its extenuation; that if killing is a crime, killing many can be no extenuating circumstance; that if robbery is disgraceful, invasion cannot be glorious. Ah! let us proclaim these absolute truths; let us dishonor war!'
'Vain wrath,' continues Maupassant, 'a poet's indignation. War is held in more veneration than ever.
'A skilled proficient in that line, a slaughterer of genius, Von Moltke, in reply to the peace delegates, once uttered these strange words:
''War is holy, war is ordained of God. It is one of the most sacred laws of the world. It maintains among men all the great and noble sentiments—honor, devotion, virtue, and courage, and saves them in short from falling into the most hideous materialism.'
'So, then, bringing millions of men together into herds, marching by day and by night without rest, thinking of nothing, studying nothing, learning nothing, reading nothing, being useful to no one, wallowing in filth, sleeping in mud, living like brutes in a continual state of stupefaction, sacking towns, burning villages, ruining whole populations, then meeting another mass of human flesh, falling upon them, making pools of blood, and plains of flesh mixed with trodden mire and red with heaps of corpses, having your arms or legs carried off, your brains blown out for no advantage to anyone, and dying in some corner of a field while your old parents, your wife and children are perishing of hunger—that is what is meant by not falling into the most hideous materialism!
'Warriors are the scourge of the world. We struggle against nature and ignorance and obstacles of all kinds to make our wretched life less hard. Learned men—benefactors of all—spend their lives in working, in seeking what can aid, what be of use, what can alleviate the lot of their fellows. They devote themselves unsparingly to their task of usefulness, making one discovery after another, enlarging the sphere of human intelligence, extending the bounds of science, adding each day some new store to the sum of knowledge, gaining each day prosperity, ease, strength for their country.
'War breaks out. In six months the generals have destroyed the
work of twenty years of effort, of patience, and of genius.
'That is what is meant by not falling into the most hideous
materialism.
'We have seen it, war. 'We have seen men turned to brutes, frenzied, killing for fun, for terror, for bravado, for ostentation. Then when right is no more, law is dead, every notion of justice has disappeared. We have seen men shoot innocent creatures found on the road, and suspected because they were afraid. We have seen them kill dogs chained at their masters' doors to try their new revolvers, we have seen them fire on cows lying in a field for no reason whatever, simply for the sake of shooting, for a joke.
'That is what is meant by not falling into the most hideous materialism.
'Going into a country, cutting the man's throat who defends his house because he wears a blouse and has not a military cap on his head, burning the dwellings of wretched beings who have nothing to eat, breaking furniture and stealing goods, drinking the wine found in the cellars, violating the women in the streets, burning thousands of francs' worth of powder, and leaving misery and cholera in one's track—
'That is what is meant by not falling into the most hideous materialism.
'What have they done, those warriors, that proves the least intelligence? Nothing. What have they invented? Cannons and muskets. That is all.
'What remains to us from Greece? Books and statues. Is Greece
great from her conquests or her creations?
'Was it the invasions of the Persians which saved Greece from
falling into the most hideous materialism?
'Were the invasions of the barbarians what saved and
regenerated Rome?
'Was it Napoleon I. who carried forward the great intellectual movement started by the philosophers of the end of last century?
'Yes, indeed, since government assumes the right of annihilating peoples thus, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the peoples assume the right of annihilating governments.
'They defend themselves. They are right. No one has an absolute right to govern others. It ought only to be done for the benefit of those who are governed. And it is as much the duty of anyone who governs to avoid war as it is the duty of a captain of a ship to avoid shipwreck.
'When a captain has let his ship come to ruin, he is judged and condemned, if he is found guilty of negligence or even incapacity.
'Why should not the government be put on its trial after every
declaration of war? IF THE PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD THAT, IF THEY
THEMSELVES PASSED JUDGMENT ON MURDEROUS GOVERNMENTS, IF THEY
REFUSED TO LET THEMSELVES BE KILLED FOR NOTHING, IF THEY WOULD
ONLY TURN THEIR ARMS AGAINST THOSE WHO HAVE GIVEN THEM TO THEM
FOR MASSACRE, ON THAT DAY WAR WOULD BE NO MORE. BUT THAT DAY
WILL NEVER COME' [Footnote: 'Sur l'Eau,' pp. 71-80].
The author sees all the horror of war. He sees that it is caused by governments forcing men by deception to go out to slaughter and be slain without any advantage to themselves. And he sees, too, that the men who make up the armies could turn their arms against the governments and bring them to judgment. But he thinks that that will never come to pass, and that there is, therefore, no escape from the present position.
'I think war is terrible, but that it is inevitable; that compulsory military service is as inevitable as death, and that since government will always desire it, war will always exist.'
So writes this talented and sincere writer, who is endowed with that power of penetrating to the innermost core of the subjects which is the essence of the poetic faculty. He brings before us all the cruelty of the inconsistency between men's moral sense and their actions, but without trying to remove it; seems to admit that this inconsistency must exist and that it is the poetic tragedy of life.
Another no less gifted writer, Edouard Rod, paints in still more vivid colors the cruelty and madness of the present state of things. He too only aims at presenting its tragic features, without suggesting or forseeing any issue from the position.
'What is the good of doing anything? What is the good of undertaking any enterprise? And how are we to love men in these troubled times when every fresh day is a menace of danger?… All we have begun, the plans we are developing, our schemes of work, the little good we may have been able to do, will it not all be swept away by the tempest that is in preparation?… Everywhere the earth is shaking under our feet and storm-clouds are gathering on our horizon which will have no pity on us.
'Ah! if all we had to dread were the revolution which is held up as a specter to terrify us! Since I cannot imagine a society more detestable than ours, I feel more skeptical than alarmed in regard to that which will replace it. If I should have to suffer from the change, I should be consoled by thinking that the executioners of that day were the victims of the previous time, and the hope of something better would help us to endure the worst. But it is
