Page:Rolland - Above the Battlefield.djvu/7



O young men that shed your blood with so generous a joy for the starving earth! O heroism of the world! What a harvest for destruction to reap! Young men of all nations, brought into conflict by a common ideal, making enemies of those who should be brothers; all of you, marching to your death, are dear to me. Slavs, hastening to the aid of your race; Englishmen fighting for honour and right; intrepid Belgians who dared to oppose the Teutonic colossus, and defend against him the Thermopylae of the West; Germans fighting to defend the philosophy and the birthplace of Kant against the Cossack avalanche; and you, above all, my young compatriots, in whom the generation of heroes of the Revolution lives again; you, who for years have confided your dreams to me, and now, on the verge of battle, bid me a sublime farewell.

Those trivial years of scepticism and hedonism in which we in France grew up are avenged in you; your faith, which is ours, you protect from their poisonous influence; and with you that faith triumphs on the battlefield. “A war of vengeance” is the cry. Yea! vengeance, indeed; but in no spirit of chauvinism. The vengeance of faith for egoism—the surrender of self to eternal ideas.

One of the greatest of the young French novelists writes to me:—

"“What are our lives, our books, compared with the magnitude of the aim? The war of the Revolution against feudalism is beginning anew. The armies of the Republic will secure the triumph of democracy in Europe and complete the work of the Convention. We are fighting not only for our hearths and homes, but for the awakening of liberty.”"

And another, one of the first art critics of our time:—