Gradually, however, they get the whole truth out of him, the devastating account that paralyses them with mortal fear. Grouchy stands there, pale and trembling as he leans on his sword. He knows that his martyrdom is beginning, but he firmly takes all the blame on himself, a thankless task. The hesitant subordinate officer who failed to make that invisible decision at the fateful moment now, face to face with nearby danger, becomes a man again and almost a hero. He immediately assembles all the officers and—with tears of anger and grief in his eyes—makes a short speech in which he both justifies and bewails his hesitation. The officers who still bore him resentment yesterday hear him in silence. Any of them could blame him and boast of having held a better opinion. But none of them dares or wants to do so. They say nothing for a long time, their depth of mourning silences them all.
And it is in that hour, after missing the vital second of decision, that Grouchy shows—but too late now—all his military strength. All his great virtues, circumspection, efficiency, caution and conscientiousness, are obvious now that he trusts himself again and not a written order. Surrounded by superior strength five times greater than his own, he leads his troops back again right through the middle of the enemy—a masterly tactical achievement—without losing a single cannon or a single man, and saves its last army for France and the empire. But when he comes home there is no emperor to thank him, and no enemy against whom he can lead the troops. He has come too late, for ever too late, and even if outwardly his life takes an upward course, if he is confirmed in his rank as a marshal and a peer of France, and he proves his worth manfully in those offices, yet nothing can buy him back that one moment that would have made him the master of destiny, if he had been capable of taking it.
That was the terrible revenge taken by the great moment that seldom descends into the life of ordinary mortals, on a man unjustly called upon to seize it who does not know how to exploit it. All the bourgeois virtues of foresight, obedience, zeal and circumspection are helpless, melted down in the fire of a great and fateful moment of destiny that demands nothing less than genius and shapes it into a lasting likeness. Destiny scornfully rejects the hesitant; another god on earth, with fiery arms it raises only the bold into the heaven of heroes.
CAPTAIN SCOTT, 90 DEGREESL ATITUDE
16 January 1912
The Struggle for the Earth
The twentieth century looks down on a world without mysteries. All its countries have been explored, ships have ploughed their way through the most distant seas. Landscapes that only a generation ago still slumbered in blissful anonymity serve the needs of Europe; steamers go as far as the long-sought sources of the Nile. The Victoria Falls, first seen by a European only half a century ago, obediently generate electricity; the Amazon rainforest, that last wilderness, has been cleared; the frontiers of Tibet, the only country that was still virgin territory, have been breached. New drawing by knowledgeable hands now covers the words Terra incognita on old maps and globes; in the twentieth century, mankind knows the planet on which it lives. Already the enquiring will is looking for new paths; it must plunge down to the fantastic fauna of the deep sea, or soar up into the endless air. For untrodden paths are to be found only in the skies, and already the steel swallows of aeroplanes shoot up, racing each other, to reach new heights and new distances, now that the earth lies fallow and can reveal no more secrets to human curiosity.
But one final secret preserved the earth’s modesty from our gaze into the present century, two tiny parts of its racked and tormented body were still saved from the greed of its own inhabitants: the South Pole and the North Pole, its backbone, two places with almost no character or meaning in themselves, around which its axis has been turning for thousands of years. The earth has protected them, leaving them pure and spotless. It has placed barriers of ice in front of this last mystery, setting eternal winter to guard them against the greedy. Access is forbidden by imperious frost and storms; danger and terror scare away the bold with the menace of death. No human eyes may dwell on this closed sphere, and even the sun takes only a fleeting glance.
Expeditions have followed one another for decades. None has achieved its aim. The body of the boldest of the bold, Andrée, who hoped to fly over the Pole in a balloon and never returned, has rested in the glass coffin of the ice for thirty-three years and has only now been discovered. Every attempt is dashed to pieces on the sheer walls of frost. The earth has hidden her face here for thousands of years, up to our own day, triumphing for the last time over the will of her own creatures. Her modesty, pure and virginal, defies the curiosity of the world.
But the young twentieth century reaches out its hands impatiently.
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