24
PARTISAN REVIEW
the Nazis with all their might if it had been possible. But only a
living society can be defended, and the decay of this one was
already too far advanced. Nobody believed in anything any more,
because nothing, objectively, was possible: no revolution could be
made by a working class stuffed with fresh Camembert, good wine,
and rhetoric, nor could a counter-revolution be made by a hour·
geosie incapable of audacity or thought, and sick with fear since
the sit-down strikes. Nor could we go on under a regime of emer·
gency decrees, whether Daladier's or Paul Reynaud's. (I used to
marvel at Daladier's funeral-parlor face in the news-reels. He
always seemed to be repeating to himself, to the point of nausea,
"No, this can't go on....") Now it was all over, the bad tooth
had been pulled.
Few people have as yet this new sense which modern man is
painfully acquiring, the sense of history. Nevertheless, the people
who fled with us along all the roads of France and in the last
trains had to acknowledge in their stupor that "it had to happen."
I suddenly recaptured the strongest and most heartening emotion
of my childhood, the one, I feel, that will stay with me all my life:
confidence. I grew up among exiled Russian revolutionists who
kept photographs on their mantlepieces of men who had been
hanged. All their talk was of prisons, of Siberia, of the next revo–
lution.. They had confidence, they knew that the revolution was
coming, inexorably. Without big phrases, they taught me faith in
man, and to await with certainty the necessary cataclysms. Trav·
elling with us was a Spanish friend (between the two of us
we
could put together a pretty collection of overturned states ) and
getting up at dawn in open fields under a light luminous rain,
we
decided that this time the road had been half-cleared for the Euro–
pean revolution.
Meanwhile the collapse went on before our eyes, sweeping us
along with it. It was our own collapse too. Yes, our own. Along
with an empire and an army, the workers' organizations were col·
lapsing, and what was more serious, even solidarity had gone. The
farce of it all, the m mstrous farce, swallowed the tragedy of a
hundred thousand dead, Amiens half destroyed, some bridges des·
perately defended at the price of blood, columns of refugees
sprinkled with bombs, children lost in the insane confusion of rail·
road stations, and more, much more. But the tragedy was left
