.
The professional soldiers will keep the war going as long as they can,
and when that is stopped, they will plan for another in the shortest
possible time. Before-the-war pacifists will all come out of their
holes, and be found at their posts, with touching demonstrations of
joy, while their old leaders who have been beating the drum in the
rear for over five years will reappear with olive branches in their
hands, smiling and talking of brotherly love. The men who swore
never to forget when they were in the trenches will accept all the
explanations and congratulations that are offered them. It is such a
bore not to forget! Five years of exhausting fatigue make you accept
anything through sheer weariness or boredom, or the wish to finish
it all, so the flourishes of triumph will drown the cries of the
vanquished. The one thought of most people will be to go back to their
sleepy before-the-war habits; first they will dance on the graves, and
then lie down and go to sleep on them, till after a while the war will
be only something to boast about in the evening. Perhaps they will
succeed in forgetting it so entirely, that the Dance of Death can be
resumed;--not all at once, of course, but later when we have had a
good rest. So there will be peace everywhere, till the time when it
will be war everywhere again. In the meaning that is now given to the
words, my friends, peace and war are just different labels for the
same bottle. It reminds me of what King Bomba said of his valiant
soldiers; dress them in red or in green as you choose, they will take
to their heels just the same. One says peace and the other war, but
neither means anything, there is only universal servitude, multitudes
swept along like the ebb and flow of tides; and this will continue as
long as no strong souls raise themselves above the human ocean, as
long as no one dares to fight against the fate that sways these great
masses."

"Fight against nature," said Coulanges. "Would you resist her laws?"

"There are no immutable laws," said Clerambault, laws like beings,
live, change, and die. It is the duty of the spirit, not to accept
these as the Stoics taught us, but rather to modify and shape them to
our needs. Laws are the outside form of the soul, and if it grows they
must grow also. The only just laws are those that suit me. Am I wrong
in thinking that the shoe should be made to fit the foot, not the foot
for the shoe?"

"I do not say that you are wrong