I clambered down the side of the mountain, and then walked quickly along the road to Ballaigues. The night was serene. A dog was howling in the valley, a harsh bark which sufficed to hold my attention. It was only when I had got back on to Swiss territory that I thought of the risk I had run of being arrested as a deserter.
I had cut through the woods. Dead branches cracked under my feet. I crushed a glow worm. At last I made out the hotel lights. My heart bounded when I reached it, I don't know what I expected.
There was nobody in the corner of the terrace where we generally gossiped, the Landrys and I. I bowed to the old Portuguese ladies who were enjoying the evening air. From the hall I saw the English installed phlegmatically at their poker table in the smoking-room. A solemn and inscrutable waiter passed me, carrying a tea tray. Nothing abnormal struck me. I wondered whether they knew.
I went down on to the terrace again. A silhouette rose from the shadows. By the light of his cigar, I recognised Cipollina.
"Well!" he called to me, "what do you say to that?"
[Pg 32]
"I can't believe it yet!"
In so saying I ingeniously betrayed my dominant feeling.
He offered me a cigarette, and said quickly:
"Shall we take a turn?"
I was going to agree to doing so when I suddenly thought of my preparations; and I was seized with the vain idea of guarding against future fatigue.
"Thanks," I said, "I've got my packing to do. What about you?"
I understood him to say he had finished. I continued:
"Are you going by my train?"
"What train?"
"The 6:50, if it still exists. The Paris Express."
He was silent.
"Are you going to rejoin soon?"
He shook his head abruptly and exclaimed:
"Not I!"
I looked at him; I understood. He went on in an aggressive tone:
"You won't catch me going to be knocked on the head, when I've the luck to be out of it! And you, are you itching for it, Dreher?"
"Yes, I'm going back," I said.
"Well, well! And I thought you so emancipated!" He went on ironically. He only had one skin, and he meant to stick to it; he hadn't the slightest desire to fight for Serbia, as I was saying just now.... No, it was astounding! A nice mess our diplomatists must have made of it!... All the more so since, as we suspected nothing, we naturally were not ready! And so it meant catastrophe!... We were going to get a licking!
[Pg 33]
He ended by taking me by the arm:
"Come along and have a smoke and then we can chat."
"No," I said decidedly. "I'm going up again."
"In that case, my dear fellow, good-bye."
"Au revoir."
"Oh! there's not much chance of our ever meeting again!"
Was it the effect of these banal remarks? Hardly had I regained my room and gone to lean my elbows on the rail of the balcony than I felt as if crushed by the revelation I had witnessed during the last three hours.
A formidable adventure was in the making and my part as a finite being was to consider it as a spectator. The things I was saying just now, without attaching any definite meaning to them appeared to me clothed suddenly in their imperious significance: Yes, in three days I should be at F——, in four my rifle and my outfit would have been handed over to me, shortly afterwards I should be entrained.... Here the vision lost its clearness; only a few concise pictures rose from a sombre haze: marches and counter marches, the bleeding feet, the exhaustion, the cold, the filthy promiscuousness, nothing to eat; and then one day the battle; not an entertaining engagement like those during man?uvres, interrupted towards 11 A.M. by the bugle call, but the grim struggle, glued to the ground advancing foot by foot, day after day and night after night, against an invisible opponent, desperate, superior in discipline and in numbers, armed with frightful machines ... the whistle of the bullet, the explosion of the shells ...! And one morning, in some hole or corner, an obscure and crushing death.
[Pg 34]
Presentiments were unknown to me: I suddenly believed in them. I saw myself killed, it was all over and done with my career as a man, this life I had been pleased to order so ingenuously. The horror of the annihilation so near at hand suffocated me.
I breathed the scented night air like a drowning man. At my feet was the dark terrace, a servant had just cut off the electricity. I heard the gravel crunching beneath a footstep. A shadow ascended the steps. It must be Cipollina.
His words echoed in my ears, his "Not much!" I was suddenly seized with fury against him—the coward!—a fury which was almost immediately turned against myself. Was it not his conduct that was logical. He refused to sacrifice himself. He coldly applied his Doctrine, our Doctrine, of calm selfishness. I fumed to see this shopkeeper, this table d'h?te philosopher, superior in practical wisdom to myself, when I had ruminated my system for so long, and looked at it from every point of view.
Why did I not imitate him? I upbraided myself harshly on my lack of rational courage. For since I was the enemy of sentimental chimeras!... What could I believe in? Nothing, nothing! Duty, Honour, the Ideal? They were so many hollow sounds to me. Patriotism? No word was more foreign to me. I too was a Citizen of the World! The chauvinism of my father, a native of Lorraine, and an old soldier, seemed to me out-of-date, an ill-omened and ridiculous passion; in that, as in everything else, I was so little his son. As far back as I could remember, I had never espoused his craze for war and revenge. In former days when we used to spend our holidays at Eberménil, some miles from the frontier, nothing irritated me so much[Pg 35] when quite a child, as to feel how immovable the people were in their wild enmity against their neighbour. They never opened their mouths without making insolent or dangerous remarks; they never dreamt, it appeared, except of bringing back a cursed year. Why this rancour? As if it ought not to have satisfied them to continue to be Frenchmen themselves? What did it matter to them that their brothers from the neighbouring villages should have changed their name. Were the former more unhappy than the latter? My handbooks of history were full of exchanges of this kind, carried out without any one rebelling against them.
Grown older, I had only strengthened, by reasoning, my instinctive indifference in regard to the fate of the Lost Provinces. I had gone one better; what a high doctrine, I thought, was that of Internationalism! And convenient, too. I should have declared myself its adherent quite openly, but for my systematic slackness, my fear of committing myself. The result was that I took an interest in those theories which denied that there was any meaning in the term Fatherland.
I happened to find in them the subject for some daring developments, with which during even the last few days, I had taken a delight in upsetting Jeannine Landry's convictions.
Germany, especially, inspired me with no enmity; on the contrary, I had a weakness for the genius of her philosophers and musicians. Two years ago I had travelled in the country, and had stayed at Iéna for three weeks with one of my friends, a lecturer at the university. We had wandered together in the Thuringian forests, and slept, rolled in our cloaks, at the top of the Schnee-Kopf. How could one fail to be won[Pg 36] over by those glorious surroundings. As for the men over there ... I had pleasant recollections of a few merry shooting friends, one named Kroemer among others. If they had not appealed to me as a whole, did any one by any chance imagine that I cherished the slightest sympathy for the millions of beings—ugly, vain, and unintelligent—who made up the great majority of the nation which was mine by birth. In Paris it was true that, within a restricted circle, I experienced certain satisfactions which I should hardly have relished anywhere else. But, when finally analysed, even these delights did not amount to very much! They comprised the one real benefit which I owed to my position as a Frenchman. In order to assure the continuation of this advantage—and what, after all, did it amount to—it was agreed that I should sacrifice my one irretrievable treasure, my life.
You can see with what a decision I seemed to be faced, but oddly enough my revolt continued to be purely theoretical and abstract. Not for an instant did it seem to me possible or within my power to take the line simply of ignoring the fact that my country was mobilising. I saw myself as the conscious victim of a superior fatality; I knew that I should take the 6:50 train next day, that I should be at the Chanzy barracks before ten o'clock on Tuesday!
But that did not prevent me from cursing at fate. Tired of grumbling at myself, I consigned to perdition the instigators of the war. Spite blinded me; I kept on revolving most bitter, and I must admit, most unjust reflections. Yes, as Cipollina had said; what an accumulation of mistakes! For a long while back. It was all very well to say that Germany wanted war; was preparing for it! During the last few years per[Pg 37]haps. But had there not been a time when she had made advances to us? We had always refused to make friends, and had kept our eyes fixed stolidly on the Frankfort Treaty in which we pretended to see the one and only source of all our ills.
Our policy, of late, had become more captious. There had been a series of clumsy manifestos, an awakening, which one could not shut one's eyes to, of the old swashbuckling, nationalistic, and chauvinistic spirit. What countless occurrences, speeches, and articles had gone towards the making of a dangerous state of exaltation. Anything rather than a humiliating peace! Anything? That meant war. Oh well, they'd got it. They'd soon see!
What exasperated me more than anything was to think of all those who had done or allowed everything to be done, the ministers, ambassadors, and delegates who in history would bear a part, however insignificant, in the terrible responsibility. They were all, or nearly all, over the age limit; they need have no fear for their skins; it was the others, me and men of my generation, the youth between twenty and thirty years of age, whom, with high-flown words and light hearts, they would send to the slaughter!
But it was necessary to pack. I fulfilled this task with such mechanical precision that it calmed me. When I had finished I went out on to the balcony again in my shirt sleeves.
A crescent moon had just risen. A green mountain-side opposite me, at the other side of the cutting which terminated, I imagined, in the ravaged gorges of the Orbe, was bathed in her light. Vaguely phosphorescent fields lay soaked in a milky whiteness. Spreading[Pg 38] brown forests quivered softly. Half-way up fires were shining, the factory and station at Brassus. I admired the bold sweep and the contour of the Dent de Vaulion on the right. Farther on in the distance a series of mountain ridges, forming a circle, were indicated, bluish and pale beneath the halo.
My brow was cooling again. In the contemplation of this veiled and unreal scene my thoughts insensibly freed themselves of sinister obsessions.
What made me call to mind a very insignificant incident in this day fertile in shocks, that moment on the road when I had passed in review the joys for which I lived? The obscure feeling of distress which had made me stop talking recaptured me. I again experienced the sensation that everything was dismal, but at the same time was there not something which might be called an unexpected hope rising within me? What hope? I caught it, and questioned it. Was it not of new days when I should perhaps shake myself free of the torpor where I languished?
Halloa! I jeered. Was I too lending a hand in the resurrection of the warlike instinct legitimate in the son of the soldier who was in the charge at Rez?nville, in the grandson of the man who had commanded a regiment at Magenta? No, no: I acquitted myself of that; such wild intoxication was quite alien to me. The most I might admit was that my eyes were fixed on the future with a greater interest, that curiosity made my resignation easier.
I let my imagination run away with me. Turning successively towards the two horizons, I imagined I saw, beyond the mountains, the vastness of the two hostile territories where since to-night so many forces were being lavished in the elaboration of the battles[Pg 39] where they would devour each other to-morrow; a gigantic sheaf of hatred and lust, but also of devotion and heroism which had just burst into flame!
Midnight struck. My exaltation dwindled; at all events, I was not sorry, I thought, to have been equal to the emergency if only for a moment.
I went down to give the hall-porter orders to wake me at five o'clock, he was to have my bill ready, and I should expect a cab to be there for my luggage. In crossing the lounge I came upon the three Englishmen who were leaving the card-room. We had never exchanged a word, or a nod; I thought them ignorant of our language. I was going straight past them, when the one who was walking in front, a big, fair man, who looked an athlete in his smoking-jacket, stopped right in front of me.
"Good luck to your country, sir," he said.
"Thank you."
I mechanically held out my hand, which he shook hard.
His two companions did likewise.
I went upstairs again, feeling rather touched. Up there my scepticism got the upper hand again. I thought.
Will they stick to us, I wonder.
An amusing idea occurred to me, of sending a post-card to the little Landry girl to tell her of the incident. I took up a pen, but while doing so it struck me that the girl would not see anything very funny about it. Sentimentalise ... no thanks! I scrawled a few lines for her without mentioning the occurrence.