Clerambault | Page 9

day before, and his constant optimism. It was not plain sailing, but
there is nothing that the brain cannot attain to. When its master thinks it
absolutely necessary to get rid for a time of principles which are in his
way, it finds in these same principles the exception which violates them
while confirming the rule. Clerambault began to construct a thesis, an
ideal--absurd enough--in which these contradictions could be
reconciled: War against War, War for Peace, for eternal Peace.

The enthusiasm of his son was a great help to him. Maxime had
enlisted. His generation was carried away on a wave of heroic joy; they
had waited so long--they had not dared to expect an opportunity for
action and sacrifice.
Older men who had never tried to understand them, stood amazed; they
remembered their own commonplace, bungling youth, full of petty
egotisms, small ambitions, and mean pleasures. As they could not
recognise themselves in their children they attributed to the war this
flowering of virtues which had been growing up for twenty years
around their indifference and which the war was about to reap. Even
near a father as large-minded as Clerambault, Maxime was blighted.
Clerambault was interested in spreading his own overflowing diffuse
nature, too much so to see clearly and aid those whom he loved: he
brought to them the warm shadow of his thought, but he stood between
them and the sun.

These young people sought employment for their strength which really
embarrassed them, but they did not find it in the ideals of the noblest
among their elders; the humanitarianism of a Clerambault was too
vague, it contented itself with pleasant hopes, without risk or vigour,
which the quietude of a generation grown old in the talkative peace of
Parliaments and Academies, alone could have permitted. Except as an
oratorical exercise it had never tried to foresee the perils of the future,
still less had it thought to determine its attitude in the day when the
danger should be near. It had not the strength to make a choice between
widely differing courses of action. One might be a patriot as well as an
internationalist or build in imagination peace palaces or
super-dreadnoughts, for one longed to know, to embrace, and to love
everything. This languid Whitmanism might have its aesthetic value,
but its practical incoherence offered no guide to young people when
they found themselves at the parting of the ways. They pawed the
ground trembling with impatience at all this uncertainty and the
uselessness of their time as it went by.
They welcomed the war, for it put an end to all this indecision, it chose
for them, and they made haste to follow it. "We go to our death,--so be
it; but to go is life." The battalions went off singing, thrilling with
impatience, dahlias in their hats, the muskets adorned with flowers.
Discharged soldiers re-enlisted; boys put their names down, their
mothers urging them to it; you would have thought they were setting
out for the Olympian games.
It was the same with the young men on the other side of the Rhine, and
there as here, they were escorted by their gods: Country, Justice, Right,
Liberty, Progress of the World, Eden-like dreams of re-born humanity,
a whole phantasmagoria of mystic ideas in which young men shrouded
their passions. None doubted that his cause was the right one, they left
discussion to others, themselves the living proof, for he who gives his
life needs no further argument.
The older men however who stayed behind, had not their reasons for
ceasing to reason. Their brains were given to them to be used, not for
truth, but for victory. Since in the wars of today, in which entire

peoples are engulfed, thoughts as well as guns are enrolled. They slay
the soul, they reach beyond the seas, and destroy after centuries have
passed. Thought is the heavy artillery which works from a distance.
Naturally Clerambault aimed his pieces, also the question for him was
no longer to see clearly, largely, to take in the horizon, but to sight the
enemy,--it gave him the illusion that he was helping his son.
With an unconscious and feverish bad faith kept up by his affection, he
sought in everything that he saw, heard, or read, for arguments to prop
up his will to believe in the holiness of the cause, for everything which
went to prove that the enemy alone had wanted war, was the sole
enemy of peace, and that to make war on the enemy was really to wish
for peace.
There was proof enough and to spare; there always is; all that is needed
is to know when to open and shut your eyes ...But nevertheless
Clerambault was not entirely satisfied. These half-truths, or