for them, although I am not sure that they will give heed to me. Should
my warning be unheeded, I shall still have reaped the fruit of my
agonizing in having cured myself, and, like the fox caught in a trap,
shall have gnawed off my captive foot.




CHAPTER II

REFLECTIONS

During the wars of the Empire, while husbands and brothers were in
Germany, anxious mothers gave birth to an ardent, pale, and neurotic
generation. Conceived between battles, reared amid the noises of war,
thousands of children looked about them with dull eyes while testing
their limp muscles. From time to time their blood-stained fathers would
appear, raise them to their gold-laced bosoms, then place them on the
ground and remount their horses.

The life of Europe centred in one man; men tried to fill their lungs with
the air which he had breathed. Yearly France presented that man with
three hundred thousand of her youth; it was the tax to Caesar; without
that troop behind him, he could not follow his fortune. It was the
escort he needed that he might scour the world, and then fall in a little
valley on a deserted island, under weeping willows.

Never had there been so many sleepless nights as in the time of that man;
never had there been seen, hanging over the ramparts of the cities, such
a nation of desolate mothers; never was there such a silence about those