[Light by Henri Barbusse]@TWC D-Link bookLight CHAPTER XVI 29/51
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. 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.
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