Above the Battle Part 1

Above the Battle.

by Romain Rolland.

INTRODUCTION

_"Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice, Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problem of freedom yet._

_(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?

Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?

Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)"_

These lines of Walt Whitman will be recalled by many who read the following pages: for not only does Rolland himself refer to Whitman in his brief Introduction, but, were it not for a certain _bizarrerie_ apart from their context, the words "Over the Carnage" might perhaps have stood on the cover of this volume as a striking variant on _Au-dessus de la Melee_.

Yet though the voice comes to us over the carnage, its message is not marred by the pa.s.sions of the moment. After eighteen months of war we are learning to look about us more calmly, and to distinguish amid the ruins those of Europe's intellectual leaders who have not been swept off their feet by the fury of the tempest. Almost alone Romain Rolland has stood the test. The two main characteristics which strike us in all that he writes are lucidity and common sense--the qualities most needed by every one in thought upon the war. But there is another feature of Rolland's work which contributes to its universal appeal. He describes our feelings and sensations in the presence of a given situation, not what actually pa.s.ses before our eyes: he describes the effects and causes of things, but not the things themselves. Through his work for the _Agence internationale des prisonniers de guerre_, to which one of the articles now collected is largely devoted, he is, moreover, in a position to observe every phase of the great battle between ideals and between nations which fills him with such anguish and indignation. And with his matchless insight and sympathy he gives permanent form to our vague feelings in these n.o.ble and inspiring essays.

It will not, however, surprise the vast public who have read _Jean-Christophe_ to find that while so many have capitulated to the madness of the terrible year through which we have pa.s.sed, Rolland has remained firm, and has surpa.s.sed himself. He was prepared. As the extract placed at the beginning of this volume shows, he was one of the few who realized only too well the horror he was powerless to prevent.

Yet he made every effort to open the eyes of Europe and especially of the young, so many of whom had learned to look up to him as a leader. To these young men, one of the finest essays in the present collection is primarily addressed--_O jeunesse heroique du monde_....

Eighteen months have pa.s.sed and they still endure the terrible ordeal, the young men of Germany and France, whom he had striven so hard to bring together; on whose aspirations and failings _Jean-Christophe_ is a critical commentary. The movements and tendencies of society were there given a dramatic embodiment, permeated for Rolland by the Life Force--that struggle between Good and Bad, Love and Hatred, which makes life worth living. All is set down with the clear a.n.a.lysis of feeling natural to a musical critic. But in spite of his burning words on the destruction of Rheims, Rolland, as is clear from his other critical and biographical writings, is more interested in men than in their achievements. And the men of today interest him most pa.s.sionately.

"Young men," he has said, "do not bother about the old people. Make a stepping-stone of our bodies and go forward."

And above all it is the permanent things in life with which he is concerned. As Mr. Lowes d.i.c.kinson puts it, "M. Rolland is one of the many who believe, though their voice for the moment may be silenced, that the spiritual forces that are important and ought to prevail are the international ones; that co-operation, not war, is the right destiny of nations; and that all that is valuable in each people may be maintained in and by friendly intercourse with the others. The war between these two ideals is the greater war that lies behind the present conflict. Hundreds and thousands of generous youths have gone to battle in the belief that they are going to a 'war that will end war,' that they are fighting against militarism in the cause of peace. Whether, indeed, it is for that they will have risked or lost their lives, only the event can show."

The forces against such ideals are powerful, but Rolland is not dismayed. "Come, friends! let us make a stand! Can we not resist this contagion, whatever its nature and virulence be--whether moral epidemic or cosmic force." And he appeals not only in the name of humanity but in the name of that France which he loves so dearly--"la vraie France" of which Jaures wrote (in the untranslatable words which Rolland has quoted), "qui n'est pas resumee dans une epoque et dans un jour, ni dans le jour d'il y a des siecles, ni dans le jour d'hier, mais la France tout entiere, dans la succession de ses jours, de ses nuits, de ses aurores, de ses crepuscules, de ses montees, de ses chutes, et qui, a travers toutes ces...o...b..es melees, toutes ces lumieres incompletes et toutes ces vicissitudes, s'en va vers une pleine clarte qu'elle n'a pas encore atteinte, mais dont le pressentiment est dans sa pensee!"

But though his love for France inspires every word that Rolland has written, the significance of the present volume is not less apparent to English readers. Some of the articles and letters now collected have already appeared in English, for the most part in the pages of _The Cambridge Magazine_, from which they have been widely quoted in the press. For help in rendering the translations as adequately as possible I may also take this opportunity of acknowledging my special indebtedness to Mr. Roger Fry,[1] who has just issued through the Omega Workshops a striking translation of some of the most recent French poetry inspired by the war; to Mr. James Wood, who has himself done part of the translation, particularly "pro Aris"; and to Mr. E. K. Bennett, of Caius College, whose version of "Above the Battle" has already been quoted by the Archbishop of Canterbury and others. For the most part, the articles here collected have not appeared in English before; and they have been almost inaccessible even in French, as their author explains in his Preface.

C. K. OGDEN.

MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, _January, 1916_.

PREFACE

A great nation a.s.sailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect: it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets loose. To each his part: to the armies the protection of the soil of their native land; to the thinkers the defense of its thought. If they subordinate that thought to the pa.s.sions of their people they may well be useful instruments of pa.s.sion; but they are in danger of betraying the spirit, which is not the least part of a people's patrimony. One day History will pa.s.s judgment on each of the nations at war; she will weigh their measure of errors, lies, and heinous follies. Let us try and make ours light before her!

Children are taught the Gospel of Jesus and the Christian ideal.

Everything in the education they receive at school is designed to stimulate in them intellectual understanding of the great human family.

Cla.s.sical education makes them see, beyond the differences of race, the roots and the common trunk of our civilization. Art makes them love the profound sources of the genius of a people. Science makes them believe in the unity of reason. The great social movement which renews the world, reveals the organized effort of the working cla.s.ses all round them to unite their forces in the hopes and struggles which break the barriers of nations. The brightest geniuses of the earth, like Walt Whitman and Tolstoi, chant universal brotherhood in joy and suffering, or else like our Latin spirits, pierce with their criticism the prejudices of hatred and ignorance which separate individuals and peoples.

Like all the men of my time, I have been brought up on these thoughts; I have tried in my turn to share the bread of life with my younger or less fortunate brothers. When the war came I did not think it my duty to deny these thoughts because the hour had come to put them to the test.

I have been insulted. I knew that I should be and I went forward. But I did not know that I should be insulted without even a hearing.

For several months no one in France could know my writings except through sc.r.a.ps of phrases arbitrarily extracted and mutilated by my enemies. It is a shameful record. For nearly a year this has gone on.

Certain socialist or syndicalist papers may have succeeded here and there in getting some fragments through,[2] but it was only in the month of June 1915 that for the first time my chief article, the one which was the object of the most violent criticism, "Above the Battle," dating from September 1914, could be published in full (almost in full), thanks to the malevolent zeal of a maladroit pamphleteer, to whom I am indebted for bringing my words before the French public for the first time.

A Frenchman does not judge his adversary unheard. Whoever does so judges and condemns himself: for he shows that he fears the light. I place before the world the texts they have slandered.[3] I shall not defend them. Let them defend themselves!

One single word will I add. For a year I have been rich in enemies. Let me say this to them: they can hate me, but they will not teach me to hate. I have no concern with them. My business is to say what I believe to be fair and humane. Whether this pleases or irritates is not my business. I know that words once uttered make their way of themselves.

Hopefully I sow them in the b.l.o.o.d.y soil. The harvest will come.

ROMAIN ROLLAND.

_September, 1915._

I. AN OPEN LETTER TO GERHART HAUPTMANN

_Sat.u.r.day, August 29, 1914._[4]

I am not, Gerhart Hauptmann, one of those Frenchmen who regard Germany as a nation of barbarians. I know the intellectual and moral greatness of your mighty race. I know all that I owe to the thinkers of old Germany; and even now, at this hour, I recall the example and the words of _our_ Goethe--for he belongs to the whole of humanity--repudiating all national hatreds and preserving the calmness of his soul on those heights "_where we feel the happiness and the misfortunes of other peoples as our own_." I myself have labored all my life to bring together the minds of our two nations; and the atrocities of this impious war in which, to the ruin of European civilization, they are involved, will never lead me to soil my spirit with hatred.

Whatever pain, then, your Germany may give me, whatever reasons I may have to stigmatize as criminal German policy and the means it employs, I do not attach responsibility for it to the people which is burdened with it and is used as its blind instrument. It is not that I regard, as you do, war as a fatality. A Frenchman does not believe in fatality.

Fatality is the excuse of souls without a will. War springs from the weakness and stupidity of nations. One cannot feel resentment against them for it; one can only pity them. I do not reproach you with our miseries; for yours will be no less. If France is ruined, Germany will be ruined too. I did not even raise my voice when I saw your armies violating the neutrality of n.o.ble Belgium. This flagrant breach of honor, which incurs the contempt of every upright conscience, is quite in the political tradition of your Prussian kings; it did not surprise me.

But when I see the fury with which you are treating that magnanimous nation whose only crime has been to defend its independence and the cause of justice to the last, as you Germans yourselves did in 1813 ...

that is too much! The world is revolted by it. Keep these savageries for us Frenchmen, your true enemies! But to wreak them against your victims, against this small, unhappy, innocent Belgian people ... how shameful is this!

And not content to fling yourselves on living Belgium, you wage war on the dead, on the glories of past ages. You bombard Malines, you burn Rubens, and Louvain is now no more than a heap of ashes--Louvain with its treasures of art and of science, the sacred town! What are you, then, Hauptmann, and by what name do you want us to call you now, since you repudiate the t.i.tle of barbarians? Are you the grandsons of Goethe or of Attila? Are you making war on enemies or on the human spirit? Kill men if you like, but respect masterpieces. They are the patrimony of the human race. You, like all the rest of us, are its depositories; in pillaging it, as you do, you show yourselves unworthy of our great heritage, unworthy to take your place in that little European army which is civilization's guard of honor.

It is not to the opinion of the rest of the world that I address myself in challenging you, Hauptmann. In the name of our Europe, of which you have hitherto been one of the most ill.u.s.trious champions, in the name of that civilization for which the greatest of men have striven all down the ages, in the name of the very honor of your Germanic race, Gerhart Hauptmann, I abjure you, I challenge you, you and the intellectuals of Germany, amongst whom I reckon so many friends, to protest with all your energy against this crime which is recoiling upon you.

If you fail to do this, you will prove one of two things: either that you approve what has been done--and in that case may the opinion of mankind crush you--or else that you are powerless to raise a protest against the Huns who command you. If this be so, by what t.i.tle can you still claim, as you have claimed, that you fight for the cause of liberty and human progress? You are giving the world a proof that, incapable of defending the liberty of the world, you are even incapable of defending your own, and that the best of Germany is helpless beneath a vile despotism which mutilates masterpieces and murders the spirit of man.

I am expecting an answer from you, Hauptmann, an answer that may be an act. The opinion of Europe awaits it as I do. Think about it: at such a time silence itself is an act.

_Journal de Geneve_, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1914.

II. PRO ARIS[5]

Among the many crimes of this infamous war which are all odious to us, why have we chosen for protest the crimes against things and not against men, the destruction of works and not of lives?

Many are surprised by this, and have even reproached us for it--as if we have not as much pity as they for the bodies and hearts of the thousands of victims who are crucified! Yet over the armies which fall, there flies the vision of their love, and of _la Patrie_, to which they sacrifice themselves--over these lives which are pa.s.sing away pa.s.ses the holy Ark of the art and thought of centuries, borne on their shoulders.

The bearers can change. May the Ark be saved! To the elite of the world falls the task of guarding it. And since the common treasure is threatened, may they rise to protect it!