The older men however who stayed behind, had not their reasons for ceasing to reason. Their brains were given to them to be used, not for truth, but for victory. Since in the wars of today, in which entire peoples are engulfed, thoughts as well as guns are enrolled. They slay the soul, they reach beyond the seas, and destroy after centuries have passed. Thought is the heavy artillery which works from a distance. Naturally Clerambault aimed his pieces, also the question for him was no longer to see clearly, largely, to take in the horizon, but to sight the enemy—it gave him the illusion that he was helping his son.
With an unconscious and feverish bad faith kept up by his affection, he sought in everything that he saw, heard, or read, for arguments to prop up his will to believe in the holiness of the cause, for everything which went to prove that the enemy alone had wanted war, was the sole enemy of peace, and that to make war on the enemy was really to wish for peace.
There was proof enough and to spare; there always is; all that is needed is to know when to open and shut your eyes … But nevertheless Clerambault was not entirely satisfied. These half-truths, or truths with false tails to them, produced a secret uneasiness in the conscience of this honest man, showing itself in a passionate irritation against the enemy, which grew more and more. On the same lines—like two buckets in a well, one going up as the other goes down—his patriotic enthusiasm grew and drowned the last torments of his mind in a salutary intoxication.
From now on he was on the watch for the smallest newspaper items in support of his theory; and though he knew what to think of the veracity of these sheets, he did not doubt them for an instant when their assertions fed his eager restless passion. Where the enemy was concerned he adopted the principle, that the worst is sure to be true—and he was almost grateful to Germany when, by acts of cruelty and repeated violations of justice, she furnished him the solid confirmation of the sentence which, for greater security, he had pronounced in advance.
Germany gave him full measure. Never did a country at war seem more anxious to raise the universal conscience against her. This apoplectic nation bursting with strength, threw itself upon its adversary in a delirium of pride, anger and fear. The human beast let loose, traced a ring of systematic horror around him from the first. All his instinctive and acquired brutalities were cleverly excited by those who held him in leash, by his official chiefs, his great General Staff, his enrolled professors, his army chaplains. War has always been, will forever remain, a crime; but Germany organised it as she did everything. She made a code for murder and conflagration, and over it all she poured the boiling oil of an enraged mysticism, made up of Bismarck, of Nietzsche, and of the Bible. In order to crush the world and regenerate it, the Superman and Christ were mobilised. The regeneration began in Belgium—a thousand years from now men will tell of it. The affrighted world looked on at the infernal spectacle of the ancient civilisation of Europe, more than two thousand years old, crumbling under the savage expert blows of the great nation which formed its advance guard. Germany, rich in intelligence, in science and in power, in a fortnight of war became docile and degraded; but what the organisers of this Germanic frenzy failed to foresee was that, like army cholera, it would spread to the other camp, and once installed in the hostile countries it could not be dislodged until it had infected the whole of Europe, and rendered it uninhabitable for centuries. In all the madness of this atrocious war, in all its violence, Germany set the example. Her big body, better fed, more fleshly than others, offered a greater target to the attacks of the epidemic. It was terrible; but by the time the evil began to abate with her, it had penetrated elsewhere and under the form of a slow tenacious disease it ate to the very bone. To the insanities of German thinkers, speakers in Paris and everywhere were not slow to respond with their extravagances; they were like the heroes in Homer; but if they did not fight, they screamed all the louder. They insulted not only the adversary, they insulted his father, his grandfather, and his entire race; better still they denied his past. The tiniest academician worked furiously to diminish the glory of the great men asleep in the peace of the grave.
Clerambault listened and listened, absorbed, though he was one of the few French poets who before the war had European relations and whose work would have been appreciated in Germany. He spoke no foreign language, it is true; petted old child of France that he was, who would not take the trouble to visit other people, sure that they would come to him. But at least he welcomed them kindly, his mind was free from national prejudices, and the intuitions of his heart made up for his lack of instruction and caused him to pour out without stint his admiration for foreign genius. But now that he had been warned to distrust everything, by the constant: “Keep still—take care,” and knew that Kant led straight to Krupp, he dared admire nothing without official sanction. The sympathetic modesty that caused him in times of peace to accept with the respect due to words of Holy Writ the publications of learned and distinguished men, now in the war took on the proportions of a fabulous credulity. He swallowed without a gulp the strange
