ir pedantic and
all-sufficient intellectuality. Sons of sophistry and grandsons of
cant, they had considered themselves capable of proving the greatest
absurdities by the mental capers to which they had accustomed their
acrobatic intellects.

They had employed the favorite method of the thesis, antithesis and
synthesis in order to demonstrate that Germany ought to be the Mistress
of the World; that Belgium was guilty of her own ruin because she had
defended herself; that true happiness consisted in having all humanity
dominated by Prussia; that the supreme idea of existence consisted in
a clean stable and a full manger; that Liberty and Justice were nothing
more than illusions of the romanticism of the French; that every deed
accomplished became virtuous from the moment it triumphed, and that
Right was simply a derivative of Might. These metaphysical athletes with
guns and sabres were accustomed to consider themselves the paladins of
a crusade of civilization. They wished the blond type to triumph
definitely over the brunette; they wished to enslave the worthless man
of the South, consigning him forever to a world regulated by "the salt
of the earth," "the aristocracy of humanity." Everything on the page of
history that had amounted to anything was German. The ancient Greeks had
been of Germanic origin; German, too, the great artists of the Italian
Renaissance. The men of the Mediterranean countries, with the inherent
badness of their extraction, had falsified history. . . .

"That's the best place for you. . . You are better where you are buried,
you pitiless pedants!" thought Desnoyers, recalling his conversations
with his friend, the Russian.

What a shame that there were not here, too, all the Herr Professors of
the German universities--those wise men so unquestionably skilful
in altering the trademarks of intellectual products and changing the
terminology of things! Those men with flowing beards and gold-rimmed
spectacles, pacific rabbits of the laboratory and the professor's
chair that had been preparing the ground for the present war with their
sophistries and their unblushing effrontery! Their guilt was far greater
than that of the Herr Lieutenant of the tight corset and the gleaming
monocle, who in his thirst for strife and slaughter was simply and
logically working out the professional charts.

While the German soldier of the lower classes was plundering what he
could and drunkenly shooting whatever crosse