crown of filth! I begin
again that moment when I clasped him against me to crush him; when I
propped him against the shell, when my arms felt his bones cracking
round his heart! It was he!--It was I! He says nothing, from the
eternal abysses in which he remains my brother in silence and
ignorance. The remorseful cry which tears my throat outstrips me, and
would find some one else.

Who?

That destiny which killed him by means of me--has it no human faces?

"Kings!" said Termite.

"The big people!" said the man whom they had snared, the close-cropped
German prisoner, the man with the convict's hexagonal face, he who was
greenish from top to toe.

But these kings and majesties and superhuman men who are illuminated by
fantastic names and never make mistakes--were they not done away with
long since? One does not know.

One does not see those who rule. One only sees what they wish, and
what they do with the others.

Why have They always command? One does not know. The multitudes have
not given themselves to Them. They have taken them and They keep them.
Their power is supernatural. It is, because it was. This is its
explanation and formula and breath--"It has to be."

As they have laid hold of arms, so they lay hold of heads, and make a
creed.

"They tell you," cried he, whom none of the lowly soldiers would deign
to listen to; "they say to you, 'This is what you must have in your
minds and hearts.'"

An inexorable religion has fallen from them upon us all, upholding what
exists, preserving what is.

Suddenly I hear beside me, as if I were in a file of the executed, a
stammering death-agony; and I think I see him who struggled like a
stricken vulture, on the earth that was bloated with dead. And his
words enter my heart more distinctly than when they were still alive;
and they wound me like blows at once of darkness and of light.

"Men _must_ not open their eyes!"

"Faith comes at will, like the rest!" said Adjutant Marcassin, as he
fluttered in his red trousers about the ranks, like a blood-stained
priest of the God of War.

He was right! He had grasped the chains of bondage when he hurled that
true cry against the truth. Every man is something of account, but
ignorance isolates and resignation scatters. Every poor man carries
within him centuries of indifference and servility. He is a
defenseless prey for hatred and dazzlement.

The man of the people whom I am looking for, while I writ