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 there in the torchlight, which had gone to plunge into the town and grow darker among the dungeon-cells of the bedchambers, there to hatch more forgetfulness in the gloom, more evil and misery, or to breed unavailing generations who will be abortive at the age of twenty!

The desire to do it gripped my body for a moment.  I fell back, and I went away, like the others.

It seems to me that, in not doing it, I did an evil deed.

For if the men who are to come free themselves instead of sinking in the quicksands, if they consider, with lucidity and with the epic pity it deserves, this age through which I go drowning, they would perhaps have thanked me, even me!  From those who will not see or know me, but in whom for this sudden moment I want to hope, I beg pardon for not doing it.

* * * * * *

In a corner where the neglected land is turning into a desert, and which lies across my way home, some children are throwing stones at a mirror which they have placed a few steps away as a target.  They jostle each other, shouting noisily; each of them wants the glory of being the first to break it.  I see the mirror again that I broke with a brick at Buzancy, because it seemed to stand upright like a living being!  Next, when the fragment of solid light is shattered into crumbs, they pursue with stones an old dog, whose wounded foot trails like his tail.  No one wants it any more; it is ready to be finished off, and the urchins are improving the occasion.  Limping, his pot-hanger spine all arched, the animal hurries slowly, and tries vainly to go faster than the pebbles.