ore. The other recognized him only too well. He perceived in him
what he himself had been not so long ago and what never he could be
again. He made him pay for it. It caused him regret afterward, but of
that he showed no sign and just began over again. Both of them suffered
and, through a too common misunderstanding, their suffering, so much
alike, so near, which ought to have brought them together, only
separated them. The sole difference between them was that the elder knew
that it was near while Pierre believed himself alone in his suffering
with nobody to whom he could open his soul.

Then why did he not turn toward those of his own age, his companions at
school? It might seem as if these growing youths ought to have come
close to one another and mutually given one another support. But nothing
of the kind. On the contrary, a sorrowful fatality kept them separate,
scattered in little groups, and even in the inner circle of these minim
groups kept them distant and reserved. The commoner sort had plunged,
eyes closed, head foremost into the current of the war. The larger
number drew themselves away and did not feel any connection with the
generations that preceded them; they did not partake in any way of their
passions, their hopes and their hatreds; they were bystanders beside all
the frantic goings-on like men who are sober looking on at those who are
drunk. But what could they do in opposition? Many had started little
magazines, reviews whose ephemeral lives were snuffed out after the
first numbers for lack of air; the censorship produced a vacuum; the
entire thought of France was under the pneumatic exhausting bell. Among
these young fellows the most distinguished ones, too feeble to rebel and
too proud to complain, knew beforehand that they were delivered up to
the sword of war. While they waited for their turn at the
slaughterhouse they looked on and made their judgments in silence, each
one by himself, with a little surprise and a great deal of irony.
Through a disdainful reaction against the mental condition of the herd
they fell back into a kind of egotism, intellectual and artistic
egotism, an idealistic sensualism, where the tracked and hunted ego
vindicated its rights against human fellowship. Laughable fellowship,
which made itself manifest to these adolescents only in the shape of
finished murder, one undergone in common! A precocious experience had
shriveled their illusions: they had seen how much those s