I have thought well to efface myself behind these students. Were I to substitute my thought for theirs, I should lay myself open to the reproach which I so often address to my generation. I have let them speak for themselves. Any commentary would detract from the beauty of the sight of these enthusiastic and serious young people, in this most tragical hour of history, discussing their duties ardently and at great length, taking stock of their faith, and solemnly affirming that faith in a sort of oath of the tennis court.[35] We see them affirming their faith in liberty; in the solidarity of the peoples; in their moral mission; in their duty to destroy the hydra of imperialism, both militarist and capitalist, whether at home or abroad; in their duty to construct a juster and more humane society.
I give them fraternal greetings. They do not speak alone. Everywhere the echoes answer. Everywhere I see young people resembling them, and stretching forth friendly hands to their fellows in Switzerland. The vicissitudes of this war—a war which, endeavouring to crush free spirits, has but succeeded in making them feel the need for seeking one another out and for cementing unity—has brought me into close relationships with the young of all countries, in Europe, in America, and even in the east and the far east. Everywhere I have found the same communion of sufferings and hopes, the same aspirations, the same revolts, the same determination to break with the past whose malevolence and stupidity have been so plainly proved. I have found them all animated with the same ambition to rebuild human society upon new foundations, wider and more firmly laid than those which sustain the quaking edifice of this old world of rapine and fanaticism, of savage nationalities scorched by the war, rearing heavenward frames blackened by the fire.
June, 1917.
"demain," Geneva, July, 1917.
XV
UNDER FIRE
By Henri Barbusse[36]
HERE we have a pitiless mirror of the war. In that mirror the war is reflected day by day for sixteen months. It is a mirror of two eyes; they are clear, shrewd, perspicacious, and bold; they are the eyes of a Frenchman. The author, Henri Barbusse, dedicates his book: "To the memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119," during December, 1915. In Paris Le Feu was honoured with the Goncourt prize.
By what miracle has so truth-telling a work been able to appear unmutilated, at a time when so many free words, infinitely less free, have been censored? I shall not attempt to explain the fact, but I shall profit by it. The voice of this witness drives back into the shadow all the interested falsehoods which during the last three years have served to idealise the European slaughter-house.
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