Page:Rolland - Clerambault, tr. Miller, 1921.djvu/161

 name.

The "_Pardon Asked of the Dead_," was more effective than the other ever could be; its sadness touched the mass of simple hearts, to whom the war was agony. The authorities had been indifferent up to now, but at the first hint of this they tried to put a stop to it. They had sense enough to know that rigorous measures against Clerambault would be a mistake, but they could put pressure on the paper through influence behind the scenes. An opposition to the writer showed itself on the staff of the paper. Naturally they did not blame the internationalism of his views; they merely stigmatised it as _bourgeois_ sentimentality.

Clerambault furnished them with fresh arguments by a new article, where his aversion to war seemed incidentally to condemn revolution as well. Poets are proverbially bad politicians.

It was a reply to "_The Appeal to the Dead_," that Barrès, like an owl perched on a cypress in a graveyard, had wailed forth.

_TO THE LIVING_

_Death rules the world. You that are living, rise and shake off the yoke! It is not enough that the nations are destroyed. They are bidden to glorify Death, to march towards it with songs; they are expected to admire their own sacrifice ... to call it the "most glorious, the most enviable fate" ... but how untrue this is! Life is the great, the holy thing, and love of life is the first of virtues. The men of today have it no longer; this war has shown that, and even worse. It has proved that during the last fifteen years, many have hoped for these horrible upheavals--you cannot deny it! No man loves life who has no better use for it than to throw it into the jaws of Death. Life is a burden to many--to you rich of the middle-class, reactionary