"I believe in the passionate endeavor of man toward beauty and justice."
"Which he will never attain?"
La Villaumer suddenly changed his tone, and gazing smilingly upon the young woman said:
"That would be paradise, my dear friend; be reasonable!"
[XIV]
It was the last hour of an April afternoon; budding foliage on the trees, the Arc de Triomphe, upon which every saunterer who looks to-day, looks with the vision of the triumphal procession to come, and the Champs-Elysées, unequalled promenade, which Odette and La Villaumer had so often seen crowded and joyful, in the days when the world was happy.
"Do you remember? Oh, you were a little girl, loving to hang around Guignol and trail after the goat-carts. But I was then no longer very young. Do you remember the time when there were no automobiles, and when the victorias used to go slowly down the street bearing beautifully dressed women whom one had time to admire, to criticise, to recognize, and salute? The auto is perfect, but the best it can do is to rush from one place to another, and that has by no means the interest of the daily procession, when it seemed that every one still had time to live. Excuse my capricious imagination, but it seems to me that these machines were made just to bring us with all the more haste to the frightful time in which we are living. I dare say this to you because I know that you are not going to remind me that autos are rendering admirable service to the war, especially at this very time. You think, like me, that they also render service to our enemies, and that all these rapid means of reaching the battlefield coincide with a war without a conceivable end. In a general way, scientific inventions—don't confuse them with the sciences, which merit all veneration—conspire to give to this war a character of atrocity to which no armed conflict has ever attained, and I wish that it could be proved to me that they alleviate it in equal proportion. Think only of the horror which this 'progress' in the art of extermination inspires. How many brains are unable to resist it? Civilians are dying every day, and the best of them, who go to pieces merely from imagining the war. We see them fall like the hollow bark which still seems to support a tree. You yourself did not know in your childhood the amazement that Jules Verne's 'Nautilus' caused. But you witnessed the crazy conduct of your contemporaries the first time they saw an airship sailing about in the air. It was pretty, to be sure, and the audacity of the early pilots roused us all to enthusiasm. Recall to mind the saying that was current on the greensward at Deauville when twelve airplanes arrived from Havre, three hundred metres above the earth, all rosy in the sunset rays. 'The flying Peace,' some one said. I shrugged my shoulders sorrowfully, because I know that in the face of an astounding invention one must always think of the homicidal use to which man may put it. Man has once again stolen the fire of heaven; a new Zeus will punish him for it. Humanity will blindly and with ecstasy invent the instrument of its own destruction. By means of an admirable scientific instrument it will commit wholesale suicide with a beatific smile. Man has already abdicated in favor of a machine. The war that is being waged is a war no longer of men but of material. Man is belittled; the machine surpasses him! A rudimentary intelligence suffices to set the true force in motion. We are still believers in the ancient saying that the true force is manly virtue, the fine, old-fashioned bravery. We have belittled the only thing in the world which might be wholly great—man. Do we profess to worship that bravery of man which all the past has justified? Why, by the scientific character of war it has become—one dares permit himself the blasphemy—almost a sign of inferiority. We reckon upon the mystical value of our bravery, and we send our men by the thousands against an army of tools! By virtue of our century-old prejudices we honor only the man who exposes himself, sacrifices himself, furnishes, however uselessly, his proofs of courage, when the glory of our arms will belong to him who shall most securely have sheltered his divisions behind gigantic steam-hammers! The applied sciences have caused a moral revolution. By riveting man, who is before all else a soul, to material elements, they have destroyed whatever might be justifiable in the great contests of humanity. A paltry little engineer behind his disguised heavy cannon, or with his mitrailleuse under thirty metres of cement, counts for more than our superb heroes with their courage, their loyalty, and their white gloves. Man, chained like a galley-slave to a machine, to a chemical substance, is forced to unlearn what it is to be a man. He appears very intelligent when he is equipped with algebra and terminology; yes, we must grant to matter all that it can give, but pause a little: have you not an impression that something superior is lacking in so abnormal a compound? They have domesticated the forces of nature; they believe themselves Titans; and there they stand glowering at one another like beasts; they cannot distinguish themselves from these material fabrics that surprise and overwhelm them. They call themselves masters of matter, and matter is all the time jeering at them. Engineering genius is probably not the result of a knowledge of matter, but of a knowledge of man."
[XV]
At that period people were still dulling their senses with words and stupefying their minds with discussions, if so they might divert them from that one place which for the time being was as the pivot of the world, upon which they had for six months felt that all depended, as two years before all had for ten days depended upon the battle of the Marne.
La Villaumer went to his club; his lip curled with an almost wicked smile at the thought of the ridiculously false news which that evening, as every other, he was about to hear. Then he reflected that the charming Odette, whom he had just quitted was very young, and asked himself whom she might marry.