The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



the terrible thunderclap of war which roused 

 to a protest of intolerable grief the uttermost 

 fibres of his being. 



The whole man suffered. The French- 

 man, to see his beloved country the victim of 

 the brutal and underhand aggression of a 

 predatory nation: the father to see his dear 

 children, a son and two sons-in-law, cast into 

 the furnace; the idealist and the great- 

 hearted man who had held war to be a relic 

 of barbarism, doomed to disappear from 

 the annals of the human race, to see war de- 

 clared, and spreading with the violence of a 

 conflagration, surpassing in horror all that 

 history tells us of the armed conflicts of the 

 past. 



Before the bloody vision of the battle- 

 fields, how should he not feel shaken to the 

 depths of his being by the tremors of a ter- 

 rible anger and a vast pity, he who had 

 never been able to see an insect suffering 

 without a pang at the heart? 



True, in his incomparable Iliad, the 

 Homer of the Insects had often described 

 creatures that hunt one another, kill one an- 

 other, devour one another with indescribable 

 ardour and ferocity, and he knew that he 

 had only written a chapter of that " struggle 

 for life " which is to be found on every step 



384 



