Ainsi parlent nos morts. Et ils disent encore:
FRANÇAIS, aimez-vous les uns les autres d'un amour fraternal et, pour prevaloir contre l'ennemi, mettez en commun vos biens et vos pensées. Que parmi vous les plus grands et les plus forts soient les serviteurs des faibles. Ne marchandez pas plus vos richesses que votre sang à la patrie. Soyez tous égaux par la bonne volonté. Vous le devez à vos morts.
VOUS nous devez d'assurer, à notre exemple, par le sacrifice de vous-mêmes, le triomphe de la plus sainte des causes. Frères, pour payer votre dette envers nous, il vous faut vaincre, et il vous faut faire plus encore: il vois faut mériter de vaincre.
Nos morts nous ordonnent de vivre et de combattre en citoyens d'un peuple libre, de marcher résolument dans l'ouragan de fer vers la paix qui se levera comme une belle aurore sur l'Europe affranchie des menaces de ses tyrans, et verra renaître, faibles et timides encore, la JUSTICE et L'HUMANITE étouffées par le crime de l'Allemagne.
Voila ce qu'inspirent nos morts à un Français que le détachement des vanités et le progrès de l'age rapprochent d'eux.
[signed]Anatole France
What our Dead Say to Us
There is no need to recall to the minds of our people those who were dear to us and have passed hence, for they are celebrating—and with good cause—the anniversaries of their deaths. Was it not in France, in the 19th century, that there was born that philosophy which placed in the rank of the foremost duties of mankind gratitude towards those generations who have preceded us to the grave, and have left us the fruits of their thoughts and of their labors? Indeed, ancestral worship prevails in all climes and at all periods; in fact, with certain Oriental nations it is the only religion. But in what country is the link between the dead and the living so strong as it is in France—the rites at the same time so solemn and so intimate? With us, as a rule, our dead, beloved and venerated, never entirely depart from the homes in which they have dwelt, but take up their abode in the hearts of the living who imitate them, consult them, pay heed to them.
I recollect, too vaguely to make full use of it here, a beautiful scene from the heroic song, "Girart de Roussillon," I think it is, where one is shown a king's daughter, one night after a battle gazing across the battlefield where lay the innumerable warriors who had fallen in the fight. "She felt a desire," said the poet, "to embrace them all." And from the depths of my far-away memories this apparition of the daughter of a royal house arises before me as an image of our France to-day, weeping for the flower of our race so abundantly cut down.
My object in writing these lines is not to exhort my fellow-citizens to commemorate to-day our noble dead, according to immemorial custom, but to honor as a united people those who have sacrificed their lives for their country and to meditate upon the lesson that comes to us from their scattered burial places.