ches, the military displays in the vast
amphitheaters of public places, and the march past of those who go to
die, who walk in step to hell by reason of their strength and youth,
and the hurrahs for war, and the real pride which the lowly feel in
bending the knee before their masters and saying, as their cavalcade
tops the hill, "It's fine! They might be galloping over us!" "It's
magnificent, how warlike we are!" says the woman, always dazzled, as
she convulsively squeezes the arm of him who is going away.

And another kind of excitement takes form and seizes me by the throat
in the pestilential pits of hell--"They're on fire, they're on fire!"
stammers that soldier, breathless as his empty rifle, as the flood of
the exalted German divisions advances, linked elbow to elbow under a
godlike halo of ether, to drown the deeps with their single lives.

Ah, the intemperate shapes and unities that float in morsels above the
peopled precipices! When two overlords, jewel-set with glittering
General Staffs, proclaim at the same time on either side of their
throbbing mobilized frontiers, "We will save our country!" there is one
immensity deceived and two victimized. There are two deceived
immensities!

There is nothing else. That these cries can be uttered together in the
face of heaven, in the face of truth, proves at a stroke the
monstrosity of the laws which rule us, and the madness of the gods.

I turn on a bed of pain to escape from the horrible vision of
masquerade, from the fantastic absurdity into which all these things
are brought back; and my fever seeks again.

Those bright spells which blind, and the darkness which also blinds.
Falsehood rules with those who rule, effacing Resemblance everywhere,
and everywhere creating Difference.

Nowhere can one turn aside from falsehood. Where indeed is there none?
The linked-up lies, the invisible chain, the Chain!

Murmurs and shouts alike cross in confusion. Here and yonder, to right
and to left, they make pretense. Truth never reaches as far as men.
News filters through, false or atrophied. On _this_ side--all is
beautiful and disinterested; yonder--the same things are infamous.
"French militarism is not the same thing as Prussian militarism, since
one's French and the other's Prussian." The newspapers, the somber
host of the great prevailing newspapers, fall upon the minds of men and
wrap them up. The daily siftings link them together and chain them up,
and