Chapter III: Treitschke and the Professors 230 (6)

Priests and ecclesiastical students are serving in the armies of the Republic in many capacities. Some are chaplains, regularly attached to the army ambulances and hospitals: the old virus of anti-clericalism was still active enough to delay their nomination till the eleventh hour. Others are doing the same work, but as volunteers under a scheme inaugurated by the late Comte de Mun. Still others are employed as stretcher-bearers or hospital attendants. The balance, the great majority, are fighting side by side with their fellow-citizens as plain soldiers of the Army of Liberation. This inclusion of priests in the ranks is peculiar to France. It dates from the adoption of the Two Years’ Law, when, on the shortening of the term of military service, all exemptions were suppressed. It is hardly to be denied that the measure was inspired less by logic than by malice. But in actual working out it has recoiled singularly on those who saw in it a lever for the disintegration of the Church. The soldier-priests have been the little leaven that has leavened the whole mass.

It is impossible to estimate the total number engaged under all these heads. We do know that there are not less than twenty thousand occupied in the care of the wounded, and that sixty thousand is a conservative total estimate. They are sown through every corps of the Grand Army, and their influence would seem to be as great with the _gamin_ and the _gouailleur_ of Paris as with the simplest peasant of Brittany or Alsace.

The first picture that seizes the imagination is the return of the soldier-priests from all the ends of the earth to give their answer to the crime of Prussia. From foreign universities, from Constantinople, Jerusalem, Madagascar, the Americas, from Ireland itself they came, trooping at the sound of the bugle of defence. It is, of course, foolish to suppose that all, or most of them, had been driven into enforced exile: most of them were voluntarily engaged in teaching or missionary work, but some were, in the truest and saddest sense, exiles. What matter! Their mother France had sinned, but her sins were as snow against the scarlet brutality of Prussia. M. Bompard, the French Ambassador at Constantinople, gives in his official report a vivid picture of the priests of every Order eagerly imploring facilities--almost quarrelling in their ardour--to return to France and the flag without a moment’s delay.

“If I live for a hundred years,” writes the Archbishop of Laodicea, “I shall never forget the spectacle I witnessed at the station of Fribourg (Switzerland) during the days of mobilisation.... I saw a great crowd of compatriots who, with shouts of ‘France for ever!’ ‘Switzerland for ever!’ were streaming into the last train. Among them I noticed many young men wearing soutanes or other ecclesiastical costume. When I learned that they were expelled religious I could not forbear expressing to them my gratitude and enthusiasm. I shall never forget the generous eagerness with which they were flying to the help of France. They declared themselves ready to do their duty, their whole duty. A sympathetic crowd surrounded them, cheering heartily. I shall always have before my eyes that picture of waving handkerchiefs, of young manly faces, radiant with faith and hope. The mobilisation appeared to me in all its beauty ‘symbolised by a sword surmounted by a cross.’”

So they returned, and, once in the field, their record is almost monotonous in its heroism. Mgr. Herscher truly describes the collection of incidents and letters assembled by M. Langlois as a “breviary of patriotism.” You find in it a cloud of witnesses testifying to the fashion in which, with the first roar of the guns, religion came back to honour.

“There are neither pagans nor sceptics here,” writes one young soldier. “Everybody is glad, if he has five minutes, to spend them before the altar. Before the war many were ashamed to be seen kneeling or making the sign of the Cross; you find no one like that now.”

“The cannon,” says another, “is a good converter.” “Nothing gives you the feeling of absolute dependence on God so well as twenty-four hours in the trenches.” “If my friends saw me now,” runs the confession of a Parisian, “they would certainly not recognize me, me the mocker who believed in nothing. I am transformed.” The chief anxiety of those who have strayed, and come back, is to let their people at home know that they died in the faith of Christ. “Tell my wife, father, to teach the little one her prayers. That is the best of all!” runs a typical last message.

“I do not fear death,” writes a fatally wounded boy of twenty-two. “I have seen it and see it too close this moment: there is nothing horrid about it, for it leads to happiness.”

The Abbé Morette, who served in 1870, is, in this war, an army chaplain. He gives graphic and touching pictures of the re-awakening.

“When we are fortunate enough to be able to set up our field chapel, or to celebrate Mass and Benediction in some church half-destroyed by the enemy, it is a curious spectacle to see the officers mingled indifferently with their men ‘waiting their turn.’ No favour is shown to the commissioned ranks--one chaplain hears the confession, the other gives Holy Communion. Sometimes when danger is reported too near one gives Communion that evening... by way of _viaticum_. Sometimes when the order to advance comes unexpectedly we have to give absolution _en bloc_ to a whole company ... on condition of subsequent confession later when the recipient returns... if he does return!”

It is the same with the enemy’s wounded. The Abbé, not without a gleam of humour, shows himself acting as interpreter between a French Lutheran minister, who did not know German, and German wounded of his denomination. “The most scrupulous theologian might perhaps find in my exhortations certain grammatical faults, but not, I think, any capital error of dogma.”

Assuredly it is long years since, in the fair plains of France, Mass was celebrated in such settings of beauty and terror. This is how a Montmartrois attended it in a village church--

“I was returning with the rest of a fatigue party from digging potatoes for the company.... With the clay still on my hands I managed to work my way into a place beside my lieutenant, a commandant, a sergeant, and some comrades. The elevation had been reached.... And then in the choir the fresh, clear voices of young girls intoned the canticle: ‘Mary, Queen of France, protect us!’ My nerves could not bear the tension, and then ... well, I hid my face in my képi.

“They sang very prettily, the little country maidens, and the three canticles to Joan of Arc (which I did not know!) were ‘the right thing in the right place.’... I offered a prayer of thanks to the good God for having protected me against all dangers.

“The poor old priest... Mass finished, turned round in front of the altar and said to us in a strangled voice: ‘And now, valiant soldiers,... go to victory!’”

Or they pray in the open.

“Imagine a very beautiful valley, planted with great trees all yellowing with autumn, horses tied to every trunk, huts of every kind, shape, and style, soldiers of all arms: the whole forming a picture of incomparable dignity.

“The altar was set up against two giant oaks. There were more than a thousand soldiers present, including the Staff, generals, colonels and commandants.”

And this is how Cardinal Lucon celebrated his Christmas Mass in a cellar in bombarded Rheims--

“I shall never forget that Christmas night. The altar was supported on champagne-cases, and each person assisting had a champagne-case for a seat. There were present refugees who have nowhere else to sleep, citizens taking refuge from the shells, and at least 800 soldiers and officers of all grades. The hymns were sung by a group of fifty soldiers. They sang all our popular hymns.... It was very impressive; we seemed to have returned to the Catacombs.”

The Abbé Félicien Laroutzet, second-lieutenant in the 144th of the Line, paints us still another Mass with a brush steeped in even stranger colours. He had been permitted to say Mass for the first time for a month--

“Hardly had I finished the Elevation than a German shell hit the tower just above the choir, and plunged the church in darkness. Then a second. It was to be feared that a third would enter by the windows and shatter the altar to fragments. During the Communion the third shell arrived. Almost complete darkness ensued, but the altar, the curé, and myself went untouched. I finished Communion as quickly as possible, and we escaped.”

This famous encounter, he adds, secured his promotion to the grade of second-lieutenant.

And so on, and so on. All behind the front; with shells, friendly and hostile, whistling in a perpetual criss-cross overhead, on improvised altars; with every idle vanity shrivelled under the scrutiny of death, the soldiers of France assist humbly at the supreme sacrifice. As the celebrant raises for adoration the Host, transubstantiated from bread to the Body of Christ, the buglers lift their instruments, and a fanfare of spiritual triumph cleaves through the thunder of the guns. The _Ave Maria_ and the _Stabat Mater_, chanted in stout soldier voices, are followed by the _Marseillaise_. Thus does France, returned to her origins, repel the invader of her peaceful land, the ravager of homes, the profaner of churches.

When we come to the priest-combatants, the _curés sac-au-dos_, the record is one of stainless and noble heroism. As Mgr. Herscher says, it would be necessary to invent a new language in order to characterise justly what have become deeds of every day. It is not in “clerical” newspapers that the courage of the soldier-priest is enshrined, but in the columns of the _Journal Officiel_. The Legion of Honour and the Military Medal have been awarded in numerous instances, and citations in the Orders of the Day have been still more frequent.

Thus Corporal de Gironde, of the 81st of the Line, receives the Military Medal for extraordinarily daring patrol work. He is a Jesuit. The Dominican Corporal Jaméguy rallies, within fifty yards of the German trenches, a party of five unwounded and eight wounded men who had been cut off, and leads them all into safety the next day under a vicious fire. The Abbé Boravalle writes--

“After a very hot day our commandant announced that he was making recommendations in our company for promotion to the rank of corporal. Of four recommended, three were priests: I am proud to be one of them.”

Incidents of devoted heroism, in which there is a swift counterchange between the rôle of soldier and that of priest, are almost innumerable: certainly no selection can convey a just notion of their abundance. Let me quote the words of a writer in the _Journal de Genève_, the chief organ of Swiss Protestantism--

“Observe that there is not a list of those who have fallen on the field of honour or who are cited in the Order of the Day of the Army in which you will not find priests. Such a one carried the flag into action; another, recommended for the Legion of Honour, was killed that very day; a third, seeing his company waver--he was a lieutenant--leaped to their head shouting, ‘I am a priest. I do not fear death! Forward! He recovered the position, but fell riddled with bullets.

“Or we read such stories as this: After the battle, amongst the wounded and agonising, a soldier not so badly wounded as the rest dragged himself to an erect position and cried out to the dying: ‘I am a priest. Receive absolution!’ And he blessed them with his mutilated hand.”

Take again the testimony of M. Frédéric Masson, a great writer, but no Catholic--

“What Frenchmen were the first to march? Who gave the example, who went to death instantly and without a murmur, who merited the epaulettes and the crosses? The priests.

“There they are with their knapsacks on their backs, and soon the knapsacks will be off by order of our generals. In this supreme peril we need officers. And many, for many are being killed. You will see the priests in command of sections, companies--who knows if you will not see them in command of regiments if there are any priests left! There they are all the braver because it is their duty to be tender: _beati milites_, and if they are a little short in military instruction, which is easily acquired, one recalls the saying of Bonaparte to Subry--they have what is not to be acquired: contempt for death, for they are priests and they believe.”

The superior education of the _prêtre-soldat_, as compared with the majority of his comrades, gives to his narrative letters a special value. A seminarist describes a night surprise on a German sentry post--

“I crawl through the mud, stopping for five minutes every three or four yards... reach the edge of the canal and drop quietly in.... I advance very slowly, the sentry is not more than ten paces away. But suddenly my teeth begin to chatter, and I am unable, for all my efforts, to keep my jaws quiet. Fear? No, cold!... I am obliged to take my handkerchief and tie it round my head as if I had the toothache....”

He surprises the sentry, chokes him into insensibility, trusses him up, and crawls back to his men. The reconnaissance completed they return to their lair in a little wood. They are troubled about the fate of the sentry.

“My sergeant, my two soldiers, and myself recite a decade of the Rosary for him. One of the soldiers refused at first to pray for a Boche. It was necessary to explain a whole heap of theological matters to him on charity in time of war. He at last consented on condition that we should say two other decades for our own dear soldiers.... I do not dare to say that I find pleasure in the work I have to do. But when I think of our poor France, and of the crimes of these barbarians: if you knew what they have done!”

So runs the record. Everywhere you find the priest first in danger, and in abnegation, confessing his comrades in the trenches, then heading their bayonet-charge; after the battle, his rifle laid aside, he is whispering consolation into the ear of some poor broken enemy, Pole or German, launched against civilisation by the bloodthirsty megalomania of a Prussian Emperor.

I cannot close this paper of random instances without transcribing in full the story of Sister Julie of Gerbeviller. This is how her name stands in the _Journal Officiel_--

“By order of the Minister of War to be Chevalier of the Legion of Honour: Mme. Amélie Rigard, in religion Sister Julie, nurse at the field hospital of Gerbeviller.”

Appointed by her Superior to this hospital, she remained at her post during an incessant bombardment in charge of a thousand wounded. She fed and cared for them, and saved them, by the calm authority of her manner, from being put to death during the German occupation. Can one read without a thrill of pride and admiration this glorious salute paid by soldiers of France to the heroic nun?

On the recapture of Gerbeviller a squadron of _chasseurs_ halts before the hospital.... The captain asks to see Sister Julie.

“Sister, will you do us a favour? Permit me to parade my soldiers before you.”

Prevailing with difficulty over her modesty, the captain has his way. Turning to his squadron, he orders the “Portez lance!”

“Comrades, you remember when we checked the Germans here on August 25th. We saw in this direction huge flames rising up into the heavens. You see what these flames meant....

“Well in the middle of this evacuated village, under the shells and bullets, even after the retreat of our heroic infantry who--one against ten--had held the bridge so long, a woman remained here at the post of charity attending to the wounded, lavishing her care on all. It was Sister Julie.

“The President of the Republic has hung on her breast the Cross of the brave. Salute it!”

So, with swords and lances at the salute, the squadron swept on to battle.

It is a noble and touching episode, worthy of France, and there were many such as Sister Julie in the dark days of retreat. Innumerable, patient, fearless women tended the poilu back to health, won the whole nation to the height of resolution and confidence from which it now so confidently confronts the future.

These books are a rich, even an inexhaustible repository of Catholic heroism. It will be a pity, and a grave loss to the literature of the war, if they are not made available for English readers. France has long enough been judged for her sins; it is time that there was some celebration of her virtues. She has been long enough condemned on a bill of indictment drafted by her enemies, and would-be conquerors: it is time that we listened to her speaking for herself. Nor in praising France do I, or do my fellow-writers, think it necessary to blacken German Catholicism. Simple, misled, unfree units of the Central Powers are dying all over Europe at the bidding of two disastrous Emperors: these plain soldiers, obeying the call of patriotism and deprived of any true vision of things, are dying in good faith, in our good Faith, and dying well. But over all the leaders of German Catholicism lies the red cloud of blood with which the statecraft of their country has enveloped the world. When they burned Louvain, the barbarians lit a fire which is not easily to be put out.

THE GOSPEL OF THE DEVIL

I.--BISMARCK

What is the Devil’s Gospel? I take it that the three main articles are violence, intellect, and a certain malign splendour of domination. If that is the formula of the Courts of Hell, it is certainly the formula of Prussianism.

There is here no question of mere instinctive egotism. We are in presence of an Evangel of Conquest, fully worked out, and completely conscious of itself. Later in this series we shall have an opportunity of examining the wild work of some of the Berlin theorists of blackguardism. But before there was a theory, there was a fact. In the world of action Prussia had thrown up two huge mountain-peaks of achievement: Frederick the Great, so grossly flattered by Carlyle, and Bismarck. Between them yawns that Valley of Purification to which Jena marks the entrance. For that interregnum of humility Prussia is truly great: your heart beats with Körner, with Fichte, even with the cloudy Hegel. But two generations later the type is once more master: Frederick, reincarnated, calls himself Otto Eduarde Leopold Bismarck Schönhausen. He is the modern Wotan to whom Germany has built her altars.

In that curious non-moral mode of writing history for which that German “moralist,” Carlyle, was chiefly responsible Bismarck was a “great man.” He changed the map of Europe. He stole Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark; euchred Austria out of her share of the spoils; and taking, as his raw materials, the old free German States, the blood of France, and the imbecile bluff of Napoleon, he produced Modern Germany. Let us observe the light of idealism in which he worked. It is not literature, or imagination, or mere phrase-spinning to say that Bismarck made cruelty his sacrament. I am anxious to make this study as objective and free from prejudice as possible. It is Bismarck who speaks for himself in 1849--

“It is desirable and necessary to improve the social and political condition of Germany; this, however, cannot be brought about by resolutions, and votes of majorities or speeches of individuals, but by _blood and iron_.”

If this was Bismarck’s own guiding star, there were others who recognised it as clearly as himself. When the list of a suggested new Cabinet was presented to Frederick William IV in just that year, 1849, he drew a thick line through Bismarck’s name and wrote opposite it in the margin--

“Red-hot reactionary. Likes the smell of blood. May be employed later on.”

When employed later on--in France--he did not belie the nostril diagnosis. I quote from Hoche’s _Bismarck Intime_--

“Apropos of the burnt villages and the peasants who were burnt, Bismarck remarked that the smell from the villages was ‘like the smell of roast onions.’ Favre remarked to Bismarck that ladies were to be seen strolling on the boulevards, and pretty, healthy children were playing around. ‘You surprise me,’ said Bismarck; ‘I thought you had already eaten all the children.’

“Favre complained to Bismarck that his soldiers had fired on a hospital, _L’Hospice des Quinze-Vingts_: ‘Why not?’ he replied. ‘The French fired on our soldiers who were vigorous and strong.’”

The Prussia, to whose tradition he succeeded, lives in the irony or indignant protest of the great humanists. I cite but two. “War,” said Mirabeau, “is the national industry of Prussia.” And Mr. Frederic Harrison, in a superb essay, published when Germany was hammering at the gates of Paris in 1870–71, drew out a sound digest of title--

“Prussia is the sole European kingdom which has been built up province by province on the battlefield, cemented stone by stone in blood. Its kings have been soldiers; sometimes generals, sometimes drill-sergeants, but ever soldiers; its people are a drilled nation of soldiers on furlough; its sovereign is simply commander-in-chief; its aristocracy are officers of the staff; its capital is a camp.”

He went on to characterise in words that bite deeper since Liége, Louvain, and Antwerp--

“Unhappily the gospel of the sword has sunk deeper into the entire Prussian people than any other in Europe. The social system being that of an army, and each citizen drilled man by man, there is no sign of national conscience in the matter. And this servile temper, begotten by this eternal drill, inclines a whole nation to repeat as if by word of command, and perhaps to believe, the convenient sophisms which the chief of its staff puts into their mouths.”

His central belief was that power consists in bullying. Had he thought things over he might, perhaps, have noticed that it costs more strength to lift a man up than to knock him down. He chose the other way. His spiritual successors tell you that the meaning of the black, red, and white of the German tricolour is: “Through night and blood to the light.” Germany had legitimate ambitions. There are ways of influencing the world that do not involve war: it was not powder, or bayonets, or even howitzers that laid Europe in intellectual bondage to Kant. Bismarck chose the formula of “Blood and Iron.” What it cost he himself will tell us, speaking out of the shadows and desolation of old age. The quotation is from Busch, his less discreet Boswell--

“‘There is no doubt, however,’ said Bismarck, ‘that I have caused unhappiness to great numbers. But for me three great wars would not have taken place. Eighty thousand men would not have been killed, and would not now be mourned by parents, brothers, sisters, and widows.’ ‘And sweethearts,’ I added somewhat prosaically and inconsiderately. ‘And sweethearts,’ he repeated. ‘I have settled that with God, however. But I have had little, if any, pleasure from all that I have done, while on the contrary, I have had a great deal of worry, anxiety, and trouble.’”

He sought power, and, in seeking it, he had little regard for scraps of paper. Frederick the Great had taught him that, if a ruler is sometimes bound to sacrifice his life, he is often bound to sacrifice his honour to the greatness of the State. Maturely, coldly, with ashes fallen over all the flames of passion, he tells us in his _Reflections and Reminiscences_ how he forced on the Franco-German War. There are versions of the story more vivid and so far more vile. The Ems telegram has arrived. Bismarck is dining with von Moltke and Roon, and all three fail to find anything resembling war in it. But the Prince has a “conviction”--

“Under this conviction I made use of the royal authorisation communicated to me through Abeken, to publish the contents of the telegram; and in the presence of my two guests I reduced the telegram by striking out words, but without adding or altering....

“The difference in the effect of the abbreviated text of the Ems telegram as compared with that produced by the original was not the result of stronger words but of the form which made this announcement seem decisive, _while Abeken’s version would only have been regarded as a fragment of a negotiation still pending, and to be continued at Berlin_.

“After I had read out the concentrated edition to my two guests, Moltke remarked: ‘Now it has a different ring; it sounded before like a parley; now it is like a flourish in answer to a challenge.’”

Bismarck then explained what he would do with his “concentrated edition.”

“This explanation brought in the two generals a revulsion to a more joyous mood, the liveliness of which surprised me. They had suddenly recovered their pleasure in eating and drinking, and spoke in a more cheerful vein. Roon said: ‘Our God of old lives still, and will not let us perish in disgrace.’ Moltke so far relinquished his passive equanimity that, glancing up joyously towards the ceiling, and abandoning his usual punctiliousness of speech, he smote his hand upon his breast and said: ‘If I may but live to lead our armies in such a war, then the devil may come directly afterwards and fetch away the “old carcase.”’”

If the God of Roon, the God of falsified telegrams, was the same God with whom Bismarck “settled matters” regarding his eighty thousand slain, that strange compact of reconciliation is readily intelligible. Otherwise, no!

If Bismarck made cruelty his sacrament, in the gross, he was far from neglecting details. No torch lit a village in France, no finger pulled a trigger against non-combatants, that was not sped by his counsel. I first read his words in Belgium as the stories of Liége, and Visé, and Aerschot, and Louvain poured in--

“True strategy consists in hitting your enemy and hitting him hard. Above all, you must inflict on the inhabitants of invaded towns the maximum of suffering, so that they may become sick of the struggle, and may bring pressure to bear on their government to discontinue it. You must leave the people through whom you march only their eyes to weep with.

“In every case the principle which guided our general was that war must be made terrible to the civil population so that it may sue for peace.”

And when Favre, coming out from the heroic defence of Paris, appealed to him in name of that “brotherhood which binds the brave of all the earth,” the Wotan of modern Germany replied--

“‘You speak of your resistance! You are proud of your resistance. Well, let me tell you, if M. Trochu were a German general, I would shoot him this evening. You have not the right--do you understand?--in the face of God, in the face of humanity, for mere military vainglory, to expose to the horrors of famine a city of two millions.... Do not speak of your resistance, it is criminal!’”

Abeken, who was called “Bismarck’s Pen,” wrote of his chief--

“Goethe’s saying, ‘Faithful to one aim, even on a crooked road,’ suits him well.”

Such was the founder of the German Empire, and such the methods by which he founded it.

II.--NIETZSCHE

It is in no way surprising to find defenders of the calamitous prophet of Hohenzollernism active to prove that he meant this fine thing, and that, and did not mean blood and domination. The truth is that only too many English writers allowed themselves to be tarred with the Nietzschean brush. They made him a cult, a boom, a pinnacle of superior vision. Now that the Moloch, whose high priests were beyond all others Nietzsche and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, is exacting his awful tribute, the worshippers, once so self-confident, begin to fear a little for their own reputations. For the issue of this war is to kill Prussianism, not only in Germany, but in the whole life and philosophy of Europe. The universal watchword is: “Never again!”

The vogue of the Supermaniacs is, perhaps, best explained by the curious lack of seriousness in dealing with ideas which is characteristic of the English mind in its worst periods. Great journals flatter the Harnacks and the Euckens and the rest in their attempt to deny all authenticity to the “scraps of paper” on which Christian belief is founded, and wonder, in the next column, why people are not going to church. Professor Cramb--who, by the way, is painfully German in his “anti-German” book--touches upon this inexplicable unreality of English thought. He suggests that it has counted for much in producing in Germany that professorial contempt which one finds, especially, in a writer like Treitschke. When your Prussian says: “Fill me a bath of blood!” he means blood. When your English critic reads it, he says, too often: “What a vivid image!”

Of the “deep damnation” which lies at the heart of the Nietzschean philosophy no doubt is admissible. It is idle to say that he contradicted himself at twenty turns, and that especially he hated the professors and raked them with the shrapnel of his irony. It is the way of supermen to hate other supermen. It is the badge of the tribe. Of all his writings Germany took and absorbed just as much as fitted in with her mood of domination and Empire. Hauptmann--another of the flattered renegades--told us the other day that if you open the knapsack of a German soldier you will probably find in it a copy of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_. Nietzsche was angry with the professors only because they preferred obscure, and he preferred lucid brutality. Not since Lucifer was so much light used to dark ends. Not since Diana was great in Ephesus were such beautiful images cast or carven in the service of a false worship. He made German dance, as before him, only Heine had done.

“I have the idea,” he wrote, “that with _Zarathustra_ I have brought the German language to its point of perfection.”

The boast is probably true. The devil was always a good stylist, and it is not inappropriate that when his gospel is at its worst, his prose should be at its best. We may charitably assume that those whom he led off the plain paths of life into his foul and blood-bathed jungles, were taken captive, not by his message, but by his music.

What then was his creed, or rather his vision? For he was the mystagogue of Prussianism, who chanted but never explained. As in the case of Bismarck, I propose to exclude as far as possible anything written _ad hoc_, or since the war. My first witness is Alfred Fouillée, the doyen of French philosophy, Whose _Nietzsche et l’Immoralisme_ appeared in 1902 (the unfamiliarity of Fouillée’s name is a biting satire on our leaders of thought)--

“If the Vandals had read a course in Hegelian metaphysics, they would have held the same language as Nietzsche.”

The popular instinct which named the Prussians the Huns was thus long anticipated by the greatest Platonist in Europe.

* * * * *

To Nietzsche the whole motive behind life is a sort of metaphysical symbol which he calls the Will-to-Power. The whole task of life is to impose your power on others _an andern Macht auslassen_. With what aim? To evolve the Superman. But in this struggle of all against all we must, in a world divided into nations and classes, struggle for the victory of some nation and some fashion of government. For Prussia, and for an aristocracy more scientifically cruel than the world has ever known. And what is the first step towards this Elysium? War, and again war. War, with the formula of the Assassins for its formula--

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

* * * * *

It is idle to remind us that Nietzsche touched life at other points, and that in his flaming incoherence you will find contradictions of this vision. For it was this vision of Attila, and no other, that conquered the imagination of Prussia. She desired all Europe for an Empire, and after that the seas, and at last the world. It needed but one further step in this mysticism of the madhouse to decree divine honours to the Kaiser.

Now let Nietzsche speak for himself. Thus spake Zarathustra on the morality of war--

“You shall love peace as a means to new wars, and a short peace better than a long....

“I do not counsel you labour, I do not counsel you peace, but victory. Let your labour be a conflict, and your peace a victory....

“It was said of old that a good cause sanctifies war; but I say to you that a good war sanctifies any cause.”

As to what he meant by a “good” war he leaves us in no doubt. He meant simply a war in which a victorious Prussia would slay and burn without measure and without pity.

“My brothers, I place above you this new Table of the Law: Be hard!”

* * * * *

Zarathustra washes, with shame, his hands, because they have aided someone who was suffering. “Nay, I labour to cleanse my very soul” of the sin of pity, he adds.

“I dream,” he cries, “of an association of men who would be whole and complete, who would know no compromise, and who would give themselves the name of destroyers....”

In memorial verses on the death of a friend, killed in France in 1870, he writes--

“Even in the hour of death he ordered men, and he ordered them to destroy.”

The three cardinal virtues of the warrior are “pleasure, pride and the instinct of domination.”

“If I am convinced”--he means, plainly, “Since I am convinced”--he writes, “that harshness, cruelty, trickery, audacity, and the mood of battle tend to augment the vitality of man, I shall say Yes! to evil, and sin....”

And lest any of his defenders should seek to explain away this very coherent doctrine as “poetry,” let it be remembered that this was a man who had seen war, much of the war of 1870. During its actual progress he wrote deliberately a Satanic pæan from which he never receded--

“On the one hand they (the Democrats) conjure up systems of European equilibrium; on the other hand, they do their best to deprive absolute sovereigns of the right to declare war.... They feel it incumbent on them to weaken the monarchical instinct of the masses, and do weaken it by propagating amongst them the liberal and optimistic conception of the world which has its roots in the doctrines of French rationalism and the Revolution; that is, in a philosophy altogether foreign to the German spirit, a Latin platitude, devoid of any metaphysical meaning.”

We “must have war, and war again.”

“It will not, therefore, be thought that I do ill when I raise here the pæan of war. The resonance of its silver bow is terrible. It comes to us sombre as night; nevertheless, Apollo accompanies, Apollo the rightful leader of states, the god who purifies them.... Let us say it then; war is necessary to the state, as the slave is to society.”

* * * * *

This transition leads us without a break on to some amiable views regarding the internal organization of states. To Nietzsche the mass of humanity is a sweating negligibility--

“The misery of those who live by labour must be made yet more rigorous, in order that a very few Olympian men may create a world of art.” (Unnecessary to say that the son of the Pastor of Naumburg was to have a life membership of Olympus.) “At their expense, by the artifice of unpaid labour, the privileged classes should be relieved from the struggle for life, and given such new conditions that they can create, and satisfy a new order of needs.... And if it is true to say that the Greeks were destroyed by slavery, this other affirmation is most certainly even truer; for lack of slavery, we are perishing.”

The reader can but be astonished at the modesty of the slightly impecunious professor from Basel. Why did he not call himself a god? Why a mere superman?

On the subject of God and gods, however, he had views of his own. Just as Fichte used to say to his philosophical students at a certain point in the course: “To-morrow, gentlemen, I will proceed to create God!” so Nietzsche was never tired of repeating: “I have killed God!” His argument is very simple--

“If there did exist gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods.”

As to that special mode of worship called Christianity, upon which all justice, love, pity, and help of our neighbours, is in the tradition of Europe, immovably based, he is unable to speak with even a colour of sanity.

“The Christian concept of God--God as the deity of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit--is one of the most corrupt concepts of God that have ever been attained on earth.” Christianity and alcohol are “the two great instruments of corruption.”

That he said, “You are going among women. Do not forget your whip!” I do not regard as essential to his philosophy. Most men have said angry things about women at one time or other. But it does happen that the position of women is more abject in Germany than anywhere else in Europe. And it does happen that Nietzsche also said--

“For man, happiness lies in the formula, I desire. For woman, in the formula, he desires.”

And also “man is to be reared for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior. All the rest is folly.”

Did Hauptmann’s Germans, one wonders, whip out their new knapsack Bibles and run over this text before they entered Aerschot and Louvain?

In his practical ethics he works out the theory of the Ems telegram and the Berlin Press Bureau--

“In point of fact it matters greatly to what end one lies, whether one preserves or destroys by means of falsehood.”

It would be a simple weariness to multiply passages in greater abundance. They are all of the same texture, for, despite incoherence and contradictions, they all come from the same centre of corruption, the Will-to-Power. It is a long-drawn-out Metaphysics of Bullying, nothing less and nothing more.

One has only to think of the soil into which seed like this was dropped in order to understand the harvest of desolation that the swords are now reaping. Think of Prussia, flattered by all the world--even by Matthew Arnold--into regarding herself as the chosen of the Lord. Think of the unearned prosperity brought by the French tribute, of the raw egotism, the coarse insolence bred by it. Think of how the old Germanic racial chauvinism was nourished by the theories of Gobineau as freshened by the appalling Chamberlain. Think of how French intellect has been boycotted in England and America for thirty years, while troops of translators, critics and publishers ran round canvassing first-class reputations for fourth-rate German scholars. Think of the tawdry pretensions of Berlin, of the infinite vulgarity of the Alley and Column of Victory.

* * * * *

Is it to be wondered at that a creed like Nietzsche’s, let loose in such a world, has succeeded? Reading it, Krupp feels himself a veritable knight of the Holy Ghost. Kaiser Wilhelm’s brow grows heavy with the growing cares of the superman. Buccaneer Bernhardi cries out: “My lust for blood is philosophised.” The diplomats join in in chorus: “Remember Bismarck! Since France and England both want peace, let us either lie or bully them into war!”

Nietzsche said of himself: “I am a fatality!” He was. Three years before this war was thought of, in attempting to define Nietzscheanism in an introduction to Halévy’s _Life_, I wrote as opening words: “The duel between Nietzsche and Civilisation is over....”

I was wrong; it is not over. But between Prussianism and Civilisation it is that this epical war is joined; there is not room on earth for the two.

III.--TREITSCHKE AND THE PROFESSORS

I confess that I am weary of these German Professors. Having deposed God--by stern decree of their theological Press Bureau--they felt that a gap had been created, and volunteered to fill it. But as a substitute divinity the Herr Professor falls a little short of perfect accomplishment. I have sat under or come in contact with a few truly great men among them, like Windleband of Heidelberg, and Pastor of Innsbruck. But the Haeckels, the Harnacks, the Euckens, and the rest mistook their trade when they went in for omniscience. These drill-sergeants of metaphysics understand everything except reality. The “fog of war,” of which one had heard so much, was as nothing to the fog of peace into which they had plunged Germany and Europe.

You must remember the nature of the system of which they are the mature, show products. In a German university it is unusual for a student to take a degree. Our own institutions are appalling enough, in all conscience; but there is, at least, a sort of scheduled, educational mediocrity to which even athletic demigods must attain. And there is not the least doubt that, in the intervals of neglecting their work, our college men do, in the mass, enter by subtle ways into the mysterious and honourable art of being gentlemen. In a German university you do not find any uniform, general life on which everybody can draw. The caste system--on which all Prussia is founded--manifests itself very soon. Either you clip off your friends’ ears in duels, keep dogs, abjure learning, and absorb beer for two or three years, or else you set out to be a Herr Doktor. By steadily accumulating notes, and grimly avoiding fresh air, you arrive at the moment when you can order a visiting card with this wizard-title on it. Then, wearing a nimbus of adulation, you pass on to be a _Privat Dozent_, and ultimately a Herr Professor. Everybody’s hat is off to you; you meet with no real criticism or free thrust of thought.

Add to this the fact that German is a singularly difficult language in which to tell the truth plainly, even if you should desire to do so. Two or three writers, like Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, have contrived the miracle; but the general impression inflicted on the Latin mind by German literature is that of inadequately cooked plum-duff. One understands a great Socialist like Otto Effertz turning in his third book from German to French with the observation: “Formerly I wrote in a provincial dialect. I now experiment in a European language.” A brilliant lady of my acquaintance, who suffered fools more or less gladly at Marburg and Bonn, is of opinion that the Prussian reaches his most exquisite moment of lyricism when, at Christmas or Easter, he ties a bow of blue ribbon on a sausage, and presents it to his beloved. This is a disputable view; but it does indicate certain inadequacies in the German apparatus of expression which really exist.

Imagine, then, your Herr Professor, thus fed on gross flattery, inducted into the most rigid caste system in Europe, mentally imprisoned in a language in which it is easier to say Yes! and No! together to any question than to say either separately: turn him loose on German history, give him a Kaiser and a Court audience who demand adulation, give him, further, a set of prosperous bandits like Frederick the Great and fruitful liars like Bismarck to work on, and you get Treitschke. I have looked more or less carefully through eight large volumes of his history and essays. In one sentence you find jingoism, in the next egotism. For my part, I have been unable to find much else. I gather from Dr. Max Lenz and other biographers that this renegade Saxon was at one time or other blind, deaf, and honest. Whether he was all three simultaneously, or in what permutations he worked, I do not know, and one is very far from gibing at human suffering. But when an invalid sets up as a Prophet of Bullydom, when a feeble creature, saved from collapse only by human affection, goes about to blaspheme all the intimate sanctities of civilisation, one feels justified in summoning him to the bar of his own Darwinism. Among modern nations Prussia has had the strange experience of having a Gospel of Relentless Force preached to her by invalids and degenerates. Her metaphysic has been dictated from a hospital ward.

The one thing you find in Treitschke, reverberating through page after page, is the doctrine of a Chosen People. He used his learning, which was not inconsiderable, his prestige, and his influence to keep hammering into Prussia the belief that she was the chosen race, the seed of the superman, the predestined ruler of Western civilisation. He preached the ruthless supremacy of the State, and the sacrifice to military power of all humane activities. He regarded Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Luxemburg as fragments of Germany that had been temporarily broken off, and must be recovered. He taught those whom he influenced to dream of a Vandal Empire, straddled across all Europe from Dunkirk to Belgrade. Domination, domination, and again domination: that is the message of Treitschke. Were he alive he would have rejoiced blatantly at the tearing up of the “scrap of paper” which stood for nothing except the conscience of Europe and the integrity of Belgium.

I understand that we are to have solemn and careful studies of his works issued in English. A great deal of his detailed historical research is probably of high value. But it would be just as well if critics realised that, for the future, when a German corrupter like Treitschke is translated, he comes not to judge, but to be judged. He preached the Gospel of the Devil, the gospel of domination, cruelty, and planned barbarism. Whatever intellectual prestige he came to acquire will no more save him than brilliancy will save Lucifer.

TRADE OR HONOUR?

A democracy, which, for its own defence, has deprived itself of free speech is a dangerous paradox. The position is not merely abnormal; it is so abnormal that the path of return to normality is to the average citizen unimaginable. Since war is the supplanting of reason by violence it is natural that it should swallow up Liberalism which is precisely the opposite. All values are turned inside out. Killing becomes a solemn duty. Lying is holy on condition that it deceives the enemy to his death. Men must approve their manhood by handing themselves over soul and body to others, their military superiors. Criticism, and the individual mind, accept engulfment in a world of patterned conduct, salutes, absolutism. All that corruption of the essence of life comes with war as its inseparable shadow, and the rankness of the Prussian offence is not merely to have foregone honour, and broken treaties and sown untimely death throughout the world, but also to have compelled civilisation to debase itself in order to preserve itself. So, at least, must it strike a Liberal.

We have bowed to the whole process of retrogression imposed on us. With bitterness of spirit we have seen unnecessary arbitrariness added to what was necessary, added by methods as contemptible as were ever used in furtherance of the old political and economic tyrannies before the war. Now we have the right to call a halt. The rich, reckless clamourers who in these days are almost the monopolists of free speech have already achieved some deterioration of the ideal for which the people of the Allied countries took up the challenge of war. We may assume that the Allied Governments are better custodians of the democratic faith, but there is always danger, in times of stress, from those whom one may call the terrorists of “patriotism.” Protest has become an obligation. Nobody who has watched latest developments can fail to be alarmed by their manifest tendency. That tendency may be summarised in one ignoble sentence. An attempt is being made to transform what began as a war for honour into a war for trade. Powerful intriguers of unbounded assurance are sedulous behind the backs of the fighting men, scheming to run up new flags in the place of the old. The inscription “Justice” is to be hauled down, and “Markets” is to be hoisted in its stead. In pursuance of that new object the powerful innovators are ready to extend far beyond their natural term the torture and agony which are now the sole realities of Europe. They are willing, for the accomplishment of it, to ordain that the blood of better men shall drip indefinitely into the cistern of Gehenna. And since it is the bellowers and gamblers at home and not the silent trench-fellows of death at the front that exercise most influence on national policy, it is to be feared that the former may prevail. Assuredly protest is a matter of obligation.

This is no argument, or faint-hearted appeal, for a premature or inconclusive peace. Truly the scourge of war is more terrible, more Apocalyptic in its horror, than even the most active imagination could have pictured. When the time comes to write down in every country a plain record of it, with its wounds and weariness, and flesh-stabbing, and bone-pulverising, and lunacies, and rats and lice and maggots, and all the crawling festerment of battle-fields, two landmarks in human progress will be reached. The world will for the first time understand the nobility, beyond all phrase, of soldiers, and it will understand also the foulness, beyond all phrase, of those who compel them into war. In these days God help the militarists! There will be no need to organise a peace movement; it will organise itself in all democratic countries, spontaneous and irresistible as a prime force of nature. It will still be necessary to arm against those who linger in the blood-mists of autocracy, just as civilised men provide against tigers and murderers and syphilis. But God help those who go preaching to mutilated veterans and stricken homes the gospel that war is a normal incident of the intercourse between nations, and an ennobling thing to be cultivated for its own sake! That by the way. Such is modern war, and knowing it to be such, there is not a man or woman of the Allied peoples, in uniform or out of it, but is ready to go through with it day after day and, if need be, year after year until the anti-human evangel of Berlin is down in the mud. That resolution, so unmistakable, is the supreme answer of democracy to the whole race of blood-and-ironmongers. They loved war, praised war, planned war; we loathed it, believed so little that a modern state would loose it on the world as even to neglect advisable precautions. And now the peace-workers have the war-workers by the throat, and are humbling them in their own picked arena. Despite Nietzsche and Bernhardi and the rest, democracy does not so soften men that they will not die for their ideals. They will do more than die, they will conquer.

So much is liminal; it lies across the threshold of any temple of peace that can be imagined. Until the objects for which the Allies went into the war are achieved it must go on, and we mean it to go on, regardless of any waste of life or substance. But there is another proposition just as basal against the ignoring of which the writer of this article enters his protest. No statesman has the right to change, behind the backs of the fighting men, the aim and purpose of the war. No government has a mandate to substitute markets for justice. The necessary blood must be spent, it will spend itself freely and without question. But the diplomatist who lavishes one life in excess, in order to achieve objects other than that for which peaceful citizens transformed themselves into soldiers, is a criminal against civilisation. There are many, very many, men in the New Army who believe that no war merely for trade can be justifiable or other than an abomination. If another Power launches war in the name of trade, your resistance is a very different matter: it is the answer of a higher to a lower morality. It must succeed in order precisely to punish those who are willing to make war solely for trade.

Is the fear well founded that powerful men are in fact working behind the stages to bring about such a transformation as has been indicated? Is it merely fancy that discovers the assiduous and not over-clean finger of predatory finance in certain pies that are now on the menu? If so, Liberalism cannot too soon awaken. The New Army attested to die, if need be, for the public law of Europe: there was no mention of tariffs in the bond.