“Au milieu de fantômes tristes et sans nombre”
There is something daunting, even to the mind of one not guilty of war or of massacres, in the thought of multitudes: the multitude of the dead, of the living, of one generation, of men since there have been men on earth. And war brings this horror to us daily, or rather nightly, because such great companies of men have suddenly died together, passing in comradeship and community from the known to the unknown. Yet dare we say “together”? The unparalleled solitariness and singleness of death is not altered by the general and simultaneous doom of battle.
And it is with the multitude, and all the ones in it, that the maker of war is in unconscious relation. He does not know their names, he does not know them by any kind of distinction, he knows them only by thousands. Yet everyone with a separate life and separate death is in conscious relation with him, knows him for the tyrant who has taken his youth, his hope, his love, his fatherhood.
What a multitude to meet, whether in thought, in conscience, or in another world! We all, no doubt, try to make the thought of massacre less intolerable to our minds by telling ourselves that the sufferers suffer one by one, to each his own share, and not another’s; that though the numbers may appal, they do not make each man’s part more terrible. But this is not much comfort. There is not, it is true, a sum of multiplication; but there is the sum of addition. And that addition—the multitude man by man—the War Lord has to reckon with: Frederick the Great with his men, Napoleon with his, the German Emperor with his—each one of the innumerable unknown knowing his destroyer.
ALICE MEYNELL
“Mais quand la voix de Dieu l’appela il se voyait seul sur la terre au milieu de fantômes tristes et sans nombre.”