THE WAR'S LEGACY OF HATRED

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

BEFORE we reach the end of this war, whose days of grief and terror now seem to be numbered, let us weigh for the last time in our minds the words of hatred and malediction which it has so often wrung from us.

We have to deal with the strangest of enemies. He has deliberately, scientifically, in full possession of his senses, without necessity or excuse, revived all the crimes which we had believed to be forever buried in the barbarous past. He has trampled under foot all the precepts which the human race had so painfully gleaned out of the cruel darknesses of its origins; he has violated all the laws of justice, of humanity, of loyalty, of honor, from the highest, which almost touch the divine, to the simplest and most elementary, which still appertain to the lower orders. There is no longer any doubt on this point. The proof of it has been established and reëstablished, the certitude definitively acquired.

But, on the other hand, it is no less certain that the enemy has displayed virtues which it would not be right for us to deny; for one honors one's self by recognizing

In October of 1916 this article appeared in Les Annales, Paris. It was later translated for the Current History Magazine, through whose courtesy it is here reprinted.

The Belgian Maeterlinck, born 1862, is well known on this side of the Atlantic as an author and playwright. He began publishing his works about 1890. Among his best-known plays are "Pelleas and Melisande," "The Blue Bird," and "The Unknown Guest."

the valor of those whom one combats. He has gone to death in deep, compact, disciplined masses, with a blind, obstinate, hopeless heroism, for which history furnishes no example equally somber, and which often has compelled our admiration and our pity.

I am well aware that this heroism is not like that which we love. For us heroism should be, above all, voluntary, free from all restraint, active, ardent, joyous, spontaneous; whereas with them it is mixed with much of servility, of passivity, of sadness, of gloomy, ignorant submission, and of fears more or less base. Yet in a moment of peril these distinctions vanish for the most part; no force on earth could drive toward death a nation that did not have within itself the will to confront death.

Our soldiers have not deceived themselves on this point. Ask those who return from the trenches. They execrate the enemy; they have a horror of the aggressor, unjust, arrogant, gross, too often cruel and perfidious; they do not hate the man, they pity him; and, after the battle, in the defenseless wounded or the disarmed prisoner they recognize with astonishment a brother in misery who, like themselves, has been trying to do his duty, and who has laws which he considers high and necessary. Underneath the intolerable enemy they see the unfortunate mortal who likewise is bearing the burden of life.

Leaving out of account the unpardonable aggression, and the inexpiable violation of treaties, very little is lacking to make this war, despite its madness, a bloody but magnificent testimonial of grandeur, of heroism, of the spirit of sacrifice. Humanity was ready to raise itself above itself, to surpass all that it had achieved up to this hour. And it has done it. We have not known of nations that were capable, through months and years, of renouncing their rest, their security, their wealth, their well

being, all that they possessed and loved, even life itself, to accomplish what they believed to be their duty. We had never seen whole nations that were able to understand and admit that the happiness of each of those living at the moment of trial does not count when it is a question of the honor of those no longer living or of the happiness of those not yet born.

Here we stand on summits that had never before been attained. And if, on the, part of our enemies, this unexampled renunciation had not been poisoned at its source, if the war which they wage against us had been as beautiful, as loyal, as generous, as chivalrous as that which we wage against them, one might believe that it was to be the last war, and that it was to end, not in mortal combat, but in the awakening from a bad dream with a noble and fraternal astonishment. They have not permitted this to be so; and it is their deception, we may rest assured, that the future will have the greatest difficulty in pardoning.

Now, what are we going to do? Must we go on hating to the end of our days? Hatred is the heaviest load that man can bear on this earth, and we should be bowed down by the burden. But, on the other hand, we do not wish to be again the victims of trust and love. Here once more our soldiers, in their clear-eyed simplicity and nearness to truth, anticipate the future and teach us what is best to do and not to do. As we have seen, they do not hate the individual, but they do not trust him. They do not see the human being in him until he is unarmed. They know from sad experience that as long as he has weapons he does not resist the mad impulse to injure, to betray, to kill, and that he becomes good only when he is powerless.

Is he thus by nature, or has he been made thus by those

who lead him? Have the chiefs carried away the whole nation, or has the whole nation driven its chiefs? Have the leaders made the people like themselves, or have the people chosen the leaders and supported them only because they resembled themselves? Did the disease come from below or from above, or was it everywhere? This is the great obscure point of the awful adventure. It is not easy to explain, and it is still less easy to find an

excuse.

If they prove that they have been deceived and corrupted by their masters, they are proving at the same time that they are less intelligent, less firmly grounded in justice, honor, and humanity in a word, less civilized

than those whom they pretend to have a right to subjugate in the name of a superiority which their own demonstration annihilates; on the other hand, if they do not prove that their errors, their perfidies, and their cruelties, - which can no longer be denied are to be imputed solely to their masters, these sins fall back upon their own heads with all their pitiless weight. I do not know how they will escape the horns of this dilemma, nor what decision will be rendered by the future, which is wiser than the past, even as the morning, to quote the old Slavic proverb, is wiser than the night. Meanwhile let us imitate the prudence of our admirable soldiers, who know better than we do what path to follow.

FRANCE AND THE NEW COMMANDMENTS

PAUL DESCHANEL

LET us hearken to the voice of the trench and the tomb; what comes from there is a cry of love. Never has the French family been more united. Frenchmen were following different roads, but they have come together at the summit. The same devotion, the same ideal! The heroes facing death know that before the brief flame of life is extinguished in them it lights another, it is immortal. And the enemy does not comprehend that the thing which was tearing us apart is what is now uniting us the passion for right.

France of St. Louis, of Joan of Arc, of St. Vincent de Paul, of Pascal; France of Rabelais, of Descartes, of Molière, of Voltaire; France of the Crusades and France of the Revolution, you are sacred to us, and your sons are equal in our hearts as they are in the face of peril. Those who do not discover the common peak under the same rays have not looked long enough or far enough.

Yes, this sublime array of youth goes to death as to a higher life. Will that higher life be the life of France?

Paul Eugène Louis Deschanel has held several of the highest offices in the gift of the French Nation, being several times President and Vice President of the French Chamber of Deputies. He was born in 1856 and obtained his education at the College St.-Barbe. He has published many studies of social, political, and economic conditions in his native land.

The address here given was delivered on the occasion of the meeting of the Academics of the Institute of France in Paris, October 26, 1916.