o is life." The battalions went off singing,
thrilling with impatience, dahlias in their hats, the muskets adorned
with flowers. Discharged soldiers re-enlisted; boys put their names
down, their mothers urging them to it; you would have thought they
were setting out for the Olympian games.

It was the same with the young men on the other side of the Rhine, and
there as here, they were escorted by their gods: Country, Justice,
Right, Liberty, Progress of the World, Eden-like dreams of re-born
humanity, a whole phantasmagoria of mystic ideas in which young men
shrouded their passions. None doubted that his cause was the right
one, they left discussion to others, themselves the living proof, for
he who gives his life needs no further argument.

The older men however who stayed behind, had not their reasons for
ceasing to reason. Their brains were given to them to be used, not for
truth, but for victory. Since in the wars of today, in which entire
peoples are engulfed, thoughts as well as guns are enrolled. They slay
the soul, they reach beyond the seas, and destroy after centuries have
passed. Thought is the heavy artillery which works from a distance.
Naturally Clerambault aimed his pieces, also the question for him was
no longer to see clearly, largely, to take in the horizon, but to
sight the enemy,--it gave him the illusion that he was helping his
son.

With an unconscious and feverish bad faith kept up by his affection,
he sought in everything that he saw, heard, or read, for arguments
to prop up his will to believe in the holiness of the cause, for
everything which went to prove that the enemy alone had wanted war,
was the sole enemy of peace, and that to make war on the enemy was
really to wish for peace.

There was proof enough and to spare; there always is; all that is
needed is to know when to open and shut your eyes ...But nevertheless
Clerambault was not entirely satisfied. These half-truths, or truths
with false tails to them, produced a secret uneasiness in the
conscience of this honest man, showing itself in a passionate
irritation against the enemy, which grew more and more. On the same
lines--like two buckets in a well, one going up as the other goes
down--his patriotic enthusiasm grew and drowned the last torments of
his mind in a salutary intoxication.

From now on he was on the watch for the smallest newspaper items
in support of his theory; and though he knew what to think of the
veracity of the