ame illusions
were worth in their elders and how those who did not believe in them
paid for them with their lives. Even as to those of their own age and as
to man in general their confidence was shaken. And besides, at such a
time it cost something to confide in people! Every day one learned of
some denunciation of thoughts and intimate conversations by a patriotic
spy whose zeal the government honored and stimulated. So it was that
these young people, through discouragement, through disdain, through
prudence, through a stoical sense of their solitude in thought, gave
themselves very little indeed the one to the other.

Pierre could not find among them that Horatio whom little
eighteen-year-old Hamlets seek. If he had a horror of estranging his
thought from public opinion (that public woman) he did feel the need of
joining it freely with souls of his own choosing. He was too tender to
be able to content himself with himself. He suffered from the universal
suffering. That crushed him by the amount of its pain, which he
exaggerated:--for if humanity does support it in spite of everything,
that is because humanity has a harder hide than is the delicate skin of
a frail boy. But what he did not exaggerate and what weighed him down
much more than the suffering of the world was the imbecility of it all.

It is nothing to undergo pain, it is nothing to die, if only one can see
a reason for it. Sacrifice is a good thing when one understands why it
is made. But what is this why? What is the sense of this world and its
harrowings for a youth? If he be sincere and sound of mind, in what way
can he interest himself in the coarse medley of nations standing head to
head like stupid rams on the brink of an abyss, into which all are about
to tumble? And yet the road was broad enough for all. Why then this
madness to destroy oneself? Why these countries given over to pride,
these States devoted to rapine, these peoples to whom is taught murder,
as if murder were their duty? But wherefore this butchery everywhere
among living beings? Why this world that devours itself? To what purpose
the nightmare of that monstrous and endless chain of life, each one of
whose links sets its jaws into the neck of the other, feasts on its
flesh, delights in its suffering and lives through its death? Why the
conflict and why the pain? Why death? Why life? Why? Why?...

That night when the boy got home the why had ceased its cry.

* * * * *

NEVER