A cold rage filled me. I vented it on poor Guillaumin to begin with. He was on the point of returning to the subject of his Champagne and his Flanders.... One would have thought they belonged to him and that someone wanted to pick his pocket of them!
None of that! I shut him up, and told him what an ass I thought him. The dull resentment which had been heaped up in me by these first days of subjection, rose up from the depths of my being. And I did not stop at that; my egoism and the anarchism of my bad days rebelled.
I suddenly announced that I hoped the socialistic agitations would come to something.
"What agitations?" Guillaumin asked.
"Oh!" I said. "They were keeping quiet on the subject, by order! but they existed, could not help existing in spite of certain recantations. Would they smother the peoples' poignant cry for peace at any price, much longer? War on the War!" Following up the bold refrain, I asserted that I should like to see the workmen who had been called up, fire their first shots at the instigators of the catastrophe, all these statesmen, generals, and financiers of both countries, who were driving two peaceful nations to the slaughter! As if all the political and economic interests in the world were worth this massacre of innocents!
I went further—or lower. I blush when I remember to what degrading lengths I allowed myself to go. If our neighbours were really so passionately anxious for the expansion of their "Kultur" as Fortin had said they were, did he, Guillaumin, know what remained to be done? Simply fold our arms and wait for them. They would not devour us, or at least not all of us! We should be invaded? And then? Annexed? What a misfortune that would be to be sure! There would be no more France? Well, if she had to disappear, why not to-morrow, just as well as in a hundred years!... All these tales of separate races, and of native lands were simply the patter of disastrous phrase-makers.... Let all those who believed them go and get killed for them. There could be nothing more just! To the frontier with the enthusiasts, the convinced—the imbeciles—who could not bear the idea of changing their names. But as for us, for me, who did not care a blow about it all...!
"Talk away!" said Guillaumin.
"What?"
"You won't take me in!"
"How do you mean?"