aning, the gnashing of
teeth, the howling, the crashing and bursting, the wailing and cursing
and agonising in death, because their ears are filled with the murmur of
everyday affairs. These blind and deaf ones are sick, not I. Sick are
those dumb beings whose soul can give voice neither to compassion nor to
anger...." ("My Comrade").

The author's aim is to arouse these sick beings from their torpor, to
treat them with the actual cautery of pain. This aim is portrayed in the
person of Captain Marschner ("Baptism of Fire"), who, when his company
is in the thick of the slaughter, suffers from nothing so intensely as
from the harsh impassivity of his lieutenant, but who, himself at the
point of death, finds it a positive solace to see on Weixler's stern
face a shadow of pain, brotherly pain.

"Thank God," he thinks. "At last he knows what suffering is!"

"Through sympathy to knowledge," sings the mystical chorus of
_Parsifal_.

This "suffering with others" (sympathy, Mitleid), this "pain which
unites," overflows from the work of Andreas Latzko.

_November 15, 1917._

"Les Tablettes," Geneva, December, 1917.

XIX

VOX CLAMANTIS....[43]

After the glacial torpor of the early days of the war, mutilated art
begins to bloom anew. The irrepressible song of the soul wells up out of
suffering. Man is not merely, as he is apt to boast, a reasoning animal
(he might, with better ground, term himself an unreasoning one); he is a
singing animal; he can no more get on without singing than without
bread. We learn it amid the very trials through which we are passing
to-day. Although the general suppression of liberty in Europe has
doubtless deprived us of the deeper music, of the most intimate
confessions, we nevertheless hear great voices rising from every land.
Some of these, coming from the armies, sing in sad and epic strains.
See, for example, _Under Fire_ by Henri Barbusse, and the heart-rending
tales issued by Andreas Latzko under the collective title of _Men in
Battle_. Others express the pain and horror of those who, remaining at
home, look on at the butchery without taking part in it, and who, being
inactive, suffer all the more from the torments of thought. To this
category belong the impassioned poems of Marcel Martinet[44] and P. J.
Jouve.[45] Paying less attention to suffering and more concerned with
understanding, the English novelists, H. G. Wells[46] and Douglas
Goldring,[47] give a faithful analysis