ses as food for cannon.

A great thing, doubtless, when the struggle is great, when a people
fights for an eternal cause, the fervor of which fires the whole nation,
from the smallest to the greatest; when it fuses all the egoisms,
purifies desire, and out of many souls makes one unanimous soul. But if
the cause be suspect or if it is tainted (as we judge that of our
adversaries to be), what will be the situation of a moral elite which
has preserved the sad and lofty privilege of perceiving at least a part
of the truth, and which must nevertheless fight and die and kill for a
faith which it doubts?

Those passionate natures that are intoxicated by fighting or are
voluntarily blinded by the necessities of action are not troubled by
these questions. For them the enemy is a single mass; nothing else
exists for them but this, for they have to break it; it is their
function and their duty. And to each his special duty. But if minorities
do not exist for such men, they do exist for us who, since we are not
fighting, have the liberty and the duty to see every aspect of the
case--we who form part of the eternal minority, the minority which has
been, is, and always will be eternally oppressed. It is for us to hear
and to proclaim these moral sufferings! Plenty of others repeat or
invent the jubilant echoes of the struggle. May other voices be raised
to give the tragic accents of the fight and its sacred horror!

I shall take my examples from the enemy camp, for several reasons:
because the German cause being from the first tainted with injustice,
the sufferings of the few who are just, and the still fewer who have
spiritual perceptions are greater there than elsewhere; because these
evidences appear openly in publications whose boldness the German
censorship has not perceived; because I bow with respect to the heroic
discipline of silence which France in fighting imposes on her
sufferings. (Would to God that this silence were not broken by those
who, trying to deny these sufferings, profane the grandeur of the
sacrifice by the revolting levity of their silly jests in newspapers
which are without either gravity or dignity.)

* * * * *

I have shown in the last chapter that a part of the intellectual youth
of Germany was far from sharing the war-madness of its elders. I cited
certain energetic reproofs delivered by these young writers to the
theorists of imperialism. And these writers are not, a