Henri Barbusse

“ The cemetery is full of mud under the muslin of fallen rain, and the footfalls make a sticky sound in it. There are a few trees, naked and paralyzed. The sky is marshy and sprinkled with crows.
The coffin, with its shapeless human form, is lowered from the hearse and disappears in the fresh earth.
They march past. Marie and her father take their places beside me. I say thanks to every one in the same tone; they are all like each other, with their gestures of impotence, their dejected faces, the words they get ready and pour out as they pass before me, and their dark costume. ”

“ I am sure of the principles I see at the source of all—justice, logic, equality; all those divinely human truths whose contrast with the realized truth of to-day is so heart-breaking. And I want to appeal to you all; and that confidence which fills me with a tragic joy, I want to give it to you, at once as a command and as a prayer. There are not several ways of attaining it athwart everything, and of fastening life and the truth together again; there is only one—right-doing. Let rule begin again with the sublime control of the intellect. I am a man like the rest, a man like you. ”

“ One is broken and blurred; one emerges like a peak, a good half of it fallen into nothing. At the end of the row, the ravages have been less, and only the eyes are smitten. The hollow orbits in those marble heads look outwards with dried darkness. The deep and obscure face-wounds have the look of caverns and funnels, of the shadows in the moon; and stars of mud are clapped on the faces in the place where eyes once shone.
Our strides have passed that trench. We go more quickly and trouble no more now about the star-shells, which, among us who know nothing, say, "I know" and "I will." ”

“ I remember, while I lean on this wall and listen, that one day in the past not far from here, a lowly woman raised her voice and said, "That woman does not believe in God! It's because she has no children, or else because they've never been ill."
And I remember, too, without being able to picture them to myself, all the voices I have heard saying, "It would be too unjust, if there were no God!"
There is no other proof of God's existence than the need we have of Him. God is not God—He is the name of all that we lack. He is our dream, carried to the sky. God is a prayer, He is not some one. ”

“ With this truth that clings to me alone, amid the world and its phantoms, am I not indeed rushing into a sort of tragedy impossible to maintain? They who surround me, filled to the lips, filled to the eyes, with the gross acceptance which turns men into beasts, they look at me mistrustfully, ready to be let loose against me. Little more was lacking before I should be as much a reprobate as Brisbille, who, in this very place, before the war, stood up alone before the multitude and tried to tell them to their faces that they were going into the gulf. ”

“ On the glass which entombs the picture I see the gently moving and puffing reflection of the fidgety window curtains, and the face of that glazed portrait becomes blurred with broken streaks and all kinds of wave marks.
"Ah, these adventures!" Marie sometimes sighs, at the end of a chapter; "these things that never happen!"
"Thank Heaven," I cry.
"Alas," she replies.
Even when people live together they differ more than they think!
At other times Marie reads to herself, quite silently. I surprise her absorbed in this occupation. It even happens that she applies herself thus to poetry. ”

“ Some day I should like to live yonder; but between the two halves of the town there is a division—a sort of frontier, which has always been and will always be.
In the Rue Verte I meet only a street lamp, and then a mouse-like little girl who emerges from the shadows and enters them again without seeing me, so intent is she on pressing to her heart, like a doll, the big loaf they have sent her to buy. Here is the Rue de l'Etape, my street. Through the semi-darkness, a luminous movement peoples the hairdresser's shop, and takes shape on the dull screen of his window. ”

“ I say all this to Marie. She appears to be more struck by the vehemence of my tone than by the obviousness of what I say. She replies, feebly, "Yes, indeed," and nods her head; but she asks me, "But the moral law that you talk about, isn't it tradition?"
"No. It is the automatic law of the common good. Every time that finds itself at stake, it re-creates itself logically. It is lucid; it shows itself every time right to its fountain-head. Its source is reason itself, and equality, which is the same thing as reason. ”

“ Our looks are worn away in looking. We do not see, we are powerless to people the world. We all have nothing in common but eyes of evening and a soul of night.
And always, always, in these trenches whose walls run down like waves, with their stale stinks of chlorine and sulphur, chains of soldiers go forward endlessly, towing each other. They go as quickly as they can, as if the walls were going to close upon them. They are bowed as if they were always climbing, wholly dark under colossal packs which they carry without stopping, from one place to another place, as they might rocks in hell. ”

“ When I read a letter from her which spoke of caresses to come, Marie stammered, "And she dared to write that!" but she did not blush and was not confused.
Then she shook her head a little, and said dolefully:
"What a lot of things we have hidden away, little by little, in spite of ourselves! How strong people must be to forget so much!"
She was beginning to catch a glimpse of a bottomless abyss, and to despair. Suddenly she broke in:
"That's enough! We can't read them again. We can't understand what's written. That's enough—don't take my illusion away." ”

“ No, there is no beauty in it; it is not the emblem of this corner of my native land, whose fair picture it disturbs with its savage stripes. It is the screaming signboard of the glory of blows, of militarism and war. It unfurls over the living surges of humanity a sign of supremacy and command; it is a weapon. It is not the love of our countries, it is their sharp-edged difference, proud and aggressive, which we placard in the face of the others. It is the gaudy eagle which conquerors and their devotees see flying in their dreams from steeple to steeple in foreign lands. ”

“ It seems as if real suffering is giving voice through him with a beast's cry.
When he has spoken, he collapses on to a stone. With his fist, whose leather is covered with red hair, like a cow's, he hides the squalid face that looks as if it had been spat upon. "Folks aren't wicked," he says, "but they're stupid, stupid, stupid."
And Brisbille cries.
Just then Father Piot advances into the space, with his silver aureole, his benevolent smile, and the vague and continuous lisping which trickles from his lips. ”

“ Tradition reigns, the gospel of the blind adoration of what was and what is—God without a head. Man's destiny is eternally blockaded by two forms of tradition; in time, by hereditary succession; in space, by frontiers, and thus it is crushed and annihilated in detail. It is the truth. I am certain of it, for I am touching it.
But I do not know what will become of us. All the blood poured out, all the words poured out, to impose a sham ideal on our bodies and souls, will they suffice for a long time yet to separate and isolate humanity in absurdity made real? History is a Bible of errors. ”

“ In a weak voice she calls some memories up—this and that—and "one morning——" She applies herself to it and counts them. I speak, too, gently. We question each other. "Do you remember?"—"Oh, yes." And when some more precise and intimate detail prompts the question we only reply, "A little." Our separation and the great happenings past which the world has whirled have made the past recoil and shaped a deep ditch. Nothing has changed; but when we look we see.
Once, after we had recalled to each other an enchanted summer evening,
I said, "We loved each other," and she answered, "I remember." ”

“ To live is to be happy to live. The usefulness of life—ah! its expansion has not the mystic shapes we vainly dreamed of when we were paralyzed by youth. Rather has it a shape of anxiety, of shuddering, of pain and glory. Our heart is not made for the abstract formula of happiness, since the truth of things is not made for it either. It beats for emotion and not for peace. Such is the gravity of the truth.
"You've done well to say all that! Yes, it is always easy to lie for a moment. You might have lied, but it would have been worse when we woke up from the lies. It's a reward to talk. ”

“ I am carried along at a height of two thousand yards. An air-pocket has seized me in a corridor of cloud, and I have fallen like a stone a thousand yards lower, garrotted by furious air which is cold as a blade, and filled by a plunging cry. I have seen conflagrations and the explosions of mines, and plumes of smoke which flow disordered and spin out in long black zigzags like the locks of the God of War! I have seen the concentric circles by which the stippled multitude is ever renewed. The dugouts, lined with lifts, descend in oblique parallels into the depths. ”

“ All the while performing as a duty my daily task, all the while taking suitable precautions so that Marie may not know and may not suffer, I am looking for the happiness which lives. And truly, when I have a sense of some new assent wavering and making ready, or when I am on the way to a first rendezvous, I feel myself gloriously uplifted, and equal to everything!
This fills my life. Desire wears the brain as much as thought wears it. All my being is agog for chances to shine and to be shared. ”

“ They are rooted in the human being. They overflow and palpitate. When I demand justice, I am not groping in a dream, I am crying from the depths of all unhappy hearts.
Such are they, that mountain of people heaped on the ground like metal for the roads, overwhelmed by unhappiness, debased by charity and asking for it, bound to the rich by urgent necessity, entangled in the wheels of a single machine, the machine of frightful repetition. And in that multitude I also place nearly all young people, whoever they are, because of their docility and their general ignorance. ”

“ At the foot of the hill we stop. There ought to be a clear view, but it is evening—because of the bad weather and because the sky is full of black things and of chemical clouds with unnatural colors. Storm is blended with war. Above the fierce and furious cry of the shells I heard, in domination over all, the peaceful boom of thunder.
They plant us in subterranean files, facing a wide plain of gentle gradient which dips from the horizon towards us, a plain with a rolling jumble of thorn-brakes and trees, which the gale is seizing by the hair. ”

“ The primeval cataclysm has begun again upon the earth. My vision—beautiful as a fair dream which shows men's composed reliance on each other in the sunrise—collapses in mad nightmare.
But this flashing devastation is not incoherent, as at the time of the conflict of the first elements and the groping of dead things. For its crevasses and flowing fires show a symmetry which is not Nature's; it reveals discipline let loose, and the frenzy of wisdom. It is made up of thought, of will, of suffering. Multitudes of scattered men, full of an infinity of blood, confront each other like floods. ”

“ His bony legs, in trousers too wide and too short, break off at the bottom in long and mournful shoes, with hillocks, and resembling crocodiles; and their soles, being soaked in paraffin, leave oily footprints, rainbow-hued, in the plastic mud.
Perhaps it is because of this dismal companion towards whom I turn my head, and whom I see trotting slowly and painfully at my side in the rumbling grayness of the evening exodus, that I have a sudden and tragic vision of the people, as in a flash's passing. (I do sometimes get glimpses of the things of life momentarily.) ”

“ Madame Piot settles down in a chair; she crosses her arms, lowers her head, and the time goes by.
At long intervals people take shape in the darkness by the door; people who come in on tiptoe whisper to us and go away.
The moribund moves her hands and feet and contorts her face. A gurgling comes from her throat, which we can hardly see in the cavity that is like a nest of shadow under her chin. She has blenched, and the skin that is drawn over the bones of her face like a shroud grows whiter every moment. ”

“ The weak sunshine is dressing the red roofs and the blue roofs and the sidewalks, and the tiny little stone setts all pressed together like pebbles, where polished shoes are shining and squeaking. In that old house at the corner, a house like a round lantern of shadow, gloomy old Eudo is encrusted. It forms a comical blot, as though traced on an old etching. A little further, Madame Piot's house bulges forth, glazed like pottery. By the side of these uncommon dwellings one takes no notice of the others, with their gray walls and shining curtains, although it is of these that the town is made. ”

“ The apple trees in the orchards are shaken and scatter bird-like jetsam in space; and in that bright green paddock yonder the rows of out-hung linen dance in the sunshine. The sky darkens; the wind rises and prevails. It was that very day of the gale. It assaults our two bodies on the flank of the hill; it comes out of infinity and sets roaring the tawny forest foliage. We can see its agitation behind the black grille of the trunks. It makes us dizzy to watch the swift displacement of the gray-veiled sky, and from cloud to cloud a bird seems hurled, like a stone. ”

“ The idea of motherland is not a false idea, but it is a little idea, and one which must remain little.
There is only one common good. There is only one moral duty, only one truth, and every man is the shining recipient and guardian of it. The present understanding of the idea of motherland divides all these great ideas, cuts them into pieces, specializes them within impenetrable circles. We meet as many national truths as we do nations, and as many national duties, and as many national interests and rights—and they are antagonistic to each other. ”

“ The animal kingdom dawns in that upright thing, the poor upright thing with a face and a cry, which hides an internal world and in which a heart obscurely beats. A lone being, a heart! But the heart, in the embryo of the first men, beats only for fear. He whose face has appeared above the earth, and who carries his soul in chaos, discerns afar shapes like his own, he sees the other—the terrifying outline which spies and roams and turns again, with the snare of his head. ”

“ There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and the paradise lost. There is nothing, since we always want what we have not got. We hope, and then we regret. We hope for the future, and then we turn to the past, and then we begin slowly and desperately to hope for the past! The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret, both lean upon nothing. To ask, to ask, to have not! Humanity is exactly the same thing as poverty. Happiness has not the time to live; we have not really the time to profit by what we are. ”

“ Truth is simple; but the world is no longer simple. There are so many things! How will truth ever change its defeat into victory? How is it ever going to heal all those who do not know! I grieve that I am weak and ineffective, that I am only I. On earth, alas, truth is dumb, and the heart is only a stifled cry!
I look for support, for some one who does not leave me alone. I am too much alone, and I look eagerly. But there is only Brisbille! ”

“ All things are amenable to reason, the supreme Reason which mutilated humanity, wounded in the eyes, has deified among the clouds.
* * * * * *
You will do away with the rights of the dead, and with heredity of power, whatever it may be, that inheritance which is unjust in all its gradations, for tradition takes root there, and it is an outrage on equality, against the order of labor. Labor is a great civic deed which all men and all women without exception must share or go down. Such divisions will reduce it for each one to dignified proportions and prevent it from devouring human lives. ”

“ Marie falls back upon her idea, obdurately, and says, "A woman only lives by love and for love. When she's no longer good for that she's no longer anything."
She repeats, "You see—I'm nothing any more."
Ah, she is at the bottom of her abyss! She is at the extremity of a woman's mourning! She is not thinking only of me. Her thought is higher and vaster. She is thinking of all the woman she is, of all that love is, of all possible things when she says, "I'm no longer anything." And I—I am only he who is present with her just now, and no help whatever is left her to look for from any one.
I should like to pacify and console this woman who is gentleness and simplicity and who is sinking there while she lightly touches me with her presence—but exactly because she is there I cannot lie to her, I can do nothing against her grief, her perfect, infallible grief. ”

“ Then, in the slanting rain and the limitless gray, we see a man, one only, who advances with his bayonet forward, like a specter.
We watch this shapeless being, this thing, leaving our lines and going away yonder.
We only see one—perhaps that is the shadow of another, on his left.
We do not understand, and then we do. It is the end of the attacking wave.
What can his thoughts be—this man alone in the rain as if under a curse, who goes upright away, forward, when space is changed into a shrieking machine? By the light of a cascade of flashes I thought I saw a strange monk-like face. ”

“ Now and again, the sky collapses into light, and that flash of instantaneous sunshine changes the shape of the plain every time, according to its direction. Then does the night take all back again athwart the rolling echoes.
"Men! Men!"
"What about them, then?" says a sudden jeering voice which falls like a stone.
"Men must not awake," the shining shadow goes on, in dull and hollow tones.
"Don't worry!" says the ironical voice, and at that moment it terrifies me.
Several bodies arise on their fists into the darkness—I see them by their heavy groans—and look around them. ”