The morning at Yasnaya Polyana is sunny, and the thermometer on the verandah reads sixteen degrees. The lindens, which I planted as a younger man and which now bend their thick limbs over the path, are stirring quietly. A peasant boy passes with a bundle of kindling on his back; he nods to me, and I nod to him, and between us, in this nod, there is more honesty than in all the dispatches that have been laid upon my table this morning. I have read them. I will tell you what I think.
It is reported from Washington and from Tehran that a great document is being prepared, of fourteen articles, by which the war between America and Persia is to be brought to an end. The bourses of the world, hearing this, have shaken themselves like dogs after a swim, and the price of oil has fallen, and the merchants in New York have grown six hundred dollars richer in a single afternoon. The President speaks of "very good talks." The Persian foreign minister, who is in Peking, sits at the same table as the Chinese, who are pleased to call for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, as a man with a sore tooth is pleased to call for the opening of a window. Everywhere there is the language of progress, the language of memoranda, the language of careful caveats. And yet I cannot read it without a heaviness.
For at the very hour these talks are spoken of, Israeli aeroplanes have struck the city of Beirut for the first time since the truce of mid-April, and a senior Hezbollah commander is said to lie among the rubble. The American spokesman explains that Hezbollah is "trying to derail talks," as if a man bleeding on the floor were derailing the surgeon. And in another corner of the same country, a soldier has been photographed pressing a cigarette into the mouth of a statue of the Virgin Mary. There is no protocol that addresses such a thing. It is not in the fourteen articles. It will not enter the bourses of the world. And yet, my friends, this small profanation tells us more about the war than all the diplomats taken together: that a young man who once knelt at his mother's knee, and who was taught what a mother is, has now grown up to extinguish his cigarette upon the lips of someone else's mother. This is what war does, infallibly, to the soul of every soldier, and it cannot be repaired by any signature whatever.
Outside my window the orchard is quiet. A starling is calling. From the kitchen comes the smell of bread. A man in the village is sharpening his scythe, and the small ringing of the stone against the iron is, to me, the truest sound of May. While I sit here, in Romania, on the territory of the alliance that is called North Atlantic, peasant women are watching drones cross the sky as we once watched cranes. It is the fourth year of that war. The war was always to remain on the other side of a line drawn upon a map. The drones, who do not read maps, have not respected this. And in the Ukrainian town of Oleshky, civilians who can neither stay nor flee have been cut off from food and medicine for many months; they speak of a "Road of Death," which is the only road by which to leave. This is what is meant, at last, when men in capitals speak of "a regional question."
A despatch from Moscow, that I read with bitterness, warns the foreign legations in Kyiv to depart, lest, on the day my country celebrates its victory over the great evil of the last century, my country should commit a fresh evil upon another capital. I knew already, as an old man knows the weather in his knee, that no nation is preserved from such reversals. But I had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that the day called Victory might be kept by my grandchildren as a day of grief and not of menace.
Pyongyang, meanwhile, has declared that it will not be bound by any treaty against the spread of the atom. North Korea is right, in this small particular, and wrong in every other: a treaty cannot bind the will of a man who does not himself wish to be bound. The fourteen articles between Washington and Tehran, if they are signed, will hold only as long as the men who sign them remain men of their word. And men of their word, in our age of newspapers, are rarer than they were in the time of my grandfather, when a gentleman's promise was kept because his soul required it of him, and not because it had been notarised.
In Washington itself, a new doctrine has been published, calling Europe an "incubator of terror" because of its migrants. I have travelled in Europe. I have seen the migrants. They are men, and women, and small children, who have been moved, as wheat is moved, by the great winds of war. To call them an "incubator" is to confuse the chicken with the storm that drove the hen from her nest. And in Mexico City, a nightclub has begun to charge American visitors three hundred dollars at the door, while charging others twenty: a small revenge, comic and exact, of which I cannot wholly disapprove.
I read, too, that an American named Turner has died at eighty-seven, who once invented a manner of broadcasting the news of the world without interruption, day and night, into every room of every house. He was, in his way, a great man, who believed that if only people knew, they would act. He was wrong about this, as I have been wrong about many things. People know. They have always known. The question is not whether they will be informed. The question is whether they will be moved.
The clock in the hall has struck eleven. The sun lies upon the floorboards, sixteen degrees of pleasant air come through the open window, and a fly has settled upon my inkwell. I think of the boy with the kindling. I think of the soldier with his cigarette. Between these two there is, perhaps, a treaty more important than the one of fourteen articles. It is not signed in any language. It is signed only in the heart of each living man, every morning, when he decides whether to be cruel or to be kind. The diplomats may have their day, and may bring, or fail to bring, a brief silence to the guns. But the great peace, which is the only peace that has ever held, is made and unmade by us, here, at the breakfast tables of the world, every hour.
Let us therefore, today, sign it.
