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قراءة كتاب Above the Battle
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@32779@[email protected]#XI" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">XI.
It is my pleasant duty to thank the brave friends who have defended me during the past year, in the Parisian press:—at the end of October 1914, Amédée Dunois in l'Humanité, and Henri Guilbeaux, in the Bataille syndicaliste; in the same paper, Fernand Deprès; Georges Pioch in the Hommes du Jour; J. M. Renaitour, in the Bonnet Rouge; Rouanet, in l'Humanité; Jacques Mesnil, in the Mercure de France, and Gaston Thiesson, in the Guerre Sociale. To these faithful comrades in the struggle I express my affectionate gratitude.
R. R.
October, 1915.
PREFACE
A great nation assailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect: it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets loose. To each his part: to the armies the protection of the soil of their native land; to the thinkers the defense of its thought. If they subordinate that thought to the passions of their people they may well be useful instruments of passion; but they are in danger of betraying the spirit, which is not the least part of a people's patrimony. One day History will pass judgment on each of the nations at war; she will weigh their measure of errors, lies, and heinous follies. Let us try and make ours light before her!
Children are taught the Gospel of Jesus and the Christian ideal. Everything in the education they receive at school is designed to stimulate in them intellectual understanding of the great human family. Classical education makes them see, beyond{16} the differences of race, the roots and the common trunk of our civilization. Art makes them love the profound sources of the genius of a people. Science makes them believe in the unity of reason. The great social movement which renews the world, reveals the organized effort of the working classes all round them to unite their forces in the hopes and struggles which break the barriers of nations. The brightest geniuses of the earth, like Walt Whitman and Tolstoi, chant universal brotherhood in joy and suffering, or else like our Latin spirits, pierce with their criticism the prejudices of hatred and ignorance which separate individuals and peoples.
Like all the men of my time, I have been brought up on these thoughts; I have tried in my turn to share the bread of life with my younger or less fortunate brothers. When the war came I did not think it my duty to deny these thoughts because the hour had come to put them to the test.
I have been insulted. I knew that I should be and I went forward. But I did not know that I should be insulted without even a hearing.
For several months no one in France could know my writings except through scraps of phrases arbitrarily extracted and mutilated by my enemies. It{17} is a shameful record. For nearly a year this has gone on. Certain socialist or syndicalist papers may have succeeded here and there in getting some fragments through,[2] but it was only in the month of June 1915 that for the first time my chief article, the one which was the object of the most violent criticism, "Above the Battle," dating from September 1914, could be published in full (almost in full), thanks to the malevolent zeal of a maladroit pamphleteer, to whom I am indebted for bringing my words before the French public for the first time.
A Frenchman does not judge his adversary unheard. Whoever does so judges and condemns himself: for he shows that he fears the light. I place before the world the texts they have slandered.