"... It is not true that our troops brutally destroyed Louvain. It is not true that we make war in contempt of the rights of mankind. Our soldiers commit neither undisciplined nor cruel acts...."
MANIFESTO OF THE GERMAN INTELLECTUALS.
"If the savants make science what it is, science does not make the character of the savants what it is."
EDMOND PERRIER.
"... Scientific barbarism."
EMILE BOUTROUX.
I.
If we were able—at this hour, when, through the act of the Teutonic Empire, the world may witness unnamable deeds—if we were able to cite the most odious of them, we should say that, after the massacre of innocent people and all the assaults on the rights of mankind committed by the German armies, the worst has seemed to us the shameless manner in which the superior intellects beyond the Rhine have dared to cover up these crimes. It is not that we ever believed that from any corner of Germany there could come to us an appearance of fellow-feeling, in these circumstances wherein no one has any other right than that of giving himself body and soul to his native land. We know that, before speaking for the universe, men threatened by the enemy should be faithful to their flag, in the face of everything and against everything—and with resolution. At no hour, therefore, have we thought that German savants and artists could raise their voice to repudiate their armies, when the latter were going to war with the object of further extending their empire. But, at least, they should keep silence, and before the horror of crimes to be judged especially by the tribunal of the élite they should not have shown their miserable enthusiasm. "You see," as a clear-sighted Dutch professor[5] has well written on this point, "if these intellectuals were not blinded they would rather have asked themselves if, in this war that stains Europe with blood, the Prussian military authorities were not losing for centuries the reputation of the great name of Germany." And suppose it were even a small matter if they had lost only the great name of Germany, that the epoch of Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven had covered with glory. But with it they have vilified as well the noble rôle of the philosopher, of the historian, of the savant, and of the artist. In truth they have betrayed their own gods, and the professions to which they belong can no longer be honored by them—so far as the question of conscience goes, at least. And as for the sacred thing called civilization, which is above our interests and our vanities of an hour, they may have served it usefully by their personal work in the past, but they were unequal to the task of remaining its protectors when their mere silence would perhaps have helped to save it.[6] They have thus shown that, with their more or less sparkling black eagles and under the bedizenment of their Court costumes, they are for the most part narrow fanatics or paid scribes whose pen is only a tool in the hands of their master of a day. It is not even sure whether through their cult of this "militarism," to which they have given the most shameful blind-signature, they have not hopelessly condemned it, by testifying that under the rule of the German sabre human thought has no other course than to humiliate itself!... But on the score of what they are worth in professional morality and courage, agreement is certain today, everywhere.
Their great affair—and that of every thinking German—is to object, when spoken to of their crimes, either that they were born of necessity or that they did not take place. As against these allegations, unsupported by any proof, the most formal denials have officially been given. But to the latter we shall now add the true description of the facts. And we think that, in spite of the power and the dogmatic authority of its élite, the activity of its emissaries in all parts of the world, and, finally, all its vast apparatus of conquest—military and civil—Germany cannot long make its stand against the humble little truth, which advances, noiselessly but also fearlessly, with the tenacious light in its hand that it received from Reality—from unquenchable and ardent Reality.
We come to you armed with the facts. It is only these unanswerable witnesses that we have wished to oppose to the gratuitous affirmations of our colleagues beyond the Rhine. We might have taken you into the mazes of twenty frightful dramas, for at every place where the German troops have advanced they have trodden under foot the rights of mankind and counted as nothing the civilization and the patrimony of nations. We have thought it wiser to limit ourselves to the relation of certain events bearing the seal of certainty.