perceiving poor idiotic Françoise where she crouched between the corpses of her father and her intended, among the smoking ruins of the mill, he saluted her gallantly with his sword, and shouted: [Pg 129] “Victory! Victory!” [Pg 131] [Pg 131] THREE WARS War! In France, to men of my generation, men who have passed their fiftieth year, this terrible word awakens three special memories, the memory of the Crimean expedition, of the campaign in Italy, and of our disasters in 1870. What victories, what defeats, and what a lesson! Assuredly, war is accursed. It is a horrible thing that nations should cut each other’s throats. According to our progressive humanitarian ideas, war must disappear on the day when nations come to exchange a kiss of peace. There are exalted minds which, beyond their native country, behold humanity, and prophesy universal concord. But how these theories fall[Pg 132] to pieces on the day when the country is threatened! The philosophers themselves snatch a gun and shoot. All declarations of fraternity are over; and only a cry for extermination rises from the breast of the whole nation. For war is a dark necessity, like death. It may be that we must have something of a dungheap to keep civilisation in flower. It is necessary that death should affirm life; and war is like those cataclysms of the antediluvian world which prepared the world of man. [Pg 132] We have grown tender; we make moan over every existence that passes away. And yet, do we know how many existences, more or less, are needed to balance the life of the earth? We yield to the idea that an existence is sacred. Perhaps the fatalism of the ancients, which could behold the massacres of old without leaping to a Utopia of universal brotherhood, had a truer greatness. To keep ourselves manly, to accept the dark work wrought by death in that night wherein none of us can[Pg 133] read, to tell ourselves that, after all, people die, and that there are merely hours in which they die more—this, when all is said, is the wise man’s attitude. Those who are angry with war should be angry with all human infirmities. The soft-hearted philosophers who
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