Suddenly they reveal to the people an accomplished fact which has been worked out in the terra incognita of courts, and they say, “Now that it is too late, only one resource is left you—­Kill that you be not killed.”

They brandish the superficial incident which in the last hour has caused the armaments and the heaped-up resentment and intrigues to overflow in war; and they say, “That is the only cause of the war.”  It is not true; the only cause of war is the slavery of those whose flesh wages it.

They say to the people, “When once victory is gained, agreeably to your masters, all tyranny will have disappeared as if by magic, and there will be peace on earth.”  It is not true.  There will be no peace on earth until the reign of men is come.

But will it ever come?  Will it have time to come, while hollow-eyed humanity makes such haste to die?  For all this advertisement of war, radiant in the sunshine, all these temporary and mendacious reasons, stupidly or skillfully curtailed, of which not one reaches the lofty elevation of the common welfare—­all these insufficient pretexts suffice in sum to make the artless man bow in bestial ignorance, to adorn him with iron and forge him at will.

“It is not on Reason,” cried the specter of the battlefield, whose torturing spirit was breaking away from his still gilded body; “it is not on Reason that the Bible of History stands.  Else are the law of majesties and the ancient quarrel of the flags essentially supernatural and intangible, or the old world is built on principles of insanity.”

He touches me with his strong hand and I try to shake myself, and I stumble curiously, although lying down.  A clamor booms in my temples and then thunders like the guns in my ears; it overflows me,—­I drown in that cry——­

“It must be!  It has to be!  You shall not know!” That is the war-cry, that is the cry of war.

* * * * * *

War will come again after this one.  It will come again as long as it can be determined by people other than those who fight.  The same causes will produce the same effects, and the living will have to give up all hope.

We cannot say out of what historical conjunctions the final tempests will issue, nor by what fancy names the interchangeable ideals imposed on men will be known in that moment.  But the cause—­that will perhaps everywhere be fear of the nations’ real freedom.  What we do know is that the tempests will come.

Armaments will increase every year amid dizzy enthusiasm.  The relentless torture of precision seizes me.  We do three years of military training; our children will do five, they will do ten.  We pay two thousand million francs a year in preparation for war; we shall pay twenty, we shall pay fifty thousand millions.  All that we have will be taken; it will be robbery, insolvency, bankruptcy.  War kills wealth as it does men; it goes away in ruins and smoke, and one cannot fabricate gold any more than soldiers.  We no longer know how to count; we no longer know anything.  A billion—­a million millions—­the word appears to me printed on the emptiness of things.  It sprang yesterday out of war, and I shrink in dismay from the new, incomprehensible word.