s as innocent as the defending multitude.

On a little red-covered table by the side of a little tacked label
which says, "Cold Steel: May 9," there is a twisted French bayonet--a
bayonet, the flesh weapon, which has been twisted!

"Oh, it's fine!" says a young girl from the castle.

"It isn't Fritz and Jerry, old chap, that bends bayonets!"

"No doubt about it, we're the first soldiers in the world," says
Rampaille.

"We've set a beautiful example to the world," says a sprightly Member
of the Upper House to all those present.

Excitement grows around that bayonet. The young girl, who is beautiful
and expansive, cannot tear herself away from it. At last she touches
it with her finger, and shudders. She does not disguise her pleasant
emotion:--

"I confess _I'm_ a patriot! I'm more than that--I'm a patriot and a
militarist!"

All heads around her are nodded in approval. That kind of talk never
seems intemperate, for it touches on sacred things.

And I, I see--in the night which falls for a moment, amid the tempest
of dying men which is subsiding on the ground--I see a monster in the
form of a man and in the form of a vulture, who, with the death-rattle
in his throat, holds towards that young girl the horrible head that is
scalped with a coronet, and says to her: "You do not know me, and you
do not know, but you are like me!"

The young girl's living laugh, as she goes off with a young officer,
recalls me to events.

All those who come after each other to the bayonet speak in the same
way, and have the same proud eyes.

"They're not stronger than us, let me tell you! It's us that's the
strongest!"

"Our allies are very good, but it's lucky for them we're there on the
job."

"Ah, la, la!"

"Why, yes, there's only the French for it. All the world admires them.
Only we're always running ourselves down."

When you see that fever, that spectacle of intoxication, these people
who seize the slightest chance to glorify their country's physical
force and the hardness of its fists, you hear echoing the words of the
orators and the official politicians:--

"There is only in our hearts the condemnation of barbarism and the love
of humanity."

And you ask yourself if there is a single public opinion in the world
which is capable of bearing victory with dignity.

I stand aloof. I am a blot, like a bad prophet. I hear this
declaration, which bows me like an infernal burden: It is only defeat
which c