The War! Had I not come—I remember the day before—to deify the word! Yes, it was a progressive spell. The War! While childishly attributing the rejuvenation of my soul to it, I had ended by seeing in it the fairy who was cruel to be kind. So many thinkers and poets had bowed down to this terrible goddess, before me.
My aberration fell to pieces. The War! The abominations which were really contained in this term rose up and quelled me.
Those villages, blazing like torches. The Meuse rolling by with its purple slime; the woods of Montrolles with their grasses stained with mottled patches violet, the traces of our brothers massacred there. O death, sole enemy of man, sneering at the orgies of the sword! So many beings who moved and loved, struck off the rolls, so many lights put out! De Valpic, the great-hearted, and Henriot and little Frémont; my excellent Bouillon, Prunelle, Icard; Descroix and Playoust, too, all or almost all, without discrimination—a crowd of friends and companions, now grimacing underground. And the anonymous multitude, those foul masses of corpses whose odour had pursued us all through our fighting from end to end. All that, oh! merely a prologue! As if it was enough that a million young men should be sacrificed. To death, to death with their elders, the fellows from thirty to forty. The trench fighting instituted, which would last how long, O God! The sons of the hostile races, face to face in their burrows, spitting murder and hatred at each other, tracing with their blood the baleful line of fire. Frenzy gaining the two fronts little by little, the zones of slaughter being displaced and stretched out, others being made. Where would the conflagration end? A craze for butchery sweeping through the world. Would there be an acre in Europe, to-morrow, which had not seen human remains decaying beneath the beaks of carrion crows, or which did not contain them in its depths, infecting the sources of their poisoned juices?
Ah! when the awakening came at last, and the diplomats, old vultures, were collected round the council-board to talk, they might congratulate themselves as they audited the balance sheet. Broken up, ground and crushed, these two, three, four generations of men who might have been great, and collaborated in the common cause. So many wounded who would soon succumb, wan wrecks, and so many others who, like myself, would only drag out the shadow of an existence. And all the rest! The ravaged homes, the wives abandoned to the terrors of their widowhood, the old parents dying with curses on their lips, the children delivered over without guidance to life's buffetings, the surplus girls especially, deprived of their natural associates, devoted to the sorrows of debauchery. With many of those who came back safely, the mind at least would be affected, their faith in work sapped, their brutal instincts let loose, and their desire for immediate enjoyment aroused. The public wealth destroyed, want bringing revolt in its train, the emasculated nations incapable of recovering, or even of governing themselves. The snare of revolutions, of frightful social convulsions. What could one depend upon henceforth? There would be no law or rule of any sort. The religions, Art, Science, all these would be humiliated before Force. The Ideal broken and trampled underfoot. An infected breath tainting the sacred legacies of the past. The genius of destruction hovering over a civilisation in ruins. That was what War meant!
A monstrous survival of primitive errors. How I abhorred them all of a sudden, the politics and morals which revere this scourge of God.
As to war raising the hearts of individuals and nations, alas, who could answer for it? For one soul purified, how many others would be vilified! And, above all, how terrible was the remedy, a thousand times worse than the complaint.
War might be necessary, and it was in this case, for the defence of our native land. Then it might give birth to the most noble effervescence. Then in its radiance virtues might thrive like plants beneath a tropical sun. But it remained no less the supreme calamity; the triumph of the powers of Death.
Care must be taken not to magnify it, not to flatter the fluctuating mind of the nations with bellicose dreams. We must needs greet a like catastrophe with a fiercely hostile heart, abhor it, blaspheme against it, we miserable creatures, who had but one life to live, one brief chance of being happy.