Before him let us bow down to the very ground.
Night is falling when the audience comes to an end and I find myself again on the footpath that leads to the abbey. On my return journey, along those roads broken up by rain and by military transport wagons, I remain under the charm of his welcome. And I compare these two monarchs, situated, as it were, at opposite poles of humanity, the one at the pole of light, the other at the pole of darkness; the one yonder, swollen with hypocrisy and arrogance, a monster among monsters, his hands full of blood, his nails full of torn flesh, who still dares to surround himself with insolent pomp; the other here, banished without a murmur to a little house in a village, standing on a last strip of his martyred kingdom, but in whose honour rises from the whole civilised earth a concert of sympathy, enthusiasm, magnificent appreciation, and for whom are stored up crowns of most pure and immortal glory.
V—A LITTLE JOURNEY TO THE BATTLEGROUNDS OF FRANCE
(Another Story Told by Pierre Loti)
The blood of the masters is drenching the soil of France. The great academicians are willing to die that their beloved France may live. Here we stand on the battleground with this great French novelist, whose impressions are told in Current History.
This is the first time that I have found myself so absolutely and infinitely alone, in the midst of this stage setting of immense desolation, which to-day, as it chances, is sparkling with light, and is only the more mournful for that. Until I reach the little wood to which an errand of duty calls me I need think of nothing; I need not occupy myself with anything; I need not avoid the shells, which would not give me time to avoid them, nor even choose the spot to set my foot down, since it sinks in everywhere equally. And so it comes that I drift back again to the mood of former days, to my mood of mind before the war, and all these things to which I have grown used I see and judge as though they were new.
Only a score of months ago who would have imagined such a face of things? Thus, these countless excavations—white, because the soil of this region is white—excavations that stretch on all sides and which mark across the wilderness multitudes of zebra-tracings—is it possible that they mark out the only paths along which our soldiers of France can move to-day with a sort of half security?... Little sunken ways, some of them full of curves, some of them straight, which have been named "guts," and which we have had to multiply, to multiply to such a point that the earth is furrowed by them to infinity! What an enormous sum of toil they represent, these mole paths, lying in a network over hundreds of leagues! If we add the trenches, the shelter caves, all these catacombs that plunge down into the hearts of the hills, one's mind stops dead before such a total of excavation, that might seem the work of centuries.
And these things that look like fishing nets stretched on all sides. If one were not informed in advance and accustomed to them, could one divine what they can possibly be? You might think that gigantic spiders had been spinning their webs among these myriads of posts, sometimes planted in straight lines, sometimes forming circles or half moons, tracing across the wide expanse designs that must be cabalistic in order better to ensnare and envelop the Barbarians. And besides they have terribly reinforced them, multiplying them twice, nay, ten times, since my last passage, these stake nets, and our web-spinning soldiers have had to make among them turnings and passages, with the enormous reels of barbed wire which they carry under their arms.
But there is one thing that you can understand at the first glance, and which adds to the grim horror of the whole scene, and that is the inclosures sprinkled here and there, the wooden fences that shut in closely packed groups of poor little burial crosses, made of two pieces of wood. That you can tell at once, alas! and see exactly what it is! Here they lie, therefore, under the thunder of the big guns, as though the battle was not yet finished for them, our dear departed ones, our unknown, magnificent heroes—whom even those who weep for them cannot now come nigh, because death is passing ceaselessly in the air above their silent little gatherings.
Ah! To complete the unreality of it all, here comes a black bird of gigantic wing-stretch, a monster of the apocalypse, that flits past noisily high above me. He flies on toward France, seeking doubtless the more sheltered region where women and children begin to be found, with the hope of slaughtering some of them.