Light by Henri Barbusse (good novels to read in english txt) 📕

for instance, whom we used to see go by, who was drained and dead at twenty, and so many other ignoble and irrefutable examples; and the comedies around bequests and heirs and heiresses, and their great gamble with affection and love--all these basenesses, in which custom too old has made hearts go moldy.

She is a little excited, as if the truth, in the confusion of these critical times, were beautiful to see--and even pleasant to detain with words.

All the same, she interrupts herself, and says, "They'll always find some way of deceiving." At last she says, "Yes, it would be just, perhaps; but it won't come."

* * * * * *


The valley has suddenly filled with tumult. On the road which goes along the opposite slope a regiment is passing on its way to the barracks, a new regiment, with its colors. The flag goes on its way in the middle of a long-drawn hurly-burly, in vague shouting, in plumes of dust and a sparkling mist of battle.

We have both mechanically risen on the edge of the road. At the moment when the flag passes before us, the habit of saluting it trembles in my arms. But, just as when a while ago the bishop's lifted hand did not humble me, I stay motionless, and I do not salute.

No, I do not bow in presence of the flag. It frightens me, I hate it and I accuse it. No, there is no beauty in it; it is not the emblem of this corner of my native land, whose fair picture it disturbs with its savage stripes. It is the screaming signboard of the glory of blows, of militarism and war. It unfurls over the living surges of humanity a sign of supremacy and command; it is a weapon. It is not the love of our countries, it is their sharp-edged difference, proud and aggressive, which we placard in the face of the others. It is the gaudy eagle which conquerors and their devotees see flying in their dreams from steeple to steeple in foreign lands. The sacred defense of the homeland--well and good. But if there was no offensive war there would be defensive war. Defensive war has the same infamous cause as the offensive war which provoked it; why do we not confess it? We persist, through blindness or duplicity, in cutting the question in two, as if it were too great. All fallacies are possible when one speculates on morsels of truth. But Earth only bears one single sort of inhabitant.

It is not enough to put something on the end of a stick in public places, to shake it on the tops of buildings and in the faces of public assemblies, and say, "It is decided that this is the loftiest of all symbols; it is decided that he who will not bend the knee before it shall be accursed." It is the duty of human intelligence to examine if that symbolism is not fetish-worship.

As for me, I remember it was said that logic has terrible chains and that all hold together--the throne, the altar, the sword and the flag. And I have read, in the unchaining and the chaining-up of war, that these are the instruments of the cult of human sacrifices.

Marie has sat down again, and I strolled away a little, musing.

I recall the silhouette of Adjutant Marcassin, and him whom I quoted a moment ago--the sincere hero, barren and dogmatic, with his furious faith. I seem to be asking him, "Do you believe in beauty, in progress?" He does not know, so he replies, "No! I only believe in the glory of the French name!" "Do you believe in respect for life, in the dignity of labor, in the holiness of happiness?" "No." "Do you believe in truth, in justice?" "No, I only believe in the glory of the French name."

The idea of motherland--I have never dared to look it in the face. I stand still in my walk and in my meditation. What, that also? But my reason is as honest as my heart, and keeps me going forward. Yes, that also.

In the friendly solitude of these familiar spots on the top of this hill, at these cross-roads where the lane has led me like an unending companion, not far from the place where the gentle slope waits for you to entice you, I quake to hear myself think and blaspheme. What, that notion of Motherland also, which has so often thrilled me with gladness and enthusiasm, as but lately that of God did?

But it is in Motherland's name, as once in the name of God only, that humanity robs itself and tries to choke itself with its own hands, as it will soon succeed in doing. It is because of motherland that the big countries, more rich in blood, have overcome the little ones. It is because of motherland that the overlord of German nationalism attacked France and let civil war loose among the people of the world. The question must be placed there where it is, that is to say, everywhere at once. One must see face to face, in one glance, all those immense, distinct unities which each shout "I!"

The idea of motherland is not a false idea, but it is a little idea, and one which must remain little.

There is only one common good. There is only one moral duty, only one truth, and every man is the shining recipient and guardian of it. The present understanding of the idea of motherland divides all these great ideas, cuts them into pieces, specializes them within impenetrable circles. We meet as many national truths as we do nations, and as many national duties, and as many national interests and rights--and they are antagonistic to each other. Each country is separated from the next by such walls--moral frontiers, material frontiers, commercial frontiers--that you are imprisoned when you find yourself on either side of them. We hear talk of sanctified selfishness, of the adorable expansion of one race across the others, of noble hatreds and glorious conquests, and we see these ideals trying to take shape on all hands. This capricious multiplication of what ought to remain one leads the whole of civilization into a malignant and thorough absurdity. The words "justice" and "right" are too great in stature to be shut up in proper nouns, any more than Providence can be, which every royalty would fain take to itself.

National aspirations--confessed or unconfessable--are contradictory among themselves. All populations which are narrowly confined and elbow each other in the world are full of dreams vaster than each of them. The nations' territorial ambitions overlap each other on the map of the universe; economic and financial ambitions cancel each other mathematically. Then in the mass they are unrealizable.

And since there is no sort of higher control over this scuffle of truths which are not admissible, each nation realizes its own by all possible means, by all the fidelity and anger and brute force she can get out of herself. By the help of this state of world-wide anarchy, the lazy and slight distinction between patriotism, imperialism and militarism is violated, trampled, and broken through all along the line, and it cannot be otherwise. The living universe cannot help becoming an organization of armed rivalry. And there cannot fail to result from it the everlasting succession of evils, without any hope of abiding spoils, for there is no instance of conquerors who have long enjoyed immunity, and history reveals a sort of balance of injustices and of the fatal alternation of predominance. In all quarters the hope of victory brings in the hope of war. It is conflict clinging to conflict, and the recurrent murdering of murders.

The kings! We always find the kings again when we examine popular unhappiness right to the end! This hypertrophy of the national unities is the doing of their leaders. It is the masters, the ruling aristocracies--emblazoned or capitalist--who have created and maintained for centuries all the pompous and sacred raiment, sanctimonious or fanatical, in which national separation is clothed, along with the fable of national interests--those enemies of the multitudes. The primeval centralization of individuals isolated in the inhabited spaces was in agreement with the moral law; it was the precise embodiment of progress; it was of benefit to all. But the decreed division, peremptory and stern, which was interposed in that centralization--that is the doom of man, although it is necessary to the classes who command. These boundaries, these clean cuts, permit the stakes of commercial conflict and of war; that is to say, the chance of big feats of glory and of huge speculations. _That_ is the vital principle of Empire. If all interests suddenly became again the individual interests of men, and the moral law resumed its full and spacious action on the basis of equality, if human solidarity were world-wide and complete, it would no longer lend itself to certain sudden and partial increases which are never to the general advantage, but may be to the advantage of a few fleeting profiteers. That is why the conscious forces which have hitherto directed the old world's destiny will always use all possible means to break up human harmony into fragments. Authority holds fast to all its national bases.

The insensate system of national blocks in sinister dispersal, devouring or devoured, has its apostles and advocates. But the theorists, the men of spurious knowledge, will in vain have heaped up their farrago of quibbles and arguments, their fallacies drawn from so-called precedents or from so-called economic and ethnic necessity; for the simple, brutal and magnificent cry of life renders useless the efforts they make to galvanize and erect doctrines which cannot stand alone. The disapproval which attaches in our time to the word "internationalism" proves together the silliness and meanness of public opinion. Humanity is the living name of truth. Men are like each other as trees! They who rule well, rule by force and deceit; but by reason, never.

The national group is a collectivity within the bosom of the chief one. It is one group like any other; it is like him who knots himself to himself under the wing of a roof, or under the wider wing of the sky that dyes a landscape blue. It is not the definite, absolute, mystical group into which they would fain transform it, with sorcery of words and ideas, which they have armored with oppressive rules. Everywhere man's poor hope of salvation on earth is merely to attain, at the end of his life, this: To live one's life freely, where one wants to live it; to love, to last, to produce in the chosen environment--just as the people of the ancient Provinces have lost, along with their separate leaders, their separate traditions of covetousness and reciprocal robbery.

If, from the idea of motherland, you take away covetousness, hatred, envy and vainglory; if you take away from it the desire for predominance by violence, what is there left of it?

It is not an individual unity of laws; for just laws have no colors. It is not a