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Such dead as these have a power as profound, as fruitful as life and less precarious. It is terrible that this experience should have been made, for it is the most pitiless and the first in such enormous masses that mankind has undergone; but, now that the ordeal is over, we shall soon gather the most unexpected fruits. It will not be long before we see the differences widen and the destinies diverge between the nations which have acquired all these dead and all this glory and those which were deprived of them; and we shall perceive with amazement that the nations which have lost the most are those which have kept their riches and their men. There are losses which are inestimable gains; and there are gains whereby the future is lost. There are dead whom the living cannot replace and the mere thought of whom accomplishes things which our bodies cannot perform. There are dead whose energy surpasses death and recovers life; and we are almost every one of us at this moment the mandataries of a being greater, nobler, graver, wiser and more truly living than ourselves. With all those who accompany him, he will be our judge, if it be true that the dead weigh the soul of the living and that our happiness depends on their verdict. He will be our guide and our protector, for it is the first time, since history has revealed its misfortunes to us, that man has felt so great a host of such mighty dead soaring above his head and speaking within his heart.
We shall live henceforward under their laws, which will be more just but not more severe nor more cheerless than ours; for it is a mistake to suppose that the dead love nothing but gloom: they love only that justice and that truth which are the eternal forms of happiness.
From the depths of this justice and this truth in which they are all immersed, they will help us to destroy the great falsehoods of existence; for war and death, if they sow innumerable miseries and misfortunes, have at least the merit of destroying as many lives as they occasion evils. And all the sacrifices which they have made for us will have been in vain—and this is not possible—if they do not first of all bring about the fall of the lies on which we live and which it is not necessary to name, for each of us knows his own and is ashamed of them and will be eager to make an end of them.
They will teach us, before all else, from the depths of our hearts which are their living tombs, to love those who outlive them, since it is in them alone that they wholly exist.
MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE