s last year, and the other years, and
a century ago and centuries since.

Near me an old peasant in sabots is planted. Rags, shapeless and
colorless--the color of time--cover the eternal man of the fields. He
is what he always was. He blinks, leaning on a stick; he holds his cap
in his hand because what he sees is so like a church service. His legs
are trembling; he wonders if he ought to be kneeling.

And I, I feel myself diminished, cut back, returned through the cycles
of time to the little that I am.

* * * * * *

Up there, borne by the flag-draped rostrum, a man is speaking. He
lifts a sculptural head aloft, whose hair is white as marble.

At my distance I can hardly hear him. But the wind carries me some
phrases, louder shouted, of his peroration. He is preaching
resignation to the people, and the continuance of things. He implores
them to abandon finally the accursed war of classes, to devote
themselves forever to the blessed war of races in all its shapes.
After the war there must be no more social utopias, but discipline
instead, whose grandeur and beauty the war has happily revealed, the
union of rich and poor for national expansion and the victory of France
in the world, and sacred hatred of the Germans, which is a virtue in
the French. Let us remember!

Then another orator excites himself and shouts that the war has been
such a magnificent harvest of heroism that it must not be regretted.
It has been a good thing for France; it has made lofty virtues and
noble instincts gush forth from a nation which seemed to be decadent.
Our people had need of an awakening and to recover themselves, and
acquire new vigor. With metaphors which hover and vibrate he proclaims
the glory of killing and being killed, he exalts the ancient passion
for plumes and scarlet in which the heart of France is molded.

Alone on the edge of the crowd I feel myself go icy by the touch of
these words and commands, which link future and past together and
misery to misery. I have already heard them resounding forever. A
world of thoughts growls confusedly within me. Once I cried
noiselessly, "No!"--a deformed cry, a strangled protest of all my faith
against all the fallacy which comes down upon us. That first cry which
I have risked among men, I cast almost as a visionary, but almost as a
dumb man. The old peasant did not even turn his earthy, gigantic head.
And I hear a roar of applaus