The Wrack of the Storm | Page 7

heroes of Sparta, instead of possessing an
imperative and vital interest in fighting, they had everything to gain by
not fighting and nothing to lose--save honour. In the one scale were fire
and the sword, ruin, massacre, the infinite disaster which we see; in the
other was that little word honour, which also represents infinite things,
but things which we do not see, or which we must be very pure and
very great to see quite clearly. It has happened now and again in history
that a man standing higher than his fellows perceives what this word
represents and sacrifices his life and the life of those whom he loves to
what he perceives; and we have not without reason devoted to such
men a sort of cult that places them almost on a level with the gods. But
what had never yet happened--and I say this without fear of
contradiction from whosoever cares to search the memory of man--is
that a whole people, great and small, rich and poor, learned and
ignorant, deliberately immolated itself thus for the sake of an unseen
thing.
2
And observe that we are not discussing one of those heroic resolutions
which are taken in a moment of enthusiasm, when man easily surpasses
himself, and which have not to be maintained when, forgetting his
intoxication, he lapses on the morrow to the dead level of his everyday
life. We are concerned with a resolution that has had to be taken and
maintained every morning, for now nearly four months, in the midst of
daily increasing distress and disaster. And not only has this resolution
not wavered by a hair's breadth, but it grows as steadily as the national
misfortune; and to-day, when this misfortune is reaching its full, the
national resolution is likewise attaining its zenith. I have seen many of
my refugee fellow-countrymen: some used to be rich and had lost their
all; others were poor before the war and now no longer owned even
what the poorest own. I have received many letters from every part of
Europe where duty's exiles had sought a brief instant of repose. In them
there was lamentation, as was only too natural, but not a reproach, not a
regret, not a word of recrimination. I did not once come upon that

hopeless but excusable cry which, one would think, might so easily
have sprung from despairing lips:
"If our king had not done what he did, we should not be suffering what
we are suffering to-day."
The idea does not even occur to them. It is as though this thought were
not of those which can live in that atmosphere purified by misfortune.
They are not resigned, for to be resigned means to renounce the strife,
no longer to keep up one's courage. They are proud and happy in their
distress. They have a vague feeling that this distress will regenerate
them after the manner of a baptism of faith and glory and ennoble them
for all time in the remembrance of men. An unexpected breath, coming
from the secret reserves of the human race and from the summits of the
human heart, has suddenly passed over their lives and given them a
single soul, formed of the same heroic substance as that of their great
king.
3
They have done what had never before been done; and it is to be hoped
for the happiness of mankind that no nation will ever again be called
upon for a like sacrifice. But this wonderful example will not be lost,
even though there be no longer any occasion to imitate it. At a time
when the universal conscience seemed about to bend under the weight
of long prosperity and selfish materialism, suddenly it raised by several
degrees what we may term the political morality of the world and lifted
it all at once to a height which it had not yet reached and from which it
will never again be able to descend, for there are actions so glorious,
actions which fill so great a place in our memory, that they found a sort
of new religion and definitely fix the limits of the human conscience
and of human loyalty and courage.
They have really, as I have already said and as history will one day
establish with greater eloquence and authority than mine, they have
really saved Latin civilization. They had stood for centuries at the
junction of two powerful and hostile forms of culture. They had to
choose and they did not hesitate. Their choice was all the more

significant, all the more instructive, inasmuch as none was so well
qualified as they to choose with a full knowledge of what they were
doing. You are all aware that more than half of Belgium is of Teutonic