[CHAPTER XXXV]
Return to Paris — The deserted Institute — Memoir on the Founders of Modern Medicine — Metchnikoff’s Jubilee — Last holidays at Norka.
This was but the beginning of the war; soon it spread with vertiginous rapidity, and made its cruel destructive force felt.
On our return from Norka, we found everything on a war footing. The very next morning, Metchnikoff hurried to the laboratory. He only reached Paris with some difficulty, all means of communication being encumbered by soldiers. He had left the house nervous and excited but full of courage and energy. I shall never forget his return home....
I was awaiting him as usual, just outside the station, and, as he got out of the train, I did not recognise him. I saw a stooping old man, bent as under a heavy burden; his usual vivacity was gone, and had given place to the deepest depression.
He told me in a broken voice that the Institute was already deserted; that it was under the orders of the military authorities, and completely disorganised for scientific work. The younger men were mobilised; the laboratories empty; the animals used for experiments had been killed on account of the departure of the servants, and for fear of a lack of food. Everything that had been devoted to the service of science and of research into means of preserving life had been handed over to the service of war. Normal and cultured life was arrested. And that was the outcome of civilisation.
Metchnikoff felt as if he had suddenly been dropped into the abyss of centuries, into the times of human savagery. He could not accustom his mind to the idea of such a fall; it seemed to him a paradox, an impossibility, that civilised peoples could not do without sanguinary fights in order to solve questions of mutual relations.
The events which were taking place agitated and depressed him all the more that he had not the possibility of becoming absorbed in scientific investigations; he was completely thrown off his balance.
And as, one by one, the news came of the death in action of several of the young men who had left the Institute, Metchnikoff’s grief knew no limits. He could not bear the idea, now a terrible reality, that these brilliant young lives should be sacrificed, victims of those who should have directed the peoples towards peace and a rational life, and who, instead of that, threw the most precious part of humanity into the abyss of death. War became a dark, sinister background to his daily life. The victims of war were not only those who fell on the battle-field, but included him whose whole life-effort had been directed towards the conservation of human existence and the search for rational conceptions. The contrast between his aspirations and the cruel reality had been to him a blow which his sensitive and suffering heart was not fit to bear.