those whom they know best, and it seems as if all their
previous life had suddenly retreated to a vast distance...." Then the
exultation passes, and "nothing remains but infinite fatigue and
infinite waiting."

* * * * *

But I must cut these descriptions short, for I have to consider the
leading content of the work, its thought.

In _War and Peace_ the profound sense of the destiny which guides
mankind is ardently sought, and is found from time to time by the light
of some flash of suffering or of genius, found by those few who, through
breed or individual sensibility, have exceptional insight: for instance
Prince Andrew, Peter Besuhov. But a great roller seems to have passed
over the peoples of to-day, reducing all to a level. The most that can
happen is that for a moment, now and again, there may rise from the huge
flock the isolated bleating of one of the beasts about to die. Thus we
have the ethereal figure of Corporal Bertrand, "with his thoughtful
smile"--the merest sketch--"a man of few words, never talking of
himself"; a man who could once only deliver up the secret of his
anguished thoughts--in the twilight hour which follows the killing, just
before he himself is killed. He thinks of those whom he has slain in the
frenzy of the hand-to-hand fighting:

"It had to be done," he said. "It had to be done, for the sake of the
future."

He folded his arms and threw up his head.

"The future!" he cried, all of a sudden. "Those who live after us--what
will they think of these killings, ... these exploits, concerning which
we who do them do not even know if they are to be compared with those of
the heroes of Plutarch and Corneille or with the deeds of apaches!...
For all that, mind you, there is one figure that has risen above the
war, a figure which will shine with the beauty and the greatness of its
courage."

I listened, writes Barbusse, bending towards him, leaning on a stick. I
drank in the words that came, in the twilit silence, from lips which
rarely broke silence. His voice rang out as he said:

"Liebknecht!"

The same evening, Marthereau, a humble territorial, whose face,
bristling with hair, recalled that of a water-spaniel, is listening to a
comrade who says: "William is a foul beast, but Napoleon is a great
man." This same soldier, after groaning about the war, goes on to speak
with delight of the martial ardour displayed by the only son left to
him, a boy of five.