult task, in that he has been willing to disregard
his own sympathies, his friendships, and even his country, when the
truth and his country were at odds.
Thus he is in the succession of all the great believers: Christians of
the early centuries, the reformers during the epoch of the wars of
religion, the freethinkers of the heroic age of free thought, all those
who have prized beyond everything their faith in truth--in whatever form
truth presented itself to their minds (divine or human, for to them it
was always sacred). I may add that such a man as E. D. Morel is a great
citizen even when he is demonstrating to his country the errors which it
is committing. Nay more, he is preeminently a great citizen when he does
this and because he does it. Some would draw a veil over the errors of
their country; they are unprofitable servants, or they are sycophants.
Every brave man, every straight-forward man, knows best how to honour
his country.
The state may strike down such a man if it pleases, as the state struck
down Socrates, as the state has struck down so many others, to whom,
after they were dead, it raised useless monuments. The state is not our
country. It is merely the administrator of our country, sometimes a good
administrator, sometimes a bad one, but always fallible. The state has
power, and uses power. But since man has been man, this power has
invariably broken vainly against the threshold of the free soul.
R. R.
_September 15, 1917._
"Revue mensuelle," Geneva, October, 1917.
XIV
YOUNG SWITZERLAND
If we were to attempt to found our judgment upon Swiss periodical
literature, we should form a very false opinion regarding the public
mind of Switzerland. In this land, as everywhere, the press is from ten
to twenty years behind the intellectual and moral development of the
people. The Swiss papers and other periodicals are few in number,
compared with those of neighbouring nations. Most of them are controlled
by quite a small group of persons, and nearly every one of them serves
to express the prejudices, the interests, and the routinism of
middle-aged or elderly persons. Among such as are prominent in this
journalistic world, even those who are spoken of as young, if they ever
have been young in mind, are now so only in the eyes of their elders, of
elders who refuse to admit that they have grown old.... "Young man, hold
your tongue," as Job said to Magnus.[30]
A man may live a long time in this land before he discovers the
existence of a young Switzerland free from the trammels of conservative
liberalism (more conservative than liberal), and free from those of
sectarian radicalism (preeminently sectarian). Both these trends are
abundantly represented in the columns of the leading newspapers; the
adherents of both are attached to the outworn political and social forms
of the bourgeois regime which is declining from one end of Europe to the
other.
I was surprised and delighted at what I read in the latest issues of the
"Revue de la Société de Zofingue." I wish to make my French friends
acquainted with what I have learned, so that sympathetic relationships
may be established between them and young Switzerland.
The Zofingia Society is the leading society of Swiss students, and the
oldest. It was founded in 1818, and will therefore celebrate its
centenary next year. It comprises twelve sections: nine of these are
"academic," viz. Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel, Berne, Basle, and Zurich;
three are "gymnasial," viz. St. Gall, Lucerne, and Bellinzona.[31] The
membership of the society is steadily increasing. In July, 1916, it was
575; but now, nearly a year later, it is 700. The organisation has a
monthly review, "Centralblatt des Zofingervereins," issued in French,
German, and Italian. This periodical is now in its fifty-seventh year.
It publishes lectures, reports of discussions, and other matters of
interest to the association.
The essential distinction between this body and the other societies of
Swiss students is that the Zofingia, as explained in the first article
of its constitution, "places itself above and outside all political
parties, but takes its stand on democratic principles.... It abstains
entirely from party politics." Thus, as its president writes, it affords
to the students of Switzerland a permanent possibility of creating anew
and ever anew their conception of "the true national spirit of
Switzerland.... In it, each generation can freely think out for itself
fresh ideals, can construct new forms of life. Thus the history of the
Zofingerverein is something more than a history of a Swiss students'
club; it is a miniature history of the moral and political evolution of
Switzerland since 1815."--But it has always been in the vanguard.
This society, drawing its members from three races and nine cantons,
exhibits, as may be imagined, multiplicity in unity. The "Centralblatt"
for November, 1916, contains a report of the year 1915-16, compiled by
Louis Micheli. It gives an account of the activities of the various
sections, and skilfully indicates the peculiar characteristics of each
section.
The most important section, the one which leads the Zofingia, is that of
Zurich. Here the problems of the hour are discussed with especial
eagerness. Centring round opposite poles, there are two parties,
substantially equal in numbers, and inspired with equal enthusiasm. On
the one hand we see conservatives, authoritarian and centralist in
trend, the devotees of "Studententum" of the old style. At the other
pole are the young Zofingians whose outlook is socialistic, idealistic,
and revolutionary. For a time there was a fierce struggle between these
two groups. The parties succeeded one another in power, and those who
gained control in one term would seek to undo everything which during
the preceding term had been done by the members of the late committee.
Now, a more conciliatory spirit prevails.[32] The progressive party,
reinforced by a number of youthful recruits, has gained the upper hand.
It is endeavouring to secure wider support by attracting additional
elements through breadth of view and a policy of toleration.[33] But we
are told that "the Zurichers, at bottom, are not strongly individualist,
for they are apt to immolate their individuality on the altar of party.
Hence there is danger, from time to time, that a revival of absolutism
may take place."
At Basle, it would seem, there is no such danger. This section, the
largest, extremely alert, is perhaps the least united and the most
discordant. During the last few years it has been torn by dissensions
aroused by the question of patriotism, but its members are not, like
those of the Zurich section, grouped in two armies. There are a number
of little factions, circumscribed and mutually suspicious. Its most
conspicuous traits are the following. Its discussions are conducted with
much bitterness, so that "there is a strong tendency for differences in
the realm of ideas to culminate in personal hostility." The Baslers have
little inclination towards practical activities; they prefer abstract
discussions; they aim at the development of character and individuality.
"In these respects, Basle and Lausanne are the sections containing the
most original and individual types." But, in contrast with Lausanne, the
Basle section has little interest in literary and artistic questions.
In the Lausanne section, individual types abound. Here we find students
of the most various temperaments, and interested in the most diverse
questions, in politics, sociology, literature, and the arts. But
Lausanne is pugnacious, and is on bad terms with the other sections. It
is itself broken up into factions, and it exhibits separatist trends,
which led to a crisis early in 1916. After the manner of Vaud, it keeps
itself to itself.
Lausanne, Basle, and Zurich are the three largest sections.
Lucerne and Berne are the smallest. In the former, which is of little
importance, a "slothful cordiality" prevails. The Berne section is
sleepy as well as small, with very few new adherents. One of its members
has stigmatised Berne as a "Beamtenstadt" (civil servants' town). The
Berne section has little interest in the problems of modern life, its
attachments are to common sense; it is material and unemotional; it
favours the established order. "The Bernese, by nature, distrusts
innovators and idealists, regarding them as dreamers or
revolutionists.... The state of mind of the Berne students recalls that
which prevails in official circles."
St. Gall, hard-working, enthusiastic, and independent, occupies an
intermediate position. "In St. Gall, every one can express his opinion
frankly"; but the section is unimportant compared with Zurich or
Basle.--Neuchâtel displays fitful energy, and "is fundamentally
characterised by a certain natural inertia."--Geneva, finally, is
amorphous. "The bulk of the members of this section make up a slumbrous,
irresolute mass of persons who never utter any definite opinions," and
perhaps have no definite opinions. Such activities as it displays are
the work of a few exceptions. "No section has greater need of a
masterful president." Having no leader, it is vague, somnolent, and
takes little interest in current events. It lacks the corporate spirit.
"The Genevese are strongly individualistic, and yet, unfortunately, we
rarely find among them a strong individuality." We may add that they
continue to display certain characteristics of the Genevese of old.
Dreading criticism and ironical comment, they are afraid to let
themselves go, to show what they really feel; their sensibilities are
easily wounded, and they therefore invest themselves with coldness as
with a cuirass; their attitude is one of perpetual mistrust; they are
ever on the defensive, as if the duke of Savoy were always on the point
of storming the walls.[34]
I pass no judgments. I am merely registering, in brief, the opinions of
those among the students who are best qualified to judge. Taking them
all in all, these opinions harmonise with my own observations.
* * * * *
The latest issues of the "Centralblatt des Zofingervereins" manifest a
free spirit. The issue for May, 1917, contains a frankly
internationalist article by Jules Humbert-Droz entitled _National
Defence_. Special mention must be made of a broad-minded lecture,
_Socialism and the War_, delivered in February, 1917, by Ernest Gloor of
Lausanne at the spring festival in Yverdon, and published in the
"Centralblatt" for April and May. I must also refer to Gloor's lecture
_What is our Country?_, delivered at Grütli in the canton of Lausanne.
Another noteworthy lecture is that of Serge Bonhôte, delivered at Grütli
in the canton of Neuchâtel, entitled _Fatherland_, and heralding the
days to come. These lectures were respectively published in December,
1916, and January, 1917. I should have liked to give extracts from
various appreciative articles upon _The Russian Revolution_. Above all,
I should like to quote, from the April issue, Max Gerber's enthusiastic
welcome to the revolution. But space is limited, and the best way of
expounding the ideas of these young people will be to summarise a
detailed discussion in which they have recently been engaged concerning
_The Imperialism of the Great Powers and the Role of Switzerland_. The
topic was suggested to the sections by Julius Schmidhauser of Zurich,
"cand. jur.," president of the central section. Schmidhauser has edited
the report of these discussions, bringing to the task a broad and
tolerant synthetic spirit. The work is all the more remarkable seeing
that it was penned during an arduous term of military service, when the
man who signs himself "cand. jur." (law student) was playing the part of
infantry lieutenant.
I shall merely follow his report, and shall allow the young men to speak
for themselves. (Issues of March, April, and May, 1917).
The discussion comprises a preamble and six parts:
=Preamble: How shall we envisage the Problem?=
=I. The Essence of Imperialism;=
=II. The Imperialism of the Great Powers to-day;=
=III. Can Imperialism be Justified?=
=IV. Opposition between the genuinely Swiss Outlook=
=and the Imperialist Outlook.=
=V. The Mission of Switzerland;=
=VI. The new Education.=
=Preamble: How shall we envisage the Problem?=
A. FROM THE REALIST OUTLOOK?
_a._ Can we explain imperialism as a historical product? This method is
too easy-going; it is slothful and dangerous. "Should man be the
creation of history? No; he should be its creator."--The condemnation of
historical fatalism.
_b._ Can we explain imperialism by "Realpolitik"? Even if it be thus
explicable, it must be no less energetically condemned. "I am inclined
to define the 'real politicians' as persons who are marching along with
their eyes closed to the essential realities of the world and of
mankind.... 'Real politics' may often seem to be right for a season; but
in the long run it always proves to have been wrong.... The war that
rages to-day is the outcome of the deadly falsehood of 'real politics.'
The motto of 'real politics,' which is 'si vis pacem, para bellum,' has
been pushed to an absurdity, and has thus brought disaster upon our
race. It is depressing to find that we are still afflicted with this
curse. The only possible explanation of the sway which the doctrine of
'real politics' holds over so many minds is that such persons are
fundamentally sceptical as to the reality of the good, the divine, in
man" (Schmidhauser).
B. FROM THE UTILITARIAN OUTLOOK?
Certain persons are willing to fight some particular imperialism because
it is or may be dangerous to Switzerland, while none the less they
favour other imperialisms. The Zofingia must censure such a trend in the
strongest terms. It is doubtless of urgent importance that we should
take our stand against the first-named imperialism, but we must
proscribe all the imperialisms. "Our aim is the attainment of a
universally human outlook" (H. W. Lôw, of Basle).
C. FROM THE IDEALIST OUTLOOK??
This is no better than the others. The Zofingia denounces the
hypocritical ideology of to-day, an ideology which serves to cloak a
policy of brute interest. It desires to issue a warning against the
other dangers of an abstract idealism, against the idealism of those who
fail to derive their ideas from the unbiassed study of reality. One who
locks himself up within the circle of his own ideas, one who opposes
empty thought to life, one who claims the right of issuing absolute
judgments (all or nothing) without regard to circumstances and ignoring
the manifold shades of reality, exhibits dangerous pride and culpable
levity.
D. SYNTHESIS OF THE FOREGOING OUTLOOKS.
Realism without idealism has no sense. Idealism without realism has no
blood. Genuine idealism wants life as a whole, desires its integral
realisation. It is the deepest possible knowledge of living reality,
simultaneously embracing human consciousness and facts. Such knowledge
is our best weapon.
PART ONE.
The Essence of Imperialism.
The chief characteristic of imperialism is the will to power, the desire
for expansion, the longing for domination. It is based upon a belief
that might is right; it tends to impose itself by force. One of its
mainsprings is the nationalist spirit, the mystical cult of nationality,
of the chosen people; the sacred egoism of the fatherland. Never before
has imperialism been so savage and unscrupulous as it has become to-day,
owing to the economic conditions of contemporary society. "Imperialism
is the inseparable companion of capitalism. In each country, capitalism
requires as its main prop a vigorous and powerful state which can enter
into successful competition with the capitalism of any other country. We
give the name of imperialism to the tendency towards capitalistic and
political expansion, which strides across frontiers" (Guggenheim).
"Modern imperialism issues from the capitalist system dominating
contemporary politics and society to-day. It is the cause of the world
war" (Grob).
PART TWO.
The Imperialism of the Great Powers To-Day.
The central section of the Zofingia declares: "The imperialist character
of the great powers engaged in the present struggle is indisputable." No
objections are raised by the other sections. They unite in the view that
"all the great powers pursue an imperialist policy."
Schmidhauser, presiding over the discussion, asks for justice towards
the nations, for every one of them is, as it were, entangled in the net
of the imperialist policy of Europe. He protests against the prejudiced
and superficial outlook of those who can see nothing but the worst of
any nation: of those who in the case of Germany concentrate attention on
the spirit of a Treitschke or a Bernhardi and on the crime of the
occupation of Belgium; of those who in the case of England can see
nothing but the policy of Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes, nothing
but the Boer War. The mission of Switzerland is to realise the tragedy
of mankind as a whole, and not to identify herself with any particular
section of humanity. "Childish and stupid are the views of those for
whom half of Europe should be placed in the pillory, while the other
half should wear the aureole of all the virtues and all the heroisms"
(Patry).
PART THREE.
Can Imperialism be Justified?
A. THE CHAMPIONS OF IMPERIALISM.
In only one section, that of Basle, does imperialism find defenders.
Walterlin takes up his parable on its behalf, glorifying it in the
spirit and the style of Nietzsche. "Imperialism," he declares, "is the
artery of the world, the sole source of greatness, the creator of all
progress." ...
B. THE OPPONENTS OF IMPERIALISM.
Opposition to imperialism is voiced by all the other sections. Most of
them are content to show that imperialism is a menace to Switzerland,
but Schmidhauser is by no means satisfied with this narrow and selfish
outlook. He explains the material and moral disasters which necessarily
result from imperialism, and from its offspring, the world war.
Imperialism destroys civilisation. It saps morality and law, the two
things upon which human society is founded. It is hostile to three
fundamental ideas: to the idea of the unity of mankind; to the idea of
individuality; to the idea that every individual should have the right
of self-determination.
PART FOUR.
Opposition between the genuinely Swiss Outlook and the Imperialist
Outlook.
The existence of this opposition is admitted, as a matter of principle,
by all the participants in the discussion. But difficulties arise when
they come to consider the policy which Switzerland should in particular
pursue. "What are we entitled to speak of as peculiarly and primitively
Swiss?" (Patry).
A beginning is made by defining the political essence of Switzerland,
stress being laid, first upon the basic neutrality of the country, and
secondly upon its supra-national character. "The ideal of Switzerland,"
says Clottu, "is that of a nation established above and outside the
principle of nationality." Thirdly, stress is laid upon the right to the
free development of every individual and of every social group. A fourth
characteristic of Switzerland is that in that country, before authority
and before the law, there exists a democratic equality of all citizens,
communities, cantons, nationalities, languages, etc. By its very
essence, therefore, Switzerland is absolutely opposed to the imperialism
of the great powers. "The victory of the imperialist principle would be
the political death of Switzerland" (Guggenheim).
What is to be done? These young men are convinced that Switzerland has a
mission, and are none the less aware that Switzerland lacks capacity to
fulfil that mission. With ingratiating modesty, they disclaim any desire
"to play the pharisees to Europe." Whilst they believe in the excellence
of the principles which underlie the Switzerland of their dreams (though
not Switzerland as she exists to-day), "we must not suppose," says
Patry, "that this is a fresh instance of the monopolisation of the Good
and the Beautiful by a single country, which will become the only
fatherland of these graces." We must be content with knowing that the
ground is made ready for building, and that there is still plenty of
work to be done.
"Now, at this very hour, the destiny of Switzerland stands revealed. At
a time when the principle of nationality dominates the European
situation with the strength of demoniacal possession, at a time when
opposing civilisations are rending one another, our little state claims
the honour of possessing a national ideal which dominates the
nationalities and takes them all to its bosom. Does this seem like
madness? Perhaps it does, to the sapient sceptic for whom the vision of
the present masks the vision of the future. But it is not madness for
those who are truly wise, for those who know that the great causes of
the world have ever at the outset been nailed to the cross. The
principle of nationality was a power for good in its own day. But if it
has ceased to be a factor of freedom and toleration, if it has become
the source of hatred, the source of blind and limitless national
selfishness, then it is working for its own destruction. It is the
mission of Switzerland to pave the way for a saner application of the
principle of nationality" (Clottu).
"In this domain we can and should be conquerors. Owing to the
historical origin of our country, owing to the fact that Switzerland
comprises three races and three tongues, we foreshadow on a small scale
the United States of Europe; in a word, we practise internationalism"
(Patry).
Switzerland champions the right of the nations and champions democratic
thought, as against imperialism, which is, fundamentally, an
aristocratic reaction. Imperialism makes use of democracy, but enslaves
it; it undermines the democratic pillars of modern states; it
centralises all power in the hands of a single government. "We are
reviving the age of the dictators, and there is a tragic irony in this
at a time when the whole world is speaking of liberty and when the whole
world is enslaved.... Down with imperialism, which turns the nations
aside from their true destinies!"
"The size of our country matters little, provided that it has right and
truth on its side.... We know that what New Switzerland has hitherto
done is inadequate.... But a sacred fire is beginning to burn in our
land.... Switzerland is a highway leading towards the future.... We are
animated and united by a sublime conviction, by the feeling that we are
the bearers of a great truth" (Schmidhauser).
PART FIVE.
The Mission of Switzerland.
"Switzerland can achieve greatness through principle alone. The only
conquests permissible to Switzerland, are conquests in the realm of
ideas" (Clottu).
We are not concerned here solely with the duty of a choice group of
intellectuals. The questions at issue affect the people at large, those
to whose service these young men have devoted themselves. A new spirit,
an active faith, are requisite. The war has brought to light the weak
spot in the Swiss character. Touching is the shame felt by these
truehearted youths owing to the attitude of their country at the outset
of the war. They are personally hurt by such surrenders of principle.
In the strongest terms they censure the abdication of the Swiss soul at
the time when Belgium was being invaded, noting with pain the absence of
any national and public protest. But now there is a change of spirit.
"We have a young and virile movement, the movement of those who are not
satisfied with the mere existence of Switzerland, but who desire that
Switzerland should prove herself worthy to exist, by her moral greatness
and by helping to bring salvation to other peoples" (Schmidhauser). "The
recognition of this duty will regenerate our national life" (Genevese
section).
The practical difficulties are enormous, and must be frankly faced.
Switzerland is in danger of being crushed in twofold fashion--military
and economic. The fate of Belgium and the fate of Greece are plain
warnings. She cannot forego her army, for this is a necessary safeguard
of the ideal she represents. But this army, however large, does not and
cannot suffice to avert economic pressure, which is an inevitable
outcome of the existing system of society. We have, therefore, to draw
the fatal conclusion that Switzerland is doomed should capitalist
imperialism endure. For Switzerland neither can nor ought to come to
terms with either group of allied powers. To take such a step would be
to pass sentence of death upon herself. "Her existence is inseparably
associated with the victory of the ideas of supra-national solidarity,
of world-wide socialism, world-wide individualism, world-wide
democracy." Grob boldly affirms: "To imperialist immoralism, with the
device, 'Our interest is our right,' we counterpose, 'Right is our
interest.'"
What are the leading tasks of Switzerland?
They are three: the universalisation of socialism; the universalisation
of individualism; the universalisation of democracy.
1. World-wide Socialism.--The germ of this appears in the supra-national
union which is the essential characteristic of Switzerland. But the
young Zofingians are under no illusions, and they frankly denounce the
faults of their own people. "We are far from being a nation of
brothers....Our nation is divided: it is rent asunder by egoisms and
imperialisms.... For every strong man who misuses his strength and his
wealth, displays the spirit of imperialism" (A. de Mestral). This
scourge must be vigorously combated. How? "By direct struggle with
capitalism," says one (Alexander Jaques of Lausanne). "By organising
solidarity," says another (Ernest Gloor of Lausanne). But the Swiss are
fast bound, willy-nilly, to the social system of other nations, "to the
international system of economic imperialism, the most abominable of all
the internationalisms." It is therefore categorically incumbent upon the
Swiss to devote themselves to furthering an active internationalism of
social solidarity. They must enter into an understanding with
anti-imperialists throughout the world. "It is necessary to promote the
formation of an international group organised for the struggle against
imperialist, absolutist, and materialist principles, simultaneously, in
every land" (Châtenay).
2. World-wide Individualism.--We require a counterpoise to sociocracy.
We must beware of any organisation, be it internationalist or pacifist,
which claims to subjugate and atrophy the living forces of man. The
political ideal is a genuine federalism which shall respect
individualisms. As the old saying has it: Let everything be after its
kind!
3. World-wide Democracy.--In this matter the students display perfect
unanimity, for they have absolute faith in democracy. But with their
customary scrupulousness, their dread of pharisaism, they admit that
Switzerland is still far from being a true democracy. "To-day democracy
is purely formal; in our own time the principle of true democracy is, in
a sense, revolutionary."
They tell us some of their aspirations. They desire the democratic
control of foreign policy. They want pacifism on a democratic basis.
Almost universally in Europe, political power is in the control of a
handful of men who embody imperialist egoism. The people must share this
power. Each nation has the right to control its own destinies, in
accordance with its own ideas and the dictates of its own will.
But once more, no illusions! With a clear-sightedness which is rare at
this hour, these young men point out that "imperialism has become
democratic," saying: "The western democracies, closely examined, are
nothing more than the sovereignty of a capitalist and landowning caste."
The Russian revolution arouses new hopes. "The spectacle of the struggle
between the two democratic revolutions in Russia, one capitalist and
imperialist, the other anti-imperialist and socialist, illuminates the
problem of democracy and imperialism. This spectacle shows the Swiss
democracy its path and its mission." Above all, let Switzerland reject
the new evangel, made in Germany, of a democracy supine before the will
of a politico-economic power, a democracy which tends in home policy to
class rule, and in foreign policy to imperialism! "We need a new
orientation which shall deliver democratic thought from national
restrictions, and from the sinister contemporary trend towards the reign
of material force." True democracy, supra-national democracy, must take
its stand against "imperialism masquerading as democracy."
PART SIX.
The New Education.
This lengthy discussion leads up in the end to practical conclusions.
Public education must be reorganised and must work in a new direction.
The extant educational system suffers from a threefold inadequacy. 1.
From the humanist point of view, it immures the mind in the study of
remote epochs and past civilisations, and does nothing to prepare the
pupil for the fulfilment of contemporary duties. 2. From the
specifically Swiss point of view, it aims at creating a blind
patriotism, which can neither enlighten nor guide the understanding; it
monotonously reiterates the story of wars, victories, and brute force,
instead of teaching liberty, instead of inculcating the lofty Swiss
ideal; it cares nothing for the moral and material needs of the people
of to-day. 3. From the technical point of view, it is abjectly
materialist and militarist, and has no ideals. True, that there is a
contemporary movement, and a strong one, in favour of what is called
"national education," in favour of "the teaching of civics." But we must
be on our guard! Here is a new peril. They would make a sort of state
idol, despotic and soulless; they would make a state superstition, a
state egoism, to which our minds are to be enslaved. Do not let us stoop
to the lure. An immense task lies before us, and the Zofingerverein must
lead the way. It must play its part in the fulfilment of the moral and
intellectual mission of Switzerland. But not by isolating itself. It
must never lose its feeling of solidarity of thought and action with
other lands. It sends forth deeply-felt greeting to the
"Gesinnungsfreunde," to the friends and companions in belligerent lands,
to those young men who have fallen in France and in Germany, and to those
who yet live. It must make common cause with them; it must work shoulder
to shoulder with the free youth of the world. Julius Schmidhauser,
president of the Zofingia, who chaired these discussions and subsequently
summarised them, concludes with an Appeal to Brothers, an appeal to them
that they shall have faith, that they shall act, that they shall seek
new roads for a new Switzerland--for a new humanity.
* * * * *
I have thought well to efface myself behind these students. Were I to
substitute my thought for theirs, I should lay myself open to the
reproach which I so often address to my generation. I have let them
speak for themselves. Any commentary would detract from the beauty of
the sight of these enthusiastic and serious young people, in this most
tragical hour of history, discussing their duties ardently and at great
length, taking stock of their faith, and solemnly affirming that faith
in a sort of oath of the tennis court.[35] We see them affirming their
faith in liberty; in the solidarity of the peoples; in their moral
mission; in their duty to destroy the hydra of imperialism, both
militarist and capitalist, whether at home or abroad; in their duty to
construct a juster and more humane society.
I give them fraternal greetings. They do not speak alone. Everywhere the
echoes answer. Everywhere I see young people resembling them, and
stretching forth friendly hands to their fellows in Switzerland. The
vicissitudes of this war--a war which, endeavouring to crush free
spirits, has but succeeded in making them feel the need for seeking one
another out and for cementing unity--has brought me into close
relationships with the young of all countries, in Europe, in America,
and even in the east and the far east. Everywhere I have found the same
communion of sufferings and hopes, the same aspirations, the same
revolts, the same determination to break with the past whose malevolence
and stupidity have been so plainly proved. I have found them all
animated with the same ambition to rebuild human society upon new
foundations, wider and more firmly laid than those which sustain the
quaking edifice of this old world of rapine and fanaticism, of savage
nationalities scorched by the war, rearing heavenward frames blackened
by the fire.
_June, 1917._
"demain," Geneva, July, 1917.
XV
UNDER FIRE
BY HENRI BARBUSSE[36]
Here we have a pitiless mirror of the war. In that mirror the war is
reflected day by day for sixteen months. It is a mirror of two eyes;
they are clear, shrewd, perspicacious, and bold; they are the eyes of a
Frenchman. The author, Henri Barbusse, dedicates his book: "To the
memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119,"
during December, 1915. In Paris _Le Feu_ was honoured with the Goncourt
prize.
By what miracle has so truth-telling a work been able to appear
unmutilated, at a time when so many free words, infinitely less free,
have been censored? I shall not attempt to explain the fact, but I shall
profit by it. The voice of this witness drives back into the shadow all
the interested falsehoods which during the last three years have served
to idealise the European slaughter-house.
* * * * *
The work is of the first rank, and is so full of matter that more than
one article would be requisite to present its whole scope. All that I
shall attempt to deal with here will be the chief aspects--its artistry
and its thought.
The dominant impression it conveys is one of extreme objectivity. Save
in the last chapter, wherein Barbusse expounds his ideas on social
questions, we do not make the author's acquaintance. He is there among
his obscure companions; he struggles and suffers with them, and from one
moment to another his disappearance seems imminent; but he has the
spiritual strength which enables him to withdraw himself from the
picture and to veil his ego. He contemplates the moving spectacle, he
listens, he feels, he touches; he seizes it, with all his senses on the
stretch. Marvellous is the assured grasp displayed by this French
spirit, for no emotion affects the sharpness of the outline or the
precision of the technique. We discern here manifold touches, lively,
vibrant, crude, well fitted to reproduce the shocks and starts of the
poor human machines as they pass from a weary torpor to the
hyperaesthesia of hallucination--but these juxtaposed touches are placed
and combined by an intelligence that is ever master of itself. The style
is impressionist. The author is prone, unduly prone in my opinion, to
make use of visual word-plays after the manner of Jules Renard. He is
fond of "artistic writing," a typically Parisian product, a style which
in ordinary times seems to "powder puff" the emotions, but which, amid
the convulsions of the war, exhibits a certain heroic elegance. The
narrative is terse, gloomy, stifling; but there come episodes of repose,
which break its unity, and by these the tension is relieved for a
moment. Few readers will fail to appreciate the charm, the discreet
emotion, of these episodes, as for instance in the chapter "On Leave."
But three-fourths of the book deal with the trenches of Picardy, under
the "muddy skies," under fire and under water--visions now of hell, now
of the flood.
There the armies remain buried for years, at the bottom of an eternal
battlefield, closely packed, "chained shoulder to shoulder," huddling
together "against the rain which descends from the skies, against the
mud which oozes from the ground, against the cold, an emanation from the
infinite which is all-pervading." The soldiers uncouthly rigged out in
skins, rolls of blanket, ... cardigans, and more cardigans, squares of
oilcloth, fur caps, ... hoods of tarpaulin, rubber, weatherproof cloth
... look like cave men, gorillas, troglodytes. One of them, while
digging, has turned up an axe made by quaternary man, a piece of pointed
stone with a bone handle, and he is using it. Others, like savages, are
making rough ornaments. Three generations side by side; all the races,
but not all the classes. Sons of the soil and artisans for the most
part. Small farmers, agricultural labourers, carters, porters and
messengers, factory foremen, saloon keepers, newspaper sellers,
ironmongers' assistants, miners--very few liberal professions are
represented. This amalgam has a common speech, "made up of workshop and
barrack slang and of rural dialects seasoned with a few neologisms."
Each one is shown to us as a silhouette, a sharp and admirable likeness;
once we have seen them we shall always know them apart. But the method
of depiction is very different from that of Tolstoi. The Russian cannot
meet with a soul without plumbing it to the depths. Here we look and
pass on. The individual soul hardly exists; it is a mere shell. Beneath
that shell, the collective soul, suffering, overwhelmed with fatigue,
brutalised by the noise, poisoned by the smoke, endures infinite
boredom, drowses, waits, waits unendingly. It is a "waiting-machine." It
no longer tries to think; "it has given up the attempt to understand, it
has renounced being itself." These are not soldiers, they don't wish to
be soldiers, they are men. "They are men, good fellows of all kinds,
rudely torn away from life; they are ignorant, not easily carried away,
men of narrow outlook, but full of common sense which sometimes gets out
of gear. They are inclined to go where they are led and to do as they
are bid. They are tough, and able to bear a great deal. Simple men who
have been artificially simplified yet more, and in whom, by the force of
circumstances, the primitive instincts have become accentuated: the
instinct of self-preservation, egoism, the dogged hope of living
through, the lust of eating, drinking, and sleeping." Even amid the
dangers of an artillery attack, within a few hours they get bored, yawn,
play cards, talk nonsense, "snatch forty winks"--in a word, they are
bored. "The overwhelming vastness of these great bombardments wearies
the mind." They pass through a hell of suffering and forget all about
it. "We've seen too much, and everything we saw was too much. We are not
built to take all that in. It escapes from us in every direction; we are
too small. We are forgetting-machines. Men are beings which think
little; above all, they forget." In Napoleon's day every soldier had a
marshal's baton in his knapsack, and every soldier had in his brain the
ambitious image of the little Corsican officer. There are no longer any
individuals now, there is a human mass which is itself lost amid
elemental forces. "More than six thousand miles of French trenches, more
than six thousand miles of such miseries or of worse; and the French
front is only one-eighth of the whole." Instinctively the narrator is
compelled to borrow his images from the rough mythology of primitive
peoples, or from cosmic convulsions. He speaks of "rivers of wounded
torn from the bowels of the earth which bleeds and rots
unendingly"--"glaciers of corpses"--"gloomy immensities of Styx"--"Valley
of Jehoshaphat"--prehistoric spectacles. What does the individual man
amount to in all this? What does his suffering mean? "What's the use
of complaining?" says one wounded man to another. "That's what war is,
not the battles, but the terrible unnatural weariness; water up to the
middle, mud, filth, infinite monotony of wretchedness, interrupted by
acute tragedies."--At intervals, human groans, profound shudders, issue
from the silence and the night.
Here and there, in the course of this long narration, peaks emerge from
the grey and bloody uniformity: the attack ("under fire"); "the field
hospital"; "the dawn." I wish I had space to quote the admirable picture
of the men awaiting the order to attack; they are motionless; an assumed
calm masks such dreams, such fears, such farewell thoughts! Without any
illusions, without enthusiasm, without excitement, "despite the busy
propaganda of the authorities, without intoxication either material or
moral," fully aware of what they are doing, they await the signal to
hurl themselves "once more into this madman's role imposed on each of
them by the madness of mankind." Then comes the "headlong rush to the
abyss," where blindly, amid shell-splinters hissing like red-hot iron
plunged into water, amid the stench of sulphur, they race forward. Next
comes the butchery in the trenches, where "at first the men do not know
what to do," but where a frenzy soon seizes them, so that "they hardly
recognise those whom they know best, and it seems as if all their
previous life had suddenly retreated to a vast distance...." Then the
exultation passes, and "nothing remains but infinite fatigue and
infinite waiting."
* * * * *
But I must cut these descriptions short, for I have to consider the
leading content of the work, its thought.
In _War and Peace_ the profound sense of the destiny which guides
mankind is ardently sought, and is found from time to time by the light
of some flash of suffering or of genius, found by those few who, through
breed or individual sensibility, have exceptional insight: for instance
Prince Andrew, Peter Besuhov. But a great roller seems to have passed
over the peoples of to-day, reducing all to a level. The most that can
happen is that for a moment, now and again, there may rise from the huge
flock the isolated bleating of one of the beasts about to die. Thus we
have the ethereal figure of Corporal Bertrand, "with his thoughtful
smile"--the merest sketch--"a man of few words, never talking of
himself"; a man who could once only deliver up the secret of his
anguished thoughts--in the twilight hour which follows the killing, just
before he himself is killed. He thinks of those whom he has slain in the
frenzy of the hand-to-hand fighting:
"It had to be done," he said. "It had to be done, for the sake of the
future."
He folded his arms and threw up his head.
"The future!" he cried, all of a sudden. "Those who live after us--what
will they think of these killings, ... these exploits, concerning which
we who do them do not even know if they are to be compared with those of
the heroes of Plutarch and Corneille or with the deeds of apaches!...
For all that, mind you, there is one figure that has risen above the
war, a figure which will shine with the beauty and the greatness of its
courage."
I listened, writes Barbusse, bending towards him, leaning on a stick. I
drank in the words that came, in the twilit silence, from lips which
rarely broke silence. His voice rang out as he said:
"Liebknecht!"
The same evening, Marthereau, a humble territorial, whose face,
bristling with hair, recalled that of a water-spaniel, is listening to a
comrade who says: "William is a foul beast, but Napoleon is a great
man." This same soldier, after groaning about the war, goes on to speak
with delight of the martial ardour displayed by the only son left to
him, a boy of five. Marthereau shakes his weary head, his fine eyes
shining like those of a puzzled and thoughtful hound. He sighs, saying:
"Oh, we're none of us so bad, but we're unlucky, poor devils all of us.
But we're too stupid, we're too stupid!"
As a rule, however, the human cry from these lowly fellows is anonymous.
We hardly know who has been speaking, for, often enough, all share in a
common thought. Born out of common trials, this thought brings them much
closer to the other unfortunates in the enemy trenches than to the rest
of the world away there in the rear. For visitors from the rear, "trench
tourists," for people in the rear, journalists "who exploit the public
misery," bellicose intellectuals, the soldiers unite in showing a
contempt which is free from violence but knows no bounds. To them has
come "the revelation of the great reality": a difference between human
beings, a difference far profounder and with far more impassable
barriers than those of race: the sharp, glaring, and inalterable
distinction, in the population of every country, between those who
profit and those who suffer, those who have been compelled to sacrifice
everything, those who give to the uttermost of their numbers, of their
strength, and of their martyrdom, those over whom the others march
forward smiling and successful.
One to whom this revelation has come, says bitterly: "That sort of thing
does not encourage one to die!"
But none the less this man meets his death bravely, meekly, like the
others.
* * * * *
The climax of the work is the last chapter, "The Dawn." It is like an
epilogue, the thought in which returns to join the thought in the
prologue, "The Vision," but enlarges upon that opening thought, just as
in a symphony the promise of the outset is fulfilled at the close.
"The Vision" describes the coming of the declaration of war, shows how
the tidings reached a sanatorium in Savoy, facing Mont Blanc. There,
these sick men, drawn thither from all the ends of the earth, "detached
from the affairs of the world and almost from life itself, ... as remote
from their fellow-men as if they already belonged to a future age, look
away into the distance, towards the incomprehensible land of the living
and the mad." They contemplate the flood below; they watch the
shipwrecked nations, grasping at straws. "These thirty millions of
slaves, hurled against one another by guilt and by mistake, hurled into
war and mud, uplift their human faces whose expression reveals at last a
nascent will. The future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is
plain that the old world will be transformed by the alliance one day to
be made between those whose numbers and whose miseries are infinite."
The concluding chapter, "The Dawn," is a picture of the "flood below,"
of the lowland inundated by the rain, a picture of the crumbling
trenches. The spectacle resembles a scene from the book of Genesis.
Germans and French are fleeing together from the scourge of the
elements, or are sinking pell-mell into a common grave. Some of these
castaways, taking refuge on ridges of mud that stand up amid the waters,
begin to awaken from their passivity, and a striking dialogue ensues
between the sufferers, like the strophe and antistrophe in a Greek
chorus. They are overwhelmed by excess of suffering. Even more are they
overwhelmed, "as if by a yet greater disaster," by the thought that in
days to come the survivors will be able to forget these ills.
"If only people would remember! If they would only remember, there would
be no more wars."
Suddenly, from all sides, rises the cry: "There must never be another
war."
Each in turn heaps insults upon war.
"Two armies fighting each other--that's like one great army committing
suicide."
One suggests, "It's all right if you win." But the others make answer:
"That's no good.--To win settles nothing.--What we need is to kill war."
"Then we shall have to go on fighting after the war?"--"Praps we
shall."--"But praps it won't be foreigners we shall be fighting?"--"May
be so. The peoples are fighting to-day to get rid of their
masters."--"Then one works for the Prussians too?"--"Oh well, we may
hope...."--"But we oughtn't to interfere with other folks'
business."--"Yes, yes, we ought to, for what you call other folks'
business is our own."
"What do people fight for?"--"No one knows what they fight for, but we
know whom they fight for. They fight for the pleasure of the few."
The soldiers reckon up these few: "the fighters, those born to power";
those who say, "the races hate one another"; those who say, "I grow fat
on the war"; those who say, "there always has been war and there always
will be"; those who say, "bow your head, and trust in God"; the
sabre-rattlers, the profiteers, the ghouls who batten on the spoils;
"the slaves of the past, the traditionalists, for whom an abuse has the
force of law because it is of old date."
"Such as these are your enemies quite as much as any of the German
soldiers who now share your wretchedness. The German soldiers are no
more than poor dupes odiously betrayed and brutalised, domesticated
beasts.... But the others are your enemies wherever they were born,
whatever the fashion in which they utter their names, and whatever the
language in which they lie. Look at them in the heavens above and on the
earth beneath! Look at them everywhere! Look well, till you know them,
that you may never forget their faces!"
Such is the wail of these armies. But the book closes with a note of
hope, with the unspoken oath of international brotherhood, what time a
rift forms in the black skies and a calm ray of light falls upon the
flooded plain.
* * * * *
One ray of sunlight does not make the sky clear, nor is the voice of one
soldier the voice of an army. The armies of to-day are nations; and in
such armies, as in every nation, there must doubtless conflict and
mingle many different currents. Barbusse's story is that of a single
squad, almost entirely composed of workers and peasants. But the fact
that among these humble folk, among those who, like the third estate in
'89, are nothing and shall be all,--that in this proletariat of the
armies there is obscurely forming an awareness of universal
humanity,--that so bold a voice can be raised from France,--that those
who are actually fighting can make a heroic effort to ignore environing
wretchedness and imminent death, to dream of the fraternal union of the
warring peoples,--I find in this a greatness which surpasses that of all
the victories, I find something whose poignant splendour will survive
the splendour of battle. I find something which will, I hope, put an end
to war.
_February, 1917._
"Journal de Genève," March 19, 1917.
XVI
AVE, CÆSAR, MORITURI TE SALUTANT
_Dedicated to the Heroic Onlookers in Safe Places._
In one of the scenes of his terrible and admirable book, _Under Fire_, a
record of experiences in the trenches of Picardy, dedicated "To the
memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119,"
Henri Barbusse depicts two privates going on leave to the neighbouring
town. They quit the hell of mud and blood; for months they have been
suffering unnamable tortures of body and mind; they now find themselves
among comfortable bourgeois who, being at a safe distance from the
front, are, of course, bursting with warlike enthusiasm. These
carpet-heroes welcome the two men as if they had just returned from a
wedding feast. No questions are asked concerning what goes on at the
front. The soldiers are told all about it. "It must be splendid, an
attack! These masses of men marching forward as to a revel; there's no
holding them; they die laughing!" All that our poilus can do is to hold
their tongues. One of them says resignedly to his companion: "_They_
know more than you do about war and all that goes on at the front. When
you get back, if you ever do, with your little bit of truth you will be
quite out of it amid that crowd of chatterers."
I do not believe that when the war is over, when all the soldiers have
returned home, they will so readily submit to being put in their places
by these braggarts of the rear. Already the real fighters are beginning
to speak in a singularly bitter and vengeful tone. Barbusse's book bears
powerful witness to the fact.
We have other testimonies from the front, less known but no less moving.
All of those to which I shall refer have been published. It is my rule,
as long as the war lasts, to make no use of personal confidences, oral
or written. Things I have been told by friends, known or unknown, are a
sacred trust. I shall not use them without special permission, nor until
the conditions make it safe. The testimonies I reproduce here have been
published in Paris, under a censorship which is extremely strict in the
case of the few newspapers that have remained independent. This proves
that they describe things that are widely known, things which it is
useless or impossible to conceal.
I leave the authors to speak for themselves. Comment is superfluous. The
tones are sufficiently clear.
* * * * *
Paul Husson, _L'Holocauste_ (a collection entitled _Vers et Prose_,
published by F. Lacroix, 19 rue de Tournon, Paris, January 10,
1917).--This is the note book of a soldier from the Ile de France. The
author "went to the front without enthusiasm, detesting war and devoid
of martial ardour. As a soldier he did what all the others did."
p. 19. "In the name of what superior moral principle are these struggles
imposed on us? Is it for the triumph of a race? What remains of the
glory of Alexander's soldiers or of Cæsar's? To fight, one must have
faith. A man must have faith that he is fighting in God's cause, in the
cause of some great justice; or else he must love war for its own sake.
But we have no faith; we do not love war and we know nothing about it.
Yet men fight and die believing neither in the cause of God nor in the
great justice; men who do not love war, and who die none the less with
their faces to the enemy.... Many, unawakened, go to their deaths
without thinking; but others die with anguish in their hearts, anguish
at the futile sacrifice and at their realisation of the madness of
men."
p. 20. In the trenches. "Everyone was cursing the war, everyone hated
it. Some were saying: 'Frenchmen or Germans, they are men like
ourselves, they suffer as we do in body and in mind. Do not they, too,
dream of the home-coming?' Passing through a village and seeing a man
unfit for service because he had lost two fingers, the soldiers had said
to him: 'You lucky devil; you needn't go to the war!'"
p. 21. "I am not one of those who believe in the coming of Beauty,
Goodness, and Justice.... Nor am I one of those who regild the idols of
the past, symbols of obscure forces which it behoves us to worship in
silence. I am neither submissive nor a believer.--I love Pity, for we
are unfortunates, and it does us good to be solaced, even if we be
executioners and butchers. If we do not need consolation for the ills we
are suffering, we need consolation for the ills we have done or shall
do. We need solace because we have to make others suffer, to kill and be
killed."
p. 22. "Lying prone, while the shells whistle overhead, I think. Die!
Why should we die on this battlefield?... Die for civilisation, for the
freedom of the nations? Words, words, words. We are dying because men
are wild beasts killing one another. We are dying for bales of
merchandise; we are dying for squabbles about money.--Art, civilisation,
and culture are equally beautiful, be they Romance, Teutonic, or Slav.
We should love them all!"
p. 59. "With Baudelaire, we detest the weapons of warriors.... The great
epoch was the one in which we were living before the war. The flapping
of the banners, the long files of soldiers, the roaring of the guns, and
the blare of the bugles--these things cannot inspire us with admiration
for collective murder and for the monstrous enslavement of the
peoples.... Young men lying to-day in your graves, they strew flowers on
your tombs and proclaim you immortal. What to you are empty words? They
will pass even more quickly than you have passed! It is true that, in
any case, within a few years you would have ceased to be. But these few
years of life would have been your universe and your strength."
* * * * *
André Delemer, _Waiting_ (leading article in the fourth issue, dated
March, 1917, of the review "Vivre," edited by André Delemer and Marcel
Millet, 68 boulevard Rochechouart, Paris).
"If the patriarch of Yasnaya Polyana had been granted a few additional
years, superadded to a life already long and full of grief, he would
have shuddered before the tragedy of the younger generations. Tolstoi
was a man of infinite compassion, and his heart would have been torn
with suffering as he contemplated our fate, the fate of those who were
suddenly thrust into this colossal war, those who had proclaimed their
love for life, those whose faith in the future had seemed an infallible
talisman, those who had fervently uttered this great cry of vital
affirmation:
"'To live out our youth'--how poignant is the irony of these words; what
vistas do they suddenly evoke! All the happiness we have failed to
secure, the joys of which we have been deprived, because one evening the
order came to us to shoulder our rifles! In twenty years' time people
will write about what we have suffered, a suffering which may be
compared with the Passion; but we die daily. One galling privilege is
ours, that we have lived through a convulsion, that we have been the
ransom of past errors and a pledge for the tranquillity of the future.
This mission is at once splendid and cruel; simultaneously it exalts and
revolts; for the spasm through which we are passing wounds us and
immolates us!... To-day the poor quivering refuse raked from the furnace
knows all the bitterness of the laurels. Such pride as we retain makes
it impossible for us to accept an illusory and transient glory. We know
the falsity of attitudinising, and we have probed the emptiness of
certain dreams. The fire has licked up the scenery, has reduced the
tinsel to ashes. We are now face to face with ourselves, perhaps more
fully awakened, certainly more sincere and more disillusioned, for we
have secret wounds to heal and great sufferings to lull in the shade!
The passing of the days is like wormwood in the mouth.... How painful
will be the transition, and how numerous will be the waifs! Already a
fresh anguish oppresses our minds; it is this that will afflict when the
day comes for the return of those who are still fighting. Terrible will
be the anguish as we gaze upon the ruins and the dead encumbering the
battlefields! How it will cramp the young wills and annihilate the fine
courage of their souls! Troubled and confused epoch, wherein men will be
doggedly seeking safer roads and less cruel idols!...
"Young man of my generation, it is you of whom I think as I write these
lines, you whom I do not know, though I know that you are still fighting
or that you have returned broken from the trenches. I have met you in
the street, wearing an almost shamefaced air, doing your best to conceal
some infirmity; but in your eyes I have read the intensity of your
inward agony. I know the terrible hours through which you have lived,
and I know that those who have endured like trials end by having like
souls.... I know your doubts; I share your uneasiness. I know how you
are obsessed with the question, 'What next?' You, too, are asking what
can be seen from the heights, and what is going to happen. I understand
your 'What next?'--'To live!' You sing this straight to the hearts of
all of us. 'To live!' You embody the cry of our cruel epoch. I have
heard this cry, simple yet tremendous, from the lips of the wounded who
were aware of the oncoming footsteps of victorious death. I have heard
it in the trenches, murmured low like a prayer.--Young man, this is a
grievous hour. You are a survivor from the ghastly war; your vitality
must affirm itself; you must live. Stripped of all falsehoods, freed
from every mirage, you find yourself alone in your nakedness; before you
stretches the great white road. Onward, the distance beckons. Leave
behind you the old world, and the idols of yesterday. March forward
without turning to listen to the outworn voices of the past!"
* * * * *
In the name of these young men and their brothers who have been
sacrificed in all the lands of the world engaged in mutual slaughter, I
throw these cries of pain in the faces of the sacrificers. May the blood
sting their faces!
"Revue mensuelle," Geneva, May, 1917.
XVII
AVE, CÆSAR ...
THOSE WHO WISH TO LIVE SALUTE THEE
In an earlier article I referred to the writings of certain French
soldiers. After _Under Fire_, by Henri Barbusse, _L'Holocauste_ by Paul
Husson and the poignant meditations of André Delemer gave expression to
their touching and profoundly human cry. In place of the scandalous
idealisations of the war, manufactured far from the front--crude Epinal
images, grotesque and false--they give us the stern face of truth, they
show us the martyrdom of young men slaughtering one another to gratify
the frenzy of criminal elders.
I wish to-day to make known another of these voices, more acerb, more
virile, more vengeful, than the stoical bitterness of Husson and the
despairing tenderness of Delemer. It is that of our friend Maurice
Wullens, editor of "Les Humbles, the literary review of the primary
school teachers."
He was severely wounded, and has just been given the war cross with the
following honourable mention:
"Wullens (Maurice), soldier of the second class in the eighth company of
the seventy-third infantry regiment, a good soldier to whom fear was
unknown, dangerously wounded during the defence, against a superior
force, of a post which had been entrusted to him."
In "demain," for August, 1917, we find the wonderful story of the fight
in which this man was wounded and was then given brotherly help by the
German soldiers. As he lay gasping, in expectation of the death-blow, a
lad leaned over him smiling, holding out a hand, and saying in German,
"Comrade, how do you feel?" And when the wounded man doubted his enemy's
sincerity, the latter went on: "Oh, it's all right, comrade! We'll be
good comrades! Yes, yes, good comrades." The tale is dedicated:
"To my brother, the anonymous Würtemberg soldier who, in Grurie Wood, on
December 30, 1914, withheld his hand when about to slay me, generously
saved my life;
"To the (enemy) friend who, in Darmstadt hospital, cared for me like a
father;
"And to the comrades E., K., and B., who spoke to me as man to man."
* * * * *
This soldier without fear and without reproach, returning to France,
discovered there the braggart army of the scribblers at the rear. Their
venom and their stupidity infuriated him. But instead of taking refuge,
like many of his comrades, in disdainful silence, he did what he had
always done, and turned bravely to the attack upon "a superior force."
In May, 1916, he became editor of a small magazine, entitled "Les
Humbles," but which somewhat belies its name by the ruggedness of its
accents and by its refusal to allow its voice to be stifled. He boldly
declares:
"Emerged from the whirlwind of the war, but still struggling in its
eddies, we do not propose to resign ourselves to the environing
mediocrity, to content ourselves with the servile utterance of official
platitudes.... We are weary of the daily and systematic stuffing of
people's heads with official pabulum.... We have not abdicated any of
our rights, not even our hopes."[37]
Each issue of the magazine was a fresh proof of his independence. At
this juncture, reviews edited by young thinkers were springing up
everywhere from among the ruins. That of Wullens took the leading place,
owing to his force of character and his indomitable frankness.
He found a great friend in Han Ryner, who amid the European barbarians,
amid the prevailing chaos, exhibits the calm of an exiled Socrates.
Gabriel Belot, the engraver, another sage, who, knowing nothing of
mental discord or ill-will, dwells on the Ile St. Louis as if the two
beautiful arms of the Seine sheltered him from the troubles of the
world, lights up the most sombre of articles with the peace of his
radiant designs.[38] Other friends, younger men, soldiers like Wullens,
rallied to support him in the struggle for the truth. For instance,
Marcel Lebarbier, poet and critic.
The most recent issue of "Les Humbles" contains excellent work. Wullens
begins with a tribute to the rare French writers who have shown
themselves during the last three years to be free-spirited humanists: to
Henri Guilbeaux and his periodical "demain";[39] to P. J. Jouve, author
of _Vous êtes des hommes_ and of _Poème contre le grand crime_, whose
sympathetic spirit vibrates and trembles like a tree to the wind of all
the pains and all the angers of mankind; to Marcel Martinet, one of the
greatest lyricists whom the war (the horror of the war) has brought
forth, the writer of _Temps maudits_, a poem which will for ever bear
witness to the suffering and the revolt of a free spirit; to Delemer,
that moving writer; and to a few recently founded magazines. The editor
of "Les Humbles" goes on to clear the ground of what he terms "the false
literary vanguard," telling the chauvinist writers what he thinks of
them. This lettered poilu, a blunt fellow, does not mince matters:
"I have come from this war whose praises you are singing--I who
write.... I have my honourable mention, my war cross: I never wear it. I
spent seven months as a war prisoner, before being sent home
incapacitated by my wound. I could flood you with war anecdotes. I have
no desire to do anything of the kind. Nevertheless I am writing a book
on the war. I compress into it all that my heart has felt, all that one
man has suffered during these months of unspeakable horror, and likewise
all the joy he experienced when he came to perceive, by rare flashes of
light, that humanity still lives, that kindliness still exists, on both
sides of the Rhine, the world over. You, M. B., sing 'The war in which
it is beautiful and sweet to die for our country!' All those who have
faced this death will tell you that while it may have been necessary, it
was neither beautiful nor sweet.--You glorify the sublime and tattered
tricolour: blue is the blouse of our workmen; white is the cornette of
our splendid sisters of charity.... You will excuse me for cutting you
short before coming to the red, for my unaided memory here suffices me:
the red blood of my wounds flowing and clotting on the frozen mud of
Argonne that terrible morning in December, 1914; the red mud of
pestilential slaughter-houses; the shattered heads of dead comrades;
mangled stumps irrigated with peroxide solution so that the living
corruption was half hidden by bloodstained foam; red visions glimpsed
everywhere in these ghastly and tragical days, you chase one another
through the mind tumultuous and hateful. Like the poet, I would fain
say, 'A very little more and my heart would break!'"
To bring his philippic to a close he quotes another soldier-author, G.
Thuriot-Franchi, who, in the same fighting style, with no pretty phrases
and with no concealments, compels these Hectors of the study to swallow
their boasts:[40]
"Men who are too young or too old, poets in pyjamas, jealous doubtless
of the strategists in slippers, regard it as their duty to be lavish in
patriotic song. The trumpets of rhetoric blare; invective has become the
chosen method of argument; a thousand blue-stockings, under cover of the
Red Cross, when one chats with them out strolling, make a parade of
spartan sentiments, amazonian impulses. Whence the plethora of sonnets,
odes, stanzas, etc., in which, to speak the jargon of the ordinary
critic 'the most exquisite sensibility is happily wedded to the purest
patriotism.'--For God's sake leave us alone; you know nothing about it;
shut up!"
Thus does a soldier from the front imperiously impose silence upon the
false warriors of the rear. If they are fond of the "poilu" style, they
will find plenty of it here. Those who have just been looking death in
the face have certainly earned the right to speak the plain truth to
these "amateurs" of death--the death of others.
"Revue mensuelle," Geneva, October, 1917.
XVIII
MEN IN BATTLE[41]
[_THE MAN OF SORROWS_]
Art is stained with blood. French blood, German blood, it is always the
Man of Sorrows. Yesterday we were listening to the sublime and gloomy
plaint which breathes from Barbusse's _Under Fire_. To-day come the yet
more heartrending accents of _Menschen im Krieg_ (Men in Battle).
Although they hail from the other camp, I will wager that most of our
bellicose readers in France and Navarre will flee from them with stopped
ears. For these tones would be a shock to their sensibilities.
_Under Fire_ is more tolerable to these carpet-warriors. There reigns
over Barbusse's book a specious impersonality. Despite the multitude and
the sharp outline of the figures on his stage, not one of them has a
commanding role. We see no hero of romance. Consequently, the reader
feels less intimately associated with the hardships recounted on every
page; and these hardships, like their causes, have an elemental
character. The immensity of the fate which crushes, lessens the agony of
those who are crushed. This war fresco resembles the vision of a
universal deluge. The human masses execrate the scourge, but accept it
passively. _Under Fire_ growls forth a threat for the future, but has no
menace for the present. Settling-day is postponed until after peace has
been signed.
In _Men in Battle_, the court is sitting; mankind is in the witness-box,
giving testimony against the butchers. Mankind? Not so. A few men, a few
chance victims, whose sufferings, since they are individual, appeal to
us more strongly than those of the crowd. We follow the ravages these
sufferings make in tortured body and lacerated heart; we wed these
sufferings; they become our own. Nor does the witness strain after
objectivity. He is the impassioned pleader who, just delivered panting
from the rack, cries for vengeance. The writer of the book now under
review is newly come from hell; he gasps for breath; his visions chase
him; pain's claws have left their mark upon him. Andreas Latzko[42]
will, in future days, keep his place in the first rank among the
witnesses who have left a truthful record of Man's Passion during 1914,
the year of shame.
* * * * *
The work is written in the form of six separate stories, united only by
a common sentiment of suffering and revolt. There is no logical plan in
the arrangement of the six war episodes. The first is entitled "Off to
War"; the last, "Home Again." Between, we have "Baptism of Fire," a
picture of wounded men; and "A Hero's Death." The centre piece is
devoted to "The Victor," the great general, the master of the feast, the
responsible and beflattered chief. In the last three stories, physical
pain exposes its hideous countenance like that of Medusa mutilated. The
two opening stories deal with mental pain. The hero of the centre piece
sees neither the one nor the other; his glory is throned on both; he
finds life good, and war even better. From the first page to the last,
revolt mutters. But on the last page revolt culminates in a murder; a
soldier, back from the front, kills a war profiteer.
I give an analysis of the six stories.
"Off to War" (Der Abmarsch) has for its scene the garden of a war
hospital in a quiet little Austrian town thirty miles from the front. It
is an evening late in autumn. The tattoo has just sounded. All is quiet.
From afar comes the sound of heavy guns, as if huge dogs were baying
underground. Some young wounded officers are enjoying the peace of the
evening. Three of them are talking gaily with two ladies. The fourth, a
Landsturm lieutenant, in civil life a well-known composer, sits gloomily
apart. He has had a severe nervous shock, and is utterly prostrated, so
that not even the arrival of his fair young wife enables him to pull
himself together. When she speaks to him, he is unmoved. When she tries
to touch him, he draws irritably away. She suffers, and cannot
understand his enmity. The other woman takes the lead in the
conversation. She is a Frau Major, a major's wife, who spends all her
time at the hospital and has acquired there "a peculiar, garrulous
cold-bloodedness." She is surfeited with horrors; her endless curiosity
gives the impression of hardness and hysterical cruelty. The men are
discussing, what is "the finest thing" in the war. According to one of
them the finest thing is to find oneself, as this evening, in women's
company.
"....For five months to see nothing but men--and then all of a sudden to
hear a dear woman's clear voice! That's the finest thing of all. It's
worth going to war for."
One of the others rejoins that the finest thing is to have a bath, a
clean bandage, to get into a nice white bed, to know that for a few
weeks you are going to have a rest. Number three says:
"The finest thing of all, I think, is the quiet--when you've been lying
up there in the mountains where every shot is echoed five times, and all
of a sudden it turns absolutely quiet, no whistling, no howling, no
thundering--nothing but a glorious quiet that you can listen to as to a
piece of music! The first few nights I sat up the whole time and kept my
ears cocked for the quiet, the way you try to catch a tune at a
distance. I believe I even shed a tear or two--it was so delightful to
listen to no sound."
The three young men tease the last speaker good-naturedly, and they all
laugh together. Every one of them is intoxicated by the peace of the
sleeping town and the autumn garden. Every one of them wants to make the
most of his time, to lose nothing, "to take everything easily with his
eyes tight shut, like a child before it enters a dark room."
Now the Frau Major breaks in, breathing more quickly as she speaks:
"...But, tell me, what was the most awful thing you went through out
there?"
The men purse up their lips. This theme does not enter into their
program. Suddenly a strident voice speaks out of the darkness:
"Awful? The only awful thing is the going off. You go off to war--and
they let you go. That's the awful thing."
A glacial silence follows. The Frau Major makes a bolt for it, to escape
hearing the sequel. On the pretext that she has got to get back into the
town, and that the last tram is just leaving, she takes with her the
unhappy little wife, to whom the husband's words have come as a veiled
reproach. The officers are left alone, and one of them, hoping to change
the current of thought in the sick man's mind, passes a friendly
compliment upon the wife's appearance. The other springs to his feet and
says in a fury: "Chic wife? Oh, yes. Very dashing!... She didn't shed a
tear when I left on the train. Oh, they were all very dashing when we
went off. Poor Dill's wife was, too. Very plucky. She threw roses at him
in the train, and she'd been his wife for only two months.... Roses! He,
he! 'See you soon again!' They were all so patriotic!..."
He goes on to recount what happened to Dill. Poor Dill was showing to
his comrades the new photograph his wife had sent him, when an exploding
shell sent a boot flying against his head. In the boot was the leg of a
cavalryman who had been blown to pieces many yards away. On the boot was
a great spur which stuck into Dill's brain. It took four of them to
pull the boot out, and a piece of brain came away with the spur, looking
"just like a grey jellyfish." One of the officers, horrified by the
tale, rushed away for the doctor. The latter, on arrival, tried to coax
the sick man to go in:
"You must go to bed now, Lieutenant...."
"Must go, of course," repeated the lieutenant emphatically, heaving a
profound sigh. "We must all go. The man who doesn't go is a coward, and
they have no use for a coward. That's how it is. Don't you understand?
Heroes are in fashion now. The chic Madame Dill wanted a hero to match
her new hat. Ha, ha! That's why poor Dill had to have his brains
spilled. I must go; you must go; we must all go to die.... The women
look on, plucky, because that's the fashion now...."
He gazed round questioningly.
"Isn't it sad?" he asked softly. Then, in a fury once more, he cried:
"Weren't they humbugging us?... Was I an assassin? Was I a swashbuckler?
Didn't I suit her when I sat at the piano playing? We were expected to
be gentle and considerate! Considerate! And all at once, because the
fashion changed, they wanted us to be murderers. Do you understand?
Murderers!"
Speaking now in a lower tone, he went on plaintively:
"My wife was in the fashion too, of course. Not a tear! I kept waiting,
waiting for her to begin to weep, to beg me to get out of the train, not
to go with the others--beg me to be a coward for her sake. But none of
them had the pluck to do that. They all wanted to be in the fashion.
Mine too! Mine too! She waved her handkerchief, just like the others."
His twitching arms writhed upwards, as though he were calling the
heavens to witness.
"You want to know what was the most awful thing? The disillusionment was
the most awful thing--the going off. The war wasn't. The war is what it
has to be. Did it surprise you to find out that war is horrible? The
only surprising thing was the going off. To find out that women are
cruel--that was the surprising thing. That they can smile and throw
roses; that they can give up their husbands, their children, the little
boys they have put to bed a thousand times, tucked up a thousand times,
have fondled, have created from their own flesh and blood. That was the
surprise. That they gave us up--that they sent us--actually sent us. For
every one of them would have been ashamed to stand there without a hero.
That was the great disillusionment.... Do you think we should have gone
if they had not sent us? Do you think so?... No general could have done
anything if the women hadn't allowed us to be packed into the trains, if
they had screamed out that they would never look at us again if we
became murderers. Not a man would have gone if they had sworn never to
give themselves to one who had split open other men's skulls or shot and
bayoneted his fellows. Not one man, I tell you, would have gone. I
didn't want to believe that they could stand it like that. 'They're only
pretending,' I thought. 'They're just holding themselves in. But when
the whistle blows they'll begin to scream, and tear us out of the train,
and rescue us.' That one time they had the chance to protect us. But all
they cared about was to be in the fashion!..."
He broke down, and collapsed once more on to the bench. He began to
weep. A little circle of people had formed round him. The doctor said
gently:
"Come, come, Lieutenant, let's get along to bed. Women are like that,
you know, and we can't help it."
The sick man leapt to his feet in a rage.
"Women are like that? Women are like that? Since when? Since when? Have
you never heard of the suffragettes who boxed the ears of ministers of
state, who set museums on fire, who chained themselves to lamp-posts,
all for the sake of the vote? For the sake of the vote, do you hear? But
for the sake of their men? Nothing!"
He paused to take breath, overwhelmed with a throttling despair. Then,
fighting with sobs, like a hunted beast, he cried out:
"Have you heard of one woman throwing herself in front of the train for
the sake of her husband? Has a single one of them slapped a statesman's
face, or tied herself to the railway lines, for our sake? Not one has
had to be saved from such desperate courses.... The whole world over,
not one of them has moved a finger for us. They drove us forth! They
gagged us! They gave us the spur, like poor Dill. They sent us to
murder, they sent us to die--for their vanity. Are you going to defend
them? No! They must be plucked out. Like weeds, they must be torn up by
the roots! You must pull four at a time, as we had to do with Dill. Four
of you together, then you'll get her up. Are you the doctor? There! Do
it to my head! I don't want a wife! Pull--pull her out!"
He struck himself on the head with his fist. He was dragged into the
house, howling at the top of his voice. Soon the garden was empty. By
degrees the lights were extinguished and the noise was stilled, except
for the distant artillery fire. The patrol which had helped to take the
madman back into the hospital repassed, with the old corporal in the
rear, hanging his head. From afar off came the flash of an explosion,
followed by a prolonged rumbling. The old man stood still, listened,
shook his fist, spat disgustedly, and muttered:
"Oh, Hell!"
I have given lengthy extracts from this story, for I wished to convey a
notion of the author's pulsating, vibrant, and impassioned style. There
is more of the drama here than of the novel, and an elemental fierceness
like that of Shakespearean drama. It would be well if these pages, so
profound in the bitterness of their injustice, were to become widely
known. It would be well if the poor women who, in all love as a rule,
adopt a superhuman pose, could be made to realise, by means of this
madman's outpourings, the secret thoughts which no man will dare to tell
them, to understand the mute and almost shamefaced appeal to their poor
human kindliness, to their simple and motherly compassion.
* * * * *
I shall deal more briefly with the other episodes.
The second, "Baptism of Fire" (Feuertaufe), is long, perhaps too long,
but full of pity and of pain. Almost the whole scene is played within
the soul of Captain Marschner, a man of fifty, who is leading his
company to the front-line trench under the enemy's fire. He is not a
professional soldier. As a young man he had been an officer, but at the
age of thirty he had gone to school again, wishing to quit the trade of
war and to become a civil engineer. Now the war had brought him back to
the army. He had been in Vienna only the day before yesterday. His men
were fathers of families, stonemasons, peasants, factory hands, and so
on. None of them had any patriotic enthusiasm. He read their minds, and
felt ashamed of himself because he was leading to certain death these
poor fellows who trusted him. Beside him marched Weixler, a young
lieutenant, cold, ruthless, inhuman--as one so often is at twenty years
of age "when one has had no time yet to learn the value of life." The
hardness of this man (an irreproachable officer) arouses in Marschner
mingled anger and suffering. By degrees a fierce but unspoken feud
arises between them. At the very end, just when open war is about to
break out between the two, a huge shell bursts in their trench and both
are buried under the wreckage. The captain comes to himself with a
shattered skull. At a few paces' distance lies the implacable
lieutenant, his entrails trailing on the ground beside him. They
exchange a last look. Marschner sees a face that is almost strange to
him, pale and sad, with timid eyes. The whole expression is gentle and
plaintive; there is an unforgettable air of tender, anxious resignation.
"He is suffering!" flashed through the captain's mind. "He is
suffering!" Marschner is transported with joy. And therewith he dies.
"My Comrade" (Der Kamarad) is the diary of a soldier in hospital. This
man has been driven mad by the terrible sights at the front, and above
all by the vision of a wounded man in the death agony, a poor wretch
whose face had been torn away by a grapnel. The sight was seared upon
his brain. The image never left him by day or by night. It sat down
beside him at meals; went to bed with him; got up with him in the
morning. It had become "My Comrade." The description is positively
hallucinating, and this story contains some of the most forceful
passages in the book, directed against the warmongers and against the
humbugs of the press.
"A Hero's Death" (Heldentod) describes the death in hospital of First
Lieutenant Otto Kadar. He has a fractured skull. While the regimental
officers were listening to a gramophone playing the Rakoczy march, a
bomb exploded among them. The dying man never stops talking of the
Rakoczy march. He imagines that he is looking at the corpse of a young
officer whose head has been carried away, and in place of the head,
screwed into the neck, is the gramophone disc. In his growing delirium,
he fancies that the same thing has happened to all the common soldiers,
to all the officers, to himself; that in each one the head has been
replaced by a gramophone disc. That is why it is so easy to lead them to
the slaughter. The dying man makes a frantic effort to tear away the
disc from his own neck, and as he does so all is over. The old major
looking on says in a voice vibrating with respect: "He died like a true
Hungarian--singing the Rakoczy march."
"Home Again" (Heimkehr) tells of the homecoming of Johann Bogdan, who
had been the handsomest man in his native village. He returns from the
war hopelessly disfigured. In hospital his face has been remade for him
by means of a number of plastic operations. But when he looks at himself
in the glass he is horror-stricken. No one in the village recognises
him. The only exception is a hunchback whom he had looked on with
contempt, and who now greets him familiarly. The countryside has been
transformed by the building of a munition factory. Marcsa, Bogdan's
betrothed, works there, and has become the factory owner's mistress.
Bogdan sees red, and stabs the man, to be struck down dead himself a
moment later.--In this story the growth of the revolutionary spirit is
manifest. Bogdan, a dull conservative by nature, is inspired with it
against his will. We have a threatening vision of the return of the
soldiers from all the armies, and of how they will take vengeance upon
those who sent others to death while remaining at home to enjoy life and
to grow rich by speculation.
I have kept the third story to the last, for it contrasts with the
others by the sobriety of its emotion. It is entitled "The Victor" (Der
Sieger). In the other episodes, the tragic element is nude and bleeding.
Here tragedy is veiled with irony, and is all the more formidable.
Revolt simmers beneath the calm words; the butchers are pilloried by the
bitter satire.
The victor is His Excellency the Commander-in-Chief, the renowned
Generalissimo X., universally known in the press as "The Victor of * *
*." He is there in all his glory, in the principal square of the town
which is now the military headquarters. Here he is absolute master. Here
there is nothing which he cannot do or undo at his will. The band is
playing, on a fine autumn afternoon. His Excellency sits out of doors in
front of a café, amid smart officers and elegantly dressed ladies. It is
nearly forty miles from the front. Strict orders have been given that no
wounded or convalescent soldier, or any man whose appearance might have
a depressing effect on the general war enthusiasm or might trouble the
comfort of those who are at ease, shall be allowed out of hospital. We
are told how much His Excellency is enjoying himself. He finds the war
splendid. People have never had a jollier time. "Did you notice the
young fellows back from the front? Sunburnt, healthy, happy!... I assure
you the world has never been so healthy as it is now." The whole company
chimes in to celebrate the beneficial effects of the war. His Excellency
meditates upon his good luck, his titles, his decorations, harvested in
a single year of war, after he had vegetated for nine-and-thirty years
in peace and mediocrity. It has been a perfect miracle. He is now a
national hero. He has his motor, his country mansion, his chef, delicate
fare, a lordly retinue of servants--and he has not to pay a penny for
it. Only one thing troubles his reflections, the thought that the whole
fairy tale may vanish as suddenly as it came, and that he may relapse
into obscurity. What if the enemy were to break through? But he
reassures himself. All is going well. The great enemy offensive, which
has been expected for the last three months, and which actually began
twenty-four hours ago, hurls itself vainly against a wall of iron. "The
human reservoir is full to overflowing. Two hundred thousand young
stalwarts of exactly the right age are ready to be caught up in the
whirl of the dance, until they sink in a marish of blood and bones." His
Excellency's agreeable reverie is interrupted by an aide-de-camp, who
informs him that the correspondent of an influential foreign newspaper
has requested an interview. This scene is brilliantly described. The
general does not allow the journalist to get a word in. He has his
speech ready:
"He delivered it now, speaking with emphasis, and pausing occasionally
to recall what came next. First of all, he referred to his gallant
soldiers, lauding their courage, their contempt for death, their doings
glorious beyond description. He went on to express regret that it was
impossible to reward all these heroes according to their deserts.
Raising his voice, he invoked the fatherland's eternal gratitude for
such loyalty and self-renunciation even unto death. Pointing to the
heavy crop of medals on his chest, he explained that the distinctions
conferred on him were really a tribute to his men. Finally he interwove
a few well-chosen remarks anent the military calibre of the enemy and
the skilled generalship displayed by the other side. His last words
conveyed his inviolable confidence in ultimate victory."
When the oration was finished, the general became the man of the world.
"You are going to the front now?" he asked with a courteous smile, and
responded to the journalist's enthusiastic "yes" with a melancholy sigh.
"Lucky man! I envy you. You see, the tragedy in the life of the modern
general is that he cannot lead his men personally into the fray. He
spends his whole life making ready for war; he is a soldier in body and
mind, and yet he knows the excitement of battle only from hearsay."
Of course the correspondent is delighted that he will be able to depict
this all-powerful warrior in the sympathetic role of renunciation.
The agreeable scene is disturbed by the intrusion of an infantry captain
who is out of his mind and has escaped from hospital. His Excellency,
though in a towering rage, controls his temper for the sake of
appearances, and has the inconvenient visitor sent back in his own car.
He turns the incident to account by uttering a few touching phrases
concerning the impossibility for a general to do his duty if he had to
witness all the misery at the front. He evades the correspondent's final
question, "When does Your Excellency hope for peace?" by pointing across
the square to the old cathedral, saying, "The only advice I can give you
is to go over there and ask our Heavenly Father. No one else can answer
that question."--Then His Excellency descends upon the hospital like a
whirlwind, blusters at the old staff-surgeon, and reiterates the order
to keep all the patients safely under lock and key. His wrath by now is
slightly assuaged, but it is revived by a message from the front. A
brigadier-general reports terrible losses, and declares that he cannot
hold the line without reinforcements. It was part of His Excellency's
plan that this brigade should be wiped out, after resisting the attack
as long as possible. But he is angry that his victims should have any
advice to offer, and sends curt orders, "The sector is to be held."--At
length, the day's work being over, the great man drives home in his
motor, still fiercely excogitating the correspondent's idiotic question,
"When does Your Excellency hope for peace?"
"Hope!... How tactless!... Hope for peace! What good has a general to
expect from peace? Could not this civilian understand that a
commander-in-chief is only a commander-in-chief in war-time, and that in
peace-time he is nothing more than a professor with a collar of gold
braid?"
The general is annoyed once more when the car pulls up because it is
necessary to close the hood on account of the rain. But during the pause
His Excellency hears the sound of distant firing. His eyes
brighten.--Thank God, there was still war.
* * * * *
My quotations have been enough to show the emotional force and the
trenchant irony of Latzko's book. It scorches. It is a torch of
suffering and revolt. Both its merits and its defects are sib to this
frenzy. The author is master of the writer's art, but he is not always
master of his own feelings. His memories are still open wounds. He is
possessed by his visions. His nerves vibrate like violin strings. Almost
without exception, his analyses of emotion are tremulous monologues. His
shattered spirit cannot find repose.
Doubtless he will be criticised for the preponderant place assumed in
his book by physical pain. The work is full of it. Pain monopolises the
reader's mind and wearies his eyes. Not until we have read _Men in
Battle_ do we fully appreciate Barbusse's chariness in the use of
material effects. If Latzko is persistent in their employment, this is
not merely because he is haunted by memories of pain. He wishes,
deliberately wishes, to communicate these impressions to others, for he
has suffered greatly from others' insensibility.
In very truth, such insensibility has been the saddest of all our
experiences during this war. We knew man to be stupid, mediocre,
selfish: we knew that on occasions man could be extremely cruel. But
though we had few illusions, we had never believed that man could
remain so monstrously indifferent to the cries of millions of victims.
We had never believed that there could be a smile such as we have
witnessed upon the lips of the young fanatics and of the old demoniacs
who, from their safe seats, are never weary of looking on at the mutual
slaughter of the nations, of those who kill one another for the
pleasure, the pride, the ideas, and the interests of the onlookers. All
the rest, all the crimes, we can tolerate; but this aridity of soul is
the worst of all, and we feel that Latzko has been overwhelmed by it.
Like one of his own characters, who is regarded as a sick man because he
cannot forget the sufferings he has witnessed, Latzko cries to the
apathetic public:
"Sick!... No! It is the others that are sick. They are sick who gloat
over news of victories and see conquered miles of territory arise
resplendent above mountains of corpses. They are sick who stretch a
barrier of many-coloured bunting between themselves and their better
feelings, lest they should see what crimes are being committed against
their brothers in the beyond that they call 'the front.' Every man is
sick who can still think, talk, argue, sleep, knowing that other men,
holding their own entrails in their hands, are crawling like
half-crushed worms across the furrows in the fields, and are dying like
animals before they can reach the ambulance station, while somewhere,
far away, a woman with longing in her heart is dreaming beside an empty
bed. All those are sick who fail to hear the moaning, the gnashing of
teeth, the howling, the crashing and bursting, the wailing and cursing
and agonising in death, because their ears are filled with the murmur of
everyday affairs. These blind and deaf ones are sick, not I. Sick are
those dumb beings whose soul can give voice neither to compassion nor to
anger...." ("My Comrade").
The author's aim is to arouse these sick beings from their torpor, to
treat them with the actual cautery of pain. This aim is portrayed in the
person of Captain Marschner ("Baptism of Fire"), who, when his company
is in the thick of the slaughter, suffers from nothing so intensely as
from the harsh impassivity of his lieutenant, but who, himself at the
point of death, finds it a positive solace to see on Weixler's stern
face a shadow of pain, brotherly pain.
"Thank God," he thinks. "At last he knows what suffering is!"
"Through sympathy to knowledge," sings the mystical chorus of
_Parsifal_.
This "suffering with others" (sympathy, Mitleid), this "pain which
unites," overflows from the work of Andreas Latzko.
_November 15, 1917._
"Les Tablettes," Geneva, December, 1917.
XIX
VOX CLAMANTIS....[43]
After the glacial torpor of the early days of the war, mutilated art
begins to bloom anew. The irrepressible song of the soul wells up out of
suffering. Man is not merely, as he is apt to boast, a reasoning animal
(he might, with better ground, term himself an unreasoning one); he is a
singing animal; he can no more get on without singing than without
bread. We learn it amid the very trials through which we are passing
to-day. Although the general suppression of liberty in Europe has
doubtless deprived us of the deeper music, of the most intimate
confessions, we nevertheless hear great voices rising from every land.
Some of these, coming from the armies, sing in sad and epic strains.
See, for example, _Under Fire_ by Henri Barbusse, and the heart-rending
tales issued by Andreas Latzko under the collective title of _Men in
Battle_. Others express the pain and horror of those who, remaining at
home, look on at the butchery without taking part in it, and who, being
inactive, suffer all the more from the torments of thought. To this
category belong the impassioned poems of Marcel Martinet[44] and P. J.
Jouve.[45] Paying less attention to suffering and more concerned with
understanding, the English novelists, H. G. Wells[46] and Douglas
Goldring,[47] give a faithful analysis of the distressing errors amid
which they move and which they themselves by no means escape. Yet
others, finally, taking refuge in the contemplation of the past,
rediscover there the same circle of misfortunes and of hopes--rediscover
the "eternal cycle." They cloak their grief in the fashions of other
days, thus ennobling it and despoiling it of its poisoned dart. From the
lofty eyrie of the ages, set free by art, the soul contemplates
suffering as in a vision, no longer aware whether that suffering belongs
to the present or to the past. Stefan Zweig's _Jeremias_ is the finest
contemporary specimen known to me of this august melancholy which,
looking beyond the bloody drama of to-day, is able to see in it the
eternal tragedy of mankind.
Not without struggle can such serene regions be attained.
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