Light

Other expenditure will dry up before that on destruction does, and other longings as well, and all the reasons for living. Such will be the sense of humanity's last age.

* * * * * *

The battlefields were prepared long ago. They cover entire provinces with one black city, with a great metallic reservoir of factories, where iron floors and furnaces tremble, bordered by a land of forests whose trees are steel, and of wells where sleeps the sharp blackness of snares; a country navigated by frantic groups of railway trains in parallel formation, and heavy as attacking columns. At whatever point you may be on the plain, even if you turn away, even if you take flight, the bright tentacles of the rails diverge and shine, and cloudy sheaves of wires rise into the air. Upon that territory of execution there rises and falls and writhes machinery so complex that it has not even names, so vast that it has not even shape; for aloft—above the booming whirlwinds which are linked from east to west in the glow of molten metal whose flashes are great as those of lighthouses, or in the pallor of scattered electric constellations—hardly can one make out the artificial outline of a mountain range, clapped upon space.

This immense city of immense low buildings, rectangular and dark, is not a city. They are assaulting tanks, which a feeble internal gesture sets in motion, ready for the rolling rush of their gigantic knee-caps. These endless cannon, thrust into pits which search into the fiery entrails of the earth, and stand there upright, hardly leaning so much as Pisa's tower; and these slanting tubes, long as factory chimneys, so long that perspective distorts their lines and sometimes splays them like the trumpets of Apocalypse—these are not cannon; they are machine-guns, fed by continuous ribbons of trains which scoop out in entire regions—and upon a country, if need be—mountains of profundity.

In war, which was once like the open country and is now wholly like towns—and even like one immense building—one hardly sees the men. On the round-ways and the casemates, the footbridges and the movable platforms, among the labyrinth of concrete caves, above the regiment echelonned downwards in the gulf and enormously upright,—one sees a haggard herd of wan and stooping men, men black and trickling, men issuing from the peaty turf of night, men who came there to save their country. They earthed themselves up in some zone of the vertical gorges, and one sees them, in this more accursed corner than those where the hurricane reels. One senses this human material, in the cavities of those smooth grottoes, like Dante's guilty shades. Infernal glimmers disclose ranged lines of them, as long as roads, slender and trembling spaces of night, which daylight and even sunshine leave befouled with darkness and cyclopean dirt. Solid clouds overhang them and hatchet-charged hurricanes, and leaping flashes set fire every second to the sky's iron-mines up above the damned whose pale faces change not under the ashes of death. They wait, intent on the solemnity and the significance of that vast and heavy booming against which they are for the moment imprisoned. They will be down forever around the spot where they are. Like others before them, they will be shrouded in perfect oblivion. Their cries will rise above the earth no more than their lips. Their glory will not quit their poor bodies.

I am borne away in one of the aeroplanes whose multitude darkens the light of day as flights of arrows do in children's story-books, forming a vaulted army. They are a fleet which can disembark a million men and their supplies anywhere at any moment. It is only a few years since we heard the puling cry of the first aeroplanes, and now their voice drowns all others. Their development has only normally proceeded, yet they alone suffice to make the territorial safeguards demanded by the deranged of former generations appear at last to all people as comical jests. Swept along by the engine's formidable weight, a thousand times more powerful than it is heavy, tossing in space and filling my fibers with its roar, I see the dwindling mounds where the huge tubes stick up like swarming pins. I am carried along at a height of two thousand yards. An air-pocket has seized me in a corridor of cloud, and I have fallen like a stone a thousand yards lower, garrotted by furious air which is cold as a blade, and filled by a plunging cry. I have seen conflagrations and the explosions of mines, and plumes of smoke which flow disordered and spin out in long black zigzags like the locks of the God of War! I have seen the concentric circles by which the stippled multitude is ever renewed. The dugouts, lined with lifts, descend in oblique parallels into the depths. One frightful night I saw the enemy flood it all with an inexhaustible torrent of liquid fire. I had a vision of that black and rocky valley filled to the brim with the lava-stream which dazzled the sight and sent a dreadful terrestrial dawn into the whole of night. With its heart aflame Earth seemed to become transparent as glass along that crevasse; and amid the lake of fire heaps of living beings floated on some raft, and writhed like the spirits of damnation. The other men fled upwards, and piled themselves in clusters on the straight-lined borders of the valley of filth and tears. I saw those swarming shadows huddled on the upper brink of the long armored chasms which the explosions set trembling like steamships.

All chemistry makes flaming fireworks in the sky or spreads in sheets of poison exactly as huge as the huge towns. Against them no wall avails, no secret armor; and murder enters as invisibly as death itself. Industry multiplies its magic. Electricity lets loose its lightnings and thunders—and that miraculous mastery which hurls power like a projectile.

Who can say if this enormous might of electricity alone will not change the face of war?—the centralized cluster of waves, the irresistible orbs going infinitely forth to fire and destroy all explosives, lifting the rooted armor of the earth, choking the subterranean gulfs with heaps of calcined men—who will be burned up like barren coal,—and maybe even arousing the earthquakes, and tearing the central fires from earth's depths like ore!

That will be seen by people who are alive to-day; and yet that vision of the future so near at hand is only a slight magnification, flitting through the brain. It terrifies one to think for how short a time science has been methodical and of useful industry; and after all, is there anything on earth more marvelously easy than destruction? Who knows the new mediums it has laid in store? Who knows the limit of cruelty to which the art of poisoning may go? Who knows if they will not subject and impress epidemic disease as they do the living armies—or that it will not emerge, meticulous, invincible, from the armies of the dead? Who knows by what dread means they will sink in oblivion this war, which only struck to the ground twenty thousand men a day, which has invented guns of only seventy-five miles' range, bombs of only one ton's weight, aeroplanes of only a hundred and fifty miles an hour, tanks, and submarines which cross the Atlantic? Their costs have not yet reached in any country the sum total of private fortunes.

But the upheavals we catch sight of, though we can only and hardly indicate them in figures, will be too much for life. The desperate and furious disappearance of soldiers will have a limit. We may no longer be able to count; but Fate will count. Some day the men will be killed, and the women and children. And they also will disappear—they who stand erect upon the ignominious death of the soldiers,—they will disappear along with the huge and palpitating pedestal in which they were rooted. But they profit by the present, they believe it will last as long as they, and as they follow each other they say, "After us, the deluge." Some day all war will cease for want of fighters.

The spectacle of to-morrow is one of agony. Wise men make laughable efforts to determine what may be, in the ages to come, the cause of the inhabited world's end. Will it be a comet, the rarefaction of water, or the extinction of the sun, that will destroy mankind? They have forgotten the likeliest and nearest cause—Suicide.

They who say, "There will always be war," do not know what they are saying. They are preyed upon by the common internal malady of shortsight. They think themselves full of common-sense as they think themselves full of honesty. In reality, they are revealing the clumsy and limited mentality of the assassins themselves.

The shapeless struggle of the elements will begin again on the seared earth when men have slain themselves because they were slaves, because they believed the same things, because they were alike.

I utter a cry of despair and it seems as if I had turned over and stifled it in a pillow.

* * * * * *

All is madness. And there is no one who will dare to rise and say that all is not madness, and that the future does not so appear—as fatal and unchangeable as a memory.

But how many men will there be who will dare, in face of the universal deluge which will be at the end as it was in the beginning, to get up and cry "No!" who will pronounce the terrible and irrefutable issue:—

"No! The interests of the people and the interests of all their present overlords are not the same. Upon the world's antiquity there are two enemy races—the great and the little. The allies of the great are, in spite of appearances, the great. The allies of the people are the people. Here on earth there is one tribe only of parasites and ringleaders who are the victors, and one people only who are the vanquished."

But, as in those earliest ages, will not thoughtful faces arise out of the darkness? (For this is Chaos and the animal Kingdom; and Reason being no more, she has yet to be born.)

"You must think; but with your own ideas, not other people's."

That lowly saying, a straw whirling in the measureless hand-to-hand struggle of the armies, shines in my soul above all others. To think is to hold that the masses have so far wrought too much evil without wishing it, and that the ancient authorities, everywhere clinging fast, violate humanity and separate the inseparable.

There have been those who magnificently dared. There have been bearers of the truth, men who groped in the world's tumult, trying to make plain order of it. They discover what we did not yet know; chiefly they discover what we no longer knew.

But what a panic is here, among the powerful and the powers that be!

"Truth is revolutionary! Get you gone, truth-bearers! Away with you, reformers! You bring in the reign of men!"

That cry was thrown into my ears one tortured night, like a whisper from deeps below, when he of the broken wings was dying, when he struggled tumultuously against the opening of men's eyes; but I had always heard it round about me, always.

In official speeches, sometimes, at moments of great public flattery, they speak like the reformers, but that is only the diplomacy which aims at felling them better. They force the light-bearers to hide themselves and their torches. These dreamers, these visionaries, these star-gazers,—they are hooted and derided. Laughter is let loose around them, machine-made laughter, quarrelsome and beastly:—

"Your notion of peace is only utopian, anyway, as long as you never, any day, stopped the war by yourself!"

They point to the battlefield and its wreckage:—

"And you say that War won't be forever? Look, driveler!"

The circle of the setting sun is crimsoning the mingled horizon of humanity:—

"You say that the sun is bigger than the earth? Look, imbecile!"

They are anathema, they are sacrilegious, they are excommunicated, who impeach the magic of the past and the poison of tradition. And the thousand million victims themselves scoff at and strike those who rebel, as soon as they are able. All cast stones at them, all, even those who suffer and while they are suffering—even the sacrificed, a little before they die.

The bleeding soldiers of Wagram cry: "Long live the emperor!" And the mournful exploited in the streets cheer for the defeat of those who are trying to alleviate a suffering which is brother to theirs. Others, prostrate in resignation, look on, and echo what is said above them: "After us the deluge," and the saying passes across town and country in one enormous and fantastic breath, for they are innumerable who murmur it. Ah, it was well said:

"I have confidence in the abyss of the people."

* * * * * *

And I?

I, the normal man? What have I done on earth? I have bent the knee to the forces which glitter, without seeking to know whence they came and whither they guide. How have the eyes availed me that I had to see with, the intelligence that I had to judge with?

Borne down by shame, I sobbed, "I don't know," and I cried out so loudly that it seemed to me I was awaking for a moment out of slumber. Hands are holding and calming me; they draw my shroud about me and enclose me.

It seems to me that a shape has leaned over me, quite near, so near; that a loving voice has said something to me; and then it seems to me that I have listened to fond accents whose caress came from a great way off:

"Why shouldn't you be one of them, my lad,—one of those great prophets?"

I don't understand. I? How could I be?

All my thoughts go blurred. I am falling again. But I bear away in my eyes the picture of an iron bed where lay a rigid shape. Around it other forms were drooping, and one stood and officiated. But the curtain of that vision is drawn. A great plain opens the room, which had closed for a moment on me, and obliterates it.

Which way may I look? God? "Miserere——" The vibrating fragment of the Litany has reminded me of God.

* * * * * *

I had seen Jesus Christ on the margin of the lake. He came like an ordinary man along the path. There is no halo round his head. He is only disclosed by his pallor and his gentleness. Planes of light draw near and mass themselves and fade away around him. He shines in the sky, as he shone on the water. As they have told of him, his beard and hair are the color of wine. He looks upon the immense stain made by Christians on the world, a stain confused and dark, whose edge alone, down on His bare feet, has human shape and crimson color. In the middle of it are anthems and burnt sacrifices, files of hooded cloaks, and of torturers, armed with battle-axes, halberds and bayonets; and among long clouds and thickets of armies, the opposing clash of two crosses which have not quite the same shape. Close to him, too, on a canvas wall, again I see the cross that bleeds. There are populations, too, tearing themselves in twain that they may tear themselves the better; there is the ceremonious alliance, "turning the needy out of the way," of those who wear three crowns and those who wear one; and, whispering in the ear of Kings, there are gray-haired Eminences, and cunning monks, whose hue is of darkness.

I saw the man of light and simplicity bow his head; and I feel his wonderful voice saying:

"I did not deserve the evil they have done unto me."

Robbed reformer, he is a witness of his name's ferocious glory. The greed-impassioned money-changers have long since chased Him from the temple in their turn, and put the priests in his place. He is crucified on every crucifix.

Yonder among the fields are churches, demolished by war; and already men are coming with mattock and masonry to raise the walls again. The ray of his outstretched arm shines in space, and his clear voice says:

"Build not the churches again. They are not what you think they were. Build them not again."

* * * * * *

There is no remedy but in them whom peace sentences to hard labor, and whom war sentences to death. There is no redress except among the poor.

* * * * * *

White shapes seem to return into the white room. Truth is simple. They who say that truth is complicated deceive themselves, and the truth is not in them. I see again, not far from me, a bed, a child, a girl-child, who is asleep in our house; her eyes are only two lines. Into our house, after a very long time, we have led my old aunt. She approves affectionately, but all the same she said, very quietly, as she left the perfection of our room, "It was better in my time." I am thrilled by one of our windows, whose wings are opened wide upon the darkness; the appeal which the chasm of that window makes across the distances enters into me. One night, as it seems to me, it was open to its heart.

I—my heart—a gaping heart, enthroned in a radiance of blood. It is mine, it is ours. The heart—that wound which we have. I have compassion on myself.

I see again the rainy shore that I saw before time was, before earth's drama was unfolded; and the woman on the sands. She moans and weeps, among the pictures which the clouds of mortality offer and withdraw, amid that which weaves the rain. She speaks so low that I feel it is to me she speaks. She is one with me. Love—it comes back to me. Love is an unhappy man and unhappy woman.

I awake—uttering the feeble cry of the babe new-born.

All grows pale, and paler. The whiteness I foresaw through the whirlwinds and clamors—it is here. An odor of ether recalls to me the memory of an awful memory, but shapeless. A white room, white walls, and white-robed women who bend over me.

In a voice confused and hesitant, I say:

"I've had a dream, an absurd dream."

My hand goes to my eyes to drive it away.

"You struggled while you were delirious—especially when you thought you were falling," says a calm voice to me, a sedate and familiar voice, which knows me without my knowing the voice.

"Yes," I say!

CHAPTER XVII
MORNING

I went to sleep in Chaos, and then I awoke like the first man.

I am in a bed, in a room. There is no noise—a tragedy of calm, and horizons close and massive. The bed which imprisons me is one of a row that I can see, opposite another row. A long floor goes in stripes as far as the distant door. There are tall windows, and daylight wrapped in linen. That is all which exists. I have always been here, I shall end here.

Women, white and stealthy, have spoken to me. I picked up the new sound, and then lost it. A man all in white has sat by me, looked at me, and touched me. His eyes shone strangely, because of his glasses.

I sleep, and then they make me drink.

The long afternoon goes by in the long corridor. In the evening they make light; at night, they put it out, and the lamps—which are in rows, like the beds, like the windows, like everything—disappear. Just one lamp remains, in the middle, on my right. The peaceful ghost of dead things enjoins peace. But my eyes are open, I awake more and more. I take hold of consciousness in the dark.

A stir is coming to life around me among the prostrate forms aligned in the beds. This long room is immense; it has no end. The enshrouded beds quiver and cough. They cough on all notes and in all ways, loose, dry, or tearing. There is obstructed breathing, and gagged breathing, and polluted, and sing-song. These people who are struggling with their huge speech do not know themselves. I see their solitude as I see them. There is nothing between the beds, nothing.

Of a sudden I see a globular mass with a moon-like face oscillating in the night. With hands held out and groping for the rails of the bedsteads, it is seeking its way. The orb of its belly distends and stretches its shirt like a crinoline, and shortens it. The mass is carried by two little and extremely slender legs, knobbly at the knees, and the color of string. It reaches the next bed, the one which a single ditch separates from mine. On another bed, a shadow is swaying regularly, like a doll. The mass and the shadow are a negro, whose big, murderous head is hafted with a tiny neck.

The hoarse concert of lungs and throats multiplies and widens. There are some who raise the arms of marionettes out of the boxes of their beds. Others remain interred in the gray of the bed-clothes. Now and again, unsteady ghosts pass through the room and stoop between the beds, and one hears the noise of a metal pail. At the end of the room, in the dark jumble of those blind men who look straight before them and the mutes who cough, I only see the nurse, because of her whiteness. She goes from one shadow to another, and stoops over the motionless. She is the vestal virgin who, so far as she can, prevents them from going out.

I turn my head on the pillow. In the bed bracketed with mine on the other side, under the glow which falls from the only surviving lamp, there is a squat manikin in a heavy knitted vest, poultice-color. From time to time, he sits up in bed, lifts his pointed head towards the ceiling, shakes himself, and grasping and knocking together his spittoon and his physic-glass, he coughs like a lion. I am so near to him that I feel that hurricane from his flesh pass over my face, and the odor of his inward wound.

* * * * * *

I have slept. I see more clearly than yesterday. I no longer have the veil that was in front of me. My eyes are attracted distinctly by everything which moves. A powerful aromatic odor assails me; I seek the source of it. Opposite me, in full daylight, a nurse is rubbing with a drug some gnarled and blackened hands, enormous paws which the earth of the battlefields, where they were too long implanted, has almost made moldy. The strong-smelling liquid is becoming a layer of frothy polish.

The foulness of his hands appalls me. Gathering my wits with an effort, I said aloud:

"Why don't they wash his hands?"

My neighbor on the right, the gnome in the mustard vest, seems to hear me, and shakes his head.

My eyes go back to the other side, and for hours I devote myself to watching in obstinate detail, with wide-open eyes, the water-swollen man whom I saw floating vaguely in the night like a balloon. By night he was whitish. By day he is yellow, and his big eyes are glutted with yellow. He gurgles, makes noises of subterranean water, and mingles sighs with words and morsels of words. Fits of coughing tan his ochreous face.

His spittoon is always full. It is obvious that his heart, where his wasted sulphurate hand is placed, beats too hard and presses his spongy lungs and the tumor of water which distends him. He lives in the settled notion of emptying his inexhaustible body. He is constantly examining his bed-bottle, and I see his face in that yellow reflection. All day I watched the torture and punishment of that body. His cap and tunic, no longer in the least like him, hang from a nail.

Once, when he lay engulfed and choking, he pointed to the negro, perpetually oscillating, and said:

"He wanted to kill himself because he was homesick."

The doctor has said to me—to me: "You're going on nicely." I wanted to ask him to talk to me about myself, but there was no time to ask him!

Towards evening my yellow-vested neighbor, emerging from his meditations and continuing to shake his head, answers my questions of the morning:

"They can't wash his hands—it's embedded."

A little later that day I became restless. I lifted my arm—it was clothed in white linen. I hardly knew my emaciated hand—that shadow stranger! But I recognized the identity disk on my wrist. Ah, then! that went with me into the depths of hell!

For hours on end my head remains empty and sleepless, and there are hosts of things that I perceive badly, which are, and then are not. I have answered some questions. When I say, Yes, it is a sigh that I utter, and only that. At other times, I seem again to be half-swept away into pictures of tumored plains and mountains crowned. Echoes of these things vibrate in my ears, and I wish that some one would come who could explain the dreams.

* * * * * *

Strange footsteps are making the floor creak, and stopping there. I open my eyes. A woman is before me. Ah! the sight of her throws me into infinite confusion! She is the woman of my vision. Was it true, then? I look at her with wide-open eyes. She says to me:

"It's me."

Then she bends low and adds softly:

"I'm Marie; you're Simon."

"Ah!" I say. "I remember."

I repeat the profound words she has just uttered. She speaks to me again with the voice which comes back from far away. I half rise. I look again. I learn myself again, word by word.

It is she, naturally, who tells me I was wounded in the chest and hip, and that I lay three days forsaken—ragged wounds, much blood lost, a lot of fever, and enormous fatigue.

"You'll get up soon," she says.

I get up?—I, the prostrate being? I am astonished and afraid.

Marie goes away. She increases my solitude, step by step, and for a long time my eyes follow her going and her absence.

In the evening I hear a secret and whispered conference near the bed of the sick man in the brown vest. He is curled up, and breathes humbly. They say, very low:

"He's going to die—in one hour from now, or two. He's in such a state that to-morrow morning he'll be rotten. He must be taken away on the moment."

At nine in the evening they say that, and then they put the lights out and go away. I can see nothing more but him. There is the one lamp, close by, watching over him. He pants and trickles. He shines as though it rained on him. His beard has grown, grimily. His hair is plastered on his sticky forehead; his sweat is gray.

In the morning the bed is empty, and adorned with clean sheets.

And along with the man annulled, all the things he had poisoned have disappeared.

"It'll be Number Thirty-six's turn next," says the orderly.

I follow the direction of his glance. I see the condemned man. He is writing a letter. He speaks, he lives. But he is wounded in the belly. He carries his death like a fetus.

* * * * * *

It is the day when we change our clothes. Some of the invalids manage it by themselves; and, sitting up in bed, they perform signaling operations with arms and white linen. Others are helped by the nurse. On their bare flesh I catch sight of scars and cavities, and parts stitched and patched, of a different shade. There is even a case of amputation (and bronchitis) who reveals a new and rosy stump, like a new-born infant. The negro does not move while they strip his thin, insect-like trunk; and then, bleached once more, he begins again to rock his head, looking boundlessly for the sun and for Africa. They exhume the paralyzed man from his sheets and change his clothes opposite me. At first he lies motionless in his clean shirt, in a lump. Then he makes a guttural noise which brings the nurse up. In a cracked voice, as of a machine that speaks, he asks her to move his feet, which are caught in the sheet. Then he lies staring, arranged in rigid orderliness within the boards of his carcass.

Marie has come back and is sitting on a chair. We both spell out the past, which she brings me abundantly. My brain is working incalculably.

"We're quite near home, you know," Marie says.

Her words extricate our home, our quarter; they have endless echoes.

That day I raised myself on the bed and looked out of the window for the first time, although it had always been there, within reach of my eyes. And I saw the sky for the first time, and a gray yard as well, where it was visibly cold, and a gray day, an ordinary day, like life, like everything.

Quickly the days wiped each other out. Gradually I got up, in the middle of the men who had relapsed into childhood, and were awkwardly beginning again, or plaintively complaining in their beds. I have strolled in the wards, and then along a path. It is a matter of formalities now—convalescence, and in a month's time the Medical Board.

At last Marie came one morning for me, to go home, for that interval.

She found me on the seat in the yard of the hospital, which used to be a school, under the cloth—which was the only spot where a ray of sunshine could get in. I was meditating in the middle of an assembly of old cripples and men with heads or arms bandaged, with ragged and incongruous equipment, with sick clothes. I detached myself from the miracle-yard and followed Marie, after thanking the nurse and saying good-by to her.

The corporal of the hospital orderlies is the vicar of our church—he who said and who spread it about that he was going to share the soldiers' sufferings, like all the priests. Marie says to me, "Aren't you going to see him?"

"No," I say.

We set out for life by a shady path, and then the high road came. We walked slowly. Marie carried the bundle. The horizons were even, the earth was flat and made no noise, and the dome of the sky no longer banged like a big clock. The fields were empty, right to the end, because of the war; but the lines of the road were scriptural, turning not aside to the right hand or to the left. And I, cleansed, simplified, lucid—though still astonished at the silence and affected by the peacefulness—I saw it all distinctly, without a veil, without anything. It seemed to me that I bore within me a great new reason, unused.

We were not far away. Soon we uncovered the past, step by step. As fast as we drew near, smaller and smaller details introduced themselves and told us their names—that tree with the stones round it, those forsaken and declining sheds. I even found recollections shut up in the little retreats of the kilometer-stones.

But Marie was looking at me with an indefinable expression.

"You're icy cold," she said to me suddenly, shivering.

"No," I said, "no."

We stopped at an inn to rest and eat, and it was already evening when we reached the streets.

Marie pointed out a man who was crossing over, yonder.

"Monsieur Rampaille is rich now, because of the War."

Then it was a woman, dressed in fluttering white and blue, disappearing round the corner of a house:

"That's Antonia Véron. She's been in the Red Cross service. She's got a decoration because of the War."

"Ah!" I said, "everything's changed."

Now we are in sight of the house. The distance between the corner of the street and the house seems to me smaller than it should be. The court comes to an end suddenly; its shape looks shorter than it is in reality. In the same way, all the memories of my former life appear dwindled to me.