their wives and their children. Unlike the heroes of Sparta,
instead of possessing an imperative and vital interest in fighting,
they had everything to gain by not fighting and nothing to lose--save
honour. In the one scale were fire and the sword, ruin, massacre, the
infinite disaster which we see; in the other was that little word
honour, which also represents infinite things, but things which we do
not see, or which we must be very pure and very great to see quite
clearly. It has happened now and again in history that a man standing
higher than his fellows perceives what this word represents and
sacrifices his life and the life of those whom he loves to what he
perceives; and we have not without reason devoted to such men a sort
of cult that places them almost on a level with the gods. But what had
never yet happened--and I say this without fear of contradiction from
whosoever cares to search the memory of man--is that a whole people,
great and small, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, deliberately
immolated itself thus for the sake of an unseen thing.

2

And observe that we are not discussing one of those heroic resolutions
which are taken in a moment of enthusiasm, when man easily surpasses
himself, and which have not to be maintained when, forgetting his
intoxication, he lapses on the morrow to the dead level of his
everyday life. We are concerned with a resolution that has had to be
taken and maintained every morning, for now nearly four months, in the
midst of daily increasing distress and disaster. And not only has this
resolution not wavered by a hair's breadth, but it grows as steadily
as the national misfortune; and to-day, when this misfortune is
reaching its full, the national resolution is likewise attaining its
zenith. I have seen many of my refugee fellow-countrymen: some used to
be rich and had lost their all; others were poor before the war and
now no longer owned even what the poorest own. I have received many
letters from every part of Europe where duty's exiles had sought a
brief instant of repose. In them there was lamentation, as was only
too natural, but not a reproach, not a regret, not a word of
recrimination. I did not once come upon that hopeless but excusable
cry which, one would think, might so easily have sprung from
despairing lips:

"If our king had not done what he did, we should not be suffering what
we are suffering to-day."

The idea does not even occur to them. It is as