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—