Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/128

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the colours. When next the committee-room of the Maison du Peuple receives the European chiefs of labour what a change will be there!

As for Serbia, it seems probable that nobody will have time to go to war with her. Her function has been that of the electric button which discharges the great gun of a fortress. And now that the lightnings have been released, what is the stake for which we are playing? It is as simple as it is colossal. It is Europe against the barbarians. The authentic Teuton touch betrayed itself in the gross proposition of bribes, followed by the instant violation of the Belgian frontier. The "big blonde brute" stepped from the pages of Nietzsche out on to the plains about Liége. Brought suddenly to think of it, one realises the corruption of moral standards for which Germany has in our time been responsible. Since Schopenhauer died nothing has come from her in the region of philosophy except that gospel of domination.

And now we suddenly understand that the Immoralists meant what they said. We were reading, not as we thought a string of drawing-room paradoxes, but the advance proof-sheets of a veritable Bullies' Bible. The General Bernhardis who have been teaching Germany to desire war, to provoke it, to regard it as a creative and not a destructive act, to accept it as merely the inevitable prologue to German domination, have proved to be not only brutal, but formidable. Since Belgium, and its