This morning a thin rain came down upon the birches, the patchy, undecided rain of July that cannot make up its mind to fall in earnest, and the thermometer on the terrace stood at fifteen degrees. I walked out before the household had risen and stood bareheaded among the wet grass, and it seemed to me, as it has seemed on so many mornings of my long life, that the rain fell with perfect indifference upon the just and the unjust, upon the estate of a count and upon the roof of a peasant, and that this indifference was itself a kind of instruction, if only men had the humility to receive it.
For the newspapers, when they came, were full of the affairs of great men, and the great men, as always, imagined that they were directing the course of the world.
In the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow neck of water through which the oil of nations must pass, the Americans and the Persians have again exchanged their blows. The one declares the passage open; the other declares it closed; and both, to prove their contrary assertions, hurl fire at each other's cities, so that the ports of Bandar Abbas and Jask are said to be burning, while in return the rockets of Tehran fall upon Bahrain and Kuwait and Jordan, upon men who never asked to be made the anvil of this quarrel. And what is the visible result of all this resolve, all this iron determination of presidents and generals? That the price of a barrel of oil has risen by a few coins in the markets of London. The ministers believe they move armies; in truth they move only the columns of figures in a merchant's ledger, and the merchant, not the minister, sleeps soundly.
I have written elsewhere, in the years when I still believed a book could alter the marrow of a man, that the general who imagines he commands a battle is like a child who, seated in a carriage and tugging at the straps within it, supposes that he is driving the horses. So it is here. Some functionary signs a paper concerning the Strait; the paper is read aloud; and then the thing that was going to happen happens anyway, and the paper is discovered to have controlled nothing at all. The hard men of Tehran, their old leaders killed in the spring, press now to keep the fighting alive, as though the fighting were a fire that would go out and leave them cold if they ceased for one hour to feed it. They mistake, as all such men mistake, the momentum of events for their own will.
And while the strong contend for the waterway, death, that greatest of levellers, went about his ordinary business with his ordinary thoroughness, taking the powerful and the powerless in a single morning's harvest.
In America a senator has died, a man who for years had thundered for war against Persia, who championed every strike and every campaign; and he died not upon any battlefield he had so eloquently desired for others, but quietly, of a rupture in the great artery of his own heart, in his seventy-first year. In the Gulf, the old Emir of Qatar is dead at seventy-four, he who once seized his throne from his own father without the shedding of blood and made of a small desert country a power that princes courted. Two men accustomed to being obeyed, and the same summons came to each, and neither could send a deputy in his place.
I do not write this in triumph over them, God forbid. I am an old man myself, and I feel the same door opening at my back that opened at theirs. I write it only because it is the one fact that the newspapers report and instantly forget, hurrying on to the next dispatch, when it is the only fact that ought to make the presidents lay down their weapons and weep.
Yet if death is just in that he comes to all, the manner of his coming is not distributed with any justice that a man can understand, and here my heart breaks where my reason cannot follow.
For in Bangkok, near the great market, some seven-and-twenty people went out at midnight to a place of music and drink, as the young will, and fire tore through the building, and they died running through the flames toward doors that did not save them. They had signed no treaties. They had no quarrel with Persia or with America. They were poor and young and wished only to be warm and glad for an evening, and they were burned. And in the hills of Spain, and now in the very forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, the woods themselves are burning; a British couple was drawn half-conscious from a ravine with the fire's mark upon them; and in France the heat has drowned more than a hundred and thirty souls in rivers and ponds where they fled to be cool. And in China, two millions of people were driven from their homes before a great wind came in from the sea.
Here is the true war of our age, and no general declares it and no senator votes upon it: the war of fire and flood and heat against the small, unrecorded lives of men. The presidents cannot sign a treaty with the typhoon. The armies cannot bombard the wildfire into surrender. Before these things the great and the small are made equal in their helplessness, and the only weapon that has ever availed against them is the oldest and least fashionable of all – that one man should carry another out of the flames upon his own back, asking nothing.
I came in from the garden wet through, and my daughter scolded me, and I was glad to be scolded, for it is a living voice and a warm room and bread upon the table, and I have learned late, far too late, that these are not the small things but the only great ones. The senator and the emir would give all their power now for one more grey morning of fifteen degrees and a rain that cannot decide to fall. The men in Bangkok would give the whole Strait of Hormuz, and all its oil, for one more.
Let the ministers keep their waterway. I will keep the rain.