Above the Battle Part 8

From the first scene I take these terrible words of one of those who wait in the trenches under fire of the machine guns, a _Dreissigjaehriger_ (man of thirty).

In my village they are laughing--they drink to each victory. They slaughter us like butcher's cattle--and they say "It's war!" When it is over, they are no fools, they will feast us for three years.

But the first cripple won't be grey headed before they will laugh at his white hairs.

And the Uhlan, possessed by horror in the midst of the ma.s.sacre, falls on his knees and prays:

Thou who gavest life and takest it--how shall I recognize Thee? (In these trenches strewn with mutilated bodies) I find Thee not. Does the piercing cry of these thousands suffocated in the terrible embrace of Death reach not up to Thee? Or is it lost in frozen s.p.a.ce? For whom does Thy Springtime blossom? For whom is the splendor of Thy suns? For whom, O G.o.d? I ask it of thee in the name of all those whose mouths are closed by courage and by fear in face of the horror of Thy darkness: What heat is left within me? What light of truth? Can this ma.s.sacre be Thy will? Is it indeed Thy will?

(_He loses consciousness and falls._)

A pain less lyrical, less ecstatic, more simple, more reflective, and nearer to ourselves marks the sequence of _Feldpostbriefe_ of Dr. Albert Klein, teacher in the Oberrealschule at Giessen and Lieutenant of the Landwehr, killed on the 12th of February in Champagne.[38] Pa.s.sing over what are, perhaps, the most striking pages from the point of view of artistic quality and power of thought, I will only give two extracts from these letters which are likely to be of special interest to French readers.

The first describes for us with an unusual frankness the moral condition of the German army:

Brave, without care for his own life! Who is there among us that is that? We all know too well our own worth and our own possibilities; we are in the flower of our age: force is in our arms and in our souls; and as no one willingly dies, no one is brave (_tapfer_) in the usual sense of the word: or at least such are very rare. It is just because bravery is so rare in life, it is just for that that we expend so much religion, poetry, and thought (and this begins already at school), in celebrating as the highest fate death for one's fatherland, until it attains its climax in the false heroism which makes such a sensation about us in newspapers and speeches and which is so cheap--and also in the true heroism of a small number who do risk themselves and lead on the others.... We do our duty, we do what we _ought_; but it is a pa.s.sive virtue.... When I read in the papers the scribblings of those who have a bad conscience because they are safely in the rear--when I read this talk which makes every soldier into a hero, I feel hurt. Heroism is a rare growth, and you cannot build on it a citizen army. To keep such an army together the men must respect their superiors, and even fear them more than the enemy. And the superiors must be conscientious, do their duty well, know their business thoroughly, decide rapidly, and have control of their nerves. When we read the praises which those behind the line write of us, we blush. Thank G.o.d, old-fas.h.i.+oned, robust shame is not dead in us.... Ah! my dear friends, those who are here don't speak so complacently of death, of disease, of sacrifice, and of victory as do those who behind the line ring the bells, make speeches, and write newspapers. The men here accustom themselves as best they may to the bitter necessity of suffering and of death if fate wills; but they know and see that many n.o.ble sacrifices, innumerable, innumerable sacrifices have already been made, and that already for a long while we shall have had more than enough of destruction on our side as well as the other. It is precisely when one has to look suffering in the face as I have that a tie begins to be formed that unites one to those over there, on the other side (and one that unites you too with them, my friends! Yes, surely you feel it too, don't you?) If I come back from here (which I scarcely hope for any more) my dearest duty will be to soak myself in the study and the thoughts of those who have been our enemies. I wish to reconstruct my nature on a wider basis.... And I believe that it will be easier after this war than after any other to be a human being.

The second fragment is the account of a touching encounter with a French prisoner:

Yesterday evening I was strangely touched. I happened to see a convoy of prisoners and I talked to one of them, a colleague of mine, Professor of cla.s.sical philology in the college of F----.

Such an open-minded, intelligent man, and with such a fine military bearing, like all his fellows, although they had just been through a terrible experience of machine-gun fire.... It was a proof to me of the senselessness of the war. I thought how much one would have liked to be the friend of these men, who are so near us in their education, their mode of life, the circle of their thought and their interest. We started talking about a book on Rousseau and we began to dispute like old philologists.... How much we are alike in force and worth! And how little truth there is in what our papers tell us of the shaken and exhausted conditions of the French troops! As true, or rather as untrue, as what the French newspapers write about us.... My French colleague showed in his remarks such a balanced mind and such understanding and admiration of German thought! To think that we were made so clearly to be friends and that we had to be separated! I was altogether overcome, and sat down crushed by it. I thought and thought and could not escape my mood by any sophistry. No end, no end to war, which for nearly six months now has swallowed in its gulf men, fortunes, and happiness!

And this feeling is the same with us as with the other side. It is always the same picture: we do the same thing, we suffer the same thing, we are the same thing. And it is precisely for this reason that we are so bitterly at enmity....

The same accent of troubled anguish, together with a despair which at moments nearly reaches to madness, and at others breathes a religious fervor, are seen in the letters of a German soldier to a teacher in German Switzerland. (We have known of these at the Prisoners' Agency for three or four months and they were published in _Foi et Vie_ of April 15th.[39] They have been pa.s.sed over in silence, so we shall persist in calling attention to them, for they thoroughly deserve it). In these letters, which cover from the second fortnight of August to the end of December, we see from the 25th of August onwards the evidence of a desire for peace among the German soldiers.

We all, even those who were hottest for the fight at the beginning, want nothing now but peace, our officers just as much as ourselves.... Convinced as we are of the necessity to conquer, warlike enthusiasm does not exist among us; we fulfil our duty, but the sacrifice is hard. We suffer in our souls.... I cannot tell you the sufferings I endure....

September 20th. A friend writes to me: "On the 20th to 25th of August I took part in big battles; since then I suffer morally even to complete exhaustion, both physical and spiritual. My soul finds no repose.... This war will show us how much of the beast still survives in man, and this revelation will cause us to make a great step out of animalism: if not, it is all up with us!"

November 28th. (_A splendid pa.s.sage where one almost hears the voice of Tolstoi._) What are all the torments of war compared to the thoughts that obsess us night and day? When I am on some hill from which my view commands the plain, this is the idea which ceaselessly tortures me: down there in the valley the war rages; those brown lines which furrow the landscape are full of men who are facing one another as enemies. And up there on the hill opposite you there is, perhaps, a man who, like you, is contemplating the woods and the blue sky and perhaps ruminating the same thoughts as you, his enemy! This continual proximity might make one mad! And one is tempted to envy one's comrades who can kill time in sleeping and playing cards.

December 17th. The desire for peace is intense in every one; at least, in all those who are at the front and who are obliged to a.s.sa.s.sinate and be a.s.sa.s.sinated. The newspapers say that it's hardly possible to restrain the warlike ardor of the fighters....

They lie--consciously or unconsciously. Our chaplains in their sermons dispute the legend that our military ardor is slackening.... You can hardly believe how such t.i.ttle-tattle annoys us. Let them be silent, and let them not talk about things of which they can know nothing! Or better still, let them come not as almoners who keep to the rear, but into the firing-line, rifle in hand! Perhaps then they will get to know of the inner changes which take place in so many of us. According to these chaplains, any one who is without warlike enthusiasm is not a man such as our age demands. To me it seems that we are greater heroes than the others, we, who without being upheld by warlike enthusiasm, accomplish faithfully our duty, while hating war with our whole souls.... They talk of a holy war ... I know of no holy war. I only know of one war which is the sum of all that is inhuman, impious, and b.e.s.t.i.a.l in man; it is G.o.d's chastis.e.m.e.nt and a call to repentance for the people that throws itself into war or lets itself be drawn into it.

G.o.d sends men through this h.e.l.l so that they may learn to love heaven. For the German people this war seems to me to be a punishment and a call to repentance,--and most of all for our German Church. I have friends who suffer at the idea of being unable to do anything for the fatherland. Let them stay at home with a calm conscience! All depends on their peaceful work. But let the war enthusiasts come! Perhaps they will learn to keep silent.

"Why publish these pages?" I shall be asked by some people in France.

"What good is it, when once war is let loose, to arouse pity for our adversaries, at the risk of blunting the ardor of the combatants?"--I answer, because it is the truth, and because the truth substantiates our judgment, the judgment of the whole world against the German leaders and their policy. What their armies have done we know; but that they were able to do it containing as they did such elements as those whose confessions we have just heard, incriminates still more deeply their masters. From the depths of the battlefield, these voices of a sacrificed minority rise up as a vengeful condemnation of the oppressors. To the accusations drawn up against predatory Empires and their inhuman pride, in the name of violated right, of outraged humanity by the victim peoples and by the combatants, is added the cry of pain of the n.o.bler souls of their own people whom the bad shepherds who let loose this war have led and constrained into murder and madness. To sacrifice one's body is not the worst suffering, but also to sacrifice, to deny, to kill one's own soul!--You who die at least for a just cause, and who, full of sap and loaded with faith, fall like ripe fruit, how sweet is your lot beside this torture! But we shall so act that these sufferings shall not be vain.

Let the conscience of humanity hear and accept their complaint! It will resound in the future above the glory of battles; and whether she wills or no, History will place it on her register. History will do justice between the hangmen and their peoples. And the peoples will learn how to deliver themselves from their hangmen.

_Journal de Geneve_, June 14, 1915.

XVI. JAUReS

Battles are being fought under our eyes in which thousands of men are dying, yet the sacrifice of their lives does not always influence the issue of the combat. In other cases the death of a single man may be a great battle lost for the whole of humanity. The murder of Jaures was such a disaster.

Whole centuries were needed to produce such a life; rich civilizations of North and South, of past and present, spread out on the good soil of France, matured beneath our Western skies. The mysterious chance which combines elements and forces will not easily produce a n.o.ble spirit like his a second time.

Jaures is a type, almost unique in modern times, of the great political orator who is also a great thinker, and who combines vast culture with penetrating observation, and moral grandeur with energetic activity. We must go back to antiquity to find one who, like him, could stir the crowd and give pleasure to the few; pour out his overflowing genius not only in his speeches and social treatises, but also in his philosophical and historical works;[40] and leave on all things the impress of his personality, the furrow of his robust labor, the seeds of his progressive mind. I have listened to him often in the Chamber, at socialist congresses, at meetings held on behalf of oppressed nations; he even did me the honor of presenting my _Danton_ to the people of Paris. Again I see his full face, calm and happy like that of a kindly, bearded ogre; his small eyes, bright and smiling; eyes as quick to follow the flight of ideas as to observe human nature. I see him pacing up and down the platform, walking with heavy steps like a bear, his arms crossed behind his back, and turning sharply to hurl at the crowd, in his monotonous, metallic voice, words like the call of a trumpet, which reached the farthest seats in the vast amphitheatre, and went straight to the heart, making the soul of the whole mult.i.tude leap in one united emotion. What beauty there was in the sight of these proletarian ma.s.ses stirred by the visions which Jaures evoked from distant horizons, imbibing the thought of Greece through the voice of their tribune!

Of all this man's gifts the most fundamental was to be essentially a _man_--not the man of a single profession, or cla.s.s, or party, or idea--but a complete, harmonious, and free man. His all-comprehensive nature could be the slave of nothing. The highest manifestations of life flowed together and met in him. His intelligence demanded unity,[41] his heart was full of a pa.s.sion for liberty,[42] and this twofold instinct protected him alike from party despotism and anarchy. His spirit sought to encompa.s.s all things, not in order to do violence to them, but to bring them into harmony. Above all, he had the power of seeing the _human_ element in all things, and this universal sympathy was equally averse to narrow negation and fanatical affirmation. All intolerance inspired him with horror.[43]

He had put himself at the head of a great revolutionary party, but it was with the desire "of saving the great work of democratic revolution from the sickening and brutal odor of blood, murder, and hatred which still clings to the memory of the middle-cla.s.s Revolution." In his own name, and in the name of his party, he demanded "with regard to all doctrines, respect for the human personality and for the spirit which is manifested in each." The mere feeling of the moral antagonism which exists between man and man, even when there is no open conflict, the sense of the invisible barriers which render human brotherhood impossible, was painful to him. He could not read those words of Cardinal Newman in which he speaks of the gulf of d.a.m.nation, which, even in this life, is fixed between men, without having "a sort of nightmare.... He saw the abyss ready to gape beneath the feet of fragile and unhappy human beings who think themselves bound together by a community of sympathy and suffering"--the sadness of this thought obsessed him.

To fill in this abyss of misunderstanding was his life-work. Herein lay the originality of his standpoint, that although he was the spokesman of the most advanced parties, he became the continual mediator between conflicting ideas. He sought to unite them all in the service of progress and of the common good. In philosophy he united idealism and realism--in history, the past and the present--in politics, the love of his own country and a respect for other countries.[44] He refrained from denouncing that which has been, in the name of that which is to be, as many so-called free-thinkers have done; and far from condemning, he upheld the theories of all those who had been fighters in past centuries, to whatever party they might have belonged. "We reverence the past," he said. "Not in vain have blazed the hearths of all the generations of mankind--but it is we who are advancing, who are fighting for a new ideal, it is we who are the true inheritors of the hearth of our ancestors. We have taken the flame thereof, you have preserved only the ashes." (January, 1909.) In his Introduction to _l'Histoire socialiste de la Revolution_, in which he attempts to reconcile Plutarch, Michelet, and Karl Marx, he writes: "We hail with equal respect all men of heroic will. History, even when conceived as a study of economic forms, will never dispense with individual valor and n.o.bility. The moral level of society tomorrow will be determined by the standard of morality of conscience today. So that, to offer the examples of all the heroic fighters who for the past century have been inspired by an ideal and held death in sublime contempt, is to do revolutionary work." In everything he touches he achieves a generous synthesis of life; he imposes his grand panoramic conception of the universe, the sense of the manifold and moving unity of all things. This admirable equilibrium of countless elements presupposes in the man who achieves it magnificent health of body and of mind, a mastery of his whole being.

And Jaures possessed this mastery, and because of it he was the pilot of European democracy.

How clear and far reaching was his foresight! In years to come, when the record of the war of today is set down, he will appear therein as a terrible witness. Was there anything he did not foresee? One needs only to read through his speeches during the last ten years.[45] It is yet too early, in the midst of the conflict, to quote freely his predictions concerning the coming retribution. Let us recall only his agonized presentiment, ever since the year 1905, of the monstrous war which was imminent;[46] his consciousness "of the antagonism, now m.u.f.fled, now acute, but always profound and terrible, between Germany and England"

(November 18, 1909);[47] his denunciation of the secret dealings of European finance and diplomacy, dealings which are encouraged by the "torpor of public spirit"; his cry of alarm at "the sensational lies of the press, actuated by the rotten system of capitalism, sowing panic and hatred, and playing cynically with the lives of millions of men, through mere financial considerations or delirious pride"; his contemptuous words for those whom he calls "the jockeys of his country"; his clear perception of all responsibilities;[48] his foreknowledge of the domesticated att.i.tude which would be adopted in case of war by the Social-democratic party of Germany, to whom he showed, as in a mirror (at the Amsterdam Congress in 1904) their haughty weakness, their lack of revolutionary tradition, their want of parliamentary strength, their "formidable powerlessness";[49] of the att.i.tude which certain leaders of French Socialism, too, and amongst others Jules Guesde, would maintain in the conflict between the great States of Europe;[50] and, looking even beyond the war, his premonition of the consequences, near and remote, national and international, of this conflict of nations.

How would he have acted had he lived? The proletariat of Europe looked to him for guidance, and had faith in him--Camille Huysmans has said so in the speech delivered at his grave in the name of the Workers'

International.[51] There can be no doubt that when he had fought against the war until all hope of preventing it was gone, he would have yielded loyally to the common duty of national defense and taken part in it with all his might. He had announced this point of view at the Congress in Stuttgart, in 1907, in full agreement therein with Vandervelde and Bebel: "If, whatever the circ.u.mstances, a nation were to refuse from the outset to defend itself, it would be entirely at the mercy of the Governments of violence, barbarism, and reaction.... A unity of mankind which was the result of the absorption of conquered nations by one dominating nation would be a unity realized in slavery." On his return to Paris, in giving an account of the Congress to French Socialists (September 7, 1907, at the Tivoli Vaux-Hall), he impressed upon them their double duty--war against war, so long as it is only a menace upon the horizon, and in the hour of danger war in defense of national independence. For this great European was also a great Frenchman.[52]

Yet it is certain, too, that the firm accomplishment of his patriotic duty would not have prevented him from maintaining his human ideals, and watching with untiring eyes for every opportunity of reconstructing the shattered unity. Certainly he would not have allowed the vessel of socialism to drift, as his feeble successors have done.

He has pa.s.sed from us. But the reflection of his luminous genius, his kindness in the bitter struggle, his indestructible optimism even in the midst of disaster, s.h.i.+ne above the carnage of Europe, over which the dusk is gathering, like the splendor of the setting sun.

There is one page which he wrote, which cannot be read without emotion--an immortal page in which he represents the n.o.ble Herakles, resting after his labors on the maternal earth:

"There are hours," he says, "when in feeling the earth beneath our feet, we experience a joy deep and tranquil as the earth herself. How often on my journey along footpaths and across fields I have realized suddenly that it was indeed the earth on which I trod, that I belonged to her, as she belonged to me! Then without thinking I went more slowly, because it was not worth while to hasten across her surface, because I was conscious of her and possessed her at each step I took, and my soul was moving within her depths. How many times at the fall of day, as I lay by the side of a ditch, my eyes turned towards the faint blue of the eastern sky, I have suddenly realized that the earth was speeding on her journey hastening from the fatigues of the day and the limited horizons which the sun illumines, and rus.h.i.+ng with prodigious force towards the serenity of night and unlimited horizons, and bearing me with her. I felt in my body as in my soul, and in the earth herself as in my body, the thrill of this journey, and a strange sweetness in those blue s.p.a.ces which opened out before us, without a shock, without a fold, without a murmur. Oh! how much deeper and more intense is this kins.h.i.+p of our flesh with the earth, than the vague and wandering kins.h.i.+p of our eyes with the starry heavens. How much less beautiful the night with its stars would be to us, did we not feel ourselves at the same time bound to the earth."

He has returned to the earth--that earth which belonged to him, that earth to which he belonged. They have again taken possession of each other, and his spirit is even now warming and humanizing her. Beneath the torrents of blood shed upon his tomb the new life and the peace of tomorrow are already springing. It was a favorite and often repeated thought of Jaures, as of Herac.l.i.tus of old, that nothing can interrupt the flow of things, that "peace is only a form or aspect of war, war only a form or aspect of peace, and what is conflict today is the beginning of the reconciliation of tomorrow."

R. R.

_Journal de Geneve_, August 2, 1915.

NOTES

TO PAGE 19 ("LETTER TO GERHART HAUPTMANN")

The letter to Gerhart Hauptmann, written after the destruction of Louvain, and in the stress of the emotion aroused by the first news, was provoked by a high-sounding article of Hauptmann which appeared a few days previously. In that letter he reb.u.t.ted the accusation of barbarism hurled against Germany, and returned it ... against Belgium. The article ended as follows:

" ... I a.s.sure M. Maeterlinck that no one in Germany thinks of imitating the act of his 'civilized nation.' We prefer to be and to remain the German barbarians for whom the women and the children of our enemies are sacred. I can a.s.sure him that we never thoughtlessly ma.s.sacre and make martyrs of Belgian women and children. Our witnesses are on our frontiers; the socialist beside the bourgeois, the peasant beside the savant, and the prince beside the workman: and all fight with a full realization of the object, for a n.o.ble and rich national treasure, for internal and external goods which aid the progress and the ascent of humanity."

TO PAGE 41 ("ABOVE THE BATTLE")