The first article of the code of war is then the suppression of all sensibility, pity, humanity. The nature of war is to kill and destroy. The more it destroys and kills the sooner it comes to its ideal form. Moreover, it is at bottom more humane the more inhuman it is, because the very terrors which its excesses inspire shorten it and make it less murderous.
In the second place, war necessarily ignores moral laws. Respect for laws, treaties, conventions, loyalty, good faith, sentiment and honor, scruples, nobility of soul generosity—these are mere fetters. The God-people do not recognize them. It will then, without hesitation, violate the rights of neutrals if it is to its interest. It will use falsehood, perfidy, treachery. It will justify itself by futile pretexts in committing the most atrocious acts—bombardment of undefended cities, massacre of old men, women and children; barbarous torture, pillage and assassination; bestiality to women; organized incendiarism; methodical destruction of monuments which, by their history and their antiquity and by the admiration of the world, would seem to be inviolable. "I am told: I must avenge myself." This reason suffices. We are told that some inhabitant of one city or another has been wanting in respect toward one of our men. Therefore we must burn the city and show the inhabitants what we have. Definitively, our duty is to let loose the elementary energies of nature as far as possible to attain the maximum force and the maximum of result.
The effect should, moreover, be psychological as well as material. Actions which seem horrible to man and which spread terror are commendable means, because they break the spirit even if they have no value from a military point of view. Moreover, what offends common morality is conformed to transcendent morality. The mission of the Germans at war is to punish. They work Divine vengeance. They compel their enemies to expiate the crime of resisting them. After they have taken a city, if the enemy has the insolence to take it back, it is just that they shall sack that city if possible, killing its inhabitants and burning its finest monuments.
Barbarity Multiplied by Science.
Given this problem, how to let loose most widely the powers of evil, it is clear that a people of superior culture is better equipped than any other to resolve that problem. In fact, science, where it excels, can work destruction and evil with the very forces which nature employs only to create light, heat, life, and beauty. The God-people therefore unites the maximum of science to the maximum of barbarity. The formula of its action may be thus written: "Barbarity multiplied by science."
This is the last word of the famous doctrine of Germanism. Now the identity of the ultimate consequences of the doctrine and the features which the present war presents is evident. The problem which we undertook is, therefore, solved. If, contrary to all likelihood, barbarity co-exists with culture in the Germans; if in the present war it appears to be absolutely bound up in that culture, the reason is that German culture differs profoundly from what humanity understands by culture and civilization. Human civilization tries to humanize war. German culture tends indefinitely to increase its primitive brutality by science.
In everything the Germans must be unique—in their women, their God, their wine, their loyalty. The war which the Germans wage against us strikes the world with horror and terror, because it is in the full force of the term "the German way, die deutsche Art, the German war."
As the world recognizes this astonishing proposition it asks with anxiety, what may be its future relations to Germany? Knowingly and systematically, Germany opposes to all Hellenic, Christian, humane civilizations the devastating theory of the Huns. True, after the war she will claim that she has done nothing but conform, often with pain, to the conditions of ideal and divine war, and she will appear willing to pardon to her enemies the cruelties she has had to inflict upon them. Decidedly, the world will refuse to admire this horrible magnanimity which on the first impulse of resistance becomes savagery. Today the veil is torn away. German culture is shown to be a scientific barbarity. The world, which means in the future to rid itself of all despotism, will not compromise with the despotism of barbarity.
But what a disappointment and what a grief! Formerly, Germany was held to be a great nation. Its praises were sounded in many a land of solid and high culture. The German tradition once held other doctrines than those we have now seen devolop under the hands of Prussia. Germanism, as the Prussians formulate it, consists essentially in contempt for all other nations and in the pretension of domination. But Leibnitz—as highly esteemed in the Latin world as in the German—professed a philosophy which valued unity only under the form of harmony between free and autonomous forces. Leibnitz exalted the multiple, the diverse, the spontaneous. Between rival powers he sought to establish relations which would reconcile them without changing or diminishing the value or independence of any of them. Witness his effort at the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. After Leibnitz came Kant. He certainly was very much of a German. He owned, nevertheless, that he had learned from Rousseau to honor the common man who, not being a savant, possesses moral value far above the savant, who has no merit but science. And, starting from the principle that every person, so far as he is capable of moral value, is entitled to respect, he urged men to create not a universal and despotic monarchy but a republic of nations in which each should possess a free and independent personality.
This willingness to put liberty before unity, and respect and honor the dignity of other nations while at the same time serving its own, was not extinguished in Germany with Leibnitz and Kant. Permit me, my dear Director, on this subject to indulge in some personal reminiscences.