"I have written the tragedy of a vanishing generation. I have made no attempt to conceal either its vices or its virtues, to hide its load of sadness, its chaotic pride, its heroic efforts, its struggles beneath the overwhelming burden of a superhuman task—the task of remaking an entire world, an ethic, an æsthetic, a faith, a new humanity. Such were we in our generation.
"Men of to-day, young men, your turn has come. March forward over our bodies. Be greater and happier than we have been.
"For my part, I say farewell to my former soul. I cast it behind me like an empty shell. Life is a series of deaths and resurrections. Let us die, Christophe, that we may be reborn."
CHAPTER XVIII
DEPARTURE
JEAN CHRISTOPHE has reached the further shore. He has stridden across the river of life, encircled by roaring waves of music. Safely carried across seems the heritage which he has borne on his shoulders through storm and flood—the meaning of the world, faith in life.
Once more he looks back towards his fellows in the land he has left. All has grown strange to him. He can no longer understand those who are laboring and suffering amid the ardors of illusion. He sees a new generation, young in a different way from his own, more energetic, more brutal, more impatient, inspired with a different heroism. The children of the new days have fortified their bodies with physical training, have steeled their courage in aerial flights. "They are proud of their muscles and their broad chests." They are proud of their country, their religion, their civilization, of all that they believe to be their own peculiar appanage; and from each of these prides they forge themselves a weapon. "They would rather act than understand." They wish to show their strength and test their powers. The dying man realizes with alarm that this new generation, which has never known war, wants war.
He looks shudderingly around: "The fire which had been smouldering in the European forest was now breaking forth into flame. Extinguished in one place, it promptly began to rage in another. Amid whirlwinds of smoke and a rain of sparks, it leaped from point to point, while the parched undergrowth kindled. Outpost skirmishes in the east had already begun, as preludes to the great war of the nations. The whole of Europe, that Europe which was still skeptical and apathetic like a dead forest, was fuel for the conflagration. The fighting spirit was universal. From moment to moment, war seemed imminent. Stifled, it was continually reborn. The most trifling pretext served to feed its strength. The world felt itself to be at the mercy of chance, which would initiate the terrible struggle. It was waiting. A feeling of inexorable necessity weighed upon all, even upon the most pacific. The ideologues, sheltering in the shade of Proudhon the titan, hailed war as man's most splendid claim to nobility.
"It was for this, then, that there had been effected a physical and moral resurrection of the races of the west! It was towards these butcheries that the streams of action and passionate faith had been hastening! None but a Napoleonic genius could have directed these blind impulses to a foreseen and deliberately chosen end. But nowhere in Europe was there any one endowed with the genius for action. It seemed as if the world had singled out the most commonplace among its sons to be governors. The forces of the human spirit were coursing in other channels."
Christophe recalls those earlier days when he and Olivier had been concerned about the prospect of war. At that time there were but distant rumblings of the storm. Now the storm clouds covered all the skies of Europe. Fruitless had been the call to unity; vain had been the pointing out of the path through the darkness. Mournfully the seer contemplates in the distance the horsemen of the Apocalypse, the heralds of fratricidal strife.
But beside the dying man is the Child, smiling and full of knowledge; the Child who is Eternal Life.