The Wrack of the storm

THE WRACK OF THE STORM

THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK

ESSAYS

THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE

WISDOM AND DESTINY

THE LIFE OF THE BEE

THE BURIED TEMPLE

THE DOUBLE GARDEN

THE MEASURE OF THE HOURS

ON EMERSON, AND OTHER ESSAYS

OUR ETERNITY

THE UNKNOWN GUEST

THE WRACK OF THE STORM

PLAYS

SISTER BEATRICE, AND ARDIANE AND BARBE BLEUE

JOYZELLE, AND MONNA VANNA

THE BLUE BIRD, A FAIRY PLAY

MARY MAGDALENE

PELLEAS AND MELISANDE, AND OTHER PLAYS

PRINCESS MALEINE

THE INTRUDER, AND OTHER PLAYS

AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE

HOLIDAY EDITIONS

OUR FRIEND THE DOG

THE SWARM

THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE FLOWERS

DEATH

THOUGHTS FROM MAETERLINCK

THE BLUE BIRD

THE LIFE OF THE BEE

NEWS OF SPRING AND OTHER NATURE STUDIES

POEMS

The
Wrack of the Storm

~

BY

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Translated by
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1916

<;.>>•«*'

LIBRARY

COPYRIGHT, 1916
BY DODO, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC*

Q
-o

M/553

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

THE reader taking up this volume will, for
the first time in the work of one who
hitherto had cursed no man, find words of
hatred and malediction. I would gladly
have avoided them, for I hold that he who
takes upon himself to write pledges himself
to say nothing that can derogate from the
respect and love which we owe to all men.
I have had to utter these words ; and I am
as much surprised as saddened at what I
have been constrained to say by the force
of events and of truth. I loved Ger-
many and numbered friends there, who
now, dead or living, are alike dead to me.
I thought her great and upright and gen-
erous; and to me she was ever kindly and
hospitable. But there are crimes that oblit-
erate the past and close the future. In re-
5

Author's Preface

jecting hatred I should have shown myself
a traitor to love.

I tried to lift myself above the fray;
but, the higher I rose, the more I saw of
the madness and the horror of it, of the
justice of one cause and the infamy of the
other. It is possible that one day, when
time has wearied remembrance and re-
stored the ruins, wise men will tell us that
we were mistaken and that our standpoint
was not lofty enough; but they will say it
because they will no longer know what we
know, nor will they have seen what we
have seen.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK.

NICE, 1916.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

THE present volume contains, in the
chronological order in which they were pro-
duced, all the essays published and all the
speeches delivered by M. Maeterlinck since
the beginning of the war, upon which, as
will be perceived, each one of them has a
direct bearing. They are printed as writ-
ten; and they throw an interesting light
upon the successive phases of the author's
psychology during the Titanic and hideous
struggle that has affected the mental atti-
tude of us all.

In Italy forms the preface to M. Jules
DestreVs book, En Italic avant la guerre,
1914-1$. Of the remaining essays, some
have appeared in various English and
American periodicals; others are now
printed in translation for the first time.
7

Translator's Note

I have also had M. Maeterlinck's leave
to include in this volume his first published
work, The Massacre of the Innocents.
This powerful sketch in the Flemish man-
ner saw the light originally in the Pleiade,
in 1886, and may at the present time, to
use the author's own words in a note to my-
self, be regarded as "a sort of vague sym-
bolic prophecy." An English version by
Mrs. Edith Wingate Kinder was printed in
the Dome in 1899; another has since been
issued by an English and by an American
firm of publishers; but the only authorized
translation to appear in book form is that
now added as an epilogue to The Wrack of
the Storm.

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS.
CHELSEA, 1916.

CONTENTS

PAGE

AUTHOR'S PREFACE .... 5

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE .... 7

I AFTER THE VICTORY . II

II KING ALBERT .... 21

III THE HOSTAGE CITIES . . 31

IV TO SAVE FOUR CITIES . . 37

V PRO PATRIA: I .... 45

VI HEROISM 59

VII PRO PATRIA: II .... 75
VIII PRO PATRIA: III ... 89

ix BELGIUM'S FLAG DAY . . 109

X ON THE DEATH OF A LITTLE

SOLDIER 117

XI THE HOUR OF DESTINY . . 131

XII IN ITALY 147

XIII ON REREADING THUCYDIDES . l6l

XIV THE DEAD DO NOT DIE . . 179

9

Contents

PAGE

XV IN MEMORIAM . . . . 191
XVI SUPERNATURAL COMMUNICA-
TIONS IN WAR-TIME . . 197
XVII EDITH CAVELL . . . . 217
XVIII THE LIFE OF THE DEAD . . 229
XIX THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS 24!
XX THE WILL OF EARTH . . 257

XXI FOR POLAND 271

XXII THE MIGHT OF THE DEAD . 279

XXIII WHEN THE WAR IS OVER . 291

XXIV THE MASSACRE OF THE INNO-

CENTS 303

IO

AFTER THE VICTORY

THE WRACK OF THE STORM
I

AFTER THE VICTORY1

I

AT THESE moments of tragedy, none
should be allowed to speak who can-
not shoulder a rifle, for the written word
seems so monstrously useless, so over-
whelmingly trivial, in front of this mighty
drama which shall for a long time, it may
be for ever, free mankind from the scourge
of war: the one scourge among all that
cannot be excused, that cannot be explained,
since alone among all it issues entire from
the hands of man.

2

But it is while this scourge is upon us,
while we have our being in its very centre,

^Translated by Alfred Sutro.
13

The Wrack of the Storm

that we shall do well to balance the guilt
of those who have committed this inexpi-
able crime. It is now, while we are in the
thick of the horror, undergoing it, feeling
it, that we have the energy, the clear-
sightedness needed to judge it; from the
depths of the most fearful injustice justice
is best perceived. When the hour shall
have come for settling accounts — and it
will not long delay — we shall have for-
gotten much of what we have suffered and
a blameworthy pity will creep over us and
cloud our eyes. This is the moment,
therefore, for us to frame our inexorable
resolution. After the final victory, when
the enemy is crushed — as crushed he will
be — efforts will be made to enlist our sym-
pathy, to move us to pity. We shall be told
that the unfortunate German people were
merely the victims of their monarch and
their feudal caste; that no blame attaches
to the Germany we know, which is so syn>
14

After the Victory

pathetic and so cordial — the Germany of
quaint old houses and open-hearted greet-
ing, the Germany that sits under its lime-
trees beneath the clear light of the moon —
but only to Prussia, hateful, arrogant Prus-
sia; that the homely, peace-loving, Bavar-
ian, the genial and hospitable dwellers on
the banks of the Rhine, the Silesian and
Saxon and I know not who besides — for all
these will suddenly have become whiter
than snow and more inoffensive than the
sheep in an English fold — that they all
have merely obeyed, have been compelled
to obey orders which they detested but
were unable to resist. We are face to face
with reality now ; let us look at it well and
pronounce our sentence; for this is the
moment when we hold the proofs in our
hands, when the elements of crime are hot
before us and shout out the truth that soon
will fade from our memory. Let us tell
qurselves now, therefore, now, that all that
15

*
t

I

<**&**

|M** >»«?

The Wrack of the Storm

we shall be told hereafter will be false;
and let us unflinchingly adhere to what we
decide at this moment, when the glare of
the horror is on us

3

It is not true that in this gigantic crime
there are innocent and guilty, or degrees
of guilt. They stand on one level, all
those who have taken part in it. The
German from the North has no more spe-
cial craving for blood and outrage than he
from the South has special tenderness or
pity. It is, very simply, the German, from
one end of his country to the other, who
stands revealed as a beast of prey which
the firm will of our planet finally repudiates.
We have here no wretched slaves dragged
along by a tyrant king who alone is respon-
sible. Nations have the government which
they deserve, or rather, the government
which they have is truly no more than the
16

After the Victory

magnified and public projection of the pri-
vate morality and mentality of the nation.
If eighty million innocent people select and
support a monstrous king, those eighty mil-
lion innocent people merely expose the in-
herent falseness and superficiality of their
innocence; and it is the monster they
maintain at their head who stands for all
that is true in their nature, because it is he
who represents the eternal aspirations of
their race, which lie far deeper than their
apparent and transient virtues. Let there
be no suggestion of error, of having been
led astray, of an intelligent people having
been tricked or misled. No nation can be
deceived that does not wish to be deceived;
and it is not intelligence that Germany
lacks. In the sphere of intellect such things
are not possible; nor in the region of en-
lightened, reflecting will. No nation per-
mits herself to be coerced to the one crime
that man cannot pardon. It is of her own
17

The Wrack of the Storm

accord that she hastens towards it; her
chief has no need to persuade, it is she
who urges him on.

4

We have forces here quite different from
those on the surface, forces that are secret,
irresistible and profound. It is these that
we must judge, these that we must crush
under our heel, once and for all; for they
are the only ones that will not be im-
proved or softened or brought into line by
experience or progress, or even by the bit-
terest lesson. They are unalterable and im-
movable, their springs lie far beneath hope
or influence ; and they must be destroyed as
we destroy a nest of wasps, since we know
that these never can change into a nest
of bees. And, even though individually
and singly the Germans were all innocent
and merely led astray, they would be none
the less guilty in the mass. This is the

After the Victory

guilt that counts, that alone is actual and
real, because it lays bare, underneath their
superficial innocence, the subconscious cri-
minality of all.

5

No influence can prevail on the uncon-
scious or the subconscious. It never
evolves. Let there come a thousand years
of civilization, a thousand years of peace,
with all possible refinements of art and
education, the subconscious element of the
German spirit, which is its unvarying ele-
ment, will remain absolutely the same as
it is to-day and would declare itself, when
the opportunity came, under the same a-
spect, with the same infamy. Through the
whole course of history, two distinct will-
powers have been noticed that would seem
to be the opposed, elemental manifesta-
tions of the spirit of our globe, the one
seeking only evil, injustice, tyranny and suf-
19

The Wrack of the Storm

fering, while the other strives for liberty,
the right, radiance and joy. These two
powers stand once again face to face; our
opportunity is now to annihilate the one
that comes from below. Let us know how
to be pitiless that we may have no more
need for pity. It is a measure of organic
defence. It is essential that the modern
world should stamp out Prussian militar-
ism as it would stamp out a poisonous fun-
gus that for half a century had disturbed
and polluted its days. The health of our
planet is in question. To-morrow the
United States of Europe will have to take
measures for the convalescence of the
earth.

20

KING ALBERT

II

KING ALBERT
I

OF all the heroes of this stupendous
war, heroes who will live in the
memory of man, one assuredly of the most
unsullied, one of those whom we can never
love enough, is the great young king of my
little country.

He was indeed at the critical hour the
appointed man, the man for whom every
heart was waiting. With sudden beauty
he embodied the mighty voice of his people.
He stood, upon the moment, for Belgium,
revealed unto herself and unto others. He
had the wonderful good fortune to realize
and bestow a conscience in one of those
dread hours of tragedy and perplexity
when the best of consciences waver.
23

The Wrack of the Storm

Had he not been at hand, there is no
doubt but that all would have happened
differently; and history would have lost one
of her fairest and noblest pages. Certainly
Belgium would have been loyal and true to
her word; and any government would
have been swept away, pitilessly and irre-
sistibly, by the indignation of a people that
had never, however far we probe into the
past, played false. But there would have
been much of that confusion and irresolu-
tion inevitable in a host suddenly threat-
ened with disaster. There would have been
vain talking, mistaken measures, excusable
but irreparable vacillations ; and, above all,
the much-needed words, the precise and
final words, would not have been spoken
and the deeds, than which we can picture
none more resolute, none greater, would
not have been done at the right moment.

Thanks to the king, the peerless act
shines forth and is maintained complete,
24

King Albert

unfaltering; and the path of heroism is

straight and clearly defined and splendid as

that of Thermopylae indefinitely extended.

2

But what he has suffered, what he suffers
day by day only those can understand who
have had the privilege of access to this
hero : the most sensitive and the gentlest of
men, silent and reserved; a man of con-
trolled emotions, modest with a timidity
that is at once baffling and delightful;
loving his people less as a father loves his
children than as a son loves his adoring
mother. Of all that cherished kingdom,
his pride and his joy, the seat of his happi-
ness, the centre of his love and his security,
there is left intact but a handful of cities,
which are threatened at every moment by
the foulest invader that the world has ever
borne.

All the others — so quaint or so beautiful,
so bright, so serene, happy to be there, so
25

The Wrack of the Storm

inoffensive — jewels in the crown of Peace,
models of pure and upright family life,
homes of loyal and dutiful industry, of
ready, ever-smiling geniality, with the na-
tural welcome, the ever-proffered hand and
the ever-open heart : all the others are dead
cities, of which not one stone is left upon
another; and the very country-side, one of
the fairest in this world, with its gentle
pastures, is now no more than one vast field
of horror.

Treasures have perished that were num-
bered among the noblest and dearest pos-
sessions of mankind; monuments have dis-
appeared which nothing can replace; and
the half of a nation, among all nations the
most attached to its old simple habits, its
humble homes, is at present wandering
along the roads of Europe. Thousands of
innocent people have been massacred; and
of those who remain nearly all are doomed
to poverty and hunger.
26

King Albert

But that remainder has but one soul,
which has taken refuge in the spacious soul
of its king. Not a murmur, not a word
of reproach I But yesterday a town of
thirty thousand inhabitants received the or-
der to forsake its white houses, its churches,
its ancient streets and squares, the scene of
a light-hearted and industrious life. The
thirty thousand inhabitants, women and
children and old men, set forth to seek an
uncertain refuge in a neighbouring city,
which is threatened almost as directly as
their own and which to-morrow, it may be,
must in its turn set forth, but whither none
can say, for the country is so small that
its boundaries are quickly reached, its shel-
ter soon exhausted.

No matter : they obey in silence and one
and all approve and bless their sovereign.
He did what had to be done, what every
one in his place would have done; and,
though they are all suffering as no people
27

l

.

The Wrack of the Storm

has suffered since the barbarous invasions
of the earliest ages, they know that he suf-
fers more than any of them, for in him
all their sorrows find a goal; in him they
are reflected and enhanced. They do not
even harbour the idea that they might have
been saved by a sacrifice of honour. They
draw no distinction between duty and des-
tiny. To them that duty, with its fright-
ful consequences, seems as inevitable as a
natural force against which we cannot even
dream of struggling, so great is it and so
invincible.

3

Here is an 'example of the collective
bravery of nameless heroes, an ingenuous
and almost unconscious courage, which
rivals and at times exceeds the most exalted
deeds in legend and history, for since the
days of the great martyrs men have never
suffered death more simply for a simple

idea.

28

King Albert

And, if amid the anguish of our struggle
it were seemly to speak of aught but tears
and lamentations, we should find a mag-
nificent consolation in the spectacle of the
unexpected heroism that suddenly sur-
rounds us on every side. It may well be
said that never in the memory of mankind
have men sacrificed their lives with such
zest, such self-abnegation, such enthusiasm ;
and that the immortal virtues which to this
day have uplifted and preserved the flower
of the human race have never shone more
brilliantly, never manifested greater power,
energy or youth.

29

THE HOSTAGE CITIES

Ill

THE HOSTAGE CITIES
I

THANKS to the heroism of the Allies,
the hour is approaching when the
hordes of William the Madman will quit
the soil of afflicted Belgium.

After what they have done in cold blood,
what excesses, what disasters must we not
expect of the last convulsions of their rage ?
Our anguish is all the more poignant in that
they are at this moment fighting in the most
ancient and most precious portion of Flan-
ders. Above all countries, this is historic
and hallowed land. They have destroyed
Termonde, Roulers, Charleroi, Mons, Na-
mur, Thielt and more besides; happy,
charming little towns, which will rise again
from their ashes, more beautiful than be-
33

The Wrack of the Storm

fore. They have annihilated Louvain and
Malines ; they have but lately levelled Dix-
mude; their torches, their incendiary
squirts and their bombs are about to attack
Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres
and Furnes, which are like so many living
museums, forming one of the most delight-
ful, delicate and fragile ornaments of
Europe. The things which are beginning
here and which may be completed would
be irreparable. They would mean a loss
to our race for which nothing could atone.
A quite peculiar aspect — familiar, kindly,
racy of the soil and unique — of that beauty
which a long series of comely human lives
is able to acquire and to hoard would dis-
appear for ever from the face of the earth;
and we cannot, in the trouble and confu-
sion of these too tragic hours, realize the
extent, the meaning or the consequences of
such a crime.

34

Hostage Cities

2

We have made every sacrifice without
complaining; but this would exceed all
measure. What can be done? How are
we to stop them? They seem to be no
longer accessible to reason or to any of the
feelings which men hold in honour; they
are sensible only to blows. Very soon, as
they must know, we shall have the power
to strike them shrewdly. Why do not the
Allies, this very day, swiftly, while yet
there is time, name so many hostage cities,
which would, be answerable, stone for
stone, for the existence of our own dear
towns? If Brussels, for example, should
be destroyed, then Berlin should be razed
to the ground. If Antwerp were devas-
tated, Hamburg would disappear. Nu-
remburg would guarantee Bruges ; Munich
would stand surety for Ghent.

At the present moment, when they are
feeling the wind of defeat that blows
35

The Wrack of the Storm

through their tattered standard, it is pos-
sible that this solemn threat, officially pro-
nounced, would force them to reflect, if
indeed they are still at all capable of re-
flection. It is the only expedient that re-
mains to us and there is no time to be lost.
With certain adversaries the most barbar-
ous threats are legitimate and necessary,
for these threats speak the only language
which they can understand. And our child-
ren must not one day be able to reproach
us with not having attempted everything —
even that which is most repugnant — to
save the treasures which are theirs by right.

TO SAVE FOUR CITIES

IV

TO SAVE FOUR CITIES

I

FIRST Louvain, Malines, Termonde,
Lierre, Dixmude, Nieuport (and I
am speaking only of the disasters of Flan-
ders) ; now Ypres is no more and Furnes
is half in ruins. By the side of the great
Flemish cities, Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent
and Bruges, those vast and incomparable
living museums which have been watchfully
preserved by a whole people, a people
above all others attached to its traditions,
they formed a constellation of little towns,
delightful and hospitable, too little known
to travellers. Each of them wore its own
expression, of peace, pleasantness, innocent
mirth, or meditation. Each possessed its
treasures, jealously guarded: its belfries,
its churches, its canals, its old bridges, its
39

The Wrack of the Storm

quiet convents, its ancient houses, which
gave it a special physiognomy, never to be
forgotten by those who had beheld it.

But the indisputable queen of these
beautiful forsaken cities was Ypres, with
its enormous market-place, bordered by
little dwelling-houses with stepped gables,
and its prodigious market-buildings, which
occupied one whole side of the immense
oblong. This market-place haunted for
ever the memory of those who had seen
it, were it but once, while waiting to change
trains ; it was so unexpected, so magical, so
dream-like almost, in its disproportion to
the rest of the town. While the ancient
city, whose life had withdrawn itself from
century to century, was gradually shrinking
all around it, the Grand'Place itself re-
mained an immovable, gigantic, magnifi-
cent witness to the might and opulence of
old, when Ypres was, with Ghent and Bru-
ges, one of the three queens of the western
40

To Save Four Cities

world, one of the most strenuous centres
of human industry and activity and the
cradle of our great liberties. Such as it
was yesterday — alas, that I cannot say,
such as it is to-day! — this square, with the
enormous but unspeakably harmonious
mass of those market-buildings, at once
powerful and graceful, wild, gloomy^
proud, yet genial, was one; of the most
wonderful and perfect spectacles that could
be seen in any town on this old earth of
ours. While .of a different order of ar-
chitecture, built of other elements and
standing under sterner skies, it should have
been as precious to man, as sacred and as
intangible as the Piazza di San Marco at
Venice, the Signoria at Florence or the
Piazza del Duomo at Pisa. It constituted
a peerless specimen of art, which at all
times wrung a cry of admiration from the
most indifferent, an ornament which men
hoped was imperishable, one of those things
41

The Wrack of the Storm

of beauty which, in the words of the poet,
are a joy forever.

I cannot believe that it no longer exists ;
and yet in this horrible war we have to
believe everything and, above all, the worst.
Now, fatally and inevitably, it will be the
turn of the Belfry of Bruges ; and then the
tide of barbarians will rise against Ghent
and Antwerp and Brussels; and there will
forthwith disappear one of those portions
of the world's surface in which was hoarded
the greatest wealth of beauty and of mem-
ories and of the stuff of history. We did
what we could to preserve it; we could do
no more. The most heroic of armies are
powerless to prevent the bandits whom they
are driving back from murdering the
women and children or from deliberately
and uselessly destroying all that they find
along their path of retreat. There is only
42

To Save Four Cities

one hope left us: the immediate and im-
perious intervention of the neutral powers.
It is towards them that we turn our tor-
tured gaze. Two great nations notably —
Italy and the United States — hold in their
hands the fate of these last treasures, whose
loss would one day be reckoned among the
heaviest and the most irreparable that have
been suffered in the course of long cen-
turies of human civilization. They can do
what they will; it is time for them to do
that which it is no longer lawful to leave
undone. By its frantic lies, the beast from
over the Rhine, standing at bay and in peril
of death, shows plainly enough the import-
ance which it attaches to the opinion of
the only nations which the execration of all
that lives and breathes have not yet armed
against it. It is afraid. It feels that all
is crumbling under foot, that it is being
shunned and abandoned. It seeks in every
direction a glance that does not curse it.
It must not, it shall not find that glance.

43

The Wrack of the Storm

It is not necessary to tell Italy what
our imperilled cities are worth; for Italy
is preeminently the land of noble cities.

Our cause is her cause; she owes us her
support. When a work of beauty is de-
stroyed, her own genius and her own eter-
nal gods are outraged. As for America,
she more than any other country stands for
the future. She should think of the days
that will follow after this war. When the
great peace descends upon the earth, let
not the earth be found desert and robbed
of all its jewels. The places at which
the earth is beautiful because of centuries
of effort, because of the successful zeal and
patience and genius of a race, are not so
many. This corner of Flanders, over
which death now hovers, is one of those
consecrated spots. Were it to perish, men
as yet unborn, men who at last, perhaps,
will achieve happiness, would lack memor-
ies and examples which nothing could re-
place.

44

PRO PATRIA: I

V

PRO PATRIA: I1
I

1NEED not here recall the events that
hurled Belgium into the depths of dis-
tress most glorious where she is struggling
to-day. She has been punished as never
nation was punished for doing her duty as
never nation did before. She saved the
world while knowing that she could not be
saved. She saved it by flinging herself in
the path of the oncoming barbarians, by
allowing herself to be trampled to death
in order to give the defenders of justice
time, not to rescue her, for she was well
aware that rescue could not come in time,
but to collect the forces needed to save our
Latin civilization from the greatest dan-

1 Delivered at the Scala Theatre, Milan, 30 Novem-
ber, 1914.

47

The Wrack of the Storm

ger that has ever threatened it. She has
thus done this civilization, which is the only
one whereunder the majority of men are
willing or able to live, a service exactly
similar to that which Greece, at the time of
the great Asiatic invasions, rendered to the
mother of this civilization. But, while
the service is similar, the act surpasses all
comparison. We may ransack history in
vain for aught to approach it in grand-
eur. The magnificent sacrifice at Ther-
mopylae, which is perhaps the noblest action
in the annals of war, is illumined with an
equally heroic but less ideal light, for it
was less disinterested and more material.
Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans
were in fact defending their homes, their
wives, their children, all the realities which
they had left behind them. King Albert
and his Belgians, on the other hand, knew
full well that, in barring the invader's road,
they were inevitably sacrificing their homes,
48

Pro Patria; I

their wives and their children. Unlike the
heroes of Sparta, instead of possessing an
imperative and vital interest in fighting,
they had everything to gain by not fighting
and nothing to lose — save honour. In the
one scale were fire and the sword, ruin,
massacre, the infinite disaster which we
see ; in the other was that little word hon-
our, which also represents infinite things,
but things which we do not see, or which
we must be very pure and very great to see
quite clearly. It has happened now and
again in history that a man standing higher
than his fellows perceives what this word
represents and sacrifices his life and the
life of those whom he loves to what he
perceives ; and we have not without reason
devoted to such men a sort of cult that
places them almost on a level with the gods.
But what had never yet happened — and I
say this without fear of contradiction from
whosoever cares to search the memory of
49

The Wrack of the Storm

man — is that a whole people, great and
small, rich and poor, learned and ignorant,
deliberately immolated itself thus for the
sake of an unseen thing.

And observe that we are not discussing
one of those heroic resolutions which are
taken in a moment of enthusiasm, when
man easily surpasses himself, and which
have not to be maintained when, forget-
ting his intoxication, he lapses on the mor-
row to the dead level of his everyday life.
We are concerned with a resolution that
has had to be taken and maintained every
morning, for now nearly four months, in
the midst of daily increasing distress and
disaster. And not only has this resolution
not wavered by a hair's breadth, but it
grows as steadily as the national misfor-
tune; and to-day, when this misfortune is
reaching its full, the national resolution is
50

Pro Patria: I

likewise attaining its zenith. I have seen
many, of my refugee fellow-countrymen:
some used to be rich and had lost their all ;
others were poor before the war and now
no longer owned even what the poorest
own. I have received many letters from
every part of Europe where duty's exiles
had sought a brief instant of repose. In
them there was lamentation, as was only
too natural, but not a reproach, not a re-
gret, not a word of recrimination. I did
not once come upon that hopeless but ex-
cusable cry which, one would think, might
so easily have sprung from despairing lips :

"If our king had not done what he did,
we should not be suffering what we arc
suffering to-day."

The idea does not even occur to them.
It is as though this thought were not of
those which can live. in that atmosphere
purified by misfortune. They are not re-
signed, for to be resigned means to renounce
51

The Wrack of the Storm

the strife, no longer to keep up one's cour-
age. They are proud and happy in their
distress. They have a vague feeling that
this distress will regenerate them after the
manner of a baptism of faith and glory
and ennoble them for all time in the re-
membrance of men. An unexpected
breath, coming from the secret reserves of
the human race and from the summits of
the human heart, has suddenly passed over
their lives and given them a single soul,
formed of the same heroic substance as
that of their great king.

3

They have done what had never before
been done; and it is to be hoped for the
happiness of mankind that no nation will
ever again be called upon for a like sacri-
fice. But this wonderful example will not
be lost, even though there be no longer any
occasion to imitate it. At a time when

52

Pro Patria: I

the universal conscience seemed about to
bend under the weight of long prosperity
and selfish materialism, suddenly it raised
by several degrees what we may term the
political morality of the world and lifted
it all at once to a height which it had not
yet reached and from which it will never
again be able to descend, for there are
actions so glorious, actions which fill so
great a place in our memory, that they
found a sort of new religion and definitely
fix the limits of the human conscience and
of human loyalty and courage.

They have really, as I have already said
and as history will one day establish with
greater eloquence and authority than mine,
they have really saved Latin civilization.
They had stood for centuries at the junc-
tion of two powerful and hostile forms of
culture. They had to choose and they did
not hesitate. Their choice was all the
more significant, all the more instructive,

53

The Wrack of the Storm

inasmuch as none was so well qualified as
they to choose with a full knowledge of
what they were doing. You are all aware
that more than half of Belgium is of Teu-
tonic stock. She was therefore, thanks to
her racial affinities, better able than any
other to understand the culture that was
being offered her, together with the imputa-
tion of dishonour which it included. She
understood it so well that she rejected it
with an outbreak of horror and disgust un-
paralleled in violence, spontaneous, unani-
mous and irresistible, thus pronouncing a
verdict from which there was no appeal
and giving the world a peremptory lesson
sealed with every drop of her blood.

4

But to-day she is at the end of her re-
sources. She has exhausted not her cour-
age but her strength. She has paid with
all that she possesses for the immense ser-

54

Pro Patria: I

vice which she has rendered to mankind.
Thousands and thousands of her children
are dead; all her riches have perished;
almost all her historic memories, which
were her pride and her delight, almost all
her artistic treasures, which were num-
bered among the fairest in this world, are
destroyed for ever. She is nothing more
than a desert whence stand out, more or
less intact, four great towns alone, four
towns which the Rhenish hordes, for whom
the epithet of barbarians is in point of fact
too honourable, appear to have spared only
so that they may keep back one last and
monstrous revenge for the day of the in-
evitable rout. It is certain that Antwerp,
Ghent, Bruges and Brussels are doomed be-
yond recall. In particular, the admirable
Grand'place, the Hotel de Ville and the
Cathedral at Brussels are, I know, under-
mined: I repeat, I know it from private
and trustworthy testimony against which
55

The Wrack of the Storm

no denial can prevail. A spark will be
enough to turn one of the recognized mar-
vels of Europe into a heap of ruins like
those of Ypres, Malines and Louvain.
Soon after — for, short of immediate inter-
vention, the disaster is as certain as though
it were already accomplished — Bruges,
Antwerp and Ghent will suffer the same
fate; and in a moment, as I was saying
the other day, there will vanish from sight
one of the corners of this earth in which
the greatest store of memories, of historic
matter and artistic beauties had been accu-
mulated.

5

The time has come to end this foolery!
The time has come for everything that
draws breath to rise up against these sys-
tematic, insane and stupid acts of destruc-
tion, perpetrated without any military ex-
cuse or strategic object. The reason why
we are at last uttering a great cry of dis-

56

Pro Patria: I

tress, we who are above all a silent people,
the reason why we turn to your mighty and
noble country is that Italy is to-day the
only European power that is still in a posi-
tion to stop the unchained brute on the
brink of his crime. You are ready. You
have but to stretch out a hand to save us.
We have not come to beg for our lives:
these no longer count with us and we have
already offered them up. But, in the name
of the last beautiful things that the bar-
barians have left us, we come with our
prayers to the land of all beautiful things.
It must not be, it shall not be that, on the
day when at last we return, not to our
homes, for most of these are destroyed,
but to our native soil, that soil is so laid
waste as to have become an unrecognizable
desert. You know better than any others
what 'memories mean, what masterpieces
mean to a nation, for your country is co-
vered with memories and masterpieces. It

57

The Wrack of the Storm

is also the land of justice and the cradle
of the law, which is simply justice that has
taken cognizance of itself. On this ac-
count, Italy owes us justice. And she
owes it to herself to put a stop to the great-
est iniquity in the annals of history, for not
to put a stop to it when one has the power
is almost tantamount to taking part in it.
It is for Italy as much as for France that
we have suffered. She is the source, she
is the very mother of the ideal for which
we have fought and for which the last of
our soldiers are still fighting in the last
of our trenches.

HEROISM

VI

HEROISM
I

ONE of the consoling surprises of this
war is the unlooked-for and, so to
speak, universal heroism which it has re-
vealed among all the nations taking part
in it.

We were rather inclined to believe that
courage, physical and moral fortitude, self-
denial, stoicism, the renunciation of every
sort of comfort, the faculty of self-sacrifice
and the power of facing death belonged
only to the more primitive, the less happy,
the less intelligent nations, to the nations
least capable of reasoning, of appreciating
danger and of picturing in their imagination
the dreadful abyss that separates this life
from the life unknown. We were even
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The Wrack of the Storm

almost persuaded that war would one day
cease for lack of soldiers, that is to say, of
men foolish enough or unhappy enough to
risk the only absolute realities — health,
physical comfort, an unimpaired body and,
above all, life, the greatest of earthly pos-
sessions— for the sake of an ideal which,
like all ideals, is more or less invisible.

And this argument seemed the more na-
tural and convincing because, as existence
grew gentler and men's nerves more sen-
sitive^ the means of destruction by war
showed themselves more cruel, ruthless
and irresistible. It seemed more and more
probable that no man would ever again
endures the infernal horrors of a battle-
field and that, after the first slaughter, the
opposing armies, officers and men alike,
all seized with insuppressible panic, would
turn their backs upon one another, in si-
multaneous, supernatural affright, and flee
from unearthly terrors exceeding the most
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Heroism

monstrous anticipations of those who had
let them loose.

2

To our great astonishment the very op-
posite is now proclaimed.

We realize with amazement that until
to-day we had but an incomplete and inac-
curate conception of man's courage. We
looked upon it as an exceptional virtue and
one which is the more admired as being
also the rarer the farther we go back in
history. Remember, for instance, Homer's
heroes, the ancestors of all the heroes of
our day. Study them closely. These
models of antiquity, the first professors,
the first masters of bravery, are not really
very brave. They have a wholesome
dread of being hit or wounded and an in-
genuous and manifest fear of death. Their
mighty conflicts are declamatory and deco-
rative but not so very bloody; they in-
flict more npise than pain upon their ad-
63

The Wrack of the Storm

versaries, they deliver many more words
than blows. Their defensive weapons —
and this is characteristic — are greatly su-
perior to their arms of offence; and death
is an unusual, unforeseen and almost in-
decorous event which throws the ranks into
disorder and most often puts a stop to the
combat or provokes a headlong flight that
seems quite natural. As for the wounds,
these are enumerated and described, sung
and deplored as so many remarkable phe-
nomena. On the other hand, the most
discreditable routs, the most shameful
panics are frequent; and the old poet re-
lates them, without condemning them, as
ordinary incidents to be ascribed to the
gods and inevitable in any warfare.

This kind of courage is that of all an-
tiquity, more or less. We will not linger
over it, nor delay to consider the battles of
the Middle Ages or the Renascence, in
which the fiercest hand-to-hand encounters
64

Heroism

of the mercenaries often left not more than
half-a-dozen victims on the field. Let us
rather come straight to the great wars of
the Empire. Here the courage displayed
begins to resemble our own, but with nota-
ble differences. In the first place, those
concerned were solely professionals. We
see not a whole nation fighting, but a dele-
gation, a martial selection, which, it is true,
becomes gradually more extensive, but
never, as in our time, embraces every man
between eighteen and fifty years of age
capable of shouldering a weapon. Again
— and above all — every war was reduced
to two or three pitched battles, that is to
say, two or three culminating moments;
immense efforts, but efforts of a few
hours, or a day at most, towards which
the combatants directed all the vigour and
all the heroism accumulated during long
weeks or months of preparation and wait-
ing. Afterwards, whether the result was
65

The Wrack of the Storm

victory or defeat, the fighting was over;
relaxation, respite and rest followed; men
went back to their homes. Destiny must
not be defied more than once; and they
knew that in the most terrible affray the
chances of escaping death were as twenty
to one.

3

Nowadays, everything is changed; and
death itself is no longer what it was. For-
merly, you looked it in the face, you knew
whence it came and who sent it to you. It
had a dreadful aspect, but one that re-
mained human. Its ways were not un-
known: its long spells of sleep, its brief
awakenings, its bad days and dangerous
hours. At present, to all these horrors it
adds the great, intolerable fear of mystery.
It no longer has any aspect, no longer has
habits or spells of sleep and it is never still.
It is always ready, always on the watch,
everywhere present, scattered, intangible

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Heroism

and dense, stealthy and cowardly, diffuse,
all-encompassing, innumerous, looming at
every point of the horizon, rising from the
waters and falling from the skies, inde-
fatigable, inevitable, filling the whole of
space and time for days, weeks and months
without a minute's lull, without a second's
intermission. Men live, move and sleep
in the meshes of its fatal web. They
know that the least step to the right or left,
a head bowed or lifted, a body bent or up-
right is seen by its eyes and draws its thun-
der.

Hitherto we had no example of this pre-
ponderance of the destructive forces. We
should never have believed that man's
nerves could resist so great a trial. The
nerves of the bravest man are tempered to
face death for the space of a second, but
not to live in the hourly expectation of
death and nothing else. Heroism was
once a sharp and rugged peak, reached for
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The Wrack of the Storm

a moment but soon quitted, for mountain-
peaks are not inhabitable. To-day it is
a boundless plain, as uninhabitable as the
peaks ; but we are not permitted to descend
from it. And so, at the very moment
when man appeared most exhausted and
enervated by the comforts and vices of ci-
vilization, at the moment when he was hap-
piest and therefore most selfish, when, pos-
sessing the minimum of faith and vainly
seeking a new ideal, he seemed least capable
of sacrificing himself for an idea of any
kind, he finds himself suddenly confronted
with an unprecedented danger, which he
is almost certain that the most heroic na-
tions of history would not have faced nor
even dreamed of facing, whereas he does
not even dream that it is possible to do
aught but face it. And let it not be said
that we had no choice, that the danger and
the struggle were thrust upon us, that we
had to defend ourselves or die and that in
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Heroism

such cases there are no cowards. It is not
true: there was, there always has been,
there still is a choice.

It is not man's life that is at stake, but
the idea which he forms of the honour, the
happiness and the duties of his life. To
save his life he had but to submit to the
enemy; the invader would not have ex-
terminated him. You cannot exterminate
a great people; it is not even possible to
enslave it seriously or to inflict great sorrow
upon it for long. He had nothing to be
afraid of except disgrace. He did not so
much as see the infamous temptation ap-
pear above the horizon of his most in-
stinctive fears; he does not even suspect
that it is able to exist; and he will never
perceive it, whatever sacrifices may yet
await him. We are not, therefore, speak-
ing of a heroism that would be but the last
69

The Wrack of the Storm

resource of despair, the heroism of the ani-
mal driven to bay and fighting blindly to
delay death's coming for a moment. No,
it is heroism freely donned, deliberately
and unanimously hailed, heroism on behalf
of an idea and a sentiment, in other words,
heroism in its clearest, purest and most
virginal form, a disinterested and whole-
hearted sacrifice for that which men regard
as their duty to themselves, to their kith
and kin, to mankind and to the future. If
life and personal safety were more precious
than the idea of honour, of patriotism and
of fidelity to tradition and the race, there
was, I repeat, and there is still a choice
to be made ; and never perhaps in any war
was the choice easier, for never did men
feel more free, never indeed were they
more free to choose.

But this choice, as I have said, did not
dare show its faintest shadow on the lowest
horizons of even the most ignoble con-
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Heroism

sciences. Are you quite sure that, in other
times which we think better and more vir-
tuous than our own, men would not have
seen it, would not have spoken of it?
Can you find a nation, even among the
greatest, which, after six months of a war
compared with which all other wars seem
child's-play, of a war which threatens and
uses up all that nation's life and all its
possessions, can you find, I say, in history,
not an instance — for there is no instance —
but some similar case which allows you to
presume that the nation would not have
faltered, would not at least, were it but for
a second, have looked down and cast its
eyes upon an inglorious peace?

5

Nevertheless, they seemed much stronger

than we are, all those who came before

us. They were rude, austere, much closer

to nature, poor and often unhappy. They

71

The Wrack of the Storm

had a simpler and a more rigid code of
thought; they had the habit of physical
suffering, of hardship and of death. But I
do not believe that any one dares contend
that these men would have done what our
soldiers are now doing, that they would
have endured what is being endured all
around us. Are we not entitled to con-
clude from this that civilization, contrary
to what was feared, so far from enervating,
depraving, weakening, lowering and dwarf-
ing man, elevates him, purifies him,
strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him
capable of acts of sacrifice, generosity and
courage which he did not know before?
The fact is that civilization, even when it
seems to entail corruption, brings intelli-
gence with it and that intelligence, in days
of trial, stands for potential pride, nobility
and heroism. That, as I said in the be-
ginning, is the unexpected and consoling
revelation of this horrible war : we can rely
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Heroism

on man implicitly, place the greatest trust
in him, nor fear lest, in laying aside
his primitive brutality, he should lose his
manly qualities. The greater his progress
in the conquest of nature and the greater
his apparent attachment to material wel-
fare, the more does he become capable,
nevertheless, unconsciously, deep down in
the best part of him, of self-detachment
and of self-sacrifice for the common safety
and the more does he understand that he is
nothing when he compares himself with the
eternal life of his forbears and his children.
It was so great a trial that we dared not,
before this war, have contemplated it.
The future of the human race was at stake ;
and the magnificent response that comes to
us from every side reassures us fully as to
the issue of other struggles, more for-
midable still, which no doubt await us
when it will be a question no longer of fight-
ing our fellow-men, but rather of facing
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The Wrack of the Storm

the more powerful and cruel of the great
mysterious enemies that nature holds in re-
serve against us. If it be true, as I believe,
that humanity is worth just as much as the
sum total of latent heroism which it con-
tains, then we may declare that humanity
wa,s never stronger nor more exemplary
than now and that it is at this moment
reaching one of its highest points and capa-
ble of braving everything and hoping
everything. And it is for this reason that,
despite our present sadness, we are entitled
to congratulate ourselves and to rejoice.

74

PRO PATRIA : II

VII

PRO PATRIA: II1

MORE than three months ago, I was
in one of the grandest of your
cities, a city that welcomed in a manner
which I shall never forget the cause which
I had come among you to represent. I
was there, as I told my hearers at the time,
in the name of the last remnants of beauty
that the barbarians had left us, to plead
with the land of every kind of beauty.
Those threatened beauties, our only cities
yet intact, the treasures and sanctuaries of
our whole past and of all our race, are
still reeling on the brink of the same abyss
and, failing a miracle which we dare not
hope for, they will suffer the fate of Ypres,

1 Delivered in Rome, before the Associazione della
Stampa, 13 March, 1915.

77

The Wrack of the Storm

Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Dixmude
and so many other less illustrious victims.
The danger in which they stand has no
doubt aroused the indignation of the civil-
ized world; but not a hand has armed itself
to defend them. I blame no one; I re-
proach no one ; the morality of the nations
is a virtue that has not yet emerged from
the state of infancy; and fortunately, by
the hazard of war, it is not yet too late to
save four innocent cities.

To-day I have not come to speak of
monuments, of historical relics, nor even of
the wrongs committed, of the violation of
all the rights and laws of warfare and
every international convention, of incen-
diarism, pillage and massacre ; I have come
simply to utter before you the last dis-
tressful cry of a dying nation.

At this moment a tragedy is being en-
acted in Belgium such as has no prece-
dent in the history of civilized peoples, nor
78

Pro Patria: II

even in that of the barbarians, for the bar-
barians, when committing their most stu-
pendous crimes, lacked the infernal de-
liberation and the scientific, all-powerful
means of working evil which to-day are in
the hands of those who profit by the re-
sources and benefits of civilization only
to turn them against it and to seek the
annihilation of all its noblest and most gen-
erous characteristics. The despairing ru-
mours of this tragedy come to us only
through the chinks of that ensanguined well
which isolates it from the rest of the world.
Nothing reaches our ears but the lies of
the enemy. In reality, the whole of Bel-
gium is one huge Prussian prison, where
every cry is cruelly and methodically stifled
and where no voices are heard save those
of the gaolers. Only now and again,
after a thousand adventures, despite a
thousand perils, a letter from some
kinsman or captive friend arrives from
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The Wrack of the Storm

the depths of that great living ceme-
tery, bringing us a gleam of authentic
truth.

2

You are as familiar with this truth as
I am. At the moment when her soil was
invaded, Belgium numbered seven million
seven hundred thousand inhabitants. It is
estimated that between two hundred and
fifty and three hundred thousand have per-
ished in battle or massacre, or as the result
of misery and privation; and I am not
speaking of the infant children, the sacri-
fice of whom, owing to the dearth of milk,
has, it appears, been frightful. Five or six
hundred thousand unfortunates have fled
to Holland, France or England. There
remain therefore in the country nearly
seven million inhabitants; and more than
half of these seven millions are living
almost exclusively on American charity.
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Pro Patria: II

In what is above all an industrial coun-
try, producing normally, in time of peace,
less than a third part of the wheat ne-
cessary for home consumption, the enemy
has systematically requisitioned everything,
carried off everything, for the upkeep of
his armies, and has sent into Germany what
he could not consume on the spot. The re-
sult of so monstrous a proceeding may
readily be divined: on all that soil, once
so happy and so rich, to-day taxed and pil-
laged and pillaged again, ravaged and
devastated by fire and the sword, there is
nothing left. And the situation of suffer-
ing Belgium is so cruelly paradoxical that
her best friends, her dearest allies, even
those whom she has saved, are powerless
to succour her. Isolated as she is from the
rest of the world, she would have starved
even though nothing had been taken from
her. Now she has been despoiled of all
that she possessed, while France and Eng-
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The Wrack of the Storm

land can send her neither money nor pro-
visions, for they would fall into the hands
of those engaged in torturing her, so much
so that every attempt on their part to alle-
viate her sufferings would but retard her
deliverance still further. Did history ever
witness a more poignant, a more des-
perate tragedy? It is a fact that in the
midst of this war we are constantly find-
ing ourselves confronted with events such
as history hitherto has never beheld. A
people resembling an enormous beast of
prey, in order to punish a loyalty and
heroism which, if it retained the slight-
est notion of justice and injustice, the
smallest sense of human dignity and
honour, it ought to worship on its knees:
this vast predatory race stealthily resolved
to exterminate an inoffensive little nation
whose soul it felt was too great to be en-
slaved or reduced to the semblance of its
conqueror's. It was on the point of sue-

Pro Patria : II

ceeding, amid the silence, the impotence,
or the terror of the world, when from
beyond the Atlantic a generous nation took
that heroic little people under its protec-
tion. It understood that what was in-
volved was not merely an act of justice
and elementary pity, but also and more
particularly a higher duty towards the mor-
ality and the eternal conscience of man-
kind. Thanks to this great nation's in-
tervention, it will not be said, in the days
to come, that justice, loyalty, honesty and
heroism are no more than dangerous il-
lusions and a fool's bargain, or that evil
must necessarily, at all times and places,
conquer whenever it is backed by force, or
that the only reward which duty magnifi-
cently done may hope to receive on this
earth is every manner of grief and disaster,
ending in death by starvation. So im-
mense and triumphant an example of in-
quiry would strike the ideals of mankind
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The Wrack of the Storm

a blow from which they would not recover
for centuries.

3

But already this help is becoming ex-
hausted ; it cannot be indefinitely prolonged ;
and very soon it will be insufficient. It is,
moreover, at the mercy of the slightest
diplomatic or political complication; and
its failure will be irreparable. It will
mean utter famine, unexampled extermina-
tion, which till the end of the world will
cry to heaven for vengeance. It is no
longer a question of weeks or months, but
one of days. That is where we stand ; and
these are the last hours granted by destiny
to an inactive Europe wherein to expunge
the shame of her indifference.

These hours belong almost solely to you,
for others have not your power. What-
ever may happen, however long you may,
postpone the issue, one of these days you
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Pro Patria: II

will be obliged to join in the fray. Every-
thing advises, everything orders you to do
so; and I can see nothing on the side of
honour, justice or humanity, on the side
of the will of the centuries or the human
race, nor even on the side of prudence and
self-interest, that allows you to avoid it.
Is it not better and more worthy of your-
selves than all the subtleties, plottings and
petty bargainings of diplomacy?

The one hour, the peremptory hour has
struck when your aid can break the balance
between the powers of good and evil which,
for more than two hundred days, have kept
(the future of Europe hanging over the
abyss.

Fate has granted you the magnificent
boon, the all but divine privilege, of saving
from the most horrible of deaths four or
five millions of innocent human beings, four
or five millions of martyrs who have per-
formed the finest action that a people could
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The Wrack of the Storm

perform and who are perishing because
they defended the ideals which your
fathers taught them. I know that we are
faced by duties which until to-day had
never entered into the morality of States;
for it is but too true that this morality still
lags a thousand miles behind that of the
meanest peasant. But, if such a thing has
never yet been done, it is all the more
glorious to be the first to do it, to make
an effort that will raise the life of na-
tions to a level which the life of the in-
dividual has long since attained. And no
people is better qualified than the Italian
to make this effort which the world and
the future are awaiting as a deliverance.

But I will say no more. I have been
reproached for speaking of matters which,
as a foreigner, I ought not to discuss. I
believed that these great questions of hu-
manity interested the whole human race.
Perhaps I was wrong. I will respect the
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Pro Patria : II

profound silence in which great actions are
developed; and I leave to the meditation
of your hearts that which I am constrained
to leave unsaid. They will tell you very
much better than I could all that I had to
say to you.

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PRO PATRIA: III

A

VIII

PRO PATRIA: III1
I

LTHOUGH nothing entitles me
to the honour of addressing you
in the name of my refugee countrymen,
nevertheless it is only fitting, since a kindly
insistence brings me here, that I should
in the first place give thanks to England
for the manner in which she welcomed
them in their distress. I am but a voice
in the crowd ; and, if my words exceed the
limits of this hall and lend to him who
utters them an authority which he himself
does not possess, it is only because they are
filled with unbounded gratitude.

In this horrible war, whose stakes are
the salvation and the future of mankind,

1 Delivered in London, at the Queen's Hall, 7 July,
1915.

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The Wrack of the Storm

let us first of all salute our wonderful sis-
ter, France, who is supporting the heaviest
burden and who, for more than eleven
months, having broken its first and most
formidable onslaught, has been struggling,
foot by foot, at closest quarters, without
faltering, without remission, with an heroic
smile, against the most formidable organ-
ization of pillage, massacre and devasta-
tion that the world or hell itself has seen
since man first learnt the history of the
planet on which he lives. We have here a
revelation of qualities and virtues surpass-
ing all that we expected from a nation
which nevertheless had accustomed us to
expect of her all that goes to make the
beauty and the glory of humanity. One
must reside in France, as I have done for
many years, to understand and admire as
it deserves the incomparable lesson in
courage, abnegation, firmness, determina-
tion, coolness, conscious dignity, self-mas-
92

Pro Patria: III

tery, good-humour, chivalrous generosity
and utter charity and self-sacrifice which
this great and noble people, which has
civilized more than half the globe, is at
the present moment teaching the civilized
world.

Let us also salute boundless Russia, with
her wonderful soldiers, innocent and in-
genuous as the saints of old, ignorant of
fear as children who do not yet know the
meaning of death. Yonder, along a for-
midable front running from the Baltic
to the Black Sea, with silent multitudi-
nous heroism, amid defeats which are but
victories delayed, she is beginning the great
work of our deliverance. Lastly let us
greet Servia, small but prodigious, whom
we must one day place on the summit of
that monument of glory which Europe will
raise to-morrow to the memory of those
who have freed her from her chains.

So much for them. They have a right

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The Wrack of the Storm

to all our gratitude, to all our admiration.
They are doing magnificently all that had
to be done. But they occupy a place apart
in duty's splendid hierarchy. They are the
protagonists of direct, material, tangible,
undeniable, inevitable duty. This war is
their war. If they would not accept the
worst of disgraces, if they were not pre-
pared to suffer servitude, massacre, ruin
and famine, they had to undertake it ; they
could not do otherwise. They were at-
tacked by the born enemy, the irreducible
and absolute enemy, of whom they knew
enough to understand that they had nothing
to expect from him but total and unremit-
ting disaster. It was a question of their
continued existence in this world. They
had no choice; they had to defend them-
selves; and any other nation in their place
would have done the same, only there are
few who would have done it with the same
spirit of self-abnegation, the same devotion,

94

Pro Patria; III

the same perseverance, the same loyalty and
the same smiling courage.

2

But for us Belgians — and we may say
as much for you English — it was not a
question of this kind of duty. The horri-
ble drama did not concern us. It demand-
ed only the right to pass us by without
touching us; and, far from doing us any
harm, it would have flooded us with the
unclaimed riches which armies on the
march drag in their wake. We Belgians
in particular, peaceable, hospitable, inof-
fensive and almost unarmed, should, by
the very treaties which assured our exist-
ence, have remained complete strangers to
this war. To be sure, we loved France,
because we knew her as well as we knew
ourselves and because she makes herself
beloved by all who know her. But we en-
tertained no hatred of Germany. It is
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The Wrack of the Storm

true that, in spite of the virtues which we
believed her to possess but which were
merely the mask of a spy, our hearts barely
responded to her obsequiously treacherous
advances. For the German, of all the in-
habitants of our planet, has this one and
singular peculiarity, that he arouses in us,
from the onset, a profound, instinctive, in-
tuitive feeling of antipathy. But, even so
and wherever our preferences may have
lain, our treaties, our pledged word, the very
reason of our existence, all forbade us to
take part in the conflict. Then came the
incredible ultimatum, the monstrous de-
mand of which you know, which gave us
twelve hours to choose between ruin and
death or dishonour. As you also know, we
did not need twelve hours to make our
choice. This choice was no more than a
cry of indignation and resolution, sponta-
neous, fierce and irresistible. We did not
stay for a moment to ponder the extenua-
96

Pro Patria: III

ting circumstances which our weakness
might have invoked. We did not for a mo-
ment consider the absolution which history
would have granted us later, on realizing
that a conflict between forces so completely
disproportioned was futile, that we must
inevitably be crushed, massacred and an-
nihilated and that the sacrifice of a little
people in its entirety could prevent nothing,
could barely cause delay and would have
no weight in the immense balance into
which the world's destinies were about
to be flung. There was no question of all
this; we saw one thing only: our plighted
word. For that word we must die; and
since then we have been dying. Trace the
course of history as far back as you will;
question the nations of the earth; then
name those who have done or who would
have done what we did. How many will
you find? I am not judging those whom
I pass over in silence, for to do so would
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The Wrack of the Storm

be to enter into the secret of men's hearts
which I have not the right to violate; but
in any case there is one which I can name
aloud, without fear of being mistaken ; and
that is the British nation. This people
too entered into the conflict, not through
interest or necessity or inherited hatred, but
simply for a matter of honour. It has not
suffered what we have suffered; it has not
risked what we have risked, which is all
that we possessed beneath the arch of
heaven; but it owes this immunity only to
outside circumstances. The principle and
the quality of the act are the same. We
stand on the same plane, one step higher
than the other combatants. While the
others are the soldiers of necessity, we are
the volunteers of honour; and, without de-
tracting from their merits, this title adds
to ours all that a pure and disinterested
idea adds to the noblest acts of courage.
There is not a doubt but that in our place
98

Pro Patria: III

you would have done precisely what we
did. You would have done it with the
same simplicity, the same calm and con-
fident ardour, the same good faith. You
would have thrown yourselves into the
breach as whole-heartedly, with the same
scorn of useless phrases and the same stub-
born conscientiousness. And the reason
why I do not shrink from singing in your
presence the praises of what we have done
is that these praises also affect yourselves,
who would not have hesitated to do the
selfsame things.

3

In short, we have both the same concep-
tion of honour; and a like idea must needs
bear like fruits. In your eyes as in ours,
a formal promise, a word once given is the
most sacred thing that can pass between
man and man. Now far more than the
valour of a man — because it rises to much

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The Wrack of the Storm

greater heights and extends to much greater
distances — the valour of a people depends
upon the conception of its honour which
that people holds and, above all, upon
the sacrifices which it is capable of making
for the sake of that honour. We may dif-
fer upon all the other ideas that guide the
actions of mankind, notably upon the re-
ligious idea; but those who do not agree
on this one point are unworthy of the name
of man. It represents the purest flame, the
ever more ardent focus of all human
dignity and virtue.

You have sacrificed yourselves wholly
to this idea; and, in the name of this idea,
which is as vital and as powerful in your
souls as in ours, you came to our aid, as
we knew that you would come, for we
counted on you as surely as you counted
on us. You are ready to make the same
sacrifices ; and already you are proudly sup-
porting the heaviest of sacrifices. Thus,

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Pro Patria: III

in this stupendous struggle, we are united
by bonds even more fraternal than those
which bind the other Allies. Our union is
more lofty and more generous, for it is
based wholly upon/ the noblest thoughts
and feelings that can inspire the heart.
And this union, which is marked by a mu-
tual confidence and affection that grow
hourly deeper and wider, is helping us both
to go even beyond our duty.

For we have gone beyond it; and we are
exceeding it daily. We have done and are
doing far more than we were bound to do.
It was for us Belgians to resist, loyally, vi-
gorously, to the utmost of our strength, as
we had promised. But the most sensitive
honour would have allowed us to lay down
our arms after the immense and heroic ef-
fort of the first few days and to trust to
the victor's clemency when he recognized
that we were beaten. Nothing compelled
us to immolate ourselves entirely, to sur-
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The Wrack of the Storm

render, in succession, as a burnt-offering to
our ideals, all that we possessed on earth
and to continue the struggle after we were
crushed, even in the last torments of starva-
tion, which to-day holds three millions of
us in its grip. Nothing compelled us to
this course, other than the increasingly lofty
ideal of duty held by those who began by
putting it into practice and are now living
in its fulfilment.

As for you English, you had to come
to our assistance, that is to say, to send us
the troops which you had ready under
arms; but nothing compelled you either,
after the first useless engagements, to de-
vote yourselves with unparalleled ardour
and self-sacrifice, to hurl into the mortal
and stupendous battle the whole of your
youth, the fairest upon earth, and all your
riches, the most prodigious in this world,
nor to conjure up from your soil, by a
miracle which was thought impossible, in

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Pro Patria: III

fewer months than the years that would
have seemed needful, the most gallant, de-
termined and tenacious armies that have
yet been marshalled in this war. Nothing
compelled you, save the spirit of emulation,
the same mad love of duty, the same pas-
sion for justice, the same idolatry of the
given word which, that it may be sure of
doing all that it promised, performs far
more than it would have dared to promise.

4

Now, during the last few weeks, a new
combatant has entered the lists, one who
occupies a place quite apart in the sacred
hierarchy of duty and honour and in the
moral history of this war. I speak of
Italy; and I pay her the tribute of homage
which is her due and which I well know
that you will render with me, for you of all
nations are qualified to do so.

Italy had no treaty except with our ene-

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The Wrack of the Storm

mies. Her first act of justice, when con-
fronted with an iniquitous aggression, was
to discard this treaty, which was about to
draw her into a crime which she had the
courage to judge and condemn from the
outset, while her former allies were still in
the full flush of a might that seemed un-
shakable. After this verdict, which was
worthy of the land where justice first saw
the light, she found herself free; she now
owed no obligations to any one. There
was nothing left to compel her to rush into
this carnage, which she could contemplate
calmly from the vantage of her delightful
cities; and she had only to wait till the
twelfth hour to gather its first fruits.
There was no longer any compact, any
written bond, signed by the hands of kings
or peoples, that could involve her destiny.
But now, at the spectacle, unforeseen and
daily more abominable and disconcerting,
of the barbarian invasion, words half-
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Pro Patria: III ,

effaced and secret treaties written by un-
known hands on the souls and consciences
of all men revealed themselves and slowly
gathered life and radiance. To some ex-
tent I was a witness of these things; and
I was able, so to speak, to follow with my
eyes the awakening and the irresistible
promulgation of those great and mysterious
laws of justice, pity and love which are
higher and more imperishable than all
those which we have engraved in marble
or bronze. With the increase of the
crimes, the power of these laws increased
and extended. We may regard the inter-
vention of Italy in many ways. Like every
human action and, above all, like every
political action, it is due to a thousand
causes, many of which are trifling. Among
them we may see the legitimate hatred and
the eternal resentment felt towards an
hereditary enemy. We may discover an
interested intention to take part, without
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The Wrack of the Storm

too much risk, in a victory already cert-
ain and in its previously allotted spoils.
We may see in it anything that we please :
the resolves of men contain factors of all
kinds ; but we must pity those who are able
to consider none but the meaner sides of
the matter, for these are the only sides
which never count and which are always
deceptive. To find the real and lasting
truth, we must learn to view the great
masses and the great feelings of mankind
from above. It is in them and in their
great and simple movements that the will
of the soul and of destiny is asserted, for
these two form the eternal substance of a
people. And, in the present case, the
movement of the great masses and the great
feelings of the people took the form of
an immense impulse of sympathy and in-
dignation, which gradually increased, pene-
trating farther and farther into the popu-
lar strata and gathering volume as it pro-
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Pro Patria; III

gressed, until it urged a whole nation to as-
sume the burden of a war which it knew
to be crushing and merciless, a war which
each of those who called for it knew to
be a war which he himself must wage, with
his own hands, with his own body, a war
which would wrest him from the pleasant
ways of peace, from his labours and his
comforts, which would weigh terribly upon
all those whom he loved, which would
expose him for weeks, perhaps for months,
to incredible sufferings and which meant
almost certain death to a third or a half
of those who demanded the right to
brave it. And all this, I repeat, occurred
without any material necessity, from no
other motive than a fine sense of honour
and a magnificent surge of admiration
and pity for a small foreign nation
that was being unjustly martyred. We
cannot repeat it too often: here, as in
the case of the sacrifice which Belgium
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The Wrack of the Storm

and England offered to the ideal of
honour, is a new and unprecedented fact
in history.

108

BELGIUM'S FLAG DAY

IX

BELGIUM'S FLAG DAY

i

TO-DAY our flag will quiver in every
French hand as a symbol of love
and gratitude. This day should be a day
of hope and glory for all Belgium.

Let us forget for a moment our terrible
distress ; let us forget our plains and mead-
ows, the fairest and most fertile in Europe,
now ravaged to such a degree that
the utmost that one can say is powerless
to give any idea of a desolation which
seems irremediable. Let us forget — if to
forget them be possible — the women, the
children, the old men, peaceable and inno-
cent, who have been massacred in their
thousands, the tale of whom will amaze
the world when once the grim barrier is
broken behind which so many secret hor-
iii

The Wrack of the Storm

rors are being committed. Let us forget
those who are dying of hunger in our coun-
try, a land without harvests and without
homes, a land methodically taxed, pillaged
and crushed until it is drained of the last
drop of its life-blood. Let us forget those
remnants of our people who are scattered
hither and thither, who have trodden the
path of exile, who are living on public
charity, which, though it show itself full
of brotherhood and affection, is yet so op-
pressive to those supremely industrious
hands, which had never known the grievous
burden of alms. Let us forget even those
last of our cities to be menaced, the fairest,
the proudest, the most beloved of our
cities, which constitute the very face of
our country and which only a miracle could
now save. Let us forget, in a word, the
greatest calamity and the most crying in-
justice of history and think to-day only
of our approaching deliverance. It is not

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Belgium's Flag Day

too early to hail it. It is already in all
our thoughts, as it is in all our hearts. It
is already in the air which we breathe, in
all the eyes that smile at us, in all the voices
that welcome us, in all the hands out-
stretched to us, waving, the laurels which
they hold; for what is bringing us deliver-
ance is the wonder, the admiration of the
whole world!

To-morrow we shall go back to our
homes. We shall not mourn though we
find them in ruins. They will rise again
more beautiful than of old from the ashes
and the shards. We shall know days of
heroic poverty; but we have learnt that
poverty is powerless to sadden souls up-
held by a great love and nourished by a
noble ideal. We shall return with heads
erect, regenerated in a regenerated Europe,
rejuvenated by our magnificnt misfortune,
"3

The Wrack of the Storm

purified by victory and cleansed of the
littleness that obscured the virtues which
slumbered within us and of which we are
not aware. We shall have lost all the
goods that perish but as readily come
to live again. And in their place we shall
have acquired those riches which shall not
again perish within our hearts. Our eyes
were closed to many things; now they
have opened upon wider horizons. Of
old we dared not avert our gaze from our
wealth, our petty comforts, our little rooted
habits. But now our eyes have been
wrested from the soil; now they have
achieved the sight of heights that were
hitherto unnoticed. We did not know our-
selves; we used not to love one another
sufficiently; but we have learnt to know
ourselves in the amazement of glory and
to love one another in the grievous ardour
of the most stupendous sacrifice that any
people has ever accomplished. We were
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Belgium's Flag Day

on the point of forgetting the heroic vir-
tues, the unfettered thoughts, the eternal
ideas that lead humanity. To-day, not
only do we know that they exist: we have
taught the world that they are always tri-
umphant, that nothing is lost while faith
is left, while honour is intact, while love
continues, while the soul does not sur-
render and that the most monstrous of
powers will never prevail against those
ideal forces which are the happiness and
the glory of man and the sole reason for
his existence.

ON THE DEATH OF
A LITTLE SOLDIER

X

ON THE DEATH OF A LITTLE SOLDIER

I

WHEN I speak of this little soldier
who fell a few days ago, up there
in the Vosges, it is not that I may mourn
him publicly. It behoves us in these days
to mourn our dead in secret. Personal sor-
rows no longer count; and we must learn
how to suppress them in the presence of
that greater sorrow which extends over all
the world, the particular sorrow of the
mothers who are setting us an example of
the most heroic silence that human suffer-
ing has been taught to observe since suf-
fering first visited womankind. For the
admirable silence of the mothers is one
of the great and striking lessons of this
war. Amid that tragic and sublime silence
no regret dare make itself heard.

"9

The Wrack of cfie Storm

But, though my grief remains dumb, my
admiration can still raise its voice; and in
speaking of this young soldier, who had
not reached man's estate and who died as
the bravest of men, I speak of all his
brothers-in-arms and hail thousands like
him in his name, which name becomes a
great and glorious symbol ; for at this time,
when a prodigious wave of unselfishness
and courage, surging up from the very
depths of the human race, uplifts the men
who are fighting and giving their lives for
its future, they all resemble one another in
the same perfection.

My friend Raymond Bon was a sergeant
in the 2yth battalion of the Chasseurs Al-
pins. He left for the front in August,
1914, with the other recruits of the 1915
class, which means that he was hardly
twenty years of age ; and he won his stripes
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On the Death of a Soldier

on the battlefield, after being twice named
in dispatches. The second time was on re-
turning from a murderous assault at
Thann, in Upper Alsace, in which he had
greatly distinguished himself. I quote the
exact words :

"Corporal Bon is mentioned in the or-
ders of the battalion for his gallantry
under fire and his indifference to danger.
When the leader of his section was killed,
Bon took command, rushed to the front
and, shouting to his men to follow him,
gave proofs of the greatest initiative and
courage. He was the first in the enemy's
trenches with his section,"

That day he was promoted to sergeant
and complimented by the general in front
of his battalion in the following terms:

"This is the second time, my friend, that

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The Wrack of the Storm

I am told what you have done; next time
you shall be told what I have done."

To-day men tell of his death, but also
of the undying glory which death alone
confers.

"At Hartmannsviller," writes one of
Bon's comrades, ''according to his cap-
tain's story, our friend's company was held
in reserve, waiting to support the attack
delivered by a regiment of infantry. The
order came to support and reinforce the
attack. The company at once leapt from
the trenches, with the captain and Bon at
its head. There was a salvo of artillery;
and the bursting of a great shell caught
Raymond almost full in the body, smash-
ing his right leg and his chest. The cap-
tain was hit in the right hand. Notwith-
standing his horrible wounds, Bon did not
lose consciousness; he was able to stammer
out a few words and to press the hand

122

On the Death of a Soldier

which the captain gave him. In less than
two minutes all was over."

And the captain adds:
"Always ready to sacrifice himself; a
brave among the brave."

These are modest and yet glorious de-
tails : modest because they are so very com-
mon, because they are constantly being
repeated in their noble monotony and
springing up from every side, numberless
as the essential actions of our daily life;
and glorious because before this war they
seemed so rare and almost legendary and
incomprehensible.

3

Raymond Bon was a child of the south,
of that Provence which, day after day, is
shedding torrents of its blood to wipe out
slanders which we can no longer remem-
ber without turning pale with anger and
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The Wrack of the Storm

indignation. He was born at Avignon, the
old city of the Popes and the cicadas,
where men have louder accents and lighter
hearts than elsewhere. He was a little
boxing-master, who earned a livelihood at
Nice for himself and his destitute parents
by giving lessons in the noble art of self-
defence with the good, ever-ready weapons
which nature has bestowed upon us. He
boasted no other education than that which
a lad picks up at the primary school; but,
almost illiterate as he was, he possessed all
the refinement, the innate culture, the un-
conscious delicacy and tact, the kindliness
of speech and feeling and the beautiful
heart of that comely race whose foremost
sons seem to be purified and spiritualized
from their first childish steps by the most
radiant sunshine in the world. One would
say that they were directly related to those
exquisite ephebes of ancient Greece who
sprang into existence ready to understand
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On the Death of a Soldier

all things and to experience life's purest
emotions before they themselves had lived.
My reason for insisting upon the point is
that, in this respect above all, he repre-
sented thousands and thousands of young
men from that wonderful region where all
the best and most lovable qualities of man-
kind lie hidden all around beneath the in-
different surface of everyday existence,
only awaiting a favourable occasion to blos-
som into astonishing flowers of grace and
generosity and heroism.

4

When I heard that he had gone to the
front, I felt a melancholy certainty that I
should never set eyes on him again. He
was of those whose fate there is no mis-
taking. He was one of those predestined
heroes whose courage marks them out be-
forehand for death and laurels. I but too
well knew his eagerness, his unbounded sin-
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The Wrack of the Storm

cerity and single-mindedness and his great
heart: that admirable heart devoid of all
caution or ulterior motive or calculation,
that heart turned, at all times and with all
its might, purely towards honour and duty.
He was bound to be in the trenches and in
the bayonet-charge the same man that I
had so often seen in the ring, taking risks
from the start, taking them wholesale, un-
remittingly, blindly and cheerfully and al-
was ready with his pleasant smile, like
that of a shy child, at any time to face
whatever giant might have challenged him.
I remember that one day in the year 1914,
he was training Georges Carpentier, who
was to meet some negro heavy-weight or
other. The disproportion in the strength
of the two men struck my friends and me
as rather alarming ; and we took the cham-
pion of the world aside and begged him not
to hit too hard and to spare our little in-
structor as much as he could. That good
126

On the Death of a Soldier

fellow Carpentier, who is full of chival-
rous gentleness, promised to do what we
asked; but after the first round he came
back to us and said:

"I can't let him off just as lightly as I
should like. The little chap is too plucky
and too sensitive; and I have to hit out
in earnest. Besides, he overheard you
and what he says is, 'Never mind what
the gentlemen say; they are much too
considerate and are always afraid of my
getting smashed up. There's no fear of
that. You go for me hard, else we sha'n't
be doing good work.' '

5
"Good work." That is evidently what

he did down at the front and what all of
them there are doing. It is indeed fine
work, the most glorious that a man can
perform, to die like that for a cause
whose triumph he will not behold, for bene-
fits which he does not reap and which will
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The Wrack of the Storm

accrue solely to his fellow-men whom he
will never see again. For, apart from
those benefits, like so many other men, like
almost all the others, he had nothing to
gain and nothing to lose by this war. All
that he possessed in the world was the
strength of his two arms ; and that strength
finds a country everywhere.

But we are no longer concerned with the
personal and immediate interests that guide
nearly all the actions of everyday life. A
loftier ideal has visited men's minds and
occupies them wholly; and the least pre-
pared, the humblest, the minds that seemed
to understand hardly anything of the
existence that came before the tremendous
trial, now feel it and live it as thoroughly
and with the same infinite ampleness as do
those minds which thought themselves
alone capable of grasping it, of considering
it from above or contemplating it from
every side. Never did a sheer ideal sink
128

On the Death of a Soldier

so deeply into so many hearts or abide there
for so long without wavering or faltering.
And therefore, beyond a doubt, somewhere
on high, in the heart of the unknown
powers that rule us, there is being piled
up at this moment the most wonderful
treasure of immaterial forces that man has
ever possessed, one upon which he will
draw until the end of time; for in that
superhuman treasure-house nothing is lost
and we are still living day by day on the
virtues stored in it long centuries ago by
the heroes of Greece and Rome, by the
saints and martyrs of the primitive Church
and by the flower of mediaeval chivalry.

129

THE HOUR OF DESTINY

XI

THE HOUR OF DESTINY
I

WE ARE already free to speak of
this war as if it were ended and
of victory as if it were assured. In princi-
ple, in the region of moral certainties, Ger-
many has been beaten since the battle of
the Marne; and reality, which is always
slower, because it goes burdened beneath
the weight of matter, must needs come
obediently to join the ranks of those cert-
ainties. The last agony may be prolonged
for weeks and months, for the animal is
endowed with the stubborn and almost in-
extinguishable vitality of the beasts of
prey; but it is wounded to the death;
and we have only to wait patiently, wea-
pon in hand, for the final convulsions that
announce the end. The historic event, the

133

The Wrack of the Storm

greatest beyond doubt since man possessed
a history, is therefore accomplished; and,
strange to say, it seems as though it had
been accomplished in spite of history,
against its laws and contrary to its wishes.
It is rash, I know, to speak of such things ;
and it behoves us to be very cautious in
these speculations which pass the scope of
human understanding; but, when we con-
sider what the annals of this earth of ours
have taught us, it seemed written in the
book of the world's destinies that Germany
was bound to win. It was not only, as we
are too ready at the first glance to believe,
the megalomania of an autocrat drunk
with vanity, the gross vanity of some brain-
less buffoon; it was not the warlike im-
pulses, the blind infatuation and egoism of
a feudal caste; it was not even the impa-
tient and deliberately fanned envy and
covetousness of a too prolific race close-
cramped on a dreary and ungrateful soil:
134

The Hour of Destiny

it was none of these that let loose the hate-
ful war. All these causes, adventitious or
fortuitous as they were, only settled the
hour of the decision ; but the decision itself
was taken and written, probably ages ago,
in other spheres which cannot be reached
by the conscious will of man, spheres in
which dark and mighty laws hold sway
over illimitable time and space. The
whole line, the whole huge curve of history
showed to the mind of whosoever tried
to read its sacred and fearful hieroglyphics
that the day of a new, a formidable and
inexorable event was at hand.

The theories built up on this point in
the last sixty years by the German pro-
fessors, notably by Giesbrecht, the his-
torian of the Ottos and the Hohenstaufens,
and Treitschke, the historian of the Hohen-
zollerns, do not necessarily carry conviction
but are at least impressive; and the work
of these two writers, which we do not know
135

The Wrack of the Storm

as well as we should, and of Treitschke
in particular possessed in Germany an in-
fluence that sank deep into every mind,
far exceeding that of Nietzsche, which we
looked upon as preponderant.

But let us ignore for the moment all that
belongs to a 'remote past, the study of
which would call for more space than we
have at our disposal. Let us not question
the empire of the Ottos, the Hohenstau-
fens or the Hapsburgs, in which Germany,
at least as a nation and a race, played but
a secondary part and was still unconscious
of her existence. Let us rather see what
is happening nearer to us and, so to speak,
before our very eyes.

A hundred years ago, under Napoleon,

France enjoyed her spell of hegemony,

which she was not able to prolong because

this hegemony was more the work of a

136

The Hour of Destiny

prodigious but accidental genius than the
fruit of a real and intrinsic power. Next
came the turn of England, who to-day pos-
sesses the greatest empire that the world
has seen since the days of ancient Rome,
that is to say, more than a fifth part of
the habitable globe. But this vast em-
pire rests no more than did Napoleon's
upon an incontestible force, inasmuch as
up to this day it was defended only by an
army less numerous and less well-equipped
than that of many a smaller nation, thus
almost inevitably inviting war, as Pro-
fessor Cramb pointed out a year or two ago
in his prophetic book, Germany and Eng-
land, which has only recently aroused the
interest which it deserves.

It seemed, therefore, as if between these
two Powers, which were more illusory than
real, pending the advent of Russia, whose
hour had not yet struck; in this gap in
history, between a nation on the verge of
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The Wrack of the Storm

its decline, or at least seemingly incapable
of defending itself, and a nation that was
still too young and incapable of attack, fate
offered a magnificent place to whoso cared
to take it. This is what Germany felt, at
first instinctively, urged by all the ill-de-
fined forces that impel mankind, and sub-
sequently, in these latter years, with a
consciousness that became ever clearer and
more persistent. She grasped the fact
that her turn had come to reign over the
earth, that she must take her chance and
seize the opportunity that comes but once.
She prepared to answer the call of fate
and, supported by the mysterious aid which
it lends to those whom it summons, she did
answer, we must admit, in an astonishing
and most formidable manner.

She was within a hair's breadth of suc-
ceeding. A little less prolonged and less
gallant resistance on the part of Belgium,
a suspicious movement from Italy, a false
138

The Hour of Destiny

step made upon the banks of the Marne;
and we can picture Paris falling; France
overrun and fighting heroically to her last
gasp; Russia, not crushed, but weary of
seeking victory and making terms for good
or ill with a conqueror impotent to harm
her; the neutral nations more or less re-
luctantly siding with the strongest; Eng-
land isolated, giving up her colonies to
staunch the wounds of her invaded isle;
the fasces of justice broken asunder by a
separate peace here, a separate peace there,
each equally humiliating; and Germany,
monstrous, ferocious, implacable, finally
towering alone over the ruins of Europe.

3

Now it seems that we have turned aside
the inflexible decree. It seems that we
have averted the fate that was about to
be accomplished. It was bearing down
upon us with the weight of the ages, with
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The Wrack of the Storm

all the weight of all the vague but irresist-
ible aspirations of the past and, perhaps,
the future. Thanks to the greatest effort
which mankind has ever opposed to the
unknown gods that rule it, we are entitled
to believe that the decree has broken down
and that we have driven it into the evil
cave where never human force before had
compelled it to hide its defeat.

I say, "It seems ;" I say, "We are en-
titled to believe." The fact is that the or-
deal is not yet past. Even on the day when
the war is ended and when victory is in our
hands, destiny will not yet be conquered.
It has happened — seldom, it is true, but
still it has happened twice or thrice — that a
nation has compelled the course of fate to
turn aside or to fall back. The nation con-
gratulated herself, even as we believe that
we have the right to do. But events were
not slow in proving that she had congratu-
lated herself too soon. Fatality, that is to
140

The Hour of Destiny

say, the enormous mass of causes and ef-
fects of which we have no understanding,
was not overcome; it was only delayed,
it awaited its revenge and its day, or
at least what we call its day, which may
extend over a hundred years and more
where nations are concerned, for fatality
does not reckon in the manner of men, but
after the fashion of the great movements
of nature. It is important at this time to
know whether we shall be able to escape
that revenge and that day. If men and na-
tions were swayed only by reason, if, after
being so often the absolute masters of their
happiness and their future, they had not
so often destroyed that which they had
just achieved, then we might say — and in-
deed ought to say — that our escape de-
pends only upon ourselves. In point of
fact, three-quarters of the risk are run
and the fourth is in our power; we have
only to keep it so. Almost all the chances

141

The Wrack of the Storm

of the fight are on our side at last; and,
when the war is over, there will be no-
thing but our wisdom and our will con-
fronting a destiny which from that time
onward will be powerless to take its course,
unless it first succeed in blinding and per-
verting them.

In this hour all that lies hidden under
that mysterious word will be waiting on
our decision, waiting to know if victory is
with us or with it. It is after we have
won that we must really vanquish; it is in
the hour of peace that the actual war will
begin against an invisible foe, a hundred
times as dangerous as the one of whom we
have seen too much. If at that hour we
do not profit by all our advantages; if we
do not destroy, root and branch, the mili-
tary power of an enemy who is in secret
alliance with the evil influences of the
earth; if we do not here and now, by an
irrevocable compact, forearm ourselves
142

The Hour of Destiny

against our sense of pity and generosity,
our weakness, our imprudence, our future
rivalries and discords; if we leave a single
outlet to the beast at bay; if, through our
negligence, we give it a single hope, a sin-
gle opportunity of coming to the surface
and taking breath, then the vigilant fatal-
ity which has but one fixed idea will resume
its progress and pursue its way, dragging
history with it and laughing over its
shoulder at man once more tricked and
discomfited. Everything that we have done
and suffered, the ruins, the sacrifices, the
nameless tortures and the numberless dead,
will have served no purpose and will be
lost beyond redemption. Everything will
not have to be done over again, for nothing
is ever done over again and fortunate op-
portunities do not occur twice; but every-
thing except our woes and all their con-
sequences will be as though it had never
been.

143

The Wrack of the Storm

4

It will therefore be a matter of holding
our own against the enemy whom we do
not see and mastering him until the turn
or chance of the accursed race is past.
How long will that be? We cannot
tell; but, in the swift-moving history of
to-day, it seems probable that the waiting
and the struggle will be much shorter than
they would have been in former times. Is
it possible that fatality — by which I mean
what perhaps for a moment was the un-
acknowledged desire of the planet — shall
not regain the upper hand? At the stage
which man has reached, I hope and believe
so. He had never conquered it before;
but also he had not yet risen to the height
which he has now attained. There is no
reason why that which has never happened
should not take place one day; and every-
thing seems to tell us that man is approach-
ing the day whereon, seizing the most
144

The Hour of Destiny

glorious opportunity that has ever present-
ed itself since he acquired a consciousness,
he will at last learn that he is able, when he
pleases, to control his whole fate in this
world.

145

IN ITALY

XII

IN ITALY
I

A FEW days before Italy formed her
great resolve, the following lines ap-
peared in one of the leading Pangermanic
organs of the peoples beyond the Rhine,
the Kreuzzeitung:

"We have already observed that it will
not do to be too optimistic as to Italy's de-
cision ; in point of fact, the situation is very
serious. If none but moderate considera-
tions had ruled Italy's intentions, there is
little doubt as to which path she would
choose ; but we know the height which the
wave of Germanophobia has attained in
that country, a significant mark of the
popular sentiment being the declaration of
the Italian Socialists upon the reasons of
149

The Wrack of the Storm

tneir inability to oppose the war. An equal
source of danger is the fact that the gov-
ernment feels that it no longer controls
the current of public opinion."

The whole drama of Italian intervention
is summed up in these lines, which explain
it better than would the longest and most
learned commentaries.

The Italian government, restrained by
a politic wisdom and prudence, excessive,
perhaps, but very excusable, did not wish
for war. To the utmost limits of patience,
until its dignity and its sense of security
could bear no more, it did all that could
be done to spare its people the greatest
calamity that can befall a land. It held
out until it was literally submerged and car-
ried away by the flood of Germanophobia
of which the passage which I have quoted
speaks. I witnessed the rising of this
flood. When I arrived in Milan, at the
150

In Italy

end of November, 1914, to speak a few
sentences at a charity-fete organized for the
benefit of the Belgian refugees, the hatred
of Germany was already storing itself up
in men's hearts, but had not as yet come to
the surface. Here and there it did break
out, but it was still fearful, circumspect and
hesitating. One felt it brewing, seething
in the depths of men's souls, but it seemed
as yet to be feeling its way, to be reckoning
itself up, to be painfully attaining self-con-
sciousness. When I returned to Italy in
March, 1915, I was amazed to behold the
unhoped-for height to which the invading
flood had so swiftly risen. That pious
hatred, that necessary hatred, which in this
case is merely a magnificent passion for
justice and humanity, had swept over every-
thing. It had come out into the full sun-
light; it thrilled and quivered at the
least appeal, proud and happy to assert
itself, to manifest itself with the beautiful
151

The Wrack of the Storm

tumultuous ostentation of the South; and it
was the "neutrals" that now hid themselves
after the manner of unspeakable insects.
That species had all but disappeared, anni-
hilated by the storm that was gathering on
every hand. The Germans themselves had
gone to earth, no one knew where; and
from that moment it was certain that war
was imminent and inevitable.

In the space of three months a stupen-
dous work had been accomplished. It is
impossible for the moment to weigh and
determine the part of each of those who
performed it. But we can even now say
that in Italy, which is governed preemi-
nently by public opinion and which, more
than any other nation, has in its blood the
traditions and the habits of the forum and
the ancient republics, it is above all the
spoken word that changes men's hearts
and urges them to action.

152

In Italy

2

From this point of view, the admirable
campaign of agitation and propaganda un-
dertaken by M. Jules Destree, author
of En Italic, was of an importance and pos-
sessed consequences which are beyond com-
parison with anything else accomplished
and which are difficult to realize by those
who were not present at one or other of
the meetings at which, for more than six
months, indefatigably, travelling from
town to town, from the smallest to the
most populous, he uttered the distressful
complaint of martyred Belgium, unveiling
the lies, the felonies, the monstrosities and
the acts of devastation perpetrated by the
barbarian horde and making heard, with
sovran eloquence, the august voice of out-
raged justice and of baffled right.

I heard him more than once and was
able to judge for myself of the magical
effect — the term is by no means too strong
153

The Wrack of the Storm

— which he produced on the Italian crowd.
It was a magnificent spectacle, which I shall
never forget. I then perceived for the
first time in my life the mysterious, in-
cantatory, supernatural powers of great
eloquence.

He would come forward wearing a lan-
guid, dejected and overburdened air. The
crowd, like all crowds awaiting their mas-
ter, sat thronged at his feet, silently hum-
ming, undecided, unshaped, not yet know-
ing what it wanted or intended. He would
begin; his voice was low, leisurely, almost
hesitating; he seemed to be painfully
searching for his ideas and expressions, but
in reality he was feeling for the sensitive
and magnetic points of the huge and un-
known being whose soul he wished to reach.
At the outset it was evident that he did not
know exactly what he was going to say. He
swept his words across the assembly as
though they had been antennae. They

In Italy

came back to him charged with sympathy
and strength and precise information.
Then his delivery became more rapid, his
body drew itself erect, his stature and his
very size increased. His voice grew fuller ;
it became tremendous, seductive or sarcas-
tic, overwhelming like a hurricane all the
ideas of his audience, beating against the
walls of the largest buildings, flowing,
through the doors and windows, out into
the surging streets, there to kindle the ar-
dour and hatred which already thrilled the
hall. His face — tawny, brutal, ravaged,
furrowed with shade and s}ashed with light,
powerful and magnificent in its ugliness —
became the very mask, the visible symbol
of the furious and generous passions of the
crowd. At moments such as this, he truly
merited the name which I heard those
about me murmuring, the name which the
Italians gave him in that kind of helpless
fear and delight which men feel in the
i55

The Wrack of the Storm

presence of an irresistible force: he was
"the Terrible Orator."

But all this power, which seemed so
blindly released, was in reality extremely
circumspect, extremely subtle and marvel-
lously disciplined. The handling of those
shy though excited crowds called for the
utmost prudence, as a certain French
speaker, whom I will not name, but who
wished to make a like attempt, learnt to
his cost. The Italian is generous, court-
eous, hospitable, expansive and enthusiastic,
but also proud and susceptible. He does
not readily allow another to dictate his
conduct, to reproach him with his short-
comings or to offer him advice. He is
conscious of his own worth; he knows that
he is the eldest son of our civilization and
that no one has the right to patronize him.
It is necessary, therefore, beneath the ap-
pearance of the most fiery and unbridled
eloquence, to observe perfect self-mastery,
156

In Italy

combined with infinite tact and discretion.
It is often essential to divine instantane-
ously the temper of the crowd, to bow be-
fore the most varied and unexpected cir-
cumstances and to profit by them. I
remember, among others, a singularly
prickly meeting at Naples. The Neapoli-
tans are hardly warlike people; but they
none the less felt on this occasion that they
must not appear indifferent to the generous
movement which was thrilling the rest of
Italy. At the last moment, we were
warned that we might speak of Belgium
and her misfortunes, but that any too
pointed allusion to the war, any too violent
attack upon the Teutonic bandits would
arouse protests which might injure our
cause. I, being no orator, had only my
poor written speech, which, as I could not
alter it, became dangerous. It was neces-
sary to prepare the ground. Destree
mounted the platform and, in a masterly

The Wrack of the Storm

improvisation, began by establishing a long,
patient and scholarly parallel between
Flemish and Italian art, between the great
painters of Florence and Venice and those
of Flanders and Brabant; and thence, by
imperceptible degrees, he shifted his
ground to the present distress in Belgium,
to the atrocities and infamies committed by
her oppressors, to the whole story, to the
whole series of injustices, to the whole dan-
ger of this nameless war. He was ap-
plauded; the barriers were broken down.
Anything added to what he had said was
superfluous ; but everything was permissible.

3

For the rest, it must be admitted that
a wonderful impulse of pity and admira-
tion for Belgium sustained the orator and
lent his every word a range and a potency
which it could not otherwise have pos-
sessed. This unanimous and spontaneous
158

In Italy

sympathy assumed at times the most touch-
ing and unexpected forms. All difficulties
were smoothed away before us as by magic;
the sternest prohibitions were ingeniously
evaded or benevolently removed. From
the towns which we were due to visit the
hotel-keepers telegraphed to us, begging
as a favour permission to give us lodg-
ing; and, when the time came to set-
tle our account, it was impossible to
get them to accept the slightest remu-
neration; and the whole staff, from the
majestic porter to the humblest boot-
boy, heroically refused to be tipped. If
we entered a restaurant and were recog-
nized, the customers would rise, take coun-
sel together and order a bottle of some
famous wine ; then one among them would
come forward, requesting, gracefully and
respectfully, that we would do them the
honour of drinking with them to the deli-
verance of our martyred motherland. At
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The Wrack of the Storm

the memory of what that unhappy country
had suffered for the salvation of the world,
a sort of discreet and affecting fervour was
visible in the looks of all; it may be said
that nowhere was the heroic sacrifice of Bel-
gium more nobly and more affectionately
admired and understood; and it will be
recognized one day, when time has done
its work, that, although other causes in-
duced Italy to take upon her shoulders the
terrible burden of what was not an inevi-
table war, the only causes that really, in
the depths of her soul, liberated her re-
solve were the admiration, the indignation
and the heroic pity inspired by the specta-
cle, incessantly renewed, of our unmerited
afflictions. You will not find in history a
nobler sacrifice nor one made for a nobler
cause.

160

ON REREADING THUCYDIDES

XIII

ON REREADING THUCYDIDES
I

AT MOMENTS above all when his-
tory is in the making, in these times
when great and as yet incomplete pages are
being traced, pages by the side of which
all that had already been written will pale,
it is a good and salutary thing to turn to
the past in search of instruction, warning
and encouragement. In this respect, the
unwearying and implacable war which
Athens kept up against Sparta for twenty-
seven years, with the hegemony of Greece
for a stake, presents more than one ana-
logy with that which we ourselves are
waging and teaches lessons that should
make us reflect. The counsels which it
gives us are all the more precious, all the
more striking or profound inasmuch as the
163

The Wrack of the Storm

war is narrated to us by a man who re-
mains, with Tacitus, despite the striving of
the centuries, the progress of life and all
the opportunities of doing better, the great-
est historian that the earth has ever known.
Thucydides is in fact the supreme historian,
at the same time swift and detailed, scrupu-
lously sifting his evidence but giving free
play to intuition, setting forth none but
incontestable facts, yet divining the most
secret intentions and embracing at a glance
all the present and future political conse-
quences of the events which he relates. He
is withal one of the most perfect writers,
one of the most admirable artists in the
literature of mankind ; and from this point
of view, in an entirely different and almost
antagonistic world, he has not an equal
save Tacitus. But Tacitus is before every-
thing a wonderful tragic poet, a painter
of foul abysses, of fire and blood, who can
lay bare the souls of monsters and their
164

On Rereading Thucydides

crimes, whereas Thucydides is above all a
great political moralist, a statesman en-
dowed with extraordinary perspicacity, a
painter of the open air and of a free state,
who portrays the minds of those sane, in-
genious, subtle, generous and marvellously
intelligent men who peopled ancient Greece.
The one piles on the gloom with a lavish
hand, gathers dark shadows which he
pierces at each sentence with lightning-
flashes, but remains sombre and oppressed
on the very summits, whereas the other con-
denses nothing but light, groups together
judgments that are so many radiant sheaves
and remains luminous and breathes freely
in the very depths. The first is passion-
ate, violent, fierce, indignant, bitter, sin-
cerely but pitilessly unjust and all made up
of magnificent animosities; the second is al-
ways even, always at the same high level,
which is that which the noblest endeavour
of human reason can attain. He has no
165

The Wrack of the Storm

passion but a passion for the public weal,
for justice, glory and intelligence. It is
as though all his work were spread out in
the blue sky; and even his famous picture
of the plague of Athens seems covered with
sunshine.

2

But there is no need to follow up this
parallel, which is not my object. I will
not dwell any longer — though perhaps I
may return to them one day — upon the les-
sons which we might derive from that
Peloponnesian War, in which the position
of Athens towards Lacedaemon provides
more than one point of comparison with
that of France towards Germany. True,
we do not there see, as in our own case,
civilized nations fighting a morally barbar-
ian people : it was a contest between Greeks
and Greeks, displaying however in the same
physical race two different and incompati-
ble spirits. Athens stood for human life
166

On Rereading Thucydides

in its happiest development, gracious,
cheerful and peaceful. She took no serious
interest except in the happiness, the impon-
derous riches, the innocent and perfect
beauties, the sweet leisures, the glories and
the arts of peace. When she went to war,
it was as though in play, with the smile still
on her face, looking upon it as a more
violent pleasure than the rest, or as a duty
joyfully accepted. She bound herself down
to no discipline, she was never ready, she
improvised everything at the last moment,
having, as Pericles said, "with habits not
of labour but of ease and courage not of
art but of nature, the double advantage
of escaping the experience of hardship in
anticipation and of facing them in the hour
of need as fearlessly as those who are never
free from them."1

and the later passage from Pericles' funeral
oration I have quoted from the late Richard Craw-
ley's admirable translation of Thucydides' Pelopon-
nes'ian War, now published in the Temple Classics.—
A. T. de M.

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The Wrack of the Storm

For Sparta, on the other hand, life was
nothing but endless work, an incessant
strain, having no other objective than war.
She was gloomy, austere, strict, morose, al-
most ascetic, an enemy to everything that
excuses man's presence on this earth, a na-
tion of spoilers, looters, incendiaries and
devastators, a nest of wasps beside a swarm
of bees, a perpetual menace and danger to
everything around her, as hard upon her-
self as upon others and boasting an ideal
which may appear lofty, if it can be man's
ideal to be unhappy and the contented slave
of unrelenting discipline. On the other
hand, she differed entirely from those whom
we are now fighting in that she was gener-
ally honest, loyal and upright and showed a
certain respect for the gods and their tem-
ples, for treaties and for international law.
It is none the less true that, if she had from
the beginning reigned alone or without en-
countering a long resistance, Hellas woul'd
168

On Rereading Thucydides

never have been the Hellas that we know.
She would have left in history but a precar-
ious trace of useless warlike virtues and of
minor combats without glory ; and mankind
would not have possessed that centre of
light towards which it turns to this day.

3

What was to be the issue of this war?
Here begins the lesson which it were well
to study thoroughly. It would seem in-
deed as if, with the first encounters in that
conflict, as in our own, the inexplicable will
that governs nations was favourable to the
less civilized; and in fact Lacedaemon
gained the upper hand, at least temporarily
and sufficiently to abuse her victory to such
a degree that she soon lost its fruits. But
Athens held the evil will in check for
seven-and-twenty years; for twenty-seven
summers and twenty-seven winters, to use
Thucydides* reckoning, she proved to us
169

The Wrack of the Storm

that it is possible, in defiance of probability,
to fight against what seems written in the
book of heaven and hell. Nay more, at
a time when Sparta, whose sole industry,
whose sole training, whose only reason for
existence and whose only ideal was war,
was hugging the thought of crushing in a
few weeks, under the weight of her for-
midable hoplites, a frivolous, careless and
ill-organized city, Athens, notwithstanding
the treacherous blow which fate dealt her
by sending a plague that carried off a third
of her civil population and a quarter of her
army, Athens for seventeen years definitely
held victory in her grasp.

During this period, she more than once
had Lacedaemon at her mercy and did not
begin to descend the stony path of ruin and
defeat until after the disastrous expedition
to Sicily, in which, carried away by her
rhetoricians and bitten with inconceivable
folly, she hurled all her fleet, all her sold-
170

On Rereading Thucydides

iers and all her wealth into a remote, un-
profitable, unknown and desperate adven-
ture. She resisted the decline of her for-
tunes for yet another ten years, heaping up
her sins against wisdom and simple com-
mon sense and with her own hands drawing
tighter the knot that was to strangle her,
as though to show us that destiny is for
the most part but our own madness and
that what we call unavoidable fatality has
its root only in mistakes that might easily
be avoided.

4

To point this moral was again not my
real object. In these days when we have
so many sorrows to assuage and so many
deaths to honour, I wished merely to re-
call a page written over two thousand years
ago, to the glory of the Athenian heroes
who fell for their country in the first bat-
tles of that war. According to the cus-
tom of the Greeks, the bones of the dead
171

The Wrack of the Storm

that had been burnt on the battlefield were
solemnly brought back to Athens at the end
of the year ; and the people chose the great-
est speaker in the city to deliver the funeral
oration. This honour fell to Pericles, son
of Xanthippus, the Pericles of the golden
age of human beauty. After pronouncing
a well-merited and magnificent eulogium on
the Athenian nation and institutions, he
concluded with the following words :

"Indeed, if I have dwelt at some length
upon the character of our country, it has
been to show that our stake in the struggle
is not the same as theirs who have no such
blessing to lose and also that the panegyric
of the men over whom I am now speaking
might be by definite proofs established.
That panegyric is now in a great measure
complete ; for the Athens that I have cele-
brated is only what the heroism of these
and their like have made her, men whose
172

On Rereading Thucydides

fame, unlike that of most Hellenes, will
be found to be only commensurate with
their deserts. And, if a test of worth be
wanted, it is to be found in their closing
scene; and this not only in the cases in
which it set the final seal upon their merit,
but also in those in which it gave the first
intimation of their having any. For there
is justice in the claim that steadfastness in
his country's battles should be as a cloak
to cover a man's other imperfections, since
the good action has blotted out the bad and
his merit as a citizen more than outweighed
his demerits as an individual. But none
of these allowed either wealth with its pro-
spect of future enjoyment to unnerve his
spirit, or poverty with its hope of a day
of freedom and riches to tempt him to
shrink from danger. No, holding that
vengeance upon their enemies was more to
be desired than any personal blessings and
reckoning this to be the most glorious of
173

The Wrack of the Storm

hazards, they joyfully determined to accept
the risk, to make sure of their vengeance
and to let their wishes wait; and, while
committing to hope the uncertainty of final
success, in the business before them they
thought fit to act boldly and trust in them-
selves. Thus choosing to die resisting
rather than to live submitting, they fled
only from dishonour, but met danger face
to face and, after one brief moment, while
at the summit of their fortune, escaped not
from their fear but from their glory.

"So died these man as became Athenians.
You, their survivors, must determine to
have as unfaltering a resolution in the field,
though you may pray that it may have a
happier issue. And, not contented with
ideas derived only from words of the ad-
vantages which are bound up with the de-
fence of your country, though these would
furnish a valuable text to a speaker even
before an audience so alive to them as the

174

On Rereading Thucydides

present, you must yourselves realize the
power of Athens and feed your eyes upon
her from day to day, till love of her fills
your hearts; and then, when all her great-
ness shall break upon you, you must reflect
that it was by courage, sense of duty and a
keen feeling of honour in action that men
were enabled to win all this and that no
personal failure in an enterprise could make
them consent to deprive their country of
their valour, but they laid it at her feet
as the most glorious contribution that they
could offer. For by this offering of their
lives made in common by them all they
each of them individually received that re-
nown which never grows old and, for a
sepulchre, not so much that in which their
bones have been deposited, but that noblest
of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to
be eternally remembered upon every occa-
sion on which deed or story shall call for
its commemoration. For heroes have the
i75

The Wrack of the Storm

whole earth for their tomb; and in lands
far from their own, where the column with
its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined
in every breast a record unwritten with no
tablet to preserve it, except that of the
heart. These take as your model and,
judging happiness to be the fruit of free-
dom and freedom of valour, never decline
the dangers of war. For it is not the
miserable that would most justly be un-
sparing of their lives: these have nothing
to hope for ; it is rather they to whom con-
tinued life may bring reverses as yet un-
known and to whom a fall, if it came,
would be most tremendous in its conse-
quences. And surely, to a man of spirit,
the degradation of cowardice must be im-
measurably more grievous than the unfelt
death which strikes him in the midst of his
strength and patriotism !

"Comfort, therefore, not condolence, is
what I have to offer to the parents of the
176

On Rereading Thucydides

dead who may be here. Numberless are
the chances to which, as they know, the life
of man is subject; but fortunate indeed are
they who draw for their lot a death so
glorious as that which h|as caused your
mourning and to whom life has been so
exactly measured as to terminate in the
happiness in which it has been passed. Still
I know that this is a hard saying, especially
when those are in question of whom you
will be constantly reminded by seeing in
the homes of others blessings of which once
you also boasted; for grief is felt not so
much for the want of what we have never
known as for the loss of that to which we
have been long accustomed. Yet you who
are still of an age to beget children must
bear up in the hope of having others in
their stead: not only will they help you to
forget those whom you have lost, but they
will be to the state at once a reinforcement
and a security; for never can a fair or just
policy be expected of the citizen who does

The Wrack of the Storm

not, like his fellows, bring to the decision
the interests and apprehensions of a father.
While those of you who have passed your
prime must congratulate yourselves with
the thought that the best part of your life
was fortunate and that the brief span that
remains will be cheered by the fame of the
departed. For it is only the love of hon-
our that never grows old; and honour it is,
not gain, as some would have it, that re-
joices the heart of age and helplessness.
"And, now that you have brought to a
close your lamentations for your relatives,
you may depart."

These words spoken twenty-three centu-
ies ago ring in our hearts as though they
were uttered yesterday. They celebrate
our dead better than could any eloquence of
ours, however poignant it might be. Let
us bow before their paramount beauty and
before the great people that could applaud
and understand.

178

THE DEAD DO NOT DIE

XIV

THE DEAD DO NOT DIE

I

WHEN we behold the terrible loss of
so many young lives, when we sec
so many incarnations of physical and moral
vigour, of intellect and of glorious pro-
mise pitilessly cut off in their first flower, we
are on the verge of despair. Never before
have the fairest energies and aspirations
of men been flung recklessly and incessantly
into an abyss whence comes no sound or
answer. Never since it came into existence
has humanity squandered its treasure, its
substance and its prospects so lavishly. For
more than twelve months, on every battle-
field, where the bravest, the truest, the most
ardent and self-sacrificing are necessarily
the first to die and where the less courage-
ous, the less generous, the weak, the ailing,
181

The Wrack of the Storm

in a word the less desirable, alone possess
some chance of escaping the carnage, for
over twelve months a sort of monstrous
inverse selection has been in operation, one
which seems to be deliberately seeking the
downfall of the human race. And we won-
der uneasily what the state of the world
will be after the great trial and what will
be left of it and what will be the future
of this stunted race, shorn of all the best
and noblest part of it.

The problem is certainly one of the
darkest that have ever vexed the minds of
men. It contains a material truth before
which we remain defenceless; and, if we
accept it as it stands, we can discover no
remedy for the evil that threatens us. But
material and tangible truths are never any-
thing but a more or less salient angle of
greater and deeper-lying truths. And, on
the other hand, mankind appears to be such
a necessary and indestructible force of na-
182

The Dead Do not Die

ture that it has always, hitherto, not only
survived the most desperate ordeals, but
succeeded in benefiting by them and emer-
ging greater and stronger than before.

We know that peace is better than war;
it were madness to compare the two. We
know that, if this catacylsm let loose by an
act of unutterable folly had not come upon
the world, mankind would doubtless have
reached ere long a zenith of wonderful
achievement whose manifestations it is im-
possible to foreshadow. We know that, if
a third or a fourth part of the fabulous
sums expended on extermination and de-
struction had been devoted to works of
peace, all the iniquities that poison the air
we breathe would have been triumphantly
redressed and that the social question, the
one great question, that matter of life and
death which justice demands that posterity
183

The Wrack of the Storm

should face, would have found its definite
solution, once and for all, in a happiness
which now perhaps even our sons and
grandsons will not realize. We know that
the disappearance of two or three million
young existences, cut down when they were
on the point of bearing fruit, will leave in
history a void that will not be easily filled,
even as we know that among those dead
were mighty intellects, treasures of genius
which will not come back again and which
contained inventions and discoveries that
will now perhaps be lost to us for centuries.
We know that we shall never grasp the
consequences of this thrusting back of pro-
gress and of this unprecedented devastation.
But, granting all this, it is a good thing to
recover our balance and stand upon our
feet. There is no irreparable loss. Every-
thing is transformed, nothing perishes and
that which seems to be hurled into destruc-
tion is not destroyed at all. Our moral
184

The Dead Do not Die

world, even as our physical world, is a vast
but hermetically sealed sphere, whence
naught can issue, whence naught can
fall, to be dissolved in space. All that
exists, all that comes into being upon
this earth remains there and bears fruit;
and the most appalling wastage is but
material or spiritual riches flung away for
an instant, to fall to the ground again in a
new form. There is no escape or leakage,
no filtering through cracks, no missing the
mark, not even waste or neglect. All this
heroism poured out on every side does not
leave our planet; and the reason why the
courage of our fighters seems so general
and yet so extraordinary is that all the
might of the dead has passed into the
survivors. All those forces of wisdom,
patience, honour and self-sacrifice which in-
crease day by day and which, we ourselves,
who are far from the field of danger, feel
rising within us without knowing whence
185

The Wrack of the Storm

they come are nothing but the souls of the
heroes gathered and absorbed by our own
souls.

3

It is well at times to contemplate in-
visible things as though we saw them with
our eyes. This was the aim of all the
great religions, when they represented
under forms appropriate to the civilization
of their day, the latent, deep, instinctive,
general and essential truths which are the
guiding principles of mankind. All have
felt and recognized that loftiest of all
truths, the communion of the living and
the dead, and have given it various names
designating the same mysterious verity : the
Christians know it as revival of merit, the
Buddhists as reincarnation, or transmigra-
tion of souls, and the Japanese as Shinto-
ism, or ancestor-worship. The last are
more fully convinced than any other nation
186

The Dead Do not Die

that the dead do not cease to live and that
they direct all our actions, are exalted by
our virtues and become gods.

Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has
most closely studied and understood that
wonderful ancestor-worship, says:

"One of the surprises of our future will
certainly be a .return to beliefs and ideas
long ago abandoned upon the mere assump-
tion that they contained no truth — beliefs
still called barbarous, pagan, mediaeval, by
those who condemn them out of traditional
habit. Year after year the researches of
science afford us new proof that the savage,
the barbarian, the idolater, the monk, each
and all have arrived, by different paths, as
near to some point of eternal truth as any
thinker of the nineteenth century. We are
now learning also, that the theories of the
astrologers and of the alchemists were but
partially, not 'totally, wrong. We have
187

The Wrack of the Storm

reason even to suppose that no dream of
the invisible world has ever been dreamed,
that no hypothesis of the unseen has ever
been imagined — which future science will
not prove to have contained some germ of
reality.5'1

There are many things which might be
added to these lines, notably all that the
most recent of our sciences, metapsychics,
is engaged in discovering with regard to
the miraculous faculties of our subcon-
sciousness.

But, to return more directly to what we
were saying, was it not observed that, after
the great battles of the Napoleonic era, the
birth-rate increased in an extraordinary
manner, as though the lives suddenly cut
short in their prime were not really dead
and were eager to be back again in our
midst and complete their career? If we

^Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Life, chap-
ter xiv., "Some thoughts about Ancestor-Worship."
188

The Dead Do not Die

could follow with our eyes all that is hap-
pening in the spiritual world that rises
above us on every side, we should no doubt
see that it is the same with the moral force
that seems to be lost on the field of slaugh-
ter. It knows where to go, it knows its
goal, it does not hesitate. All that our
wonderful dead relinquish they bequeath to
us; and when they die for us, they leave
us their lives not in any strained meta-
phorical sense, but in a very real and direct
way. Virtue goes out of every man who
falls while performing a deed of glory;
and that virtue drops down upon us; and
nothing of him is lost and nothing evapor-
ates in the shock of a premature end. He
gives us in one solitary and mighty stroke
what he would have given us in a long life
of duty and love. Death does not injure
life; it is powerless against it. Life's ag-
gregate never changes. What death takes
from those who fall enters into those who
189

The Wrack of the Storm

are left standing. The number of lamps
grows less, but the flame rises higher.
Death is in no wise the gainer so long as
there are living men. The more it exercises
its ravages, the more it increases the in-
tensity of that which it cannot touch; the
more it pursues its phantom victories, the
better does it prove to us that man will end
by conquering death,

190

IN MEMORIAM

XV

IN MEMORIAM
I

THOSE who die for their country
should not be numbered with the dead.
We must call them by another name. They
have nothing in common with those who
end in their beds a life that is worn out, a
life almost always too long and often use-
less. Death, which every elsewhere is but
the object of fear and horror, bringing
naught but nothingness and despair, this
death, on the field of battle, in the clash
of glory, becomes more gracious than birth
and exhales a beauty greater than that of
love. No life will ever give what their
youth is offering us, that youth which gives
in one moment the days and the years that
lay before it. There is no sacrifice to be
compared with that which they have made ;

193

The Wrack of the Storm

for which reason there is no glory that can
soar so high as theirs, no gratitude that can
surpass the gratitude which we owe them.
They have not only a right to the foremost
place in our memories: they have a right
to all our memories and to everything that
we are, since we exist only through them.

And now it is in us that their life, so
suddenly cut short, must resume its course.
Whatever be our faith and whatever the
God whom it adores, one thing is almost
certain and, in spite of all appearances, is
daily becoming more certain: it is that
death and life are commingled; the dead
and the living alike are but moments,
hardly dissimilar, of a single and infinite
existence and members of one immortal
family. They are not beneath the earth,
in the depths of their tombs; they lie deep
in our hearts, where all that they once were
194

In Memoriam

will continue to live to to act ; and they live
in us even as we die in them. They see us,
they understand us more nearly than when
they were in our arms; let us then keep a
watch upon ourselves, so that they witness
no actions and hear no words but words
and actions that shall be worthy of them.

195

SUPERNATURAL COMMUNICA-
TIONS IN WAR-TIME

XVI

SUPERNATURAL COMMUNICATIONS IN
WAR-TIME

I

IN A volume entitled The Unknown
Guest, published not long ago, among
other essays I devoted one in particu-
lar1 to certain phenomena of intuition,
clairvoyance or clairaudience, vision at
great distance and even vision of the future.
These phenomena were grouped together
under the somewhat unsuitable and none
too well-constructed title of "psychometry,"
which, to borrow Dr. Maxwell's excellent
definition, is "the faculty possessed by cert-
ain persons of placing themselves in re-
lation, either spontaneously or, for the
most part, through the intermediary of

1 Chap. ii. : "Psychometry."
199

The Wrack of the Storm

some object, with unknown and often very
distant things and people."

The existence of this faculty is no longer
seriously denied by any one who has given
some little attention to metapsychics ; and
it is easily verified by those who will take
the necessary trouble, for its possessors,
though few in number, are not inaccessible.
It has been the subject of many experi-
ments and of a few treatises, among which
I will name one by M. Duchatel,
Enquete sur des cas de psychometrie, and
Dr. Osty's recent book, Lucidite et
intuition, which is the most complete and
searching work that we have had upon this
question until now.

Psychometry is one of the most curious
faculties of our subconsciousness and doubt-
less contains the clue to many of those
manifestations which appear to proceed
from another world. Let us see, with the
aid of a living example, how it is employed.
200

Supernatural Communications

One of the best mediums of this class
is a lady to whom I referred in The Un-
known Guest as Mme. M. Her visitor
gives her an object of some kind that
has belonged to or been touched or han-
dled by the person about whom he pro-
poses to question her. Mme. M. oper-
ates in a state of trance; but there are
other celebrated psychometers who retain
all their normal consciousness, so that the
hypnotic or somnambulistic state is not,
generally speaking, by any means indispen-
sable when we wish to arouse this extraor-
dinary clairvoyance.

After placing the object, usually a let-
ter, in the medium's hands, you say to her :

"I wish you to put yourself in com-
munication with the writer of this letter,"
or "the owner of this article," as the case
may be.

Forthwith the medium not only per-
ceives the person in question, his physical

201

The Wrack of the Storm

appearance, his character, his habits, his in-
terests, his state of health, but also, in a
series of swift and changing visions that
follow one another like the pictures of a
cinematograph, sees and describes exactly
that person's environment, the surrounding
country, the rooms in which he lives, the
people who live with him and who wish
him well or ill, the mentality and the most
secret and unexpected intentions of all the
various characters that figure in his exist-
ence. If by means of your questions you
direct her towards the past, she traces the
whole course of the subject's history. If
you turn her towards the future, she seems
often to discover it as clearly as the past.
But here we must make certain reserva-
tions. We are entering upon forbidden
tracts; errors are almost the rule and
proper supervision is all but impossible. It
is better therefore not to venture into those
dangerous regions. Pending fuller inves-

202

Supernatural Communications

tigation of the question, we may say that
the foretelling of the future, when it claims
to cover a definite space of time, is nearly
always illusory. There is scarcely any
accuracy of vision, except when the events
concerned are very near at hand, already
developing or actually being consummated ;
and it then becomes difficult to distinguish
it from presentiments, which in their turn
are rarely true except where the immedi-
ate future is concerned. To sum up, in
the present state of our experience, we ob-
serve that what the psychometers and clair-
voyants foretell us possesses a certain value
and some chance of proving correct only
in so far as they put into words our own
forebodings, forebodings which again may
be quite unknown to us and which they dis-
cover deep down in our subconsciousness.
They confine themselves — I speak of the
genuine mediums — to bringing to light and
revealing to us our unconscious and per-
203

The Wrack of the Storm

sonal intuition of an event that is hanging
over us. But, when they venture to predict
a general event, such as the result of a war,
an epidemic, an earthquake, which does
not interest ourselves exclusively or which
is too remote to come within the somewhat
limited scope of our intuition, they almost
invariably deceive themselves and us.

It is very difficult to fathom the nature
of this intuition. Does it relate to events
partly or wholly realized, but still in a
latent state and perceived before the know-
ledge of them reaches us through the norm-
al channels of the mind or brain? Does
our ever-watchful instinct of self-preserva-
tion notice causes or traces which escape
our ever-inattentive and slumbering rea-
son? Are we to believe in a sort of auto-
suggestion that induces us to realize things
which we have been foretold or of which
we have had presentiments? This is not
the place to examine so complex a problem,
204

Supernatural Communications

which brings us into contact with all the
mysteries of subconsciousness and the
preexistence of the future.

There remains another point to which it
is well to draw attention in order to avoid
misunderstanding and disappointment. Ex-
perience shows us that the medium per-
ceives the person in question quite clearly,
in his present and usual state, but not ne-
cessarily in the exact accidental state of the
moment. She will tell you, for instance,
that she sees him ailing slightly, lying in a
deck-chair in a garden of such and such a
kind, surrounded by certain flowers and
petting a dog of a certain size and breed.
On enquiring, you will find that all these
details are strictly correct, with one excep-
tion, that at that precise moment this
person, who ordinarily spends his time in
the garden, was inside his house or call-
ing on a neighbour. Mistakes in time
therefore are comparatively frequent and
205

The Wrack of the Storm

simultaneity between action and vision com-
paratively rare. In short, the habitual
often masks the accidental action. This, I
insist, is a point of which we must not lose
sight, lest we ask of psychometry more
than it is obviously able to give us.

Having said so much, is it open to us,
amid all the mental anguish and suffering
which this terrible war has engendered,
without profaning the sorrow of our fel-
low-men and women, to give to those who
are in mortal fear as to the fate of some one
whom they love the hope of finding, among
those extrahuman phenomena which have
been unjustly and falsely disparaged, a con-
soling gleam of light that shall not be a
mere mockery or delusion? I venture to
declare — and I am doing so not thought-
lessly, but after studying the problem with
the conscientious attention which it de-
206

Supernatural Communications

mands and after personally making a
number of experiments or causing them to
be made under my supervision — I venture
to declare, without for a moment losing
sight of the respect due to grief, that we
possess here, in these indisputable cases
where no normal mode of communication
is possible, a strange but real and serious
source of information and comfort. I
could mention a large number of tests that
have been made, so to speak, before my
eyes by absolutely trustworthy relatives or
friends.

As my space is limited, I will relate
only one, which typifies and summarizes
all the others very fairly. A mother
had three sons at the front. She was hear-
ing pretty regularly from tfie eldest and
the second; but for some weeks the young-
est, who was in the Belgian trenches, where
the fighting was very fierce, had given no
sign of life. Wild with anxiety, she was
207

The Wrack of the Storm

already mourning him as dead when her
friends advised her to consult Mme. M.
The medium consoled her with the first
words that she spoke and told her that she
saw her son wounded, but in no danger
whatever, that he was in a sort of shed
fitted up as a hospital, that he was being
very well looked after by people who spoke
a different language, that for the time be-
ing he was unable to write, which was a
great worry to him, but that she would re-
ceive a letter from him in a few days. The
mother did, in fact, receive a card from
this son a few days later, worded a little
stiffly and curtly and written in an un-
natural hand, telling her that all was well
and that he was in good health. Greatly
relieved, she dismissed the matter from
her mind, merely said to herself that of
course the medium, like all mediums, had
been wrong and thought no more of it.
But two or three messages following on the
208

Supernatural Communications

first, all couched in short, stilted phrases
that seemed to be hiding something,
ended by alarming her so much that she
was unable to bear the strain any longer
and entreated her son to tell her the whole
truth, whatever it might be. He then
admitted' that he had been wounded,
though not seriously, adding that he
was in a sort of shed fitted up as a
hospital, where he was being capitally
looked after by English doctors and
nurses, in short, just as the medium
had seen him.

I repeat, mediumistic experience can
show other instances of this kind. If it
stood alone, it would be valueless, for it
might well be explained by mere coinci-
dence. But it forms part of a very normal
series; and I could easily enumerate many
others within my own knowledge. This,
however, would merely mean repeating,
with uninteresting variations, the essential
209

The Wrack of the Storm

features of the present case, a proceeding
for which there would be no excuse save
In a technical work.

Is success then practically certain ? Yes,
rash and surprising though the statement
may seem, mistakes upon the whole are
very rare, provided that the medium be
carefully chosen and that the object serving
as an intermediary have not passed through
too many hands, for it will contain and re-
veal as many distinct personalities as it has
undergone contacts. It will be necessary,
therefore, first to eliminate all these acces-
sory personalities, so as to fix the medium's
attention solely on the subject of the con-
sultation. On the other hand, we must
beware of calling for details which the
nature of the medium's vision does not
allow her to give us. If asked, for in-
stance, about a soldier who is a prisoner in
Germany, she will see the soldier in quest-
ion very plainly, will perceive his state of
210

Supernatural Communications

health and mind, the manner in which he is
treated, his companions, the fortress or
group of huts in which he is interned, the
appearance of the camp, of the town, of
the surrounding district; but she will very
seldom indeed be able to mention the name
of the camp, town or district. In fact, she
can describe only what she sees; and, un-
less the town or camp have a board bear-
ing its name, there will be nothing to enable
her to identify it with sufficient accuracy.
Let us add, lastly, that, with mediums in a
state of trance, who are not conscious of
what they are saying, we are exposed to
terrible shocks. If they see death, they
announce the fact bluntly, without suspect-
ing that they are in the presence of a
horror-stricken mother, wife or sister, so
much so that, in the case of Mme. M. parti-
cularly, it has been found necessary to take
certain precautions to obviate any such
shock.

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3

Now what is the nature of this strange
and incredible faculty? In the book which
I mentioned at the beginning of this article,
I tried to examine the different theories
that suggested themselves. The argument,
unfortunately, is infinitely too long to be re-
published here, even if I were to compress
it ruthlessly. I will give merely a brief
summary of the conclusions, or rather of
the attempted conclusions, for the mystery,
like most of the world's mysteries, is pro-
bably unfathomable. After dismissing the
spiritualistic theory, which implies the in-
tervention of the dead or of discarnate
entities and is not as ridiculous as the pro-
fane would think, but which nothing
hitherto has adequately confirmed, we may
reasonably ask ourselves first of all whether
this faculty exists in us or in the medium.
Does it simply decipher, as is probably the
case where the future is concerned, the latent

212

Supernatural Communications

ideas, knowledge and certainties which we
bear within us, or does it alone, of its own
initiative and independently of us, perceive
what it reveals to us? Experience seems
to show that we must adopt the latter
hypothesis, for the vision appears just as
distinctly when the illuminating object is
brought by a third person who knows no-
thing and has never heard of the individual
to whom the object once belonged. It
seems therefore almost certain that the
strange virtue is contained solely in the
object itself, which is somehow galvanized
by a complementary virtue in the medium.
This being so, we must presume that the
object, having absorbed like a sponge a
portion of the spirit of the person who
touched it, remains in constant communica-
tion with him, or, more probably, that it
serves to track out, among the prodigious
throng of human beings, the one who im-
pregnated it with his fluid, even as the dogs
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The Wrack of the Storm

employed by the police — at least so we are
told — when given an article of clothing to
smell, are able to distinguish, among in-
numerable cross-trails, that of the man who
used to wear the garment in question. It
seems more and more certain that, as cells
of one vast organism, we are connected
with everything that exists by an infinitely
intricate network of waves, vibrations, in-
fluences, currents and fluids, all nameless,
numberless and unbroken. Nearly always,
in nearly all men, everything transmitted
by these invisible threads falls into the
depths of the subconsciousness and passes
unperceived, which is not the same as say-
ing that it remains inactive. But sometimes
an exceptional circumstance, such as, in the
present case, the marvellous sensibility of a
first-rate medium, suddenly reveals to us
the existence of the infinite living network
by the vibrations and the undeniable opera-
tion of one of its threads.
214

Supernatural Communications

All this, I agree, sounds incredible, but
really it is hardly any more so than the won-
ders of radioactivity, of the Hertzian
waves, of photography, electricity or hyp-
notism, or of generation, which condenses
into a single particle all the physical, moral
and intellectual past and future of thou-
sands of creatures. Our life would be re-
duced to something very small indeed if we
deliberately dismissed from it all that our
understanding is unable to embrace.

215

EDITH CAVELL

XVII

EDITH CAVELL1
I

TO-DAY, in honouring the memory of
Miss Edith Cavell, we honour not
only the heroine who fell in the midst of
her labours of love and piety, we honour
also those, wherever they may be, who have
accomplished or will yet accomplish the
same sacrifice and who are ready, in like
circumstances, to face a like death.

We are told by Thucydides that the
Athenians of the age of Pericles — who, to
the honour of humanity be it said, had
nothing in common with the Athenians of
to-day — were accustomed, each winter du-
ring their great war, to celebrate at the cost
of the State the obsequies of those who had

1 Delivered in Paris, at the Trocadero, 18 December,
1915.

219

The Wrack of the Storm

perished in the recent campaign. The
bones of the dead, arranged according to
their tribes, were exhibited under a tent
and honoured for three days. In the midst
of this host of the known dead stood an
empty bed, covered with tapestry and dedi-
cated to "the Invisible," that is, to those
whose bodies it had been impossible to re-
cover. Let us too, before all else, in the
quiet of this hall, where none but almost
religious words may be heard, raise in our
midst such an altar, a sacred and mysteri-
ous altar, to the invisible heroines of this
war, that is to say, to all those who have
died an obscure death and have left no
traces and also to those who are yet living,
whose sacrifices and sufferings will never
be told. Here, with the eyes of the spirit,
let us gaze upon all the heroic deeds of
which we know; but let us reserve an hon-
oured place for those, incomparably more
numerous and perhaps more beautiful, of
220

Edith C'avell

which we as yet know nothing and, above
all, for those of which we shall never know,
for glory has its injustices even as death
has its fatalities.

2

Yet it is hardly probable that among
these sacrifices we shall discern any more
admirable than that of Miss Edith Cavell.
I need not recall the circumstances of her
death, for they are well-known to every-
body and will never be forgotten. Des-
tiny left nothing undone for the purest
glory to emerge from the deepest shadow.
In the depths of that shadow it concen-
trated all imaginable hatred, horror, vil-
lainy, cowardice and infamy, so that all
pity, all innocent courage and mercy, all
well-doing and all sweet charity might
shine forth above it, as though to show us
how low men may sink and how high a
woman can rise, as though its express and
visible intention had been to trace, with a

221

The Wrack of the Storm

single gesture, amid all the sorrows and
tKe rare beauties of this war, an outstand-
ing and incomparable example which
should at the same time be an immortal and
consoling symbol.

3

And one would say that destiny had
taken pains to make this symbol as truth-
ful and as general as possible. It did not
select a dazzling and warlike heroine, as
it would have done in the days of old : a Ju-
dith, a Lucretia, nor even a Joan of Arc.
There was no need of resounding words,
of splendid raiment, of tragic attitudes and
accessories, of an imposing background.
The beauty which we find so touching has
grown simpler; it makes less stir and wins
closer to our heart. And this is why des-
tiny sought out in obscurity a little hospital
nurse, one of many thousands of others.
The sight of her unpretentious portrait
does not tell one whether she was rich or

222

Edith Cavell

poor, a humble member of the middle
classes or a great lady. She would pass
unnoticed anywhere until the hour of trial,
when glory recognizes its elect; and it
seems as though goodness had almost eli-
minated the individual contours of her face,
so that it might the more closely resemble
the pensive and sad smiling faces of all
the good women in the world.

Beneath those features one might indeed
have read the hidden devotion and quiet
heroism of all the women who do their
duty, that is, of those whom we see
about us day by day, working, hoping,
keeping vigil, solacing and succouring
others, wearing themselves out without
complaint, suffering in secret and mourning
their dead in silence.

4

She passed like a flash of light which for
pne moment illumined that vast and in*
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The Wrack of the Storm

numerable multitude, confirming our con-
fidence and our admiration. She has
added a final beauty to the great revela-
tions of this war; for the war, which has
taught us many things that will never fade
from our memory, has above all revealed
us to ourselves. In the first days of the
terrible ordeal, we did not know for cert-
ain how men and women would comport
themselves. In vain did we interrogate
the past, hoping thereby to learn something
of the future. There was no past that
would serve for a comparison. Our eyes
were drawn back to the present; and we
closed them, full of uneasiness. In what
condition should we find ourselves facing
duty, sacrifice, suffering and death, after
so many years of peace, well-being and
pleasure, of heedlessness and moral indif-
ference? What had been the vast and
invisible journey of the human conscience
and of those secret forces which are the
224

Edith Cavell

whole of man, during this long respite,
when they had never been called upon to
confront fate? Were they asleep, were
they weakened or lost, would they respond
to the call of destiny, or had they sunk so
deep that they would never recover the
energy to ascend to the surface of life?
There was a moment of anguish and si-
lence; and lo, suddenly, in the midst of this
anguish and silence, the most splendid re-
sponse, the most magnificent cry of resur-
rection, of righteousness, of heroism and
sacrifice that the earth has ever heard since
it began to roll along the paths of space
and time ! They were still there, the ideal
forces ! They were mounting upward, on
every side, from the depths of all those
swiftly-assembling souls, not merely intact
but more than ever radiant, more than ever
pure, more numerous and mightier than
ever! To the amazement of all of us,
who possessed them without knowing it,
225

- r

The Wrack of the Storm

they had increased in strength and stature
while apparently neglected and forgotten.
To-day there is no longer any doubt.
We may expect all things and hope all
things from the men and the women who
have surmounted this long and grievous
trial. If the heroism displayed by man on
the battlefield has never been comparable
with that which is being lavished at this
moment, we may also say of the women
that their heroism is even more beyond
comparison. We knew that a certain
number of men were capable of giving their
lives for their country, for their faith or for
a generous ideal; but we did not realize
that all would wrestle with death for end-
less months, in great unanimous masses;
and above all we did not imagine, or per-
haps we had to some extent forgotten,
since the days of the great martyrs, that
woman was ready with the same gift of
self, the same patience, the same sacrifices,
226

Edith Cavell

the same greatness of soul and was about — -
less perhaps in blood than in tears, for it
is always on her that sorrow ends by falling
— to prove herself the rival and the peer
of man.

227

THE LIFE OF THE DEAD

XVIII

THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
I

THE other day I went to see a woman
whom I knew before the war — she
was happy then — and who had lost her
only son in one of the battles in the Ar-
gonne. She was a widow, almost a poor
woman; and, now that this son, her pride
and her joy, was no more, she no longer
had any reason for living. I hesitated to
knock at her door. Was I not about to
witness one of those hopeless griefs at
whose feet all words fall to the ground like
shameful and insulting lies? Which of us
to-day is not familiar with these mournful
interviews, this dismal duty?

To my great astonishment, she offered
me her hand with a kindly smile. Her
231

The Wrack of the Storm

eyes, to which I hardly dared raise my
own, were free of tears.

"You have come to speak to me of him,"
she said, in a cheerful tone; and it was
as though her voice had grown younger.

"Alas, yes! I had heard of your sor-
sow; and I have come. . ."

"Yes, I too believed that my unhappi-
ness was irreparable ; but now I know that
he is not dead."

"What! He is not dead? Do you
mean that the news . . . ? But I thought
that the body. . ."

"Yes, his body is down there ; and I have
even a photograph of his grave. Let me
show it to you. See, that cross on the left,
the fourth cross: that is where they have
laid him. One of his friends, who buried
him, sent me this card, with all the details.
He did not suffer any pain. There was
not even a death-struggle. And he has told
me so himself. He is quite astonished that
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The Life of the Dead

death should be so easy, so slight a thing.
. . .You do not understand? Yes, I see
what it is : you are just as I used to be, as
all the others are. I do not explain the
matter to the others; what would be the
use? They do not wish to understand.
But you, you will understand. He is more
alive than he ever was; he is free and
happy. He does just as he likes. He tells
me that one cannot imagine what a release
death is, what a weight it removes from
you, nor the joy which it brings. He comes
to see me when I call him. He loves es-
pecially to come in the evening; and we
chat as we used to do. He has not al-
tered ; he is just as he was on the day when
he went away, only younger, stronger,
handsomer. We have never been happier,
or more united, or nearer to one another.
He divines my thoughts before I utter
them. He knows everything; he sees
everything; but he cannot tell me every-
233

The Wrack of the Storm

thing he knows. He says that I must be
wanting to follow him and that I must
wait for my hour. And, while I wait, we
are living in happiness greater than that
which was ours before the war, a happi-
ness which nothing can ever trouble
again. . . ."

Those about her pitied the poor woman;
and, as she did not weep, as she was gay
and smiling, they believed her mad.

Was she as mad as they thought? At
the present moment, the great questions of
the world beyond the grave are pressing
upon us from every side. It is probable
that, since the world began, there have
never been so many dead as now. The
empire of death was never so mighty, so
terrible; it is for us to defend and enlarge
the empire of life. In the presence of this
mother, which are right or wrong, those
234

The Life of the Dead

who are convinced that their dead are for-
ever swept out of existence, or those who
are persuaded that their dead do not cease
to live, who believe that they see them and
hear them? Do we know what it is that
dies in our dead, or even if anything dies?
Whatever our religious faith may be, there
is at any rate one place where they cannot
die. That place is within ourselves; and,
if this unhappy mother went beyond the
truth, she was yet nearer to it than those
despairing ones who nourish the mournful
certainty that nothing survives of those
whom they loved. She felt too keenly
what we do not feel keenly enough. She
remembered too much; and we do not
know how to remember. Between the two
errors there is room for a great truth ; and,
if we have to choose, hers is the error
towards which we should lean. Let us
learn to acquire through reason that which
a wise madness bestowed on her. Let us
235

The Wrack of the Storm

learn from her to live with our dead and
to live with them without sadness and with-
out terror. They do not ask for tears, but
for a happy and confident affection. Let
us learn from her to resuscitate those whom
we regret. She called to hers, while we
repulse ours; we are afraid of them and
are surprised that they lose heart and pale
and fade away and leave us forever. They
need love as much as do the living. Then
die, not at the moment when they sink into
the grave, but gradually as they sink into
oblivion ; and it is oblivion alone that makes
the separation irrevocable. We should
not allow it to heap itself above them. It
would be enough to vouchsafe them each
day a single one of those thoughts which
we bestow uncounted upon so many use-
less objects: they would no longer think
of leaving us; they would remain around
us and we should no longer understand
what a tomb is ; for there is no tomb, hdw-
236

The Life of the Dead

ever deep, whose stone may not be raised
and whose dust dispersed by a thought.

There would be no difference between
the living and the dead if we but knew how
to remember. There would be no more
dead. The best of what they were dwells
with us after fate has taken them from us;
all their past is ours; and it is wider than
the present, more certain than the future.
Material presence is not everything in this
world ; and we can dispense with it and yet
not despair. We do not mourn those who
live in lands which we shall never visit, be-
cause we know that it depends on us
whether we go to find them. Let it be
the same with our dead. Instead of be-
lieving that they have disappeared never
to return, tell yourselves that they are in
a country to which you yourself will as-
suredly go soon ; a country not so very far
away. And, while waiting for the time
when you will go there once and for all,
237

The Wrack of the Storm

you may visit them in thougnt as easily as
if they were still in a region inhabited by
the living. The memory of the dead is
even more alive than that of the living; it
is as though they were assisting our me-
mory, as though they, on their side, were
making a mysterious effort to join hands
with us on ours. One feels that they are
far more powerful than the absent who
continue to breathe as we do.

3

Try then to recall those whom you have
lost, before it is too late, before they have
gone too far; and you will see that they
will come much closer to your heart, that
they will belong to you more truly, that
they are as real as when they were in the
flesh. In putting off this last, they have
but discarded the moments in which they
loved us least or in which we did not love
at all. Now they are pure; they are.
238

The Life of the Dead

clothed only in the fairest hours of life;
they no longer possess faults, littlenesses,
oddities; they can no longer fall away, or
deceive themselves, or give us pain. They
care for nothing now but to smile upon us,
to encompass us with love, to bring us a
happiness drawn without stint from a past
which they live again beside us.

239

THE WAR AND
THE PROPHETS

XIX

THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS

AT the end of an essay occurring in
The Unknown Guest and entitled,
The Knowledge of the Future, in which
I examined a certain number of phenomena
relating to the anticipatory perception of
events, such as presentiments, premoni-
tions, precognitions, predictions, etc., I
concluded in nearly the following terms:

"To sum up, if it is difficult for us to
conceive that the future preexists, perhaps
it is just as difficult for us to understand
that it does not exist; moreover, many
facts tend to prove that it is as real and
definite and has, both in time and eternity,
the same permanence and the same vivid-
ness as the past. Now, from the moment
that it preexists, it is not surprising that
243

The Wrack of the Storm

we snould be able to know it; it is even
astonishing, granted that it overhangs us
from every side, that we should not dis-
cover it oftener and more easily."

Above all is it astonishing and almost
inconceivable that this universal war, the
most stupendous catastrophe that has over-
whelmed humanity since the origin of
things, should not, while it was approach-
ing, bearing in its womb innumerable woes
which were about to affect almost every
one of us, have thrown upon us more
plainly, from the recesses of those days in
which it was making ready, its menacing
shadow. One would think that it ought
to have overcast the whole horizon of
the future, even as it will overcast the
whole horizon of the past. A secret of
such weight, suspended in time, ought
surely to have weighed upon all our lives;
and presentiments or revelations should
244

The War and the Prophets

have arisen on every hand. There was
none of these. We lived and moved with-
out uneasiness beneath the disaster which,
from year to year, from day to day, from
hour to hour, was descending upon the
world; and we perceived it only when it
touched our heads. True, it was more or
less foreseen by our reason ; but our reason
hardly believed in it; and besides I am
not for the moment speaking of the induc-
tions of the understanding, which are al-
ways uncertain and which are resigned be-
forehand to the capricious contradictions
which they are accustomed daily to receive
from facts.

2

But I repeat, beside or above these in-
ductions of our everyday logic, in the less
familiar domain of supernatural intuitions,
of divination, prediction or prophecy pro-
perly so-called, we find that there was prac-
tically nothing to warn us of the vast peril.
245

The Wrack of the Storm

This does not mean that there was any
lack of predictions or prophecies collected
after the event; these number, it appears,
no fewer than eighty-three; but none of
them, excepting those of Leon Sonrel and
the Rector of Ars, which we will examine
in a moment, is worthy of serious discus-
sion. I shall therefore mention, by way of
a reminder, only the most widely known;
and, first of all, the famous prophecy of
Mayence or Strasburg, which is supposed
to have been discovered by a certain Jecker
in an ancient convent founded near May-
ence by St. Hildegard, of which the original
text could not be found and of which no
one until lately had ever heard. Then
there is another prophecy of Mayence or
Fiensberg, published in the Neue Metaphy-
sische Rundschau of Berlin in February,
1912, in which the end of the German Em-
pire is announced for the year 1913. Next,
we have various predictions uttered 'by
246

The War and the Prophets

Mme. de Thebes, by Dom Bosco, by the
Blessed Andrew Bobola, by Korzenicki,
the Polish monk, by Tolstoy, by Brother
Hermann and so on, which are even less
interesting; and lastly the prophecy of
"Brother Johannes," published by M.
Josephin Peladan in the Figaro of 16
September, 1914, which contains no evi-
dence of genuineness and must therefore
meanwhile be regarded merely as an in-
genious literary conceit.

All these, on examination, leave but a
worthless residuum; but the prophecies of
the Rector of Ars and of Leon Sonrel are
more curious and worthy of a moment's
attention.

Father Jean-Baptiste Vianney, Rector

of Ars, was, as everybody knows, a very

saintly priest, who appears to have

been endowed with extraordinary me-

247

The Wrack of the Storm

diumistic faculties. The prophecy in quest-
ion was made public in 1862, three years
after the miracle-worker's death, and was
confirmed by a letter which Mgr. Perriet
addressed to the Very Rev. Dom Grea on
the 24th of February, 1908. Moreover, it
was printed, as far back as 1872, in a
collection entitled, Volx prophetiques, ou
signes, apparitions et predictions modernes.
It therefore has an incontestable date. I
pass over the part relating to the war of
1870, which does not offer the same safe-
guards ; but I give that which concerns the
present war, quoting from the 1872 text:

"The enemies will not go altogether;
they will return again and destroy every-
thing upon their passage; we shall not re-
sist them, but will allow them to advance;
and after that we shall cut off their provi-
sions and make them suffer great losses.
They will retreat towards their country;
248

The War and the Prophets

we shall follow them and there will be
hardly any who return home. Then we
shall take back all that they took from us
and much more."

As for the date of the event, it is stated
definitely and rather strikingly in these
words :

"They will want to canonize me, but
there will not be time."

Now the preliminaries to the canoniza-
tion of Father Vianney were begun in July,
1914, but abandoned because of the war.

I now come to the Sonrel prediction.
I will summarize it as briefly as possible
from the admirable article which M. de
Vesme devoted to it in the Annales des
sciences psychiques.1

On the 3rd of June, 1914 — observe the
date — Professor Charles Richet handed M.
de Vesme, from Dr. Amedee Tardieu, a

August, September and October, 1915.
249

The Wrack of the Storm

manuscript of which the following is the
substance: on the 23rd or 24th of July,
1869, Dr. Tardieu was strolling in the gar-
dens of the Luxembourg with his friend
Leon Sonrel, a former pupil of the Higher
Normal School and teacher of natural phi-
losophy at the Paris Observatory, when the
latter had a kind of vision in the course of
which he predicted various precise and act-
ual episodes of the war of 1870, such as the
collection on behalf of the wounded at the
moment of departure and the amount of
the sum collected in the soldiers' kepis; in-
cidents of the journey to the frontier; the
battle of Sedan, the rout of the French,
the civil war, the siege of Paris, his own
death, the birth of a posthumous child,
the doctor's political career and so on:
predictions all of which were verified, as
is attested by numerous witnesses who are
worthy of the fullest credence. But I will
pass over this part of the story and c'on-
250

The War and the Prophets

sider only that portion which refers to the
present war:

"I have been waiting for two years," to
quote the text of Dr. Tardieu's manuscript
of the 3rd of June, "for the sequel of the
prediction which you are about to read. I
omit everything that concerns my friend
Leon's family and my private affairs.
Yet there is in my life at this moment a
personal matter, which, as always happens,
agrees too closely with general occurrences
for me to doubt what follows :

" 'O my God! My country is lost:
France is dead ! . . . What a disaster I ...
Ah, see, she is saved ! She extends to the
Rhine ! O France, O my beloved country,
you are triumphant; you are the queen of
nations ! . . . Your genius shines forth
over the world. . . . All the earth won-
ders at you. . . .' '

251

The Wrack of the Storm

These are the words contained in the
document written at the Mont-Dore on
the 3rd and handed to M. de Vesme
on the 1 3th of June 1914, at a moment
when no one was thinking of the ter-
rible war which to-day is ravaging half the
world.

When questioned, after the declaration
of war, by M. de Vesme on the subject
of the prophetic phrase, "I have been
waiting for two years for the sequel of
the prediction which you are about to
read," Dr. Tardieu replied, on the I2th of
August :

"I have been waiting for two years; and
I will tell you why. My friend Leon did
not name the year, but the more general
events are described simultaneously with
the events of my own life. Now the events
which concern me privately and which
were doubtful two years ago became cert-
ain in April or May last. My friends
252

The War and the Prophets

know that since May last I have been an-
nouncing war as due before September,
basing my prediction on coincidences with
events in my private life of which I do not
speak."

4

These, up to the present, are the only
prophecies known to us that deserve any
particular attention. The prediction in
both is timid and laconic; but, in those
regions where the least gleam of light as-
sumes extraordinary importance, it is not
to be neglected. I admit, for the rest,
that there has so far been no time to carry
out a serious enquiry on this point, but I
should be greatly surprised if any such en-
quiry gave positive results and if it did not
allowed us to state that the gigantic event,
as a whole, as a general event, was neither
foreseen nor divined. On the other hand,
we shall probably learn, when the enquiry is
253

The Wrack of the Storm

completed, that hundreds of deaths, acci-
dents, wounds and cases of individual ruin
and misfortune, included in the great disas-
ter, were predicted by clairvoyants, by me-
diums, by dreams and by every other man-
ner of premonition with a defmiteness
sufficient to eliminate any kind of doubt. I
have said elsewhere what I think of indivi-
dual predictions of this kind, which seem to
be no more than the reading of the presenti-
ments which we carry within us, presenti-
ments which themselves, in the majority of
cases, are but the perception, by the as yet
imperfectly known senses of our subcon-
sciousness, of events, in course of formation
or in process of realization, which escape
the attention of our understanding. How-
ever, it would still remain to be explained
how a wholly accidental death or wound
could be perceived by these subliminal
senses as an event in course of formation.
In any case, it would once more be con-
254

The War and the Prophets

firmed, after this great test, that the know-
ledge of the future, so soon as it ceases to
refer to a strictly personal fact and one,
moreover, not at all remote, is always il-
lusory, or rather impossible.

Apart then from these strictly personal
cases, which for the moment we will agree
to set aside, it appears more than ever cert-
ain that there is no communication between
ourselves and the vast store of events which
have not yet occurred and which neverthe-
less seem already to exist at some place
where they await the hour to advance upon
us, or rather the moment when we shall
pass before them. As for the exceptional
and precarious infiltrations which belong
not merely to the present that is still un-
known, veiled or disguised, but really to
the future, apart from the two which we
have just examined, which are inconclusive,
I for my part know of but four or five
that appear to be rigorously verified; and
255

The Wrack of the Storm

these I have discussed in the essay al-
ready mentioned. For that matter, they
have no bearing upon the present war.
They are, when all is said, so exceptional
that they do not prove much; at the most,
they seem to confirm the idea that a store
exists filled with future events as real, as
distinct and as immutable as those of the
past; and they allow us to hope that there
are paths leading thither which as yet we
do not know, but which it will not be for
ever impossible to discover,

THE WILL OF EARTH

XX

THE WILL OF EARTH
I

TO-DAY'S conflict is but a revival
of that which has not ceased to
drench the west of Europe in blood since
the historical birth of the continent. The
two chief episodes in the conflict, as we
all know, are the invasion of Roman Gaul,
including the north of Italy, by the Franks
and the successive conquests of England
by the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans.
Without delaying to consider questions of
race, which are complex, uncertain and al-
ways open to discussion, we may, regarding
the matter from another aspect, perceive
in the persistency and the bitterness of this
conflict the clash of two wills, of which one
or the other succumbs for a moment, only
to rise up again with increased energy and
259

The Wrack of the Storm

obstinacy. On the one hand is the will of
earth or nature, which, in the human
species as in all others, openly favours
brute or physical force; and on the other
hand is the will of humanity, or at least
of a portion of humanity, which seeks to
establish the empire of other more subtle
and less animal forces. It is incontestable
that hitherto the former has always won
the day. But it is equally incontestable
that its victory has always been only ap-
parent and of brief duration. It has
regularly suffered defeat in its very tri-
umph. Gaul, invaded and overrun, pre-
sently absorbs her victor, even as England
little by little transforms her conquerors.
On the morrow of victory, the instruments
of the will of earth turn upon her and arm
the hand of the vanquished. It is proba-
ble that the same phenomenon would recur
once more to-day, were events to follow the
course prescribed by destiny. Germany,
260

The Will of Earth

after crushing and enslaving the greater
part of Europe, after driving her back and
burdening her with innumerable woes,
would end by turning against the will which
she represents; and that will, which until
to-day had always found in this race a
docile tool and its favourite accomplices,
would be forced to seek these elsewhere,
a task less easy than of old.

2

But now, to the amazement of all those
who will one day consider them in cold
blood, events are suddenly ascending the
irresistible current and, for the first time
since we have been in a position to observe
it, the adverse will is encountering an un-
expected and insurmountable resistance. If
this resistance, as we can now no longer
doubt, maintains itself victoriously to the
end, there will never perhaps have been
such a sudden change in the history of man-
261

The Wrack of the Storm

kind; for man will have gained, over the
will of earth or nature or fatality, a tri-
umph infinitely more significant, more
heavily fraught with consequences and per-
haps more decisive than all those which,
in other provinces, appear to have crowned
his efforts more brilliantly.

Let us not then be surprised that this
resistance should be stupendous, or that it
should be prolonged beyond anything that
our experience of wars has taught us to
expect. It was our prompt and easy de-
feat that was written in the annals of des-
tiny. We had against us all the force ac-
cumulated since the birth of Europe. We
have to set history revolving in the reverse
direction. We are on the point of suc-
ceeding; and, if it be true that intelligent
beings watch us from the vantage-point of
other worlds, they will assuredly witness
the most curious spectacle that our planet
has offered them since they discovered it
262

The Will of Earth

amid the dust of stars that glitters in space
around it. They must be telling them-
selves in amazement that the ancient and
fundamental laws of earth are suddenly
being transgressed.

3

Suddenly? That is going too far. This
transgression of a lower law, which was no
longer of the stature of mankind, had been
preparing for a very long time ; but it was
within an ace of being hideously punished.
It succeeded only by the aid of a part of
those who formerly swelled the great wave
which they are to-day resisting by our side,
as though something in the history of the
world or the plans of destiny had altered,
or rather as though we ourselves had at
last succeeded in altering that something
and in modifying laws to which until this
day we were wholly subject.

But it must not be thought that the con-
263

The Wrack of the Storm

flict will end with the victory. The deep-
seated forces of earth will not be at once
disarmed; for a long time to come the in-
visible war will be waged under the reign
of peace. If we are not careful, victory
may even be more disastrous to us than
defeat. For defeat, indeed, like previous
defeats, would have been merely a vic-
tory postponed. It would have absorbed,
exhausted, dispersed the enemy, by scatter-
ing him about the world, whereas our vic-
tory will bring upon us a twofold peril. It
will leave the enemy in a state of savage
isolation in which, thrown back upon him-
self, cramped, purified by misfortune and
poverty, he will secretly reinforce his formi-
dable virtues, while we, for our part, no
longer held in check by his unbearable but
salutary menace, will give rein to failings
and vices which sooner or later will place us
at his mercy. Before thinking of peace,
then, we must make sure of the future and
264

The Will of Earth

render it powerless to injure us. We can-
not take too many precautions, for we are
setting ourselves against the manifest de-
sire of the power that bears us.

This is why our efforts are difficult and
worthy of praise. We are setting our-
selves— we cannot too often repeat it —
against the will of earth. Our enemies are
urged forward by a force that drives us
back. They are marching with nature,
whereas we are striving against the great
current that sweeps the globe. The earth
has an idea, which is no longer ours. She
remains convinced that man is an animal in
all things like other animals. She has not
yet observed that he is withdrawing him-
self from the herd. She does net yet know
that he has climbed her highest mountain-
peaks. She has not yet heard tell of just-
ice, pity, loyalty and honour; she does not
realize what they are, or confounds them
with weakness, clumsiness, fear and stu-
265

The Wrack of the Storm

pidity. She has stopped short at the
original certitudes which were indispensa-
ble to the beginnings of life. She is lag-
ging behind us ; and the interval that divides
us is rapidly increasing. She thinks less
quickly ; she has not yet had time to under-
stand us. Moreover, she does not reckon
as we do ; and for her the centuries are less
than our years. She is slow because she is
almost eternal, while we are prompt be-
cause we have not many hours before us.
It may be that one day her thought will
overtake ours; in the meantime, we have
to vindicate our advance and to prove to
ourselves, as we are beginning to do, that
it is lawful to be in the right as against her,
that our advance is not fatal and that it
Is possible to maintain it.

4

For it is becoming difficult to argue that
earth or nature is always right and that
266

The Will of Earth

those who do not blindly follow earth's im-
pulse are necessarily doomed to perish.
We have learnt to observe her more at-
tentively and we have won the right to
judge her. We have discovered that, far
from being infallible, she is continually
making mistakes. She gropes and hesi-
tates. She does not know precisely what
she wants. She begins by making stupen-
dous blunders. She first peoples the world
with uncouth and incoherent monsters, not
one of which is capable of living; these all
disappear. Gradually she acquires, at the
cost of the life which she creates, an ex-
perience that is the cruel fruit of the im-
measurable suffering which she unfeelingly
inflicts. At last she grows wiser, curbs and
amends herself, corrects herself, returns
upon her footsteps, repairs her errors, ex-
pending her best energies and her highest
intelligence upon the correction. It is in-
contestable that she is improving her me-
267

The Wrack of the Storm

thods, that she is more skillful, more pru-
dent, less extravagant than at the outset.
And yet the fact remains that, in every
department of life, in every organism,
down to our own bodies, there is a survival
of bad workmanship, of twofold functions,
of oversights, changes of intention, ab-
surdities, useless complications and mean-
ingless waste. We therefore have no rea-
son to believe that our enemies are in the
right because earth is with them. Earth
does not possess the truth any more than
we do. She seeks it, even as we do, and
discovers it no more readily. She seems
to know no more than we whither she is
going nor whither she is being led by that
which leads all things. We must not
listen to her without enquiry; and we
need not distress ourselves or despair be-
cause we are not of her opinion. We
are not dealing with an infallible and un-
changeable wisdom, to oppose which in our
268

The Will of Earth

thoughts would be madness. We are act-
ually proving to her that it is she who is
in the wrong; that man's reason for exist-
ence is loftier than that which she provi-
sionally assigned to him ; that he is already
outstripping all that she foresaw ; and that
she does wrong to delay his advance. She
is, for that matter, full of goodwill, is able
on occasion to recognize her mistakes and
to obviate their disastrous results and by
no mean§ takes refuge in majestic and in-
flexible self-conceit. If we are able to
persevere, we shall be able to convince her.
This will take much time, for, I repeat,
she is slow, though in no wise obsti-
nate. It will take much time because a
very long future is in question, a very great
change and the most important victory that
man has ever hoped to win.

269

FOR POLAND

XXI

FOR POLAND

I

THE Allies have entered into a solemn
compact that none of them will con-
clude a separate peace. They undertook
recently, by an equally irrevocable conven-
tion, that they would not lay down their
arms until Belgium was delivered. These
two acts, one of prudence, the other of
elementary justice, appear at first sight
superfluous. Yet they were necessary. It
is well that nations, even more than men,
because their conscience is less stable,
should secure themselves against the mis-
takes and weakness and ingratitude which
too often accompany strife and which even
more often follow victory. To-morrow
they will do for Servia what they have
done in the case of Belgium; but there is
273

The Wrack of the Storm

a third victim, of whom too little is said,
who has the same rights as the other two ;
and to forget her would forever attaint
the honour and the justice of those who
took up arms only in the name of justice
and honour.

2

I need not recall the fate of Poland. It
is in certain respects more tragic and more
pitiful than that of Belgium or of Servia.
She had not even the opportunity to choose
between dishonour and annihilation.

Three successive acts of injustice, which
were, until to-day, the most shameful re-
corded by history, deprived her of the
glory of that heroic choice which she would
have made in the same spirit, for she had
already thrice made it in the past, a. choice
which this day sustains and consoles her
two martyred sisters in their profoundest
tribulations. It would be too unjust if an
ancient injustice, which even yet weighs
274

For Poland

upon the memory and the conscience of
Europe, should become the sole reason of
yet a last iniquity, which this time would
be inexpiable.

3
True, the Grand-duke Nicolas made

noble and generous promises to Poland;
and these promises were repeated at the
opening of the Duma. This is good and
shows the irresistible force of the awaken-
ing conscience of a great empire; but it is
not enough. Such promises involve only
those who make them ; they do not bind a
nation. We will not insult Russia by
doubting her intentions ; but among all the
certainties which history teaches us there
is one that has been acquired once and for
all; and this is that in politics and inter-
national morality intentions count for no-
thing and that a promise, made by no mat-
ter what nations, will be kept only if those
who make it also render it impossible for
275

The Wrack of the Storm

themselves to do otherwise than keep it.
For the rest, the question at present is not
one of intentions, nor confidence, nor pity,
nor even of interest. Others have spoken
and will speak again, better than I could,
of Poland's terrible distress and of the dan-
ger, which is far more formidable and far
more imminent than is generally believed,
of those German intrigues which are seek-
ing to seduce from us and, despite them-
selves, to turn against us twenty millions
of desperate people and nearly a million
soldiers, who will die, perhaps, rather than
join our enemies, but who, in any case, can-
not fight in our ranks as they would have
done had the word for which they are
waiting in their anguish been spoken be-
fore it was too late.

4

But, however grave the peril, we are, I
repeat, far less concerned with this at the
276

For Poland

present moment than with the question of.
justice. Poland has an absolute and sacred
right to be treated even as the other two
victims of this war of justice. She is their
equal, she is of the same rank and on the
same level. She has suffered what they
have suffered, for the same cause, in the
same spirit and with the same heroism ; and
if she has not done what the two others
have done it is because only the ingratitude
of all those whom she had more than once
saved, together with one of the greatest
crimes in history, prevented her from doing
so.

It is time for the Europe of to-day to
repair the iniquity committed by the Eu-
rope of other days. We are nothing, we
are no better than our enemies, we have no
title to deliver millions of innocent men to
death, unless we stand for justice. The
idea of justice alone must rule all that we
undertake, for we are united, we have risen
277

The Wrack of the Storm

and we exist only in its name. At this
moment we occupy all the pinnacles of this
justice, to which we have brought such an
impulse, such sacrifices and such heroism as
we shall perhaps never behold again. We
shall never rise higher; let us then form
at this present time resolutions which will
forbid us to descend; and Europe would
descend, to a depth greater than was hers
in the unpardonable hour of the partition
of Poland, did she not before all else re-
pair the immense fault which she committed
when she had not yet discovered her con-
science and did not yet know what she
knows to-day.

278

THE MIGHT OF THE DEAD

XXII

THE MIGHT OF THE DEAD*
I.

IN A Beleaguered City, a little book
which, in its curious way, is a master-
piece, Mrs. Oliphant shows us the dead of
a provincial town suddenly waxing indig-
nant over the conduct and the morals of
those inhabiting the town which they had
founded. They rise up in rebellion, invest
the houses, the streets, the market-places
and, by the pressure of their innumerable
multitude, all-powerful though invisible,
repulse the living, thrust them out of doors
and, setting a strict watch, permit them to
return to their roof-trees only after a treaty
of peace and penitence has purified their

*Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and
copyright U. S. A., 1916, by Dodd, Mead & Co., Inc.

281

The Wrack of the Storm

hearts, atoned for their offences and en-
sured a more worthy future.

There is undoubtedly a great truth
beneath this fiction, which appears too far-
fetched because we perceive only material
and ephemeral realities. The dead live
and move in our midst far more really and
effectually than the most venturesome
imagination could depict. It is very doubt-
ful whether they remain in their graves.
It even seems increasingly certain that they
never allowed themselves to be confined
there. Under the tombstones where we
believe them to lie imprisoned there are
only a few ashes, which are no longer
theirs, which they have abandoned without
regret and which, in all probability, they
no longer deign to remember. All that
was themselves continues to have its being
in our midst. How and under what aspect?
After all these thousands, perhaps millions,
of years, we do not yet know; and no
282

The Might of the Dead

religion has been able to tell us with satis-
fying certainty, though all have striven to
do so; but we may, by means of certain
tokens, hope to learn.

Without further considering a mighty
but obscure truth, which it is for the
moment impossible to state precisely or to
render palpable, let us concern ourselves
with one which cannot be disputed. As I
have said elsewhere, whatever our religious
faith may be, there is in any case one place
where our dead cannot perish, where they
continue to exist as really as when they
were in the flesh and often more actively;
and this living abiding-place, this conse-
crated spot, which for those whom we have
lost becomes heaven or hell according as
we draw close to or depart from their
thoughts and their desires, is in us.

And their thoughts and their desires are
always higher than our own. It is, there-
fore, by uplifting ourselves that we
283

The Wrack of the Storm

approach them. It is we who must take
the first steps, for they can no longer
descend, whereas it is always possible for
us to rise ; for the dead, whatever they have
been in life, become better than the best of
us. The least worthy of them, in shedding
the body, have shed its vices, its littlenesses,
its weaknesses, which soon pass from our
memory as well; and the spirit alone
remains, which is pure in every man and
able to desire only what is good. There
are no wicked dead because there are no
wicked souls. This is why, as we purify
ourselves, we restore life to those who were
no more and transform our memory, which
they inhabit, into heaven.

2.

And what was always true of all the

dead is far more true to-day when only the

best are chosen for the tomb. In the region

which we believe to be under the earth,

284

The Might of the Dead

which we call the kingdom of the shades
and which in reality is the ethereal region
and the kingdom of light, there are at this
moment perturbations no less profound
than those which we are experiencing on
the surface of our earth. The young dead
are invading it from every side; and since
the beginning of this world they have never
been so numerous, so full of energy and
zeal. Whereas in the customary sequence
of the years the dwelling-place of those
who leave us receives only weary and
exhausted lives, there is not one in this
incomparable host who, to borrow Pericles'
expression, "has not departed from life at
the height of glory." Not one of them
but has gone up, not down, to his death
clad in the greatest sacrifice that man can
make for an idea which cannot die. All
that we have hitherto believed, all that we
have striven to attain beyond ourselves, all
that has lifted us to the level at which we
285

The Wrack of the Storm

stand, all that has overcome the evil days
and the evil instincts of human nature : all
this could have been no more than lies and
illusions if such men as these, such a mass
of merit and of glory, were really
annihilated, had really forever disappeared,
were forever useless and voiceless, forever
without influence in a world to which they
have given life.

3-

It is hardly possible that this could be
so as regards the external survival of the
dead; but it is absolutely certain that it is
not so as regards their survival in ourselves.
Here nothing is lost and no one perishes.
Our memories are to-day peopled by a
multitude of heroes struck down in the
flower of their youth and very different
from the pale and languid cohort of the
past, composed almost wholly of the sick
and the aged, who already had ceased to
286

The Might of the Dead

exist before leaving the earth. We must
tell ourselves that now, in each of our
homes, both in our cities and in the country-
side, both in the palace and in the meanest
hovel, there lives and reigns a young dead
man in the glory of his strength. He fills
the poorest, darkest dwelling with a splen-
dour of which it had never ventured to
dream. His constant presence, imperious
and inevitable, diffuses through it and
maintains a religion and ideas which it had
never known there before, hallows every-
thing around it, forces the eyes to look
higher and the spirit to refrain from
descending, purifies the air that is breathed
and the speech that is held and the thoughts
that are mustered there and, little by little,
ennobles and uplifts a whole people on a
scale of unexampled vastness.

Such dead as these have a power as
387

The Wrack of the Storm

profound, as fruitful as life and less
precarious. It is terrible that this experi-
ence should have been made, for it is the
most pitiless and the first in such enormous
masses that mankind has ever undergone;
but, now that the ordeal is almost over, we
shall soon derive from it the most un-
expected fruits. It will not be long before
we see the differences increase and the
destinies diverge between the nations which
have acquired all these dead and all this
glory and those which were deprived of
them; and we shall perceive with amaze-
ment that those nations which have lost the
most are those which have kept their riches
and their men. There are losses which are
inestimable gains; and there are gains
whereby the future is lost. There are dead
whom the living cannot replace and the
mere thought of whom accomplishes things
which their bodies could not perform.
There are dead whose energy surpasses

The Might of the Dead

death and recovers life ; and we are almost
every one of us at this moment the man-
dataries of a being greater, nobler, graver,
wiser and more truly living than ourselves.
With all those who accompany him, he will
be our judge, if it is the fact that the dead
weigh the soul of the living and that on
their verdict our happiness depends. He
will be our guide and our protector, for it
is the first time, since history has revealed
its misfortunes to us, that man has felt so
great a host of such mighty dead soaring
above his head and speaking within his
heart.

5-

We shall live henceforward under their
laws, which will be more just but not more
severe nor more cheerless than ours ; for it
is a mistake to suppose that the dead love
nothing but gloom; they love only the
justice and the truth which are the eternal

The Wrack of the Storm

forms of happiness. From the depths of
this justice and this truth in which they are
all immersed, they will help us to destroy
the great falsehoods of existence: for war
and death, if they sow innumerable miseries
and misfortunes, have at least the merit of
destroying as many lies as they occasion
evils. And all the sacrifices which they
have made for us will have been in vain —
and this is not possible — if they do not
first of all bring about the fall of the lies
on which we live and which it is not
necessary to name, for each of us knows his
own and is ashamed of them and will be
eager to make an end of them. They will
teach us, before all else, from the depths of
our hearts which are their living tombs, to
love those who outlive them, since it is in
them alone that they wholly exist.

290

WHEN THE WAR IS OVER

XXIII

WHEN THE WAR IS OVER

I

BEFORE closing this book, I wish to
weigh for the last time in my con-
science the words of hatred and maledic-
tion which it has made me speak in spite
of myself. We have to do with the
strangest of enemies. He has knowingly
and deliberately, while in the full possess-
ion of his faculties and without necessity
or excuse, revived all the crimes which we
supposed to be forever buried in the bar-
barous past. He has trampled under foot
all the precepts which man had so pain-
fully won from the cruel darkness of his
beginnings; he has violated all the laws of
justice, humanity, loyalty and honour, from
the highest, which are almost godlike, to
the simplest, the most elementary, which
293

The Wrack of the Str.om

still belong to the lower worlds. There
is no longer any doubt on this point : it has
been proved over and over again until we
have attained a final certitude.

But on the other hand, it is no less cert-
ain that he has displayed virtues which it
would be unworthy of us to deny; for we
honour ourselves in recognizing the valour
of those whom we are fighting. He has
gone to his death in deep, compact, disci-
plined masses, with a blind, hopeless, ob-
stinate heroism of which no such lurid
example had ever yet been known, a heroism
which has many times compelled our ad-
miration and our pity. He has known how
to sacrifice himself, with unprecedented
and perhaps unequalled abnegation, to an
idea which we know to be false, inhuman
and even somewhat mean, but which he
believes to be just and lofty; and a sacri-
fice of this kind, whatever its object, is
always the proof of a force which survives
294

When the War Is over

those who devote themselves to making it
and must command respect.

I know very well that this heroism is not
like the heroism which we love. For us,
heroism must before all be voluntary, freed
from any constraint, active, ardent, eager
and spontaneous ; whereas with them it has
mingled with it a great deal of servility,
passiveness, sadness, gloomy, ignorant,
massive submission and rather base fears.
It is nevertheless the fact that, in the mo-
ment of supreme peril, little remains of all
these distinctions and that no force in the
world can drive to its death a people which
does not bear within itself the strength to
confront it. Our soldiers make no mis-
take upon this point. Question the men
returning from the trenches: they detest
the enemy, they abhor the aggressor, the
unjust and arrogant aggressor, uncouth,
too often cruel and treacherous; but they
do not hate the man: they do him justice;
295

The Wrack of the Storm

they pity him; and, after the battle, in the
defenceless wounded soldier or disarmed
prisoner they recognize, with astonishment,
a brother in misfortune who, like them-
selves, is submitting to duties and laws
which, like themselves, he too believes lofty
and necessary. Under the insufferable
enemy they see an unhappy man who also
is bearing the burden of life. They for-
get the things that divide them to recall
only those which unite them in a common
destiny; and they teach us a great lesson.
Better than ourselves, who are removed
from danger, at the contact of profound and
fearful verities and realities they are al-
ready beginning to discern something that
we cannot yet perceive; and their obscure
instinct is probably anticipating the judg-
ment of history and our own judgment,
when we see more clearly. Let us learn
from them to be just and to distinguish
that which we are bound to despise and
296

When the War Is over

loathe from that which we may pity, love
and respect.

Setting aside the unpardonable aggres-
sion and the inexpiable violation of treaties,
this war, despite its insanity, has come near
to being a bloody but magnificent proof of
greatness, heroism and the spirit of sacri-
fice. Humanity was ready to rise above
itself, to surpass all that it had hitherto
accomplished. It has surpassed it. Never
before had nations been seen capable, for
months on end, perhaps for years, of re-
nouncing their repose, their security, their
wealth, their comfort, all that they pos-
sessed and loved down to their very life,
in order to accomplish what they believed
to be their duty. Never before had nations
been seen that were able as a whole to un-
derstand and admit that the happiness of
each of those who live in this time of trial
is of no consequence compared with the
honour of those who live no more or the
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The Wrack of the Storm

happiness of those who are not yet alive.
We stand on heights that had not been
attained before. And if, on the enemies'
side, this unexampled renunciation had not
been poisoned at its source; if the war
which they are waging against us had been
as fine, as loyal, as generous, as chivalrous
as that which we are waging against them,
we may well believe that it would have
been the last and that it would have ended,
not in battle, but, like the awakening from
an evil dream, in a noble and fraternal
amazement. They have made that impos-
sible ; and this, we may be sure, is the dis-
appointment which the future will find it
most difficult to forgive them.

What are we to do now ? Must we hate

the enemy to the end of time ? The burden

of hatred is the heaviest that man can bear

upon this earth ; and we should faint under

298

When the War is Over

the weight of it. On the other hand, we
do not wish once more to be the dupes and
victims of confidence and love. Here
again our soldiers, in their simplicity,
which is so clear-seeing and so close to the
truth, anticipate the future and teach us
what to admit and what to avoid. We
have seen that they do not hate the man;
but they do not trust him at all. They
discover the human being in him only when
he is unarmed. They know, from bitter
experience, that, so long as he possesses
weapons, he cannot resist the frenzy of de-
struction, treachery and slaughter ; and that
he does not become kindly until he is ren-
dered powerless.

Is he thus by nature, or has he been
perverted by those who lead him? Have
the rulers dragged the whole nation after
them, or has the whole nation driven its
rulers on? Did the rulers make the nation
like unto themselves, or did the nation
299

The Wrack of the Storm

select and support them because they re-
sembled itself? Did the evil come from
above or below, or was it everywhere?
Here we have the great and obscure point
of this terrible adventure. It is not easy
to throw light upon it and still less easy
to find excuses for it. If our enemies prove
that they were deceived and corrupted by
their masters, they prove, at the same time,
that they are less intelligent, less firmly at-
tached to justice, honour and humanity,
less civilized, in a word, than those whom
they claimed the right to enslave in the
name of a superiority which they them-
selves have proved not to exist ; and, unless
they can establish that their errors, per-
fidies and cruelties, which can no longer be
denied, should be imputed only to those
masters, then they themselves must bear
the pitiless weight. I do not know how
they will escape from this predicament, nor
what the future will decide, that future
300

When the War is Over

which is wiser than the past, even as, in the
words of an old Slav proverb, the dawn is
wiser than the eve. In the meanwhile, let
us copy the prudence of our soldiers, who
know what to believe far better than we do.

301

THE MASSACRE
OF THE INNOCENTS

XXIV

THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS

The Massacre of the Innocents appeared for the
first time in 1886, in a little periodical called La Plei-
ade which some friends and I had founded in the
Latin Quarter and which died of inanition after its
sixth number. My reason for making room in the
present volume for these pages marking a very modest
start — they were the first that found their way into
print — is not that I am under any delusion as to the
merits of this youthful work, in which I had simply
aimed at reproducing as best I could the different
episodes of a picture in the Brussels Museum, painted
in the sixteenth century by Pieter Breughel the Elder.
But it appeared to me that circumstances had made
of this humble literary effort a sort of prophetic vision;
for it is but too likely that similar scenes must have
been repeated in more than one of our unhappy Flem-
ish or Brabant villages and that to describe them as
they were lately enacted we should have only to change
the name of the butchers and probably, alas, to accent-
uate their cruelty, their injustice and their hideous-
ness ! — M. M.

IT WAS close upon supper-time, that
Friday the twenty-sixth day of the
month of December, when a little shep-
herd-lad came into Nazareth, sobbing bit-
terly.

Some peasants drinking ale in the Blue
305

The Wrack of the Storm

Lion opened the shutters to look into the
village orchard and observed the child run-
ning over the snow. They saw that he was
Korneliz* boy and cried from the window:

"What's the matter? Get home with
you to bed !"

But he replied in terror that the Span-
iards were come, that they had set fire to
the farm, hanged his mother among the
walnut-trees and bound his nine little sis-
ters to the trunk of a big tree.

The peasants rushed out of the inn,
gathered round the child and plied him
with questions. Then he also told them
that the soldiers were on horseback and
wore mail, that they had driven away the
cattle of his uncle Petrus Krayer and that
they would soon be entering the forest with
the cows and sheep.

All ran to the Golden Sun, where Korne-
liz and his brother-in-law were also drink-
ing their pot of ale; and the inn-keeper
306

The Massacre of the Innocents

sped into the village, shouting that the
Spaniards were at hand.

Then there was a great din in Nazareth.
The women opened the windows and the
peasants left their houses with lights which
they put out as soon as they reached the
orchard, where it was bright as midday,
because of the snow and the full moon.

They crowded round Korneliz and
Krayer in the market-place, in front of the
two inns. Several had brought their
pitchforks and their rakes and consulted
one another, terror-stricken, under the
trees.

But, as they knew not what to do, one
of them went to fetch the parish-priest,
who owned Korneliz1 farm. He came out
of his house with the sacristan, bringing
the keys of the church. All followed him
into the churchyard; and he shouted to
them from the top of the tower that he
could see nothing in the fields nor in the
307

The Wrack of the Storm

forest, but that there were red clouds in
the neighbourhood of his farm, though the
sky was blue and full of stars over all
the rest of the country.

After deliberating for a long time in the
churchyard, they decided to hide in the
wood through which the Spaniards would
have to pass and to attack them if they
were not too many, so as to recover Petrus
Krayer's cattle and the plunder which they
had taken from the farm.

They armed themselves with pitchforks
and spades; and the women remained near
the church with the priest.

Seeking a suitable spot for their ambus-
cade, they came to a mill on the skirt of
the forest and saw the farm burning amid
the starlight. Here, under some huge
oaks, in front of a frozen pool, they took
up their position.

A shepherd whom they called the Red
Dwarf went up the hill to warn the miller,
308

The Massacre of the Innocents

who had stopped his mill when he saw
the flames on the horizon. He invited the
fellow in, however; and the two of them
placed themselves at a window to watch
the distance.

In front of them the moon was shining
over the burning farm ; and they saw a long
host marching over the snow. When they
had taken stock of it, the Dwarf went down
to those in the forest; and presently they
descried four horsemen above a herd of
animals that seemed to be cropping the
grass.

As the men, in their blue hose and their
red cloaks, were looking around them on
the edge of the pool and under the snow-lit
trees, the sacristan pointed to a box-hedge ;
and they went and hid behind it.

The cattle and the Spaniards came over

the ice; and the sheep on reaching the

hedge were already beginning to nibble at

the leaves, when Korneliz broke through

309

The Wrack of the Storm

the bushes; and the others followed with
their pitchforks into the light. Then there
was a great slaughter on the pond, while
the huddled sheep and the cows gazed at
the battle in their midst and at the moon
above them.

When the men and the horses had been
killed, Korneliz ran into the meadows
towards the flames ; and the others stripped
the dead. Then they went back to the vil-
lage with the herds. The women watch-
ing the gloomy forest from behind the
walls of the churchyard saw them ap-
proaching through the trees and, with the
priest, hurried to meet them; and they re-
turned dancing gleefully all amongst the
children and the dogs.

While they made merry under the pear-
trees in the orchard, where the Red Dwarf
hung up lanterns as a sign of kermis, they
consulted the priest as to what they were
to do.

310

The Massacre of the Innocents

They at last resolved to put a horse to
a cart and fetch the bodies of the woman
and her nine little daughters to the village.
The dead woman's sisters and the other
peasant-women of her family climbed into
it, as did the priest, who was not well able
to walk, being advanced in years and very
stout.

They entered the forest once more and
arrived in silence at the dazzling white
plain, where they saw the naked men and
the horses lying on their backs upon the
gleaming ice among the trees. Then they
went on to the farm, which they could see
burning in the distance.

When they came to the orchard and to
the house all red with flames, they stopped
at the gate to mark the great misfortune
that had befallen the farmer in his garden.
His wife was hanging all naked from the
branches of a great walnut-tree ; he himself
was mounting a ladder to climb the tree,
311

The Wrack of the Storm

around which the nine little girls were
waiting for their mother on the grass. Al-
ready he was walking among the huge
boughs, when suddenly he saw the crowd,
black against the snow, watching him.
Weeping, he made signs to them to help
him ; and they went into the garden. Then
the sacristan, the Red Dwarf, the landlord
of the Blue Lion and he of the Golden Sun,
the parish-priest, with a lantern, and many
other peasants climbed into the snow-laden
walnut-tree to cut down the corpse, which
the women of the village received in their
arms at the foot of the tree, even as at the
descent from the Cross of Our Lord Jesus
Christ.

The next day they buried her; and
nothing else out of the common happened
at Nazareth that week. But, on the fol-
lowing Sunday, hungry wolves ran through
the village after high mass and it snowed
until noon; then the sun suddenly shone in
312

The Massacre of the Innocents

the sky; and the peasants went in to dinner,
as was their wont, and dressed for benedic-
tion.

At that moment there was no one in the
market-place, for it was freezing cruelly.
Only the dogs and hens remained under the
trees, where some sheep were nibbling at
a three-cornered patch of grass, while the
priest's maid-servant swept away the snow
from the presbytery-garden.

Then a troop of armed men crossed the
stone bridge at the end of the village and
halted in the orchard. Some peasants
came out of their houses; but, on recogni-
zing the Spaniards, they retreated in terror
and went to their windows to see what
would happen.

There were some thirty horsemen, clad
in armour, around an old man with a white
beard. Behind them they carried red and
yellow foot-soldiers, who jumped down and
ran over the snow to shake off their stiff-
313

The Wrack of the Storm

ness, while several of the men in armour
also alighted and eased themselves against
the trees to which they had fastened their
horses.

Then they turned to the Golden Sun and
knocked at the door. It was opened hesi-
tatingly; and they warmed themselves at
the fire and called for ale.

Next they came out of the inn, carrying
pots and jugs and wheaten loaves for their
comrades, who sat ranked around the man
with the white beard, waiting in the midst
of the lances.

As the street was empty, the commander
sent horsemen to the back of the houses, to
guard the village on its open side, and or-
dered the foot-soldiers to bring to him all
the children of two years old and under, to
be massacred, as is written in the Gospel
according to St. Matthew.

The soldiers went first to the inn of the
Green Cabbage and to the barber's cottage,
314

The Massacre of the Innocents

which stood side by side, midway in the
street.

One of them opened a stable-door; and a
litter of pigs escaped and scattered over
the village. The inn-keeper and the bar-
ber came out and humbly asked the sold-
iers what they wanted; but the men knew
no Flemish and went in to look for the
children.

The inn-keeper had one, which sat crying
in its little shirt on the table where they
had just had dinner. A man took the child
in his arms and carried it away under the
apple-tree, while the father and mother fol-
lowed him with cries of lamentation.

The soldiers also threw open the cooper's
shed and the blacksmith's and the cob-
bler's; and the calves, cows, asses, pigs,
goats and sheep strayed about the market-
place. When the men broke the glass of
the carpenter's windows, several of the
peasants, including the oldest and richest

The Wrack of the Storm

farmers in the parish, assembled in the
street and went towards the Spaniards.
They doffed their hats and caps respect-
fully to the leader in his velvet cloak and
asked him what he was going to do; but
even he did not understand their language ;
and some one went to fetch the priest.

He was making ready for benediction
and putting on a gold cope in the sacristy.
The peasant called out:

"The Spaniards are in the orchard 1"

Horrified, the priest ran to the church-
door, accompanied by the serving-boys
carrying tapers and censer.

Then he saw the animals released from
their sheds roaming on the snow and the
grass, the horsemen in the village, the sold-
iers outside the doors, the horses tied to
the trees along the street and the men and
women entreating him who was holding
the child in its shirt.

He rushed to the churchyard; and the
316

The Massacre of the Innocents

peasants turned anxiously to their priest,
coming through the pear-trees like a god
robed in gold, and stood around him and
the man with the white beard.

He spoke in Flemish and Latin ; but the
commander shrugged his shoulders slowly
up and down to show that he did not un-
derstand.

His parishioners asked him under their
breath :

"What does he say? What is he going
to do?"

Others, on seeing the priest in the or-
chard, came timidly from their farms; the
women hurried up and stood whispering
among the groups ; while some soldiers who
were besieging an inn ran back at the sight
of the great crowd that was forming in
the market-place.

Then the man who was holding by one
leg the child of the landlord of the Green
Cabbage cut off its head with his sword.
317

The Wrack of the Storm

The head fell before their eyes and the
body fell after it and lay bleeding on the
grass. The mother picked it up and car-
ried it away, leaving the head behind her.
She ran towards the house, but stumbled
against a tree and fell flat on the snow,
where she lay in a swoon, while the father
struggled between two soldiers.

Some of the younger peasants threw
stones and blocks of wood at the Spaniards,
but the horsemen all lowered their lances
together, the women fled and the priest
began to cry out in horror with his parish-
ioners, all among the sheep, the geese and
the dogs.

However, as the soldiers were once more
moving down the street, the folk stood si-
lent to see what they would do.

The band entered the shop kept by the
sacristan's sisters and then came out quietly,
without harming the seven women, who
knelt on the doorstep praying.
318

The Massacre of the Innocents

Next they went to the inn owned by the
Hunchback of St. Nicholas. Here also
the door was opened directly, to appease
them; but they reappeared amid a great
outcry, with three children in their arms
and surrounded by the Hunchback, his wife
and his daughters, clasping their hands in
token of entreaty.

On reaching the old man, the soldiers
put down the children at the foot of an elm,
where they remained, sitting on the snow
in their Sunday clothes. But one of them,
who wore a yellow frock, rose and toddled
towards the sheep. A man ran after it
with his naked sword; and the child died
with its face in the grass, while the others
were killed not far from the tree.

All the peasants and the inn-keeper's
daughters took to flight, shrieking as they
went, and returned to their homes. The
priest, left alone in the orchard, besought
the Spaniards with loud cries, going on his
319

The Wrack of the Storm

knees from horse to horse, with his arms
crossed upon his breast, while the father
and mother, sitting in the snow, wept
piteously for the dead children that lay in
their laps.

As the soldiers ran along the street, they
remarked a big blue farm-house. They
tried to break down the door, but it was
of oak and studded with nails. Then they
took some tubs that were frozen in a pool
in front of the house and used them to
climb to the upper windows, through which
they made their way.

There had been a kermis at this farm;
and kinsfolk had come to eat waffles, ham
and custards with their family. At the
sound of the broken panes, they had as-
sembled behind the table covered with jugs
and dishes. The soldiers entered the
kitchen and, after a desperate struggle,
in which many were wounded, they seized
the little boys and girls, as well as the hind,
320

The Massacre of the Innocents

who had bitten a soldier's thumb. Then
they left the house, locking the door behind
them to prevent the inmates from going
with them.

Those of the villagers who had no child-
ren slowly left their homes and followed
them from afar. When the soldiers carry-
ing their victims came to the old man, they
threw them on the grass and deliberately
killed them with their spears and their
swords, while all along the front of the
blue house the men and women leant out
of the windows of the upper floor and the
loft, cursing and rocking wildly in the sun-
shine at the sight of the red, pink and white
frocks of their little ones lying motionless
on the grass among the trees. Then the
soldiers hanged the hind from the sign of
the Half Moon on the other side of the
street; and there was a long silence in the
village.

The massacre now began to spread.
321

The Wrack of the Storm

Mothers ran out of the houses and tried
to escape to the open country through the
gardens and kitchen-plots; but the horse-
men scoured after them and drove them
back into the street. Peasants, holding
their caps in their clasped hands, followed
upon their knees the men who were drag-
ging away their children, among the dogs
which barked deliriously amid the din.
The priest, with his arms raised aloft, ran
along the houses and under the trees, pray-
ing desperately, like a martyr ; and soldiers,
shivering with cold, blew on their fingers
as they moved about the road, or, with
their hands in the pockets of their trunks
and their swords tucked under their arms,
waited beneath the windows of the houses
that were being scaled.

On seeing the grief-stricken terror of the
peasants, they entered the farm-houses in
little bands; and in like fashion they acted
throughout the length of the street.
322

The Massacre of the Innocents

A woman who sold vegetables in the old
red-brick cottage near the church seized a
chair and ran after two men who were
carrying off her children in a wheel-barrow.
When she saw them die, a sickness over-
came her; and she suffered the folk to press
her into the chair, against a tree by the
road-side.

Other soldiers climbed up the lime-trees
in front of a house painted lilac and re-
moved the tiles in order to enter the house.
When they came out again upon the roof,
the father and mother, with outstretched
arms, also appeared in the opening; and
they pushed them down repeatedly, cutting
them over the head with their swords, be-
fore they could descend into the street.

One family, which had locked itself into
the cellar of a rambling cottage, cried
through the grating, where the father stood
madly brandishing a pitchfork. An old,
bald-headed man was sobbing all alone on
323

The Wrack of the Storm

a dung-heap ; a woman in yellow had faint-
ed in the market-place and her husband
was holding her under her arms and
moaning in the shadow of a pear-tree; an-
other, in red, was kissing her little girl,
who had lost her hands, and lifting first
one arm and then the other to see if she
would not move. Yet another ran into the
country and the soldiers pursued her
through the hayricks that bounded the
snow-clad fields.

Beneath the inn of the Four Sons of Ay-
mon there was a tumult as of a siege. The
inhabitants had barred the door; and the
soldiers went round and round the house
without being able to make their way in.
They were trying to clamber up to the sign
by the fruit-trees against the front wall,
when they caught sight of a ladder behind
the garden-door. They set it against the
wall and mounted one after the other.
Thereupon the landlord and all his house-
324

The Massacre of the Innocents

hold hurled tables, chairs, dishes and cra-
dles at them from the windows. The lad-
der upset and the soldiers fell down.

In a wooden hut, at the end of the vil-
lage, another band found a peasant-woman
bathing her children in a tub by the fire.
Being old and almost deaf, she did not
hear them come in. Two soldiers took the
tub and carried it off ; and the dazed woman
went after them, with the children's
clothes, wanting to dress them. But, when
she came to the door and suddenly saw
the splashes of blood in the village, the
swords in the orchard, the cradles over-
turned in the street, women on their knees
and women waving their arms around the
dead, she began to cry out with all her
strength and to strike the soldiers, who put
down the tub to defend themselves. The
priest also came hastening up and, folding
his hands across his vestment, entreated
the Spaniards before the naked children,
325

The Wrack of the Storm

who were whimpering in the water. Other
soldiers then came up and pushed him aside
and bound the raving peasant-woman to
a tree.

The butcher had hidden his little daugh-
ter and, leaning against his house, looked
on in unconcern. A foot-soldier and one
of the men in armour went in and discover-
ed the child in a copper cauldron. Then the
butcher, in desperation, took one of his
knives and chased them down the street;
but a band that was passing struck the
knife from his grasp and hanged him by the
hands to the hooks in his wall, among the
flayed carcases, where he twitched his legs
and jerked his head and cursed and swore
till evening.

Near the churchyard, a crowd had as-
sembled outside a long green farm-house.
The farmer stood on his threshold weeping
bitter tears; as he was very fat, with a
face made for smiling, the hearts of >thc
326

The Massacre of the Innocents

soldiers softened in some measure as they
sat in the sun with their backs to the wall,
listening to him and patting his dog the
while. But the one who was dragging the
child away by the hand made gestures as
though to say :

"You may save your tears 1 It is not my
fault!

A peasant who was being hotly pursued
sprang into a boat moored to the stone
bridge and pushed across the pond with his
wife and children. The soldiers, not dar-
ing to venture on the ice, strode angrily
through the reeds. They climbed into the
willows on the bank, trying to reach them
with their spears; and, when they failed,
continued for a long time to threaten the
family, where they all sat cowering in the
middle of the water.

Meanwhile, the orchard was still full of
people, for it was there that most of the
children were slain, in front of the man with
327

The Wrack of the Storm

the white beard who directed the massacre.
The little boys and girls who were big
enough to walk alone also collected
there and, munching their bread-and-butter,
stood looking on curiously to see the others
die or gathered round the village idiot,
who lay upon the grass playing a whistle.

Then suddenly a movement ran through
the length of the village. The peasants
were turning their steps toward the castle,
standing on a high mound of yellow earth
at the end of the street. They had caught
sight of the lord of the village leaning on
the battlements of his tower, watching the
massacre. And the men, women and old
folk stretched out their arms to him where
he sat in his cloak of purple velvet and
cap of gold and entreated him as though
he were a king in heaven. But he threw
up his arms and shrugged his shoulders, to
show his helplessness; and, when they im-
plored him in ever-increasing anguish and
328

The Massacre of the Innocents

knelt bareheaded in the snow, uttering loud
cries, he turned back slowly into the tower;
and in the hearts of the peasants all hope
died.

When all the children were killed, the
tired soldiers wiped their swords on the
grass and supped under the pear-trees.
Then the foot-soldiers mounted behind the
others and they all rode out of Nazareth
together, by the stone bridge, as they had
come.

The setting sun lit the forest with a red
light and painted the village a new colour.
Weary with running and entreating, the
priest had sat down in the snow in front
of the church; and his servant-maid stood
near him, looking around. They saw the
street and the orchard filled with peasants
in their holiday attire, moving about the
market-place and along the houses. Out-
side the doors, families, with their dead
children on their knees, whispered in amaze-
329

The Wrack of the Storm

ment and horror of the fate wherewith
they had been assailed. Others were still
mourning the child where it had fallen, near
a cask, under a barrow or at a puddle's
edge, or were carrying it away in silence.
Several were already washing the benches,
chairs, tables and shirts all smirched with
blood and picking up the cradles that had
been flung into the street. But nearly all
the mothers were kneeling on the grass
under the trees, before the dead bodies,
which they knew by their woollen frocks.
Those who had no children were roaming
about the market-place, stopping to gaze
at the afflicted groups. The men who had
done weeping took the dogs and started in
pursuit of their strayed beasts, or mended
their broken windows or gaping roofs,
while the village grew hushed and still be-
neath the light of the moon as it rose slowly
in the sky.

THE END

330

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Maeterlinck, Maurice

The Wrack of the storm