optimism.  It was not plain sailing, but there is nothing that the brain cannot attain to.  When its master thinks it absolutely necessary to get rid for a time of principles which are in his way, it finds in these same principles the exception which violates them while confirming the rule.  Clerambault began to construct a thesis, an ideal—­absurd enough—­in which these contradictions could be reconciled:  War against War, War for Peace, for eternal Peace.

The enthusiasm of his son was a great help to him.  Maxime had enlisted.  His generation was carried away on a wave of heroic joy; they had waited so long—­they had not dared to expect an opportunity for action and sacrifice.

Older men who had never tried to understand them, stood amazed; they remembered their own commonplace, bungling youth, full of petty egotisms, small ambitions, and mean pleasures.  As they could not recognise themselves in their children they attributed to the war this flowering of virtues which had been growing up for twenty years around their indifference and which the war was about to reap.  Even near a father as large-minded as Clerambault, Maxime was blighted.  Clerambault was interested in spreading his own overflowing diffuse nature, too much so to see clearly and aid those whom he loved:  he brought to them the warm shadow of his thought, but he stood between them and the sun.

These young people sought employment for their strength which really embarrassed them, but they did not find it in the ideals of the noblest among their elders; the humanitarianism of a Clerambault was too vague, it contented itself with pleasant hopes, without risk or vigour, which the quietude of a generation grown old in the talkative peace of Parliaments and Academies, alone could have permitted.  Except as an oratorical exercise it had never tried to foresee the perils of the future, still less had it thought to determine its attitude in the day when the danger should be near.  It had not the strength to make a choice between widely differing courses of action.  One might be a patriot as well as an internationalist or build in imagination peace palaces or super-dreadnoughts, for one longed to know, to embrace, and to love everything.  This languid Whitmanism might have its aesthetic value, but its practical incoherence offered no guide to young people when they found themselves at the parting of the ways.  They pawed the ground trembling with impatience at all this uncertainty and the uselessness of their time as it went by.

They welcomed the war, for it put an end to all this indecision, it chose for them, and they made haste to follow it.  “We go to our death,—­so be it; but to go is life.”  The battalions went off singing, thrilling with impatience, dahlias in their hats, the muskets adorned with flowers.  Discharged soldiers re-enlisted; boys put their names down, their mothers urging them to it; you would have thought they were setting out for the Olympian games.