ion which
requires a long time and which can only have full effect in time of
peace. Later, we shall take them from childhood; we shall make good
sound soldiers of them, and of good health, morally as well as
physically."

Then the band plays; it is closing time, and there is the passion of a
military march. A woman cries that it is like drinking champagne to
hear it.

The visitors have gone away. I linger to look at the beflagged front
of the War Museum, while night is falling. It is the Temple. It is
joined to the Church, and resembles it. My thoughts go to those
crosses which weigh down, from the pinnacles of churches, the heads of
the living, join their two hands together, and close their eyes; those
crosses which squat upon the graves in the cemeteries at the front. It
is because of all these temples that in the future the sleep-walking
nations will begin again to go through the immense and mournful tragedy
of obedience. It is because of these temples that financial and
industrial tyranny, Imperial and Royal tyranny--of which all they whom
I meet on my way are the accomplices or the puppets--will to-morrow
begin again to wax fat on the fanaticism of the civilian, on the
weariness of those who have come back, on the silence of the dead.
(When the armies file through the Arc de Triomphe, who is there will
see--and yet they will be plainly visible--that six thousand miles of
French coffins are also passing through!) And the flag will continue
to float over its prey, that flag stuck into the shadowy front of the
War Museum, that flag so twisted by the wind's breath that sometimes it
takes the shape of a cross, and sometimes of a scythe!

Judgment is passed in that case. But the vision of the future agitates
me with a sort of despair and with a holy thrill of anger.

Ah, there are cloudy moments when one asks himself if men do not
deserve all the disasters into which they rush! No--I recover
myself--they do not deserve them. But _we_, instead of saying "I wish"
must say "I will." And what we will, we must will to build it, with
order, with method, beginning at the beginning, when once we have been
as far as that beginning. We must not only open our eyes, but our
arms, our wings.

This isolated wooden building, with its back against a wood-pile, and
nobody in it----

Burn it? Destroy it? I thought of doing it.

To cast that light in the face of that moving night, which was crawling
and trampling