His words echoed in my ears, his "Not much!" I was suddenly seized with fury against him—the coward!—a fury which was almost immediately turned against myself. Was it not his conduct that was logical. He refused to sacrifice himself. He coldly applied his Doctrine, our Doctrine, of calm selfishness. I fumed to see this shopkeeper, this table d'hôte philosopher, superior in practical wisdom to myself, when I had ruminated my system for so long, and looked at it from every point of view.
Why did I not imitate him? I upbraided myself harshly on my lack of rational courage. For since I was the enemy of sentimental chimeras!... What could I believe in? Nothing, nothing! Duty, Honour, the Ideal? They were so many hollow sounds to me. Patriotism? No word was more foreign to me. I too was a Citizen of the World! The chauvinism of my father, a native of Lorraine, and an old soldier, seemed to me out-of-date, an ill-omened and ridiculous passion; in that, as in everything else, I was so little his son. As far back as I could remember, I had never espoused his craze for war and revenge. In former days when we used to spend our holidays at Eberménil, some miles from the frontier, nothing irritated me so much when quite a child, as to feel how immovable the people were in their wild enmity against their neighbour. They never opened their mouths without making insolent or dangerous remarks; they never dreamt, it appeared, except of bringing back a cursed year. Why this rancour? As if it ought not to have satisfied them to continue to be Frenchmen themselves? What did it matter to them that their brothers from the neighbouring villages should have changed their name. Were the former more unhappy than the latter? My handbooks of history were full of exchanges of this kind, carried out without any one rebelling against them.
Grown older, I had only strengthened, by reasoning, my instinctive indifference in regard to the fate of the Lost Provinces. I had gone one better; what a high doctrine, I thought, was that of Internationalism! And convenient, too. I should have declared myself its adherent quite openly, but for my systematic slackness, my fear of committing myself. The result was that I took an interest in those theories which denied that there was any meaning in the term Fatherland.
I happened to find in them the subject for some daring developments, with which during even the last few days, I had taken a delight in upsetting Jeannine Landry's convictions.
Germany, especially, inspired me with no enmity; on the contrary, I had a weakness for the genius of her philosophers and musicians. Two years ago I had travelled in the country, and had stayed at Iéna for three weeks with one of my friends, a lecturer at the university. We had wandered together in the Thuringian forests, and slept, rolled in our cloaks, at the top of the Schnee-Kopf. How could one fail to be won over by those glorious surroundings. As for the men over there ... I had pleasant recollections of a few merry shooting friends, one named Kroemer among others. If they had not appealed to me as a whole, did any one by any chance imagine that I cherished the slightest sympathy for the millions of beings—ugly, vain, and unintelligent—who made up the great majority of the nation which was mine by birth. In Paris it was true that, within a restricted circle, I experienced certain satisfactions which I should hardly have relished anywhere else. But, when finally analysed, even these delights did not amount to very much! They comprised the one real benefit which I owed to my position as a Frenchman. In order to assure the continuation of this advantage—and what, after all, did it amount to—it was agreed that I should sacrifice my one irretrievable treasure, my life.
You can see with what a decision I seemed to be faced, but oddly enough my revolt continued to be purely theoretical and abstract. Not for an instant did it seem to me possible or within my power to take the line simply of ignoring the fact that my country was mobilising. I saw myself as the conscious victim of a superior fatality; I knew that I should take the 6:50 train next day, that I should be at the Chanzy barracks before ten o'clock on Tuesday!
But that did not prevent me from cursing at fate. Tired of grumbling at myself, I consigned to perdition the instigators of the war. Spite blinded me; I kept on revolving most bitter, and I must admit, most unjust reflections. Yes, as Cipollina had said; what an accumulation of mistakes! For a long while back. It was all very well to say that Germany wanted war; was preparing for it! During the last few years perhaps. But had there not been a time when she had made advances to us? We had always refused to make friends, and had kept our eyes fixed stolidly on the Frankfort Treaty in which we pretended to see the one and only source of all our ills.
Our policy, of late, had become more captious. There had been a series of clumsy manifestos, an awakening, which one could not shut one's eyes to, of the old swashbuckling, nationalistic, and chauvinistic spirit. What countless occurrences, speeches, and articles had gone towards the making of a dangerous state of exaltation. Anything rather than a humiliating peace! Anything? That meant war. Oh well, they'd got it. They'd soon see!
What exasperated me more than anything was to think of all those who had done or allowed everything to be done, the ministers, ambassadors, and delegates who in history would bear a part, however insignificant, in the terrible responsibility. They were all, or nearly all, over the age limit; they need have no fear for their skins; it was the others, me and men of my generation, the youth between twenty and thirty years of age, whom, with high-flown words and light hearts, they would send to the slaughter!