The Inferno by Henri Barbusse

society is a supreme injustice. It rests on no better basis than the law that once created races of slaves. I know patriotism has become a narrow offensive sentiment which as long as it lives will maintain war and exhaust the world. I know that neither work nor material and moral prosperity, nor the noble refinements of progress, nor the wonders of art, need competition inspired by hate. In fact, I know that, on the contrary, these things are destroyed by arms. I know that the map of a country is composed of conventional lines and different names, that our innate love of self leads us closer to those that are like-minded than to those who belong to the same geographical group, and we are more truly compatriots of those who understand and love us and who are on the level of our own souls, or who suffer the same slavery than of those whom we meet on the street. The national groups, the units of the modern world, are what they are, to be sure. The love we have for our native land would be good and praiseworthy if it did not degenerate, as we see it does everywhere, into vanity, the spirit of predominance, acquisitiveness, hate, envy, nationalism, and militarism. The monstrous distortion of the patriotic sentiment, which is increasing, is killing off humanity. Mankind is committing suicide, and our age is an agony."
    The two men had the same vision and said simultaneously:
    "A cancer, a cancer!"
    The older scientist grew animated, succumbing to the evidence.
    "I know as well as you do that posterity will judge severely those who have made a fetich of the institutions of oppression and have cultivated and spread the ideas supporting them. I know that the cure for an abuse does not begin until we refuse to submit to the cult that consecrates it. And I, who have devoted myself for half a century to the great discoveries that have changed the face of the world, I know that in introducing an innovation one encounters the hostility of everything that is.
    "I know it is a vice to spend years and centuries saying of progress, 'I should like it, but I do not want it.' But as for me, I have too many cares and too much work to do. And then, as I told you, I am too old. These ideas are too new for me. A man's intelligence is capable of holding only a certain quantum of new, creative ideas. When that amount is exhausted, whatever the progress around you may be, one refuses to see it and help it on. I am incapable of carrying on a discussion to fruitful lengths. I am incapable of the audacity of being logical. I confess to you, my boy, I have not the strength to be right."
    "My dear doctor," said the young man in a tone of reproach, meeting his older colleague's sincerity with equal sincerity, "you have publicly declared your disapproval of the men who publicly fought the idea of patriotism. The influence of your name has been used against them."
    The old man straightened himself, and his face coloured.
    "I will not stand for our country's being endangered."
    I did not recognise him any more. He dropped from his great thoughts and was no longer himself. I was discouraged.
    "But," the other put in, "what you just said--"
    "That is not the same thing. The people you speak of have defied us. They have declared themselves enemies and so have justified all outrages in advance."
    "Those who commit outrages against them commit the crime of ignorance," said the young man in a tremulous voice, sustained by a kind of vision. "They fail to see the superior logic of things that are in the process of creation." He bent over to his companion, and, in a firmer tone, asked, "How can the thing that is beginning help being revolutionary? Those who are the first to cry out are alone, and therefore ignored or despised. You yourself just said so. But posterity will remember the vanguard of martyrs. It will hail those who have cast a doubt on the equivocal word 'fatherland,' and will gather them into the fold of all the innovators who went before them and who are