The Inferno

by Henri Barbusse

  They were left alone together. The man dropped down again with a slowness and awkwardness that would have seemed ridiculous if it had not been so sad. The doctor stood between us.

  “How has your heart been behaving?”

  By an instinct which seemed tragic to me, they both lowered their voices, and in a low tone the sick man gave his daily account of the progress of his malady.

  The man of science listened, interrupted, and nodded his head in approval. He put an end to the recital by repeating his usual meaningless assurances, in a raised voice now and with his usual broad gesture.

  “Well, well, I see there's nothing new.”

  He shifted his position and I saw the patient, his drawn features and wild eyes. He was all shaken up by this talking about the dreadful riddle of his illness.

  He calmed himself, and began to converse with the doctor, who let himself down squarely into a chair, with an affable manner. He started several topics, then in spite of himself returned to the sinister thing he carried within him, his disease.

  “Disgusting!” he said.

  “Bah!” said the doctor, who was blasé.

  Then he rose.

  “Well, till to-morrow!”

  “Yes, for the consultation.”

  “Yes. Well, good-by!”

  The doctor went out, lightly carrying the burden of misery and cruel memories, the weight of which he had ceased to feel.

  ***

  Evidently the consulting physicians had just finished their examination of the patient in another room. The door opened, and two doctors entered.

  Their manner seemed to me to be stiff. One of them was a young man, the other an old man.

  They looked at each other. I tried to penetrate the silence of their eyes and the night in their heads. The older man stroked his beard, leaned against the mantelpiece, and stared at the ground.

  “Hopeless,” he said, lowering his voice, for fear of being overheard by the patient.

  The other nodded his head – in sign of agreement – of complicity, you might say. Both men fell silent like two guilty children. Their eyes met again.

  “How old is he?”

  “Fifty-three.”

  “Lucky to live so long,” the young doctor remarked.

  To which the old man retorted philosophically:

  “Yes, indeed. But his luck won't hold out any longer.”

  A silence. The man with the grey beard murmured:

  “I detected sarcoma.” He put his finger on his neck. “Right here.”

  The other man nodded – his head seemed to be nodding continually – and muttered:

  “Yes. There's no possibility of operating.”

  “Of course not,” said the old specialist, his eyes shining with a kind of sinister irony. “There's only one thing that could remove it – the guillotine. Besides, the malignant condition has spread. There is pressure upon the submaxillary and subclavicular ganglia, and probably the axillary ganglia also. His respiration, circulation and digestion will soon be obstructed and strangulation will be rapid.”

  He sighed and stood with an unlighted cigar in his mouth, his face rigid, his arms folded. The young man sat down, leaning back in his chair, and tapped the marble mantelpiece with his idle fingers.

  “What shall I tell the young woman?”

  “Put on a subdued manner and tell her it is serious, very serious, but no one can tell, nature is infinitely resourceful.”

  “That's so hackneyed.”

  “So much the better,” said the old man.

  “But if she insists on knowing?”

  “Don't give in.”

  “Shall we not hold out a little hope? She is so young.”

  “No. For that very reason we mustn't. She'd become too hopeful. My boy, never say anything superfluous at such a time. There's no use. The only result is to make them call us ignoramuses and hate us.”

  “Does he realise?”

  “I do not know. While I examined him – you heard – I tried to find out by asking questions. Once I thought he had no suspicion at all. Then he seemed to understand his case as well as I did.”

  “Sarcoma forms like the human embryo,” said the younger doctor.

  “Yes, like the human embryo,” the other assented and entered into a long elaboration of this idea.

  “The germ acts on the cell, as Lancereaux has pointed out, in the same way as a spermatozoon. It is a micro-organism which penetrates the tissue, and selects and impregnates it, sets it vibrating, gives it another life. But the exciting agent of this intracellular activity, instead of being the normal germ of life, is a parasite.”

  He went on to describe the process minutely and in highly scientific terms, and ended up by saying:

  “The cancerous tissue never achieves full development. It keeps on without ever reaching a limit. Yes, cancer, in the strictest sense of the word, is infinite in our organism.”

  The young doctor bowed assent, and then said:

  “Perhaps – no doubt – we shall succeed in time in curing all diseases. Everything can change. We shall find the proper method for preventing what we cannot stop when it has once begun. And it is then only that we shall dare to tell the ravages due to the spread of incurable diseases. Perhaps we shall even succeed in finding cures for certain incurable affections. The remedies have not had time to prove themselves. We shall cure others – that is certain – but we shall not cure him.” His voice deepened. Then he asked:

  “Is he a Russian or a Greek?”

  “I do not know. I see so much into the inside of people that their outsides all look alike to me.”

  “They are especially alike in their vile pretense of being dissimilar and enemies.”

  The young man seemed to shudder, as if the idea aroused a kind of passion in him. He rose, full of anger, changed.

  “Oh,” he said, “what a disgraceful spectacle humanity presents. In spite of its fearful wounds, humanity makes war upon humanity. We who deal with the sores afflicting mankind are struck more than others by all the evil men involuntarily inflict upon one another. I am neither a politician nor a propagandist. It is not my business to occupy myself with ideas. I have too much else to do. But sometimes I am moved by a great pity, as lofty as a dream. Sometimes I feel like punishing men, at other times, like going down on my knees to them.”

  The old doctor smiled sadly at this vehemence, then his smile vanished at the thought of the undeniable outrage.

  “Unfortunately you are right. With all the misery we have to suffer, we tear ourselves with our own hands besides – the war of the classes, the war of the nations, whether you look at us from afar or from above, we are barbarians and madmen.”

  “Why, why,” said the young doctor, who was getting excited, “why do we continue to be fools when we recognise our own folly?”

  The old practitioner shrugged his shoulders, as he had a few moments before when they spoke of incurable diseases.

  “The force of tradition, fanned by interested parties. We are not free, we are attached to the past. We study what has always been done, and do it over again – war and injustice. Some day perhaps humanity will succeed in ridding itself of the ghost of the past. Let us hope that some day we shall emerge from this endless epoch of massacre and misery. What else is there to do than to hope?”

  The old man stopped at this. The young man said:

  “To will.”

  The other man made a gesture with his hand.

  “There is one great general cause for the world's ulcer,” the younger one kept on. “You have said it – servility to the past, prejudice which prevents us from doing things differently, according to reason and morality. The spirit of tradition infects humanity, and its two frightful manifestations are–”

  The old man rose from his chair, as if about to protest and as if to say, “Don't mention them!”

  But the young man could not restrain himself any more.

  “– inheritance from the past and the fatherla
nd.”

  “Hush!” cried the old man. “You are treading on ground on which I cannot follow. I recognise present evils. I pray with all my heart for the new era. More than that, I believe in it. But do not speak that way about two sacred principles.”

  “You speak like everybody else,” said the young man bitterly. “We must go to the root of the evil, you know we must. You certainly do.” And he added violently, “Why do you act as if you did not know it? If we wish to cure ourselves of oppression and war, we have a right to attack them by all the means possible – all! – the principle of inheritance and the cult of the fatherland.”

  “No, we haven't the right,” exclaimed the old man, who had risen in great agitation and threw a look at his interlocutor that was hard, almost savage.

  “We have the right!” cried the other.

  All at once, the grey head drooped, and the old man said in a low voice:

  “Yes, it is true, we have the right. I remember one day during the war. We were standing beside a dying man. No one knew who he was. He had been found in the debris of a bombarded ambulance – whether bombarded purposely or not, the result was the same. His face had been mutilated beyond recognition. All you could tell was that he belonged to one or other of the two armies. He moaned and groaned and sobbed and shrieked and invented the most appalling cries. We listened to the sounds that he made in his agony, trying to find one word, the faintest accent, that would at least indicate his nationality. No use. Not a single intelligible sound from that something like a face quivering on the stretcher. We looked and listened, until he fell silent. When he was dead and we stopped trembling, I had a flash of comprehension. I understood. I understood in the depths of my being that man is more closely knit to man than to his vague compatriots.

  “Yes, we have a right to attack oppression and war, we have a right to. I saw the truth several times afterward again, but I am an old man, and I haven't the strength to stick to it.”

  “My dear sir,” said the young man, rising, with respect in his voice. Evidently he was touched.

  “Yes, I know, I know,” the old scientist continued in an outburst of sincerity. “I know that in spite of all the arguments and the maze of special cases in which people lose themselves, the absolute, simple truth remains, that the law by which some are born rich and others poor and which maintains a chronic inequality in 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 now universally honoured.”

  “Never!” cried the old man, who listened to this last with a troubled look. A frown of obstinacy and impatience deepened in his forehead, and he clenched his fists in hate. “No, that is not the same thing. Besides, discussions like this lead nowhere. It would be better, while we are waiting for the world to do its duty, for us to do ours and tell this poor woman the truth.”

  CHAPTER X

  The two women were alone beside the wide open window. In the full, wise light of the autumn sun, I saw how faded was the face of the pregnant woman.

  All of a sudden a frightened expression came into her eyes. She reeled against the wall, leaned there a second, and then fell over with a stifled cry.

  Anna caught her in her arms, and dragged her along until she reached the bell and rang and rang. Then she stood still, not daring to budge, holding in her arms the heavy delicate woman, her own face close to the face with the rolling eyes. The cries, dull and stifled at first, burst out now in loud shrieks.

  The door opened. People hurried in. Outside the door the servants were on the watch. I caught sight of the landlady, who succeeded ill in concealing her comic chagrin.

  They laid the woman on the bed. They removed ornaments, unfolded towels, and gave hurried orders.

  The crisis subsided and the woman stopped shrieking. She was so happy not to be suffering any more that she laughed. A somewhat constrained reflection of her laugh appeared on the faces bending over her. They undressed her carefully. She let them handle her like a child. They fixed the bed. Her legs looked very thin and her set face seemed reduced to nothing. All you saw was her distended body in the middle of the bed. Her hair was undone and spread around her face like a pool. Two feminine hands plaited it quickly.

  Her laughter broke and stopped.

  “It is beginning again.”
>
  A groan, which grew louder, a fresh burst of shrieks. Anna, her only friend, remained in the room. She looked and listened, filled with thoughts of motherhood. She was thinking that she, too, held within her such travail and such cries.

  This lasted the whole day. For hours, from morning until evening, I heard the heart-rending wail rising and falling from that pitiful double being.

  At certain moments I fell back, overcome. I could no longer look or listen. I renounced seeing so much truth. Then once more, with an effort, I stood up against the wall and looked into the Room again.

  Anna kissed the woman on her forehead, in brave proximity to the immense cry.

  When the cry was articulate, it was: “No, no! I do not want to!”

  Serious, sickened faces, almost grown old in a few hours with fatigue, passed and repassed.

  I heard some one say:

  “No need to help it along. Nature must be allowed to take her course. Whatever nature does she does well.”

  And in surprise my lips repeated this lie, while my eyes were fixed upon the frail, innocent woman who was a prey to stupendous nature, which crushed her, rolled her in her blood, and exacted all the suffering from her that she could yield.

  The midwife turned up her sleeves and put on her rubber gloves. She waved her enormous reddish-black, glistening hands like Indian clubs.

  And all this turned into a nightmare in which I half believed. My head grew heavy and I was sickened by the smell of blood and carbolic acid poured out by the bottleful.

  At a moment when I, feeling too harrowed, was not looking, I heard a cry different from hers, a cry that was scarcely more than the sound of a moving object, a light grating. It was the new being that had unloosened itself, as yet a mere morsel of flesh taken from her flesh – her heart which had just been torn away from her.

  This shook me to the depths of my being. I, who had witnessed everything that human beings undergo, I, at this first signal of human life, felt some paternal and fraternal chord – I do not know what – vibrating within me.

  She laughed. “How quickly it went!” she said.