There are dazzlings, and solemnities and ceremonies, to amuse and excite the common people, to dim their sight with bright colors, with the glitter of the badges and stars that are crumbs of royalty, to inflame them with the jingle of bayonets and medals, with trumpets and trombones and the big drum, and to inspire the demon of war in the excitable feelings of women and the inflammable credulity of the young.  I see the triumphal arches, the military displays in the vast amphitheaters of public places, and the march past of those who go to die, who walk in step to hell by reason of their strength and youth, and the hurrahs for war, and the real pride which the lowly feel in bending the knee before their masters and saying, as their cavalcade tops the hill, “It’s fine!  They might be galloping over us!” “It’s magnificent, how warlike we are!” says the woman, always dazzled, as she convulsively squeezes the arm of him who is going away.

And another kind of excitement takes form and seizes me by the throat in the pestilential pits of hell—­“They’re on fire, they’re on fire!” stammers that soldier, breathless as his empty rifle, as the flood of the exalted German divisions advances, linked elbow to elbow under a godlike halo of ether, to drown the deeps with their single lives.

Ah, the intemperate shapes and unities that float in morsels above the peopled precipices!  When two overlords, jewel-set with glittering General Staffs, proclaim at the same time on either side of their throbbing mobilized frontiers, “We will save our country!” there is one immensity deceived and two victimized.  There are two deceived immensities!

There is nothing else.  That these cries can be uttered together in the face of heaven, in the face of truth, proves at a stroke the monstrosity of the laws which rule us, and the madness of the gods.

I turn on a bed of pain to escape from the horrible vision of masquerade, from the fantastic absurdity into which all these things are brought back; and my fever seeks again.

Those bright spells which blind, and the darkness which also blinds.  Falsehood rules with those who rule, effacing Resemblance everywhere, and everywhere creating Difference.

Nowhere can one turn aside from falsehood.  Where indeed is there none?  The linked-up lies, the invisible chain, the Chain!

Murmurs and shouts alike cross in confusion.  Here and yonder, to right and to left, they make pretense.  Truth never reaches as far as men.  News filters through, false or atrophied.  On this side—­all is beautiful and disinterested; yonder—­the same things are infamous.  “French militarism is not the same thing as Prussian militarism, since one’s French and the other’s Prussian.”  The newspapers, the somber host of the great prevailing newspapers, fall upon the minds of men and wrap them up.  The daily siftings link them together and chain them up, and forbid them to look ahead.  And the impecunious papers show blanks in the places where the truth was too clearly written.  At the end of a war, the last things to be known by the children of the slain and by the mutilated and worn-out survivors will be all the war-aims of its directors.