"
What consolation can one offer, when one does not believe in the ideal
for which they lived, and which is killing them?--The long-sought
answer finally came to Clerambault, almost unconsciously: "You must
care for men more than for illusion, or even for truth."
Clerambault's warm feelings were not reciprocated; and he was more
attacked than ever, though for some months he had published nothing.
In the autumn of 1917 the anger against him had risen to an unheard-of
height. The disproportion was really laughable between this rage and
the feeble words of one man, but it was so all over the world. A dozen
or so weak pacifists, alone, surrounded, without means of being heard
through any paper of standing, spoke honestly but not loudly, and this
let loose a perfect frenzy of insults and threats. At the slightest
contradiction the monster Opinion fell into an epileptic fit.
The prudent Perrotin who, as a rule, was surprised at nothing, kept
quiet, and let Clerambault ruin himself his own way; but even he was
alarmed by this explosion of tyrannical stupidity. In history and at a
distance it could be laughed at; but close at hand it looked as if the
human brain was about to give way. Why is it that in this war men lost
their mental balance more than in any other at any previous time? Has
the war been really more atrocious? That is either childish nonsense,
or a deliberate forgetfulness of what has happened in our own day,
under our eyes; in Armenia, in the Balkans; during the repression of
the Commune, in colonial wars under new conquistadors in China and the
Congo.
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