Light - Henri Barbusse (short novels to read .txt) 📗

and poor for national expansion and the victory of France in the world, and sacred hatred of the Germans, which is a virtue in the French. Let us remember!

Then another orator excites himself and shouts that the war has been such a magnificent harvest of heroism that it must not be regretted. It has been a good thing for France; it has made lofty virtues and noble instincts gush forth from a nation which seemed to be decadent. Our people had need of an awakening and to recover themselves, and acquire new vigor. With metaphors which hover and vibrate he proclaims the glory of killing and being killed, he exalts the ancient passion for plumes and scarlet in which the heart of France is molded.

Alone on the edge of the crowd I feel myself go icy by the touch of these words and commands, which link future and past together and misery to misery. I have already heard them resounding forever. A world of thoughts growls confusedly within me. Once I cried noiselessly, "No!"--a deformed cry, a strangled protest of all my faith against all the fallacy which comes down upon us. That first cry which I have risked among men, I cast almost as a visionary, but almost as a dumb man. The old peasant did not even turn his earthy, gigantic head. And I hear a roar of applause go by, of popular expanse.

I go up to join Marie, mingling with the crowd; I divide serried knots of them. Suddenly there is profound silence, and every one stands immovable. Up there the Bishop is on his feet. He raises his forefinger and says, "The dead are not dead. They are rewarded in heaven; but even here on earth they are alive. They keep watch in our hearts, eternally preserved from oblivion. Theirs is the immortality of glory and gratitude. They are not dead, and we should envy them more than pity."

And he blesses the audience, all of whom bow or kneel. I remained upright, stubbornly, with clenched teeth. And I remember things, and I say to myself, "Have the dead died for nothing? If the world is to stay as it is, then--yes!"

Several men did not bend their backs at first, and then they obeyed the general movement; and I felt on my shoulders all the heavy weight of the whole bowing multitude.

Monsieur Joseph Bonéas is talking within a circle. Seeing him again I also feel for one second the fascination he once had for me. He is wearing an officer's uniform of the Town Guard, and his collar hides the ravages in his neck. He is holding forth. What says he? He says, "We must take the long view."

"We must take the long view. For my part, the only thing I admire in militarist Prussia is its military organization. After the war--for we must not limit our outlook to the present conflict--we must take lessons from it, and just let the simple-minded humanitarians go on bleating about universal peace."

He goes on to say that in his opinion the orators did not sufficiently insist on the necessity for tying the economic hands of Germany after the war. No annexations, perhaps; but tariffs, which would be much better. And he shows in argument the advantages and prosperity brought by carnage and destruction.

He sees me. He adorns himself with a smile and comes forward with proffered hand. I turn violently away. I have no use for the hand of this sort of outsider, this sort of traitor.

They lie. That ludicrous person who talks of taking the long view while there are still in the world only a few superb martyrs who have dared to do it, he who is satisfied to contemplate, beyond the present misery of men, the misery of their children; and the white-haired man who was extolling slavery just now, and trying to turn aside the demands of the people and switch them on to traditional massacre; and he who from the height of his bunting and trestles would have put a glamour of beauty and morality on battles; and he, the attitudinizer, who brings to life the memory of the dead only to deny with word trickery the terrible evidence of death, he who rewards the martyrs with the soft soap of false promises--all these people tell lies, lies, lies! Through their words I can hear the mental reservation they are chewing over--"Around us, the deluge; and after us, the deluge." Or else they do not even lie; they see nothing and they know not what they say.

They have opened the red barrier. Applause and congratulations cross each other. Some notabilities come down from the rostrum, they look at me, they are obviously interested in the wounded soldier that I am, they advance towards me. Among them is the intellectual person who spoke first. He is wagging the white head and its cauliflower curls, and looking all ways with eyes as empty as those of a king of cards. They told me his name, but I have forgotten it with contempt. I slip away from them. I am bitterly remorseful that for so long a portion of my life I believed what Bonéas said. I accuse myself of having formerly put my trust in speakers and writers who--however learned, distinguished, famous--were only imbeciles or villains. I fly from these people, since I am not strong enough to answer and resist them--or to cry out upon them that the only memory it is important to preserve of the years we have endured is that of their loathsome horror and lunacy.

* * * * * *


But the few words fallen from on high have sufficed to open my eyes, to show me that the Separation I dimly saw in the tempest of my nights in hospital was true. It comes down from vacancy and the clouds, it takes form and it takes root--it is there, it is there; and the indictment comes to light, as precise and as tragic as that row of faces!

Kings? There they are. There are many different kinds of king, just as there are different gods. But there is one royalty everywhere, and that is the very form of ancient society, the great machine which is stronger than men. And all the personages enthroned on that rostrum--those business men and bishops, those politicians and great merchants, those bulky office-holders or journalists, those old generals in sumptuous decorations, those writers in uniform--they are the custodians of the highest law and its executors.

It is those people whose interests are common and are contrary to those of mankind; and their interests are--above all and imperiously--let nothing change! It is those people who keep their eternal subjects in eternal order, who deceive and dazzle them, who take their brains away as they take their bodies, who flatter their servile instincts, who make shallow, resplendent creeds for them, and explain huge happenings away with all the pretexts they like. It is because of them that the law of things does not rest on justice and the moral law.

If some of them are unconscious of it, no matter. Neither does it matter that all of them do not always profit by the public's servitude, nor that some of them, sometimes, even happen to suffer from it. They are none the less, all of them, by their solid coalition, material and moral, the defenders of lies above and delusion below. These are the people who reign in the place of kings, or at the same time, here as everywhere.

Formerly I used to see a harmony of interests and ideals on all that festive, sunlit hill. Now I see reality broken in two, as I did on my bed of pain. I see the two enemy races face to face--the victors and the vanquished.

Monsieur Gozlan looks like a master of masters--an aged collector of fortune, whose speculations are famous, whose wealth increases unaided, who makes as much profit as he likes and holds the district in the hollow of his hand. His vulgar movements flash with diamonds, and a bulky golden trinket hangs on his belly like a phallus. The generals beside him--those glorious potentates whose smiles are made of so many souls--and the administrators and the honorables only look like secondary actors.

Fontan occupies considerable space on the rostrum. He drowses there, with his two spherical hands planted in front of him. The voluminous trencherman digests and blows forth with his buttered mouth; and what he has eaten purrs within him. As for Rampaille, the butcher, _he_ has mingled with the public. He is rich but dressed with bad taste. It is his habit to say, "I am a poor man of the people, I am; look at my dirty clothes." A moment ago, when the lady who was collecting for the Lest-we-Forget League suddenly confronted him and trapped him amid general attention, he fumbled desperately in his fob and dragged three sous out of his body. There are several like him on this side of the barrier, looking as though they were part of the crowd, but only attached to it by their trade. Kings do not now carry royalty everywhere on their sleeves; they obliterate themselves in the clothes of everybody. But all the hundred faces of royalty have the same signs, all of them, and are distinctly repeated through their smiles of cupidity, rapacity, ferocity.

And there the dark multitude fidgets about. By footpaths and streets they have come from the country and the town. I see, gazing earnestly, stiff-set with attention, faces scorched by rude contact with the seasons or blanched by bad atmospheres; the sharp and mummified face of the peasant; faces of young men grown bitter before they have come of age; of women grown ugly before they have come of age, who draw the little wings of their capes over their faded blouses and faded throats; the clerks of anemic and timorous career; and the little people with whom times are so difficult, whom their mediocrity depresses; all that stirring of backs and shoulders and hanging arms, in poverty dressed up or naked. Behold their numbers and immense strength. Behold, therefore, authority and justice. For justice and authority are not hollow formulas--they are life, the most of life there can be; they are mankind, they are mankind in all places and all times. These words, justice and authority, do not echo in an abstract sphere. They are rooted in the human being. They overflow and palpitate. When I demand justice, I am not groping in a dream, I am crying from the depths of all unhappy hearts.

Such are they, that mountain of people heaped on the ground like metal for the roads, overwhelmed by unhappiness, debased by charity and asking for it, bound to the rich by urgent necessity, entangled in the wheels of a single machine, the machine of frightful repetition. And in that multitude I also place nearly all young people, whoever they are, because of their docility and their general ignorance. These lowly people form an imposing mass as far as