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.


4

It is not man's life that is at stake, but the idea which he forms of
the honour, the happiness and the duties of his life. To save his life
he had but to submit to the enemy; the invader would not have
exterminated him. You cannot exterminate a great people; it is not
even possible to enslave it seriously or to inflict great sorrow upon
it for long. He had nothing to be afraid of except disgrace. He did