The Horrible
The warm night was closing in. The women had remained in the drawing room while the men sat smoking on the garden chairs in front of the door, round a table laden with cups and liqueur-glasses.
Their lighted cigars shone like eyes in the growing darkness. They had been discussing a frightful accident that had happened the previous evening, when two men and three women had been drowned in the river before the eyes of the guests.
General de G⸺ remarked: “Yes, these things do affect one but they are not horrible.
“The hackneyed word ‘horrible’ carries much more meaning than the word ‘terrible’ does. A frightful accident like this distresses, upsets, and alarms one, but it does not horrify. In order to experience horror, something more is needed than mental emotion, something more than witnessing a frightful death; there must be either a shuddering sense of mystery, or a feeling of abnormal, unnatural terror. A man who dies even in the most dramatic circumstances does not inspire horror; a battlefield is not horrible; blood is not horrible; the vilest crimes are rarely horrible.
“Listen, I will give you two instances which have made me realise the meaning of horror.
“During the war of 1870 we were retreating towards Pont-Audemer after having passed through Rouen. The army consisted of about twenty thousand men; twenty thousand men in retreat, disbanded, demoralised, exhausted, were going to re-form at Havre.
“The ground was covered with snow, and night was falling. No one had had any food since the evening before; the Prussians were not far away, and the men had to retire quickly.
“The ghastly Norman country, speckled with the shadows of the trees round the farms, lay still, under a black heavy threatening sky.
“Nothing could be heard in the wan twilight but the sound, muddled, confused, and yet over-loud, of the troops on the march, an endless tramping mingled with the faint clink of their mess-tins or their swords. The men, bent, round-shouldered, dirty, many of them in rags, dragged themselves along, toiled through the snow with long exhausted strides, their hands sticking to the steel on the butt ends of their muskets, for it was freezing hard. I frequently saw a poor devil marching barefooted, so painful were his boots, leaving bloodstained footprints at every step. After a while he would sit down for a few minutes, but he never rose again. Every man who sat down was a dead man.
“How many of these poor exhausted soldiers we left behind expected to start again as soon as they had rested their stiffened legs! But the moment they stopped, their sluggish blood ceased to circulate in their frozen veins, and an irresistible numbness chilled them to the marrow, chained them to the ground, closed their eyes, and in one second paralysed the overwrought human machine. They gradually sank down, their heads on their knees, not falling over altogether, for their backs and their limbs become as hard and rigid as a piece of wood: it was impossible either to bend the bodies or place them upright.
“The rest of us, more robust, kept on going, chilled to the bone, going forward by mere inertia, through the night, the snow, the cold deathlike country, crushed by grief, defeat, and despair, but, above all, in the grip of the appalling sense of abandonment, the end of all things, death—nothing left.
“I saw two gendarmes holding the arms of a strange-looking little man, old, beardless, quite amazing in appearance. They were searching for an officer, believing that they had caught a spy.
“The word ‘spy’ spread rapidly through the crowd of stragglers, who gathered around the prisoner. A voice shouted: ‘He must be shot.’ And through the group of soldiers falling over with fatigue and only able to stand upright by leaning on their guns, there suddenly passed that wave of infuriated and bestial anger which drives a mob to bloodshed.
“I tried to speak, because I was in command of a battalion at the time, but the authority of officers was no longer recognised and they would even have shot me.
“One of the gendarmes said: ‘He has been following us for three days. He asks everybody for information about the artillery.’
“I tried to question the man: ‘What are you doing? What do you want? Why are you following the army?’ He muttered a few words in unintelligible dialect.
“He was indeed a strange being, with narrow shoulders and a sullen look: he was so ill at ease in my presence that I had no further doubt as to his being a spy. He seemed very old and feeble, and kept looking at me furtively, in a humble, stupid, sly way.
“The men around us shouted: ‘To the wall! To the wall!’
“I said to the gendarmes: ‘You will be responsible for the prisoner?’
“I
