The moral danger was a serious one, of which the Governments took no
notice at all. They were like bad coachmen who flog their horses up a
steep hill at a gallop; it is true that the horse reaches the top, but
as the road goes on he stumbles and falls, foundered for life. With
what a gallant spirit our young men rushed to the assault in the
beginning of the war! And then their ardour gradually diminished.
But the horse was still in harness, and the shafts held him up. A
factitious excitement was kept up all around him, his daily ration was
seasoned with glittering hopes; and though the strength went out of
it little by little, the poor creature could not fall down, could not
even complain, he had not the strength to think. The countersign all
about these victims was to hear nothing, to stop the ears and to lie.
Day after day the battle-tide ebbed, and left wrecks on the sand, men
wounded and maimed; and through them the depths of this human ocean
were brought to the light. These poor wretches, ruthlessly torn
from life, moved helplessly in the void, too feeble to cling to the
passions of yesterday or dreams of tomorrow. Some asked themselves
blindly, and others with a cruelly clear insight, why they had been
born, what life meant....
"_Since he who is destroyed, suffers, and he who destroys has
no pleasure, and is shortly destroyed himself, tell me what no
philosopher can explain; whom does it please, and to whose profit is
this unfortunate life of the universe, which is only preserved by the
injury or death of all the creatures which compose it_?"[1] .
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