The Daily Worker Newspaper, January 30, 1926, Page 12

THE BEYOND By Henri Barbusse (Continued from preceding page, page 5) It is bevditine I am no longer what I was yesterday. In a few hours I have: traveled centuries, and I have aged. There is something bigger than [ and my history, and I begin to spell it out, being by being; it is the great law, that artificial fatality of which we are all the toys, which drives all living things and makes them do what they do. I bow my head. The image of my sweet Carla is overturn- ed, Carla with her delicious little breasts which I never knew. And I deserve this punishment, I who did not see the shame of reverence for idols, He lived in his function of king; she lived in her function of slave. Beyond the crying needs of nature, a few beings have forged for all the others a devilish destiny. Gold, the universal ball of gold, above the hor- izons of filth and. slime! In the salon, furnished and orna- mented with pomp beyond imagining, I look at her whom I loved, fallen there by the power of gold. She came to me of her own choice, but she gravitated to him thru the force of cir: yeumstances.-She was not one of those ‘who: resist. She was no rebel, My eyes filled with tears. He—he laughs. His powerful face, with strong features, smooth as stone, laughs. My fists clench as I see how ugly he was, and that here there was no love. It puts me back into myself, into my personal affairs: I, Hubert Allen, with my signs, my character, my handwriting, my own shape, What vengeance against a corpse? only one: to judge him, to dissect his gaping destiny; to know what he did among men, to reconstruct the drama of others as they lead to him, Again the thot flashes upon me: “Never has a man had the possibility of knowledge that I have at this mo- ment.” In the course of life, no one ean pierce the fantastic precautions and the accumulated defences, to the truth that lies back of them; the “adtisbs ‘ofthe evéiits that sieze one are buried in hard reality; the present is not to be grasped, the past and even the future are clearer than the pres- ent—nobody, ... never... Except myself today, thru an accident that, after the invisible deluge, lets me open drawers and strong-boxes, and hold autopsy, and scatter before*me to the four winds the secret archives and the intimate documents that I find hidden. I rummage thru the papers of the millionaire, filed away in order, inocu- lated with ink in his heavy handwrit- ing. I follow the thread of certain intrigues: the story of a statesman driven from his career; the affair of a colonial concession; contraband of munitions and opium; the extradition of political refugees; provision for a war following upon a Balkan loan; and notes for a long speech. All these. things hang together. I who yesterday, who this morning even, was a vague sportsman, the color of space, with the eye of a bird, I am now busy with the bitter and sombre task of untangling the elements of these great enterprises in which are gambled away the fate of crowds; the content of history. I go to the city hall, to the big news- paper office, to the police headquar- ters—into the sanctuaries and the tab- ernacles of these ‘buildings, and even to the apartments where the minister and the ambassador are staying tem- porarily, and the great Barbare, manl- tou of dollars, who was, on a world scale, what the Baron de Ghest was here in France. Here I rummage, read, note, among telegrams, confiden- tial reports, checkbooks ... I am in the presence of enormitios, too vast for my comprehension. Nev- ertheless I dig down into these things to reconstruct the combination, I use the whole day, and now it is evening. This distracted and fragmentary in- quest, by a man turned loose in a world without hindrance, brings ime, not knowledge, but a presentiment. A fantastic scenario, yes, but real. These are the amusements of gro- tesquely overgrown children, dreadful amusements which step by step ful- fill themselves in human flesh. ranged and prodigiously perfected on imbecile datalike a movie-film of suc- cess. But gold makes everything go. Ah, ah, he -was richer and stronger, a thousand times richer and stronger, | imagination could | than my petty guess, when I said that I would “make use of him.” We live by “almost,” we content ourselves with the surface ap | pearance, we don’t take the trouble to think things out, we don’t dare to face conclusions. We aré the same as the animals, In that conference room these four men with heavy faces, round and at the same time square, sit around « table with written papers. Foreign police agents: a Balkan, and one other. I know what they weére working on, that the waited this morning impatiently for the ultra-confidential report, ultra sec- ret, to be burned as soon as read. They. have written there befor~ them what they want to do in each country to drive underground, to fore. under th weight of the law, or better under the weight of public indigna tion, those who endanger the sacro sanct established law and order. No you, honorable and inoffensive spot ers of democratic eloquence, but those who show the people things as they are: the enemies, thé wild ‘beasts. Find proofs, dig them up, make them up! We must... we must... They are there, a pile of them. I see be- tween the shoulders around the table, the fabrication of a story of assassi- nation and slime which would have made possible a reign of terror against the troublers of the social or- der; these bloodhounds of the great diplomacy of law and civilization were making up the proofs. A sharper blow falls on me and leaves me weak: on a page, beside the corpse with the yellow claw, I read. “The air-raid on China. The basis for war will result from the explosion of indignation aroused in. Europe: by! the news of the massacre of the avia- tors.” Truly, at this moment, in the midst of this political and financial chaos, I see face to face, from one end to the ofier, something universal. I go back to the place of the Baron de Ghest. He lolls on his crimson be- side the girl’s body. I grip him and lift him, this man who laughs, this sorcerer who shouts his victory, who was broken at last only by the cat- aclysm that breaks the world. But he triumphed even to the end; he tri- umphs now. I shake with both hands the mummy of raw flesh. Fury rises to my hands and to my head, “You did what you wished. You took for yourself of every creature you wanted. You devoured the youth of women, you used and destroyed the youth of unnumbered men, Your in- trigues, your speculations, your me«- nopolies, were the ferocious games of a brute and a thief—and yet they were systematically built up on whole populations, and they functioned. You have made your metallic kitchen with thinking and bleeding masses, .you have prepared wars to enrich yourself further; your affair in Georgia, your affair in the Sudan, your affair in China and a hundred others at the same time! You have used every- thing, from the ideals to the hunger and thirst of humanity, with publicity, democratic parilaments, journals, law- courts and churches!” I shook him more furiously, and his skull hit the wall with a hollow crack, and I am astonished to see that the creature who directed so great an ap- paratus, the creature who planned to have me assassinated after so many others, to have a pretext for patriotic conquest, the creative all of whose calculations were based upon the sac rifice of incalculable lives,—is ofy a man like the rest, light in my hands, with a face, two arms, a collar, and « necktie. I throw him on the floor, where he strikes with a dull sound, and his scarecrow face, turned toward the last daylight in the vast room where evening is gathering, a Pole, a Roumanian, |. ne 8 ITT “Fourteenth Congress of the Party” wc M@TRIDHAAUATRIA Ces, NapTHH. tn adjustment of details, expertly ar-} ERE is a cartoon showing the great Communist Party of Kussia successfully steering the ship of the Soviet Union;-guided by the compass of Leninism. This cartoon was first published in Pravda, organ of the Russian Communist Party, and copied by an American capitalist paper. Why, at this particular moment, are many Amer- ican capitalist newspapers partially concealing their mortal hatred of Soviet Russia? The vast territory conquered by the red army of workers and peasants is an insurmountable obstacle to the re-estab- lishment of world economy on a capitalist basis. The imperialistic powers are obliged to try to soften this contradiction. Capitalism ‘ im most! touritries “Ped6ghizes” the Soviet Union. Imperialism evén suggests that the Soviet Union be invited to join the league of na- tions—of course, for the purpose of tying the hands of the Soviet Union, and with the hope of discrediting it in the eyes of the work- ing class. Capitalism today is obliged, for its own purposes, tem- porarily to create a psychology of world harmony—and this must even include fictitious overtures toward the Soviet Union. But, of course, the contradictions cannot be covered up. The compass of Leninism points to the opposite perialism. pole from that of capitalist im- laugh. He is ng genius; he tw only a king. If it had not been he, it would have been another, and if the seed of man is not dead, it will be another, The pale statue of Carla is turned to the last light of the window, and smiles too. « Vit. Almost all these thunderstruck marionettes are smiling. There is one body that won’t have that beatific mask; the old mad wo- man in the asylum. I come out in the twilight to go w her. I have that much courage. Be- sides, what else can I do? I can’t sleep... The garden, the square building, the corridor. Here, in her place. The end of the world overtook her while she leaned at a window in the corri- dor, looking out with her bewildered distress: the railroad below where the workmen stood out against the back- ground of the sea, She was wise! she alone was wise, when she warned me of the race with death and told me that I should be afraid. “He will stifle us—all, all. He must devour men. . .” It took the disembowelling of the world to teach me—jumping-jack that I was—what she knew already. Events are so implacable that only disordered imaginations can fling themselves so far! She watches the thin pallisade of workers, and beyond them the fantas- tie reality. The real fools, were, are, the care less, the calm, the optimists. But above all the poor: those who come out of the shadows, innumer- able, with hammers and sickles or continues to guns and bayonets, They who make everything: things, bread, victories. I see them outlined against the enormous devastation, dantesque fig- ures—(yet I am the only one who is Jained.) Why do they obey? Why do they make alliance with their enemies? Why do they fight against each other, in work and war, these morsels of the multitude? Why are they at one and the same time the victim and the hangman—when they only have to rise up together in ranks, to put the life of the world in order, and drown their little profiteers between their hundred thousand hearts. Fools, fools! Worse than fools: malefactors. For humankind is going to its ruin. It is fate, it is written, since the beginning of the law of wealth and of war be tween persons, and between the weary masses. If there had not been this or poisoned by space. Oh; it is not supernatural, this deluge. It is nor- a oe ena Sb