“The tragedy of the Great War—a tragedy which enhances the desolation of Rheims—is that it should have killed almost everything which the best of our soldiers died to preserve, and that it should have raised more problems than it has solved.
“We would sacrifice a dozen cathedrals to preserve what the war has destroyed in England.... We would readily surrender our ten best cathedrals to be battered by the artillery of Hindenburg as a ransom. Surely it would be better to lose Westminster Abbey than never again to have anybody worthy to be buried there.”[116]
Europe is, indeed, passing through the most critical spiritual phase of the war’s aftermath—what I may term the zero hour of the spirit. When the trenches used to fill with infantry waiting in the first cold flicker of the dawn for the signal to go “over the top,” they called it the “zero hour.” Well, Europe now faces the zero hour of peace. It is neither a pleasant nor a stimulating moment. The “tumult and the shouting” have died. The captains, kings—and presidents—have departed. War’s hectic urge wanes, losses are counted, the heroic pose is dropped. Such is the moment when the peoples are bidden to go “over the top” once more, this time toward peace objectives no less difficult than those of the battle-field. Weakened, tired Europe knows this, feels this—and dreads the plunge into the unknown. Hence the malaise of the zero hour.
The extraordinary turmoil of the European soul is strikingly set forth by the French thinker Paul Valéry.
“We civilizations,” he writes, “now know that we are mortal. We had heard tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires gone to the bottom with all their engines; sunk to the inexplorable bottom of the centuries with their gods and their laws, their academies, their science, pure and applied; their grammars, their dictionaries, their classics, their romantics and their symbolists, their critics and their critics’ critics. We knew well that all the apparent earth is made of ashes, and that ashes have a meaning. We perceived, through the mists of history, phantoms and huge ships laden with riches and spiritual things. We could not count them. But these wrecks, after all, were no concern of ours.
“Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were vague and lovely names, and the total ruin of these worlds meant as little to us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia—these would also be lovely names. Lusitania also is a lovely name. And now we see that the abyss of history is large enough for every one. We feel that a civilization is as fragile as a life. Circumstances which would send the works of Baudelaire and Keats to rejoin the works of Menander are no longer in the least inconceivable; they are in all the newspapers....
“Thus the spiritual Persepolis is ravaged equally with the material Susa. All is not lost, but everything has felt itself perish.
“An extraordinary tremor has run through the spinal marrow of Europe. It has felt, in all its thinking substance, that it recognized itself no longer, that it no longer resembled itself, that it was about to lose consciousness—a consciousness acquired by centuries of tolerable disasters, by thousands of men of the first rank, by geographical, racial, historical chances innumerable....
“The military crisis is perhaps at an end; the economic crisis is visibly at its zenith; but the intellectual crisis—it is with difficulty that we can seize its true centre, its exact phase. The facts, however, are clear and pitiless: there are thousands of young writers and young artists who are dead. There is the lost illusion of a European culture, and the demonstration of the impotence of knowledge to save anything whatever; there is science, mortally wounded in its moral ambitions, and, as it were, dishonored by its applications; there is idealism, victor with difficulty, grievously mutilated, responsible for its dreams; realism, deceived, beaten, with crimes and misdeeds heaped upon it; covetousness and renunciation equally put out; religions confused among the armies, cross against cross, crescent against crescent; there are the sceptics themselves, disconcerted by events so sudden, so violent, and so moving, which play with our thoughts as a cat with a mouse—the sceptics lose their doubts, rediscover them, lose them again, and can no longer make use of the movements of their minds.
“The rolling of the ship has been so heavy that at the last the best-hung lamps have been upset.