The world has known the barbarian always; we are all acquainted with him from personal experience. But the world has never before known a reasoned, intellectual barbarism, a barbarian that has elevated into a philosophy of human life with the sanctions of religion his instincts and impulses. And that is the menace of the German, not his force nor his brutality, but the risk that he can successfully impose upon the world such an atrocious creed, intimidating into imitation those cowardly souls whom he does not care to conquer. If Germany were to win this war, it would not be her bumptious aggression that the world ought to fear so much as the enormous impulse it would give to her detestable creed, to the principle of evil in the world. The danger for us Americans is greater than for others, not because of exposed coasts and an unprepared army, but because we are already tainted with the same raw materialism of belief. Too many individuals in America would find a sympathetic echo in their own hearts to the German creed of collective selfishness and barbarism.
* * * * *
One heard in Paris surprisingly little about German atrocities, less than in Boston and New York, much less than in London. Not that the French do not believe them: they know the bitter truth about German inhumanity as none others. With that admirable stoicism and lucid conservation of moral force displayed by the French from the beginning, they do not waste their strength in denunciation: they have accepted it as one of the terrible aspects of the evil they are fighting. They probably understand the German character as now wholly revealed better than the rest of the world and are not so much surprised by its manifestations. They have examined the German, and have fortified themselves against his cruel power.
But they cannot forget these incredible outrages. There are too many fresh examples—too many robbed and maltreated refugees, too many fatherless and motherless children, still coming to Paris by the trainload, whom they must provide for, too many relatives and friends who have been abused and murdered or whose property has been looted by German soldiers and officers. Also there are too many Frenchmen who have seen the horrors with their own eyes, too many doctors and stretcher-bearers shot down by those they were trying to aid, too many hospitals bombarded, too many wounded prisoners killed. The German atrocity is documented in France over and over, within the knowledge of millions. It will prove to be Germany's great stumbling-block after the war, when she looks about a shocked world for peoples to trade with.
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In the dining-room of the military club at Commercy, where a corps of the French army now has its headquarters, there is a wall painting of the last century representing the heroic deeds of Jeanne d'Arc. "That," said General C., pointing to the little figure on horseback, "is French! And the French have fought this war chivalrously—not against monuments, against women and children and old people, but as soldiers against soldiers!"
The Latin is sometimes cruel—he has within him the capacity for cruelty—and the history of Latin peoples is stained here and there with ferocity. But the Latin has never organized cruelty methodically, has never elevated terrorization into a principle of warfare, a weapon of statecraft. For one thing he is too intelligent: he knows that cruelty begets reprisals, that brutality breeds hate. After Alsace the German should have known too much to try the same method in harsher forms upon Belgium and invaded France. But the barbarian learns no spiritual lessons. Persian atrocity, Saracen atrocity, Indian atrocity, Spanish atrocity—they have all failed. An enduring triumph was never won on that principle of "indispensable severity."
It is barbarism as well as the barbarian which France is fighting, and the French know it, are profoundly conscious of it, from the cool, dispassionate philosopher, like Bergson or Boutroux or Hovelaque, to the girl conductor on the tram, the dirty poilu in the trench. For more than a generation the French world has suffered from the fear of this new barbarian, and the time has come again, as it has come so many times before in history, for the momentous decision with the barbarian. Again as before it must come on the fields of France where the ancient curse of barbarism has been met and destroyed.
IV
The German Lesson