Clerambault’s writings found an echo in their hearts; not that he understood them, no one could understand who had not shared their hardships. But he pitied them, and spoke humanely of the unfortunates in all camps. He dared to speak of the injustices, common to all nations, which had led to the general suffering. He could not take away their trouble, but he did raise it into an atmosphere where it could be borne.
“If you only knew how we crave a word of real sympathy; it is all very well to be hardened, or old—there are grey-haired, bent men among us—but after what we have seen, suffered, and done to others, there are times when we are like lost children, looking for their mother to console them. Even our mothers seem far away. At times we get strange letters from home, as if we were deserted by our own flesh and blood.”
Clerambault hid his face in his hands with a groan.
“What is the matter?” said Moreau, “are you ill?”
“You remind me of all the harm that I did.”
“You? No, it was other people that did the harm.”
“Yes, I, as much as the others. You must try to forgive us all.”
“You are the last who ought to say so.”
“If the truth were known, I should be among the first. For I am one of the few who see clearly how wicked I was.” He began to inveigh against his generation, but broke off with a discouraged gesture:
“None of that does any good. … Tell me about yourself.”
His voice was so humble that Moreau was really touched to see the older man blame himself so severely. All his distrust melted away, and he threw wide the door of his bitter, wounded spirit, confessing that he had come several times as far as the house, but could not make up his mind to leave his letter. He never did consent to show it. Since he came out of the hospital he had not been able to talk to anyone; these people back here sickened him with their little preoccupations, their business, their pleasures, the restrictions to their pleasures, their selfishness, their ignorance and lack of comprehension. He felt like a stranger among them, more than if he were with African savages. Besides—he stopped, the angry words seemed to stick in his throat—it was not only these people—he felt a stranger to all the world, cut off from normal life, from the pleasures and work of other men by his infirmities. He was a mere wreck, blind and maimed. The poor fellow was absurdly ashamed of it; he blushed at the pitying glances that people threw at him in passing—like a penny that you give, turning away your head at the same time from the unpleasant sight. For in his sensitiveness he exaggerated his ugliness and was disgusted by his deformity. He dwelt on his lost joys and ruined youth; when he saw couples in the street, he could not help feeling jealous; the tears would come into his eyes.
Even this was not all, and when he had poured out the bitterness of his heart—and Clerambault’s compassion encouraged him to speak further—he got down to the worst of the trouble, which he and his comrades felt like a cancer that one does not dare to look at. Through his obscure, violent, and miserable talk, Clerambault at last made out what it was that tore the hearts of these young men. It is easy enough for dried-up egotists, withered intellectuals, to sneer at this love of life in the young, and their despair at the loss of it; but it was not alone their ruined, blasted youth that pressed on these poor soldiers—though that was terrible enough—the worst was not to know the reason for this sacrifice, and the poisonous suspicion that it was all in vain. The pain of these victims could not be soothed by the gross appeal of a foolish racial supremacy, nor by a fragment of ground fought for between States. They knew now how much earth a man needs to die on, and that the blood of all races is part of the same stream of life.
Clerambault felt that he was a sort of elder brother to these young men; the sense of this and his duty towards them gave him a strength that he would not otherwise have had, and he charged their messenger with words of hope and consolation.
“Your sufferings are not thrown away,” he said. “It is true that they are the fruit of a cruel error, but the errors themselves are not all lost. The scourge of today is the explosion of evils which have ravaged Europe for ages; pride and cupidity. It is made up of conscienceless States, the disease of capitalism, and is become the monstrous machine called Civilisation, full of intolerance, hypocrisy, and violence. Everything is breaking up; all must be done over again; it is a tremendous task, but do not speak of discouragement, for yours is the greatest work that has ever been offered to a generation. The fire of the trenches and the asphyxiating gases that blind you come as much from agitators in the rear as from the enemy; you must strive to see clearly, to see where the real fight lies. It is not against a people but against an unhealthy society founded on exploitation and rivalry between nations, on the subordination of the free conscience to the Machine-State. The peoples, resigned or sceptical, would not have seen this with the tragical clearness in which it now appears, without the painful disturbance of the war. I do not bless this pain; leave that
