4
Incidents such as these would pass unperceived if one did not take the trouble to seek them out and to collect them piously amid the huge mass of tragedies which for more than four years upset and ravaged the unhappy country tortured by its invaders. Had they occurred in the history of Greece or Rome, they would have found a place among the great deeds that honour our earth and deserve to live for ever in the memory of man. It is our duty to make them known for a moment and to engrave in our recollection the names of those who were their heroes. Thus set down, simply and plainly, as befits historic truth, in depositions sworn under oath before a nameless registrar who has stripped them of any literary or sentimental embellishment, they give at first but a very faint idea of the intensity of the tragedy and the value of the sacrifice. There is here no question of a glorious death faced amid the excitement of the fighting, on a vast field of battle. Nor are we considering an indefinite or overhanging menace, or an uncertain, remote and perhaps avoidable danger. We have to do with an obscure, solitary, horrible and imminent death in a ditch; and the six rifle-barrels are there, aimed almost point-blank, ready, upon a sign of the officer who accepts your offer, to change you, in a second, into a heap of bleeding flesh and to send you to the unknown, terrible region which man dreads all the more when he is still full of strength and life. There is not a moment’s interval nor a gleam of hope between question and answer, between existence with all its joys and death with all its horrors. There is no encouragement, no word or gesture of stimulation or support, no reward; in an instant, all is given in exchange for nothing; it is sheer self-sacrifice standing naked and so pure that we are surprised that not even Germans were conquered by its beauty.
There was but one manner in which they could have extricated themselves without dishonour and that was to pardon the two victims; or else, supposing the thing which was not, which never is the case, that a death was absolutely necessary, there was a second solution, which was to accept the offer and to kill the martyr whom they ought to have worshipped on their knees. In this way they would only have acted as the worst of savages. But they discovered a third, which doubtless, before them, the Carthaginians alone would have invented and adopted. For that matter, they exceeded the fiercest savagery and equalled the abominable Punic morality in another case which brings to mind that of Regulus and which will be the third instance of heroism that I intend to recall.