efforts, but efforts of a few hours, or a day at most, towards which the combatants directed all the vigour and all the heroism accumulated during long weeks or months of preparation and waiting.  Afterwards, whether the result was victory or defeat, the fighting was over; relaxation, respite and rest followed; men went back to their homes.  Destiny must not be defied more than once; and they knew that in the most terrible affray the chances of escaping death were as twenty to one.

3

Nowadays, everything is changed; and death itself is no longer what it was.  Formerly, you looked it in the face, you knew whence it came and who sent it to you.  It had a dreadful aspect, but one that remained human.  Its ways were not unknown:  its long spells of sleep, its brief awakenings, its bad days and dangerous hours.  At present, to all these horrors it adds the great, intolerable fear of mystery.  It no longer has any aspect, no longer has habits or spells of sleep and it is never still.  It is always ready, always on the watch, everywhere present, scattered, intangible and dense, stealthy and cowardly, diffuse, all-encompassing, innumerous, looming at every point of the horizon, rising from the waters and falling from the skies, indefatigable, inevitable, filling the whole of space and time for days, weeks and months without a minute’s lull, without a second’s intermission.  Men live, move and sleep in the meshes of its fatal web.  They know that the least step to the right or left, a head bowed or lifted, a body bent or upright is seen by its eyes and draws its thunder.

Hitherto we had no example of this preponderance of the destructive forces.  We should never have believed that man’s nerves could resist so great a trial.  The nerves of the bravest man are tempered to face death for the space of a second, but not to live in the hourly expectation of death and nothing else.  Heroism was once a sharp and rugged peak, reached for a moment but soon quitted, for mountain-peaks are not inhabitable.  To-day it is a boundless plain, as uninhabitable as the peaks; but we are not permitted to descend from it.  And so, at the very moment when man appeared most exhausted and enervated by the comforts and vices of civilization, at the moment when he was happiest and therefore most selfish, when, possessing the minimum of faith and vainly seeking a new ideal, he seemed least capable of sacrificing himself for an idea of any kind, he finds himself suddenly confronted with an unprecedented danger, which he is almost certain that the most heroic nations of history would not have faced nor even dreamed of facing, whereas he does not even dream that it is possible to do aught but face it.  And let it not be said that we had no choice, that the danger and the struggle were thrust upon us, that we had to defend ourselves or die and that in such cases there are no cowards.  It is not true:  there was, there always has been, there still is a choice.