This faith was very touching in some young and simple people; no declamations, no pretensions to knowledge; only the desperate clinging of a devotion which has given all, and in return asks for one word only:  “It is true ...  Thou, my beloved, my Country, power divine, still livest, to whom I have offered up my life, and all that I loved!”—­One could kneel before those poor little black gowns, before those mothers, wives and sisters; one longed to kiss the thin hands that trembled with the hope and fear of the hereafter, and say:  “Mourn not,—­for ye shall be comforted.”

What consolation can one offer, when one does not believe in the ideal for which they lived, and which is killing them?—­The long-sought answer finally came to Clerambault, almost unconsciously:  “You must care for men more than for illusion, or even for truth.”

Clerambault’s warm feelings were not reciprocated; and he was more attacked than ever, though for some months he had published nothing.  In the autumn of 1917 the anger against him had risen to an unheard-of height.  The disproportion was really laughable between this rage and the feeble words of one man, but it was so all over the world.  A dozen or so weak pacifists, alone, surrounded, without means of being heard through any paper of standing, spoke honestly but not loudly, and this let loose a perfect frenzy of insults and threats.  At the slightest contradiction the monster Opinion fell into an epileptic fit.

The prudent Perrotin who, as a rule, was surprised at nothing, kept quiet, and let Clerambault ruin himself his own way; but even he was alarmed by this explosion of tyrannical stupidity.  In history and at a distance it could be laughed at; but close at hand it looked as if the human brain was about to give way.  Why is it that in this war men lost their mental balance more than in any other at any previous time?  Has the war been really more atrocious?  That is either childish nonsense, or a deliberate forgetfulness of what has happened in our own day, under our eyes; in Armenia, in the Balkans; during the repression of the Commune, in colonial wars under new conquistadors in China and the Congo....  Of all animals we know, the human beast has always been the most ferocious.  Then is it because men had more faith in the war of today?  Surely not.  The western peoples had reached the point of evolution when war seemed so absurd that we could no longer practise it and preserve our reason.

We are obliged to intoxicate ourselves, to go crazy, unless we would die the despairing death of darkest pessimism; and that is why the voice of one sane man threw into fits of rage all the others who wanted to forget; they were afraid that this voice would wake them up, and that they would find themselves sobered, disgraced, and without a rag to cover them.