cause it is of old date."

"Such as these are your enemies quite as much as any of the German
soldiers who now share your wretchedness. The German soldiers are no
more than poor dupes odiously betrayed and brutalised, domesticated
beasts.... But the others are your enemies wherever they were born,
whatever the fashion in which they utter their names, and whatever the
language in which they lie. Look at them in the heavens above and on the
earth beneath! Look at them everywhere! Look well, till you know them,
that you may never forget their faces!"

Such is the wail of these armies. But the book closes with a note of
hope, with the unspoken oath of international brotherhood, what time a
rift forms in the black skies and a calm ray of light falls upon the
flooded plain.

* * * * *

One ray of sunlight does not make the sky clear, nor is the voice of one
soldier the voice of an army. The armies of to-day are nations; and in
such armies, as in every nation, there must doubtless conflict and
mingle many different currents. Barbusse's story is that of a single
squad, almost entirely composed of workers and peasants. But the fact
that among these humble folk, among those who, like the third estate in
'89, are nothing and shall be all,--that in this proletariat of the
armies there is obscurely forming an awareness of universal
humanity,--that so bold a voice can be raised from France,--that those
who are actually fighting can make a heroic effort to ignore environing
wretchedness and imminent death, to dream of the fraternal union of the
warring peoples,--I find in this a greatness which surpasses that of all
the victories, I find something whose poignant splendour will survive
the splendour of battle. I find something which will, I hope, put an end
to war.

_February, 1917._

"Journal de Geneve," March 19, 1917.

XVI

AVE, CAESAR, MORITURI TE SALUTANT

_Dedicated to the Heroic Onlookers in Safe Places._

In one of the scenes of his terrible and admirable book, _Under Fire_, a
record of experiences in the trenches of Picardy, dedicated "To the
memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119,"
Henri Barbusse depicts two privates going on leave to the neighbouring
town. They quit the hell of mud and blood; for months they have been
suffering unnamable tortures of body and mind; they now find themselves
among comfortable bourgeois who, being at a safe distance