Page:Rolland - Clerambault, tr. Miller, 1921.djvu/202

 savages. Besides,--he stopped, the angry words seemed to stick in his throat--it was not only these people--he felt a stranger to all the world, cut off from normal life, from the pleasures and work of other men by his infirmities. He was a mere wreck, blind and maimed. The poor fellow was absurdly ashamed of it; he blushed at the pitying glances that people threw at him in passing--like a penny that you give, turning away your head at the same time from the unpleasant sight. For in his sensitiveness he exaggerated his ugliness and was disgusted by his deformity. He dwelt on his lost joys and ruined youth; when he saw couples in the street, he could not help feeling jealous; the tears would come into his eyes.

Even this was not all, and when he had poured out the bitterness of his heart--and Clerambault's compassion encouraged him to speak further--he got down to the worst of the trouble, which he and his comrades felt like a cancer that one does not dare to look at. Through his obscure, violent, and miserable talk, Clerambault at last made out what it was that tore the hearts of these young men. It is easy enough for dried-up egotists, withered intellectuals, to sneer at this love of life in the young, and their despair at the loss of it; but it was not alone their ruined, blasted youth that pressed on these poor soldiers,--though that was terrible enough--the worst was not to know the reason for this sacrifice, and the poisonous suspicion that it was all in vain. The pain of these victims could not be soothed by the gross appeal of a foolish racial supremacy, nor by a fragment of ground fought for between States. They knew now how much earth a man needs to die on, and that the blood of all races is part of the same stream of life.

Clerambault felt that he was a sort of elder brother to these young men; the sense of this and his duty towards them gave him a strength that he would not otherwise have