In the low room of the old house, under the green and watery gleam of the diamond panes in the lancet window, the ancient citizen cries, "There are people mad enough to believe that a day will come when Brittany will no longer be at war with Maine!" He appears in the vortex of the past, and so saying, sinks back in it. And an engraving, once and for a long time heeded, again takes life: Standing on the wooden boom of the ancient port, his scarred doublet rusted by wind and brine, his old back bellied like a sail, the pirate is shaking his fist at the frigate that passes in the distance; and leaning over the tangle of tarred beams, as he used to on the nettings of his corsair ship, he predicts his race's eternal hatred for the English. "Russia a republic!" We raise our arms to heaven. "Germany a republic!" We raise our arms to heaven. And the great voices, the poets, the singers--what have the great voices said? They have sung the praises of the victor's laurels without knowing what they are. You, old Homer, bard of the lisping tribes of the coasts, with your serene and venerable face sculptured in the likeness of your great childlike genius, with your three times millennial lyre and your empty eyes--you who led us to Poetry! And you, herd of poets enslaved, who did not understand, who lived before you could understand, in an age when great men were only the domestics of great lords--and you, too, servants of the resounding and opulent pride of to-day, eloquent flatterers and magnificent dunces, you unwitting enemies of mankind! You have all sung the laurel wreath without knowing what it is. There are dazzlings, and solemnities and ceremonies, to amuse and excite the common people, to dim their sight with bright colors, with the glitter of the badges and stars that are crumbs of royalty, to inflame them with the jingle of bayonets and medals, with trumpets and trombones and the big drum, and to inspire the demon of war in the excitable feelings of women and the inflammable credulity of the young. I see the triumphal arches, the military displays in the vast amphitheaters of public places, and the march past of those who go to die, who walk in step to hell by reason of their strength and youth, and the hurrahs for war, and the real pride which the lowly feel in bending the knee before their masters and saying, as their cavalcade tops the hill, "It's fine! They might be galloping over us!" "It's magnificent, how warlike we are!" says the woman, always dazzled, as she convulsively squeezes the arm of him who is going away. And another kind of excitement takes form and seizes me by the throat in the pestilential pits of hell--"They're on fire, they're on fire!" stammers that soldier, breathless as his empty rifle, as the flood of the exalted German divisions advances, linked elbow to elbow under a godlike halo of ether, to drown the deeps with their single lives.