he beauty of
the sight of these enthusiastic and serious young people, in this most
tragical hour of history, discussing their duties ardently and at great
length, taking stock of their faith, and solemnly affirming that faith
in a sort of oath of the tennis court.[35] We see them affirming their
faith in liberty; in the solidarity of the peoples; in their moral
mission; in their duty to destroy the hydra of imperialism, both
militarist and capitalist, whether at home or abroad; in their duty to
construct a juster and more humane society.

I give them fraternal greetings. They do not speak alone. Everywhere the
echoes answer. Everywhere I see young people resembling them, and
stretching forth friendly hands to their fellows in Switzerland. The
vicissitudes of this war--a war which, endeavouring to crush free
spirits, has but succeeded in making them feel the need for seeking one
another out and for cementing unity--has brought me into close
relationships with the young of all countries, in Europe, in America,
and even in the east and the far east. Everywhere I have found the same
communion of sufferings and hopes, the same aspirations, the same
revolts, the same determination to break with the past whose malevolence
and stupidity have been so plainly proved. I have found them all
animated with the same ambition to rebuild human society upon new
foundations, wider and more firmly laid than those which sustain the
quaking edifice of this old world of rapine and fanaticism, of savage
nationalities scorched by the war, rearing heavenward frames blackened
by the fire.

_June, 1917._

"demain," Geneva, July, 1917.

XV

UNDER FIRE

BY HENRI BARBUSSE[36]

Here we have a pitiless mirror of the war. In that mirror the war is
reflected day by day for sixteen months. It is a mirror of two eyes;
they are clear, shrewd, perspicacious, and bold; they are the eyes of a
Frenchman. The author, Henri Barbusse, dedicates his book: "To the
memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119,"
during December, 1915. In Paris _Le Feu_ was honoured with the Goncourt
prize.

By what miracle has so truth-telling a work been able to appear
unmutilated, at a time when so many free words, infinitely less free,
have been censored? I shall not attempt to explain the fact, but I shall
profit by it. The voice of this witness drives back into the shadow all
the interested falsehoods which during the last three years h