They
hoped to reconcile their pacific principles with the fact of violence
by means of "big talk" which did not sound to them as outrageous as
it really was. To refuse would have been to give themselves up to the
war-like pack, which would have devoured them.
Alexandre Mignon would have had courage to face the bloody jaws if he
had had his little community at his back, but alone it was beyond his
strength. He let things go at first, without committing himself,
but he suffered, passing through agonies something like those of
Clerambault, but with a different result. He was less impulsive and
more intellectual. In order to efface his last scruples he hid
them under close reasoning, and with the aid of his colleagues he
laboriously proved by a + b that war was the duty of consistent
pacifism. His League had every advantage in dwelling on the criminal
acts of the enemy; but did not dwell on those in its own camp.
Alexandre Mignon had occasional glimpses of the universal injustice;
an intolerable vision, on which he closed his shutters....
In proportion as he was swaddled in his war arguments, it became more
difficult for him to disentangle himself, and he persisted more and
more. Suppose a child carelessly pulls off the wing of an insect; it
is only a piece of nervous awkwardness, but the insect is done for,
and the child ashamed and irritated, tears the poor creature to pieces
to relieve his own feelings.
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