carnival, for these are your new masters, they the absolute, proclaiming on their fists and heads their gilded authority.  Such of them as are near to you are themselves only the servants of others, who wear a greater power painted on their clothes.  It is a life of misery, humiliation and diminution into which you fall from day to day, badly fed and badly treated, assailed throughout your body, spurred on by your warders’ orders.  At every moment you are thrown violently back into your littleness, you are punished for the least action which comes out of it, or slain by the order of your masters.  It is forbidden you to speak when you would unite yourself with the brother who is touching you.  The silence of steel reigns around you.  Your thoughts must be only profound endurance.  Discipline is indispensable for the multitude to be melted into a single army; and in spite of the vague kinship which is sometimes set up between you and your nearest chief, the machine-like order paralyzes you first, so that your body may be the better made to move in accordance with the rhythm of the rank and the regiment—­into which, nullifying all that is yourself, you pass already as a sort of dead man.

“They gather us together but they separate us!” cries a voice from the past.

If there are some who escape through the meshes, it means that such “slackers” are also influential.  They are uncommon, in spite of appearances, as the influential are.  You, the isolated man, the ordinary man, the lowly thousand-millionth of humanity, you evade nothing, and you march right to the end of all that happens, or to the end of yourself.

You will be crushed.  Either you will go into the charnel house, destroyed by those who are similar to you, since war is only made by you, or you will return to your point in the world, diminished or diseased, retaining only existence without health or joy, a home-exile after absences too long, impoverished forever by the time you have squandered.  Even if selected by the miracle of chance, if unscathed in the hour of victory, you also, you will be vanquished.  When you return into the insatiable machine of the work-hours, among your own people—­whose misery the profiteers have meanwhile sucked dry with their passion for gain—­the task will be harder than before, because of the war that must be paid for, with all its incalculable consequences.  You who peopled the peace-time prisons of your towns and barns, begone to people the immobility of the battlefields—­and if you survive, pay up!  Pay for a glory which is not yours, or for ruins that others have made with your hands.