day
of battle, what infinite tranquillity among the dead! At this period
there are no more notes of landscape effects; the description is of the
war, technical; otherwise the writer's thought is not of earth at all.
Once only, towards the end, we find a sorrowful recollection of himself,
a profound lamentation at the remembrance of bygone hopes, of bygone
work, of the immensity of the sacrifice. 'This war is long, too long for
those who had something else to do in the world! Why am I so sacrificed,
when so many others, not my equals, are spared? Yet I had something
worth doing to do in the world!' Most touching is that sigh, even more
touching than the signs of greatness in his soul, for it suddenly
breathes an anguish long controlled. It is a human weakness--our own
weakness--that is at last confessed, on the eve of a Passion, as in the
Divine example. At rare times such a question, in the constant sight of
death, in fatigue and weariness, in the long distress of rain and mud,
checks in him the impulse of life and of spiritual desire. He was
himself the young plant of which he writes, growing, creating fragrance
and breaking into flower, sure of God, feeling Him alive within itself.
But all at once it knows frost is coming and the threat of unpitying
things. What if the universe were void, what if in the infinity of the
exterior world there were nothing, across the splendid vision, but an
insensate fatality? What if sacrifice itself were also a delusion? 'Dark
days have come upon me, and nothingness seems the end of all, whereas
all that is in my being had assured me of the plenitude of the
universe.' And he asks himself the anxious question, 'Is it even sure
that moral effort bears any fruit?' It is something like abandonment by
God. But that darkening of his lights passes quickly away. He comes
again to the regions of tranquil thought, and leaves them thenceforward
only for the work in hand. 'I hope,' he writes, 'that when you think of
me you will have in mind all those who have left everything behind, and
how their nearest and dearest think of them only in the past, and say
of them, "We had once a brother, who, many years ago, withdrew from this
world."' How strange is the serenity of these lofty thoughts, how
entirely detached from self and from all human things is this spirit of
contemplation. Two slight traits give us signs: One night, on a
battlefield 'scattered with fragments of men' and with burning
dwellings,