Strange combats are being waged between metaphysicians, poets, historians—Eucken against Bergson; Hauptmann against Maeterlinck; Rolland against Hauptmann; Wells against Bernard Shaw. Kipling and D’Annunzio, Dehmel and de Régnier sing war hymns, Barrès and Maeterlinck chant paeans of hatred. Between a fugue of Bach and the organ which thunders Deutschland über Alles, Wundt, the aged philosopher of eighty-two, calls, with his quavering voice, the students of Leipzig to the holy war. And each nation hurls at the other the name “Barbarians.”
The academy of moral science, in the person of its president Bergson, declares the struggle undertaken against Germany to be “the struggle of civilisation itself against barbarism.” German history replies with the voice of Karl Lamprecht that “this is a war between Germanism and barbarism, and the present conflict is the logical successor of those against the Huns and Turks in which Germany was engaged throughout the ages.” Science, following history into the lists, proclaims through E. Perrier, director of the Museum, member of the Academy of Sciences, that the Prussians do not belong to the Aryan race, but are descended in direct line from the men of the stone age called Allophyles, and adds, “the modern skull, resembling by its base, the best index of the strength of the appetites, the skull of the fossilized man in the Chapelle aux Saints most nearly, is none other than that of Prince Bismarck!”
But the two moral forces whose weaknesses this contagious war shows up most clearly are Christianity and Socialism. These rival apostles of religious and secular internationalism have suddenly developed into the most ardent of nationalists. Hervé is eager to die for the standard of Austerlitz. The German socialists, pure trustees of the pure doctrine, support the bills of credit for the war in the Reichstag. They place themselves at the disposal of the Prussian minister, who uses their journals to spread abroad his lies, and sends them as secret agents to attempt to pervert Italy. It was believed for a moment that two or three of them had been shot for the honour of their cause
