e who are still fighting. Terrible will
be the anguish as we gaze upon the ruins and the dead encumbering the
battlefields! How it will cramp the young wills and annihilate the fine
courage of their souls! Troubled and confused epoch, wherein men will be
doggedly seeking safer roads and less cruel idols!...

"Young man of my generation, it is you of whom I think as I write these
lines, you whom I do not know, though I know that you are still fighting
or that you have returned broken from the trenches. I have met you in
the street, wearing an almost shamefaced air, doing your best to conceal
some infirmity; but in your eyes I have read the intensity of your
inward agony. I know the terrible hours through which you have lived,
and I know that those who have endured like trials end by having like
souls.... I know your doubts; I share your uneasiness. I know how you
are obsessed with the question, 'What next?' You, too, are asking what
can be seen from the heights, and what is going to happen. I understand
your 'What next?'--'To live!' You sing this straight to the hearts of
all of us. 'To live!' You embody the cry of our cruel epoch. I have
heard this cry, simple yet tremendous, from the lips of the wounded who
were aware of the oncoming footsteps of victorious death. I have heard
it in the trenches, murmured low like a prayer.--Young man, this is a
grievous hour. You are a survivor from the ghastly war; your vitality
must affirm itself; you must live. Stripped of all falsehoods, freed
from every mirage, you find yourself alone in your nakedness; before you
stretches the great white road. Onward, the distance beckons. Leave
behind you the old world, and the idols of yesterday. March forward
without turning to listen to the outworn voices of the past!"

* * * * *

In the name of these young men and their brothers who have been
sacrificed in all the lands of the world engaged in mutual slaughter, I
throw these cries of pain in the faces of the sacrificers. May the blood
sting their faces!

"Revue mensuelle," Geneva, May, 1917.

XVII

AVE, CAESAR ...

THOSE WHO WISH TO LIVE SALUTE THEE

In an earlier article I referred to the writings of certain French
soldiers. After _Under Fire_, by Henri Barbusse, _L'Holocauste_ by Paul
Husson and the poignant meditations of Andre Delemer gave expression to
their touching and profoundly human cry. In place of the scandalous
idealisations of