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IN the admirable and touching pages in which Octave Mirbeau bequeaths his last thoughts to us, the great friend whose loss is mourned by all who in this world hunger and thirst after justice expresses his surprise at finding how in the supreme moments of its life the collective soul of the French nation differs from the soul of each of the individuals of which it is composed.
He had devoted the best part of his work to examining, dissecting, presenting in a blinding and sometimes unbearable light and stigmatizing with unequalled eloquence and bitterness the weaknesses and selfishness, the folly and meannesses, the vanity and sordid money-sense, the lack of conscience, honesty, charity, dignity, the shameful stains on the life of his fellow-countrymen. And behold, in the hour of insistent duty, there arises suddenly, as in a fairy scene, out of the quagmire which he had so long stirred with rough and generous disgust, the purest, noblest, most patient, fraternal and whole-hearted spirit of heroism and sacrifice that the world has ever known, not only in the most glorious days of its history, but even in the time of its most romantic legends, which were but glorious dreams which it never hoped to realize.
I could say as much of another nation, which I know well, since it lives in the land where I was born. The Belgians, in the guise in which we saw them daily, appeared to give us no promise of a noble soul. They seemed to us narrow and limited, a little commonplace, honest in a mean, inglorious way, without ideals or generous aspirations, wholly absorbed by their petty material welfare, their petty local wrangles. Yet, when the same hour of duty sounded for them, more menacing and formidable than those of the other nations, because it preceded all of them in a terrible mystery; while there was everything to gain and nothing to lose, save honour, if they proved faithless to a plighted word; at the first call of their conscience aroused as by a thunderbolt, without hesitating or glancing at what they had to meet or undergo, with an unanimous and irresistible impulse, they astonished mankind by a decision such as no other people had ever taken and saved the world, well knowing that themselves could not be saved. And this assuredly is the noblest sacrifice that the heroes and martyrs who have hitherto appeared to be the professed exponents of sublime courage are able to achieve upon this earth of ours.
On the other hand, to those of us who had had occasion to mix with Germans, who had lived in Germany and believed that they knew German manners and letters, it seemed beyond doubt that the Bavarians, Saxons, Hanoverians and Rhinelanders, notwithstanding some defects of education rather than character which grated upon us a little, also possessed certain qualities, notably a genial kindness, a gravity, a laboriousness, a steadiness, an uncomplaining temper, a simplicity in their domestic life, a sense of duty and a habit of taking life conscientiously, which we had never known or had succeeded in losing. So, despite the warnings of history, we were struck dumb with amazement and at first refused to believe the early tales of atrocities which were not incidental, as in every war, but deliberate, premeditated, systematic and perpetrated with a light heart by an entire people setting itself of sober purpose and with a sort of perverse pride outside the pale of humanity, transforming itself of a sudden into a pack of devils more formidable and destructive than all those which Hell had hitherto belched forth into our world.