s a mistake
to suppose that the dead love nothing but gloom; they love only the
justice and the truth which are the eternal forms of happiness. From
the depths of this justice and this truth in which they are all
immersed, they will help us to destroy the great falsehoods of
existence: for war and death, if they sow innumerable miseries and
misfortunes, have at least the merit of destroying as many lies as
they occasion evils. And all the sacrifices which they have made for
us will have been in vain--and this is not possible--if they do not
first of all bring about the fall of the lies on which we live and
which it is not necessary to name, for each of us knows his own and is
ashamed of them and will be eager to make an end of them. They will
teach us, before all else, from the depths of our hearts which are
their living tombs, to love those who outlive them, since it is in
them alone that they wholly exist.

* * * * *

WHEN THE WAR IS OVER

XXIII

WHEN THE WAR IS OVER

1

Before closing this book, I wish to weigh for the last time in my
conscience the words of hatred and malediction which it has made me
speak in spite of myself. We have to do with the strangest of enemies.
He has knowingly and deliberately, while in the full possession of his
faculties and without necessity or excuse, revived all the crimes
which we supposed to be forever buried in the barbarous past. He has
trampled under foot all the precepts which man had so painfully won
from the cruel darkness of his beginnings; he has violated all the
laws of justice, humanity, loyalty and honour, from the highest, which
are almost godlike, to the simplest, the most elementary, which still
belong to the lower worlds. There is no longer any doubt on this
point: it has been proved over and over again until we have attained a
final certitude.

But on the other hand, it is no less certain that he has displayed
virtues which it would be unworthy of us to deny; for we honour
ourselves in recognizing the valour of those whom we are fighting. He
has gone to his death in deep, compact, disciplined masses, with a
blind, hopeless, obstinate heroism of which no such lurid example had
ever yet been known, a heroism which has many times compelled our
admiration and our pity. He has known how to sacrifice himself, with
unprecedented and perhaps unequalled abnegation, to an idea which we
know to be false, inhuman and even s