If a man wants to pluck some flower or other along the path that
smiles from the fringe of grass, let him pluck it, but without
breaking ranks, without dropping out of the squadron of which the
leader must always keep his eyes on the flaming sonorous star. But
if he put the little flower in the strap above his cuirass, not to
look at it himself, but for others to look at, away with him! Let
him go with his flower in his buttonhole and dance somewhere else.

"Look, friend, if you want to accomplish your mission and serve
your country you must make yourself unpleasant to the sensitive
boys who only see the world through the eyes of their sweethearts.
Or through something worse. Let your words be strident and rasping
in their ears.

"The squadron must only stop at night, near a wood or under the lee
of a mountain. There they will pitch their tents and the crusaders
will wash their feet, and sup off what their women have prepared,
then they will beget a son on them and kiss them and go to sleep to
begin the march again the following day. And when someone dies they
will leave him on the edge of the road with his armor on him, at
the mercy of the crows. Let the dead take the trouble to bury the
dead."

Instead of the rationalists and humanists of the North, Unamuno's idols
are the mystics and saints and sensualists of Castile, hard stalwart
men who walked with God, Loyola, Torquemada, Pizarro, Narvaez, who
governed with whips and thumbscrews and drank death down greedily like
heady wine. He is excited by the amorous madness of the mysticism of
Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz. His religion is paradoxical,
unreasonable, of faith alone, full of furious yearning other-worldliness.
His style, it follows perforce, is headlong, gruff, redundant, full of
tremendous pounding phrases. There is a vigorous angry insistence about
his dogmas that makes his essays unforgettable, even if one objects as
violently as I do to his asceticism and death-worship. There is an
anarchic fury about his crying in the wilderness that will win many a
man from the fleshpots and chain gangs.

In the apse of the old cathedral of Salamanca is a fresco of the Last
Judgment, perhaps by the Castilian painter Gallegos. Over the retablo
on a black ground a tremendous figure of the avenging angel brandishes
a sword while behind him unrolls the scroll of the _Dies Irae_ and
huddled