Part 2
I have awaited this virile disavowal from the proudest spirits of Germany, a disavowal which would have been ennobling instead of humiliating. The letter which I wrote to one of them, the day after the brutal voice of Wolff's Agency pompously proclaimed that there remained of Louvain no more than a heap of ashes, was received by the entire élite of Germany in a spirit of enmity. They did not understand that I offered them the chance of releasing Germany from the fetters of those crimes which its Empire was forging in its name. What did I ask of them? What did I ask of you all, finer spirits of Germany?--to express at least a courageous regret for the excesses committed, and to dare to remind unbridled power that even the Fatherland cannot save itself through crime, and that above its rights are those of the human spirit. I only asked for _one_ voice--a _single_ free voice.... None spoke. I heard only the clamor of herds, the pack of intellectuals giving tongue on the track whereon the hunter loosed them, and that insolent Manifesto, in which, without the slightest effort to justify its crimes, you have unanimously declared that they do not exist. And your theologians, your pastors, your court-preachers, have stated further that you are very just and that you thank God for having made you thus.... Race of Pharisees, what chastisement from on high shall scourge your sacrilegious pride!... Do you not suspect the evil which you have done to your own people? The megalomania, a menace to the world, of an Ostwald or an H. S. Chamberlain,[6] the criminal determination of ninety-three intellectuals not to wish to see the truth, will have cost Germany more than ten defeats.
How clumsy you are! I believe that of all your faults _maladresse_ is the worst. You have not said one word since the beginning of this war which has not been more fatal for you than all the speeches of your adversaries. It is you who have light-heartedly furnished the proof or the argument of the worst accusations that have been brought against you; just as your official agencies, under the stupid illusion of terrorizing us, have been the first to launch emphatic recitals of your most sinister devastations. It is you, who when the most impartial of your adversaries were obliged, in fairness, to limit the responsibility of these acts to a few of your leaders and armies, have angrily claimed your share. It is you who the day after the destruction of Rheims, which, in your inmost hearts, should have dismayed the best amongst you, have boasted of it in imbecile pride, instead of trying to clear yourselves.[7] It is you, wretched creatures, you, representatives of the spirit, who have not ceased to extol force and to despise the weak, as if you did not know that the wheel of fortune turns, that this force one day will weigh afresh upon you, as in past ages, when your great men, at least, retained the consolation of not having yielded to it the sovereignty of the spirit and the sacred rights of Right!... What reproaches, what remorse are you heaping up for the future, O blind guides--you who are leading into the ditch your nation, which follows you like the stumbling blind men of Brueghel!
What poor arguments you have opposed to us for two months!
1. _War is war_, say you, that is to say without common measure with the rest of things, above morals and reason and all the limits of ordinary life, a kind of supernatural state before which one can only bow without discussion;
2. _Germany is Germany_, that is to say without common measure with the rest of nations. The laws which apply to others do not apply to her, and the rights which she arrogates to herself to violate Right appertain to her alone. Thus she can, without crime, tear up written promises, betray sworn oaths, violate the neutrality of peoples which she has pledged herself to defend. But she claims in return the right to find, in the nations which she outrages, "chivalrous adversaries," and that they should not be so, that they should dare to defend themselves by all the means and the arms that remain to them, she proclaims a crime!...
One recognizes there indeed the interested teaching of your Prussian masters! Great minds of Germany, I do not doubt your sincerity, but you are no longer capable of seeing the truth. Prussian Imperialism has crushed down over your eyes and conscience, its spiked helmet.
"_Necessity knows no law._" ... Here is the eleventh commandment, the message that you bring to the universe today, sons of Kant!... We have heard it more than once in history: it is the famous doctrine of Public Safety, mother of heroisms and crimes. Every nation has recourse to it in the hour of danger, but the greatest are those who defend against it their immortal soul. Fifteen years have passed since the famous trial which saw a single innocent man opposed to the force of the State. Fifteen years have passed since we French affronted and shattered the idol of public safety, when it threatened, as our Péguy says, "the eternal safety of France."
Listen to him, whom you have killed; listen to a hero of the French conscience, writers who have the keeping of the conscience of Germany.
"_Our enemies of that time_," wrote Charles Péguy, "_spoke the language of the_ raison d'Etat, _of the temporal safety of the people and the race. But we, by a profound Christian movement, by a revolutionary effort, at unity with traditional Christianity, aimed at no less than attaining the heights of sacrifice, in our anxiety for the eternal salvation of this people. We did not wish to place France in the position of having committed the unpardonable sin._"
You do not trouble yourselves about that, thinkers of Germany. You bravely give your blood to save the mortal life, but do not bother about the life eternal. It is a terrible moment, I grant. Your fatherland as ours struggles for its life, and I understand and admire the ecstasy of sacrifice which impels your youth, as ours, to make of its body a rampart against death. "To be or not to be," do you say? No, that is not enough. To be the great Germany, to be the great France, worthy of their past, and respecting one another even while fighting, that is what I wish. I should blush for victory if my France bought it at the price for which you will pay for your temporary success. Even while the battles are being fought upon the plains of Belgium and amongst the chalky slopes of Champagne, another war is taking place upon the field of the spirit, and often victory below means defeat above. The conquest of Belgium, Malines, Louvain and Rheims, the carillons of Flanders, will sound a sadder knell in your history than the bells of Jena; and the conquered Belgians have robbed you of your glory. You know it. You are enraged because you know it. What is the good of vainly trying to deceive yourselves? Truth will be clear to you in the end. You have done your best to silence her--one day she will speak; she will speak by the mouth of one of your own in whom will be awakened the conscience of your race.... Oh, that he may soon appear and that we may hear his voice--the pure and noble voice of the redeemer who shall set you free! He who has lived in the intimacy of your old Germany, who has clasped her hand in the twisted streets of her heroic and sordid past, who has caught the breath of her centuries of trials and shames, remembers and waits: for he knows that even if she has never proved strong enough to bear victory without wavering, it is in her hours of trouble that she reforms herself, and her greatest geniuses are sons of sorrow.
_September 1914._
* * * * *
Since these lines were written I have watched the birth of the anxiety which little by little is making its way into the consciences of the good people of Germany. First a secret doubt, kept under by a stubborn effort to believe the bad arguments collected by their Government to oppose it--documents fabricated to prove that Belgium had renounced her neutrality herself, false allegations (in vain repudiated four times by the French Government, by the Commander-in-Chief, by the Cardinal and the Archbishop, and by the Mayor of Rheims)--accusing the French of using the Cathedral of Rheims for military purposes. Lacking arguments, their system of defense is at times disconcerting in its naïveté.
"Is it possible," they say, "that we should be accused of wishing to destroy artistic monuments, we, the people above all others who venerate art, in whom is instilled this respect from infancy, who have the greatest number of text books and historical collections of art and the longest list of lectures on æsthetics? Is it possible to accuse of the most barbarous actions the most humane, the most affectionate, and the most homely of peoples?"
The idea never strikes them that Germany is not constituted by a single race of men, and that besides the obedient masses who are born to obey, to respect the law--all the laws--there is the race which commands, which believes itself above all laws, and which makes and unmakes them in the name of force and necessity (_Not_....) It is this evil marriage of idealism and German force which leads to these disasters. The idealism proves to be a woman; a woman captive, who like so many worthy German wives, worships her lord and master, and refuses even to think that he could ever be wrong.
It is, however, necessary for the salvation of Germany that she should one day countenance the thought of divorce, or that the wife should have the courage to make her voice heard in the household. I already know several who are beginning to champion the rights of the spirit against force. Many a German voice has reached us lately in letters protesting against war and deploring with us the injustices which we deplore. I will not give their names in order not to compromise them. Not very long ago I told the "Fair"[8] which obstructed Paris that it was not France. I say today to the German Fair, "You are not the true Germany." There exists another Germany juster and more humane, whose ambition is not to dominate the world by force and guile, but to absorb in peace everything great in the thought of other races, and in return to reflect the harmony. With that Germany there is no dispute; we are not her enemies, we are the enemies of those who have almost succeeded in making the world forget that she still lives.
_October 1914._
Edition des _Cahiers Vaudois_ 10 cahier, 1914 (Lausanne, C. Tarin).
III. ABOVE THE BATTLE
O young men that shed your blood with so generous a joy for the starving earth! O heroism of the world! What a harvest for destruction to reap under this splendid summer sun! Young men of all nations, brought into conflict by a common ideal, making enemies of those who should be brothers; all of you, marching to your death, are dear to me.[9] Slavs, hastening to the aid of your race; Englishmen fighting for honor and right; intrepid Belgians who dared to oppose the Teutonic colossus, and defend against him the Thermopylæ of the West; Germans fighting to defend the philosophy and the birthplace of Kant against the Cossack avalanche; and you, above all, my young compatriots, in whom the generation of heroes of the Revolution lives again; you, who for years have confided your dreams to me, and now, on the verge of battle, bid me a sublime farewell.
Those years of scepticism and gay frivolity in which we in France grew up are avenged in you; your faith, which is ours, you protect from their poisonous influence; and with you that faith triumphs on the battlefield. "A war of revenge" is the cry. Yea! revenge indeed; but in no spirit of Chauvinism. The revenge of faith against all the egotisms of the senses and of the spirit--the surrender of self to eternal ideas.
One of the most powerful of the young French novelists--Corporal X.--writes to me:--
"What are our lives, our books, compared with the magnitude of the aim? The war of the Revolution against feudalism is beginning anew. The armies of the Republic will secure the triumph of democracy in Europe and complete the work of the Convention. We are fighting for more than our hearths and homes, for the awakening of liberty." Another of these young people, of noble spirit and pure heart, who will be, if he lives, the first art critic of our time--Lieutenant X.:--
"My friend, could you see our Army as I do, you would be thrilled with admiration for our people, for this noble race. An enthusiasm, like an outburst of the Marseillaise, thrills them; heroic, earnest, and even religious. I have seen the three divisions of my army corps set out; the men of active service first, young men of twenty marching with firm and rapid steps, without a cry, without a gesture, like the ephebi of old calmly going to sacrifice. After them come the reserve, men of twenty-five to thirty years, more stalwart and more determined, who will reinforce the younger men and make them irresistible. We, the old men of forty, the fathers of families, are the base of the choir; and we too, I assure you, set out confidently, resolute and unwavering. I have no wish to die, but I can die now without regret; for I have lived through a fortnight, which would be cheap at the price of death, a fortnight which I had not dared to ask of fate. History will tell of us, for we are opening a new era in the world. We are dispelling the nightmare of the materialism of a mailed Germany and of armed peace. It will fade like a phantom before us; the world seems to breathe again. Reassure your Viennese friend,[10] France is not about to die; it is her resurrection which we see. For throughout history--Bouvines, the Crusades, Cathedrals, the Revolution--we remain the same, the knights-errant of the world, the paladins of God. I have lived long enough to see it fulfilled; and we who prophesied it twenty years ago to unbelieving ears may rejoice today."
O my friends, may nothing mar your joy! Whatever fate has in store, you have risen to the pinnacle of earthly life, and borne your country with you. And you will be victorious. Your self-sacrifice, your courage, your whole-hearted faith in your sacred cause, and the unshaken certainty that, in defending your invaded country, you are defending the liberty of the world--all this assures me of your victory, young armies of the Marne and Meuse, whose names are graven henceforth in history by the side of your elders of the Great Republic. Yet even had misfortune decreed that you should be vanquished, and with you France itself, no people could have aspired to a more noble death. It would have crowned the life of that great people of the Crusades--it would have been their supreme victory. Conquerors or conquered, living or dead, rejoice! As one of you said to me, embracing me on the terrible threshold: "A splendid thing it is to fight with clean hands and a pure heart, and to dispense divine justice with one's life."
You are doing your duty, but have others done theirs? Let us be bold and proclaim the truth to the elders of these young men, to their moral guides, to their religious and secular leaders, to the Churches, the great thinkers, the leaders of socialism; these living riches, these treasures of heroism you held in your hands; for what are you squandering them? What ideal have you held up to the devotion of these youths so eager to sacrifice themselves? Their mutual slaughter! A European war! A sacrilegious conflict which shows a maddened Europe ascending its funeral pyre, and, like Hercules, destroying itself with its own hands!
And thus the three greatest nations of the West, the guardians of civilization, rush headlong to their ruin, calling in to their aid Cossacks, Turks, Japanese, Cingalese, Soudanese, Senegalese, Moroccans, Egyptians, Sikhs and Sepoys--barbarians from the poles and those from the equator, souls and bodies of all colors.[11] It is as if the four quarters of the Roman Empire at the time of the Tetrarchy had called upon the barbarians of the whole universe to devour each other.
Is our civilization so solid that you do not fear to shake the pillars on which it rests? Can you not see that all falls in upon you if one column be shattered? Could you not have learned if not to love one another, at least to tolerate the great virtues and the great vices of each other? Was it not your duty to attempt--you have never attempted it in sincerity--to settle amicably the questions which divided you, the problem of peoples annexed against their will, the equitable division of productive labor and the riches of the world? Must the stronger forever darken the others with the shadow of his pride, and the others forever unite to dissipate it? Is there no end to this bloody and puerile sport, in which the partners change about from century to century--no end, until the whole of humanity is exhausted thereby?
The rulers who are the criminal authors of these wars dare not accept the responsibility for them. Each one by underhand means seeks to lay the blame at the door of his adversary. The peoples who obey them submissively resign themselves with the thought that a power higher than mankind has ordered it thus. Again the venerable refrain is heard: "The fatality of war is stronger than our wills." The old refrain of the herd that makes a god of its feebleness and bows down before him. Man has invented fate, that he may make it responsible for the disorders of the universe, those disorders which it was his duty to regulate. There is no fatality! The only fatality is what we desire; and more often, too, what we do not desire enough. Let each now repeat his _mea culpa_. The leaders of thought, the Church, the Labor Parties did not desire war ... That may be.... What then did they do to prevent it? What are they doing to put an end to it? They are stirring up the bonfire, each one bringing his faggot.
The most striking feature in this monstrous epic, the fact without precedent, is the unanimity for war in each of the nations engaged. An epidemic of homicidal fury, which started in Tokio ten years ago, has spread like a wave and overflowed the whole world. None has resisted it; no high thought has succeeded in keeping out of the reach of this scourge. A sort of demoniacal irony broods over this conflict of the nations, from which, whatever its result, only a mutilated Europe can emerge. For it is not racial passion alone which is hurling millions of men blindly one against another, so that not even neutral countries remain free of the dangerous thrill, but all the forces of the spirit, of reason, of faith, of poetry, and of science, all have placed themselves at the disposal of the armies in every state. There is not one amongst the leaders of thought in each country who does not proclaim with conviction that the cause of his people is the cause of God, the cause of liberty and of human progress. And I, too, proclaim it.
Strange combats are being waged between metaphysicians, poets, historians--Eucken against Bergson; Hauptmann against Maeterlinck; Rolland against Hauptmann; Wells against Bernard Shaw. Kipling and D'Annunzio, Dehmel and de Régnier sing war hymns, Barrès and Maeterlinck chant paeans of hatred. Between a fugue of Bach and the organ which thunders _Deutschland über Alles_, Wundt, the aged philosopher of eighty-two, calls with his quavering voice, the students of Leipzig to the holy war. And each nation hurls at the other the name "Barbarians."
The academy of moral science, in the person of its president, Bergson, declares the struggle undertaken against Germany to be "_the struggle of civilization itself against barbarism_." German history replies with the voice of Karl Lamprecht that "_this is a war between Germanism and barbarism and the present conflict is the logical successor of those against the Huns and Turks in which Germany has been engaged throughout the ages._" Science, following history into the lists, proclaims through E. Perrier, director of the Museum, member of the Academy of Sciences, that the Prussians do not belong to the Aryan race, but are descended in direct line from the men of the Stone Age called Allophyles, and adds, "_the modern skull, resembling by its base, the best index of the strength of the appetites, the skull of the fossilized man in the Chapelle-aux-Saints most nearly, is none other than that of Prince Bismarck!_"
But the two moral forces whose weakness this contagious war shows up most clearly are Christianity and Socialism. These rival apostles of religious and secular internationalism have suddenly developed into the most ardent of nationalists. Hervé is eager to die for the standard of Austerlitz. The German socialists, pure trustees of the pure doctrine, support this bill of credit for the war in the Reichstag. They place themselves at the disposal of the Prussian minister, who uses their journals to spread abroad his lies, even into the barracks, and sends them as secret agents to attempt to pervert Italy. It was believed for the honor of their cause for a moment that two or three of them had been shot rather than take arms against their brothers. Indignant, they protest; they are all marching under arms! Liebknecht, forsooth, did not die for the cause of socialism;[12] but Frank, the principal champion of the Franco-German union, fell under French fire, fighting in the cause of militarism. These men have courage to die for the faith of others; they have no courage to die for their own.
As for the representatives of the Prince of Peace--priests, pastors, bishops--they go into battle in their thousands, to carry out, musket in hand, the Divine commands: _Thou shalt not kill_, and _Love one another_. Each bulletin of victory, whether it be German, Austrian, or Russian, gives thanks to the great captain God--_unser alter Gott, notre Dieu_--as William II or M. Arthur Meyer says. For each has his own God, and each God, whether old or young, has his Levites to defend him and destroy the God of the others.
Twenty thousand French priests are marching with the colors; Jesuits offer their services to the German armies; cardinals issue warlike mandates; and the Serb bishops of Hungary incite their faithful flocks to fight against their brothers in Greater Serbia. The newspapers report, with no expressions of astonishment, the paradoxical scene at the railway station at Pisa, where the Italian socialists cheered the young ordinands who were rejoining their regiments, all singing the Marseillaise together. So strong the cyclone that sweeps them all before it; so feeble the men it encounters on its career--and I am amongst them....
Come, friends! Let us make a stand! Can we not resist this contagion, whatever its nature and virulence be--whether moral epidemic or cosmic force? Do we not fight against the plague, and strive even to repair the disaster caused by an earthquake? Or must we bow ourselves before it, agreeing with Luzzatti in his famous article[13] that "_In the universal disaster, the nations triumph_"? Shall we say with him that it is good and reasonable that "the demon of international war, which mows down thousands of beings, should be let loose," so that the great and simple truth, "love of our country," be understood? It would seem, then, that love of our country can flourish only through the hatred of other countries and the massacre of those who sacrifice themselves in the defense of them. There is in this theory a ferocious absurdity, a Neronian dilettantism which repels me to the very depths of my being. No! Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and slay those noble and faithful souls who also love theirs, but rather that I should honor them and seek to unite with them for our common good.