our age.

_HENRI BARBUSSE._

BOOK I

_BEING BORN_

I

The sun was beginning to shine.

I had been walking and walking....

I had just left the brambly path which cuts a bed of sand through the
forest, laying bare its rusty bowels.

I felt full-fed by the subtle nourishment that space distils, crammed
with air, and my forehead seemed drawn taut. Was it the motes dancing in
the sunbeams? I don't know. I was spent. The fancy throbbed beneath my
temples, did its work, and I let it go.

You must have been sincere at least once in your life to know what an
hour is face to face with yourself, a whole hour, step by step, minute
by minute. And I never had been sincere. Now I escaped from my clogging
limbs, from the clay of myself. Until now I had done nothing but breathe
and sleep. All of a sudden I was alive. It was intoxicating....

Dizzy though I was I felt an exhausting need to keep on going.

I penetrated deep into the woods walking at random, my mind almost a
blank. When the leafy undergrowth enclosed me, I let myself slide to the
ground on to the dried-up grass, the fallen twigs, and the crackling
russet pine-needles.

All about in a dense circle, the rugged plant life. A moving splendor
in the play of the varying greens. Damp, aromatic smells. And a sense of
invisible swarming life everywhere....

The silence, so fresh and penetrating, was like a living thing, and I
turned round several times thinking I heard some one behind me panting.
No one. The uneven trunks of the great trees; lower down, behind their
serrated green, a slate-colored screen of mist; here, the
shadow-broidered ground; above, the patches of blue sky--and I.

I....

I was a little ashamed to link my Self to myself in this way, to give my
Self its value. The old attitude of humility, of attaching no importance
to Self--was that going to begin again? Now I felt more profoundly alone
than in the harmonious exaltation I had experienced while walking. In a
mixture of alarm and idleness I tried not to remain motionless, but to
plant my elbows on the ground and lie flat on the grass with my head
between my hands, so as to divert myself with living noise.... I could
not.

Then I stretched out on my back, my eyes fixed on the sky, my body
relaxed; and the full-blooded tide of my thoughts flowed over me.

They flowed on, of themselves, no longer halting, as they had on the
walk, on the edge of each discovery; I no longer kept