The chief seat of the disease was the idea of Nation; this inflamed point could not be touched without howls from the beast. Clerambault attacked it at once, without gloves.
What have I to do with your nations? Can you expect me to love or hate a nation? It is men that I love or hate, and in all nations you will find the noble, the base, and the ordinary man. Yes, and everywhere are few great or low, while the ordinary abound. Like or dislike a man for what he is, not for what others are; and if there is one man who is dear to me in a whole nation, that prevents me from condemning it. You talk of struggles and hatred between races? Races are the colours of life’s prism; it binds them together, and we have light. Woe to him who shatters it! I am not of one race, I belong to life as a whole; I have brothers in every nation, enemy or ally, and those you would thrust upon me as compatriots are not always the nearest. The families of our souls are scattered through the world. Let us reunite them! Our task is to undo these chaotic nations, and in their place to bind together more harmonious groups. Nothing can prevent it; on the anvil of a common suffering, persecution will forge the common affection of the tortured peoples.
Clerambault did not pride himself on his logic, but only tried to get at the popular idol through the joints of his armour. Often he did not deny the nation-idea, but accepted it as natural, at the same time attacking national rivalries in the most forcible manner. This attitude was by no means the least dangerous.
I cannot interest myself in struggles for supremacy between nations; it is indifferent which colour comes up, for humanity gains, no matter who is the winner. It is true, that in the contests of peace, the most vital, intelligent, and hardworking people, will always excel. But if the defeated competitors, or those who felt themselves falling behind, were to resort to violence to eliminate their successful rivals, it would be a monstrous thing. It would mean the sacrifice of the welfare of mankind to a commercial interest, and Country is not a business firm. It is of course unfortunate that when one nation goes up, another is apt to go down. But when “big business” in my country interferes with smaller trade, we do not say that it is a crime of lèse-patriotism, despite the fact that it may be a fight which brings ruin and death to many innocent victims.
The existing economic system of the world is calamitous and bad; it ought to be remedied; but war, which tries to swindle a more fortunate and able competitor for the benefit of the inexpert or the lazy, makes this vicious system worse; it enriches a few, and ruins the community.
All peoples cannot walk abreast on the same road; they are always passing each other, and being outstripped in their turn. What does it matter, since we are all in the same column? We should get rid of our silly self-conceit. The pole of the world’s energy is constantly changing, often in the same country. In France it has passed from Roman Provence to the Loire of the Valois; now it is at Paris, but it will not stay there always. The entire creation swings in alternate rhythm from germinating spring to dying autumn. Commercial methods are not immutable, any more than the treasures beneath the earth are inexhaustible. A people spends itself for centuries, without counting the cost; its very greatness will lead to its decline. It is only by renouncing the purity of its blood and mixing with other nations that it can subsist. Our old men today are sending the young ones to death; it does not make them younger, and they are killing the future.
Instead of raging against the laws of life, a wholesome people will try to understand them and see its real progress, not in a stupid obstinacy which refuses to grow old, but in a constant effort to advance with the age, changing and becoming greater. To each epoch its own task. It is merely sloth and weakness if we cling all our lives to the same one. Learn to change, for in that is life. The factory of humanity has work for all of us. Labour for all, peoples of the world, each man taking pride in the work of all the rest, for the travail, the genius of the whole earth is ours also!
These articles appeared here and there, whenever possible, in some little sheet of advanced literary and anarchistic views, in which violent attacks on persons took the place of a reasoned-out campaign against the order of things. They were nearly illegible, defaced as they were by the censor. Besides, when an article was reprinted in another paper, he would let pass with a capricious forgetfulness what he had cut out the day before, and cut what he had passed then. It took close study to make out the sense of the article after this treatment, but the remarkable thing was that the adversaries of Clerambault, not his friends, went to this trouble. Ordinarily, at Paris, these squalls do not last long. The most vindictive enemies, trained to wars of the pen, know that silence is a sharper weapon than insult, and get more out of their animosity by keeping it quiet; but in the hysterical crisis in which Europe was struggling, there was no guide, even for hatred. Clerambault was continually being recalled to the public mind by the violent attacks of Bertin, though he never failed to conclude each one in which he had discharged his venom, with a disdainful: “He is not worth speaking of.”
Bertin was only too familiar with the weaknesses, defects of mind, and small absurdities of his former friend; he could not resist the temptation to touch them with a sure hand, and Clerambault, stung and not wise enough to hide it, let himself be drawn into the fight, retaliated, and proved that he too could draw blood from the other. Thus a fierce enmity arose between the two.
The result might have been foreseen. Up to this time Clerambault had been inoffensive, confining himself on the whole to moral dissertations. His polemic did not step outside the circle of ideas. It might as well have been applied to Germany, England, or ancient Rome, as to the France of today. To tell the truth, like nine-tenths of his class and profession, he was ignorant of the political facts about which he declaimed, so that his trumpetings could hardly disturb the leaders of the day. In the midst of the tumult of the press, the noisy passage of arms between Clerambault and Bertin had two consequences; in the first place it forced Clerambault to play with more care, and choose a less slippery ground than logomachy, and on the other it brought him in contact with men better informed as to the facts who furnished him with the necessary information. A short time before there had been formed in France a little society, semi-clandestine, for independent study and free criticism on the war, and the causes that had led up to it. The Government, always vigilant and ready to crush any attempt at freedom of thought, nevertheless did not consider this society dangerous. Its members were prudent and calm, men of letters before all, who avoided notoriety, and contented themselves with private discussion; it was thought better policy to keep them under observation, and between four walls.
These calculations proved to be wrong, for truth modestly and laboriously discovered, though known only to five or six, cannot be uprooted; it will spring from the earth with irresistible force. Clerambault now learned for the first time of the existence of these passionate seekers after truth, who recalled the times of the Dreyfus case. In the general oppression, their apostolate behind closed doors took on the appearance of a little early-Christian group in the catacombs. Thanks to them, he discovered the falsehoods as well as the injustices of the “Great War.” He had had a faint suspicion of them, but he had not dreamed how far the history that touches us most closely had been falsified, and the knowledge revolted him. Even in his most critical moments, his simplicity would never have imagined the deceptive foundations on which reposes a Crusade for the Right, and as he was not a man to keep his discovery to himself, he proclaimed it loudly, first in articles which were forbidden by the censor, and then in the shape of sarcastic apologues, or little symbolic tales, touched with irony. The Voltairian apologues slipped through sometimes, owing to the inattention of the censor, and in this way Clerambault was marked out to the authorities as a very dangerous man.
Those who thought they knew him best were surprised. His adversaries had called him sentimental, and assuredly so he was, but he was aware of it, and because he was French he could laugh at it, and at himself. It is all very well for sentimental Germans to have a thickheaded belief in themselves; deep down in an eloquent and sensitive creature like Clerambault, the vision of the Gaul—always alert in his thick woods—observes, lets nothing escape, and is ready for a laugh at everything. The surprising thing is that this under-spirit will emerge when you least expect it, during the darkest trials and in the most pressing danger. The universal sense of humour came as a tonic to Clerambault, and his character, scarcely freed from the conventions in which it had been bound, took on suddenly a vital complexity. Good, tender, combative, irritable, always in extremes—he knew it, and that made him worse—tearful, sarcastic, sceptical, yet believing, he was surprised when he saw himself in the mirror of his writings. All his vitality, hitherto prudently shut into his bourgeois life, now burst forth, developed by moral solitude and the hygiene of action.
Clerambault saw that he had not known himself; he was, as it were, newborn, since that night of anguish. He learned to taste a joy of which he had never before had an idea—the giddy joy of the free lance in a fight; all his senses strung like a bow, glad in a perfect well-being.