“We’ve set a beautiful example to the world,” says a sprightly Member of the Upper House to all those present.

Excitement grows around that bayonet.  The young girl, who is beautiful and expansive, cannot tear herself away from it.  At last she touches it with her finger, and shudders.  She does not disguise her pleasant emotion:—­

“I confess I’m a patriot!  I’m more than that—­I’m a patriot and a militarist!”

All heads around her are nodded in approval.  That kind of talk never seems intemperate, for it touches on sacred things.

And I, I see—­in the night which falls for a moment, amid the tempest of dying men which is subsiding on the ground—­I see a monster in the form of a man and in the form of a vulture, who, with the death-rattle in his throat, holds towards that young girl the horrible head that is scalped with a coronet, and says to her:  “You do not know me, and you do not know, but you are like me!”

The young girl’s living laugh, as she goes off with a young officer, recalls me to events.

All those who come after each other to the bayonet speak in the same way, and have the same proud eyes.

“They’re not stronger than us, let me tell you!  It’s us that’s the strongest!”

“Our allies are very good, but it’s lucky for them we’re there on the job.”

“Ah, la, la!”

“Why, yes, there’s only the French for it.  All the world admires them.  Only we’re always running ourselves down.”

When you see that fever, that spectacle of intoxication, these people who seize the slightest chance to glorify their country’s physical force and the hardness of its fists, you hear echoing the words of the orators and the official politicians:—­

“There is only in our hearts the condemnation of barbarism and the love of humanity.”

And you ask yourself if there is a single public opinion in the world which is capable of bearing victory with dignity.

I stand aloof.  I am a blot, like a bad prophet.  I hear this declaration, which bows me like an infernal burden:  It is only defeat which can open millions of eyes!

I hear some one say, with detestation, “German militarism——­”

That is the final argument, that is the formula.  Yes, German militarism is hateful, and must disappear; all the world is agreed about that—­the jack-boots of the Junkers, of the Crown Princes, of the Kaiser, and their courts of intellectuals and business men, and the pan-Germanism which would dye Europe black and red, and the half-bestial servility of the German people.  Germany is the fiercest fortress of militarism.  Yes, everybody is agreed about that.