Had he given any attention to the rumours of war which troubled Europe in 1870? It seems not. He was little curious of news, and scarcely read the newspapers. Not that he was indifferent to his country, but he conceived it, in the manner of Goethe, as a source of art and moral grandeur. One of his thoughts, one alone, is perhaps inspired by the public unrest. "No war," he writes; "the State would become too strong thereby." No doubt we have here, besides one of Nietzsche's own impressions, an echo of the conversations of Triebschen: Wagner recruited his most ardent admirers in Southern Germany, in the Rhineland, in Bavaria, where his protector Louis II. reigned; the Germans of the North appreciated him badly, the Berliners worst of all, and he had no wish for a warlike crisis which would certainly have the effect of adding to the weight of Prussian dictation. The State to which Nietzsche pointed in his short note was the Prussian State. He foresaw, and like his master dreaded, the imminent hegemony of Berlin, that despised town of bureaucrats and bankers, of journalists and Jews.
On July 14th, a convalescent, stretched out on his long chair, he wrote to his comrade, Erwin Rohde. He spoke to him of Richard Wagner and of Hans von Bülow, of art and of friendship. Suddenly he stops in the middle of a phrase, marking with a blank line the interruption of his thought.
"Here is a terrible thunderclap," he wrote. "The Franco-German war is declared; a demon alights upon all our culture, already worn threadbare. What are we about to experience?
"Friend, dear friend, we met once more in the twilight of peace. To-day what do all our aspirations signify? Perhaps we are at the beginning of the end! What a gloomy sight. Cloisters will become necessary. And we shall be the first friars."
He signed himself The Loyal Swiss. This unexpected signature may be explained in a literal manner. In order to be appointed a professor at Basle, Friedrich Nietzsche had had to renounce his nationality. But assuredly it indicated more than this. It announced his detachment of mind: he had decided on the rôle of the contemplator.
What a misunderstanding of himself! He was too young, too brave, too much enamoured of his race, to adopt the part of spectator only in the imminent drama. As "a loyal Swiss," and as such dispensed from military duties, he quietly took up his abode with his sister Lisbeth in a mountain inn, where he wrote out some pages on Greek lyricism. It was then that he formulated for the first time his definition of the Dionysian and Apollonian spirits. Nevertheless, the German armies were crossing the Rhine and gaining their first victories, and it was not without emotion that Nietzsche heard the news. The thought of lofty deeds in which he had no part, of perils from which he was preserved, troubled his meditations.
On July 20th, writing to Madame Ritschl, he expressed the thoughts which occupied his solitude. First he gave expression to a fear which, as it seemed, the memory of a Greece ruined by the conflict of Sparta and Athens inspired in him. "Unhappy, historical analogies teach us that the very traditions of culture may be destroyed by the bitterness of such a war of nations." But he also expressed the emotion which had begun to seize him. "How I am ashamed of this inactivity in which I am kept, now that the instant has come when I might be applying what I learned in the artillery. Naturally I make myself ready for an energetic course of action, in case things should take a bad turn; do you know that the students of Kiel have enlisted together, with enthusiasm?" On the morning of August 7th he read in his paper the dispatches from Wörth: German victory: Enormous losses. He could no longer remain in his retreat. He returned to Basle, asked and obtained from the Swiss authorities permission to serve in the ambulance corps, and proceeded at once to Germany to enlist for the war which allured him.
He crossed conquered Alsace: he saw the charnel houses of Wissembourg and of Wörth: on August 29th he bivouacked not far from Strassburg, where conflagrations lit up the horizon; then he made his way, by Lunéville and Nancy, towards the country around Metz, now converted into an immense ambulance, where the wounded of Mars-la-Tour, Gravelotte and Saint-Privat, so numerous that it was difficult to nurse them, were dying of their wounds and of infectious illnesses. Some unfortunates were given into his charge: he did his duty with kindness and courage, but experienced a singular emotion, a sacred and almost enthusiastic horror. For the first time he considered without repulsion the labour of the masses. He watched those millions of beings, some struck down and marked by death, others marching the roads or standing under arms: he considered them without contempt, he esteemed their destiny. Under the menaces of war, these men have something momentous about them. They forget their vain thoughts; they march, they sing, they obey their chiefs; they die. Friedrich Nietzsche was recompensed for his pains; a fraternal impulse uplifted his soul, he no longer felt his solitude, he loved the simple people who surrounded him. "All my military passions awake," he writes, "and I cannot satisfy them! I would have been at Rezonville, at Sedan, actively, passively perhaps. This Swiss neutrality always ties my hands."