And even while they are saying that they do not wish for war they are doing all they can to perpetuate it.  They nourish national vanity and the love of supremacy by force.  “We alone,” they say, each behind his shelter, “we alone are the guardians of courage and loyalty, of ability and good taste!” Out of the greatness and richness of a country they make something like a consuming disease.  Out of patriotism—­which can be respected as long as it remains in the domain of sentiment and art on exactly the same footing as the sense of family and local pride, all equally sacred—­out of patriotism they make a Utopian and impracticable idea, unbalancing the world, a sort of cancer which drains all the living force, spreads everywhere and crushes life, a contagious cancer which culminates either in the crash of war or in the exhaustion and suffocation of armed peace.

They pervert the most admirable of moral principles.  How many are the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word “national”?  They distort even truth itself.  For the truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their national truth.  So many nations, so many truths; and thus they falsify and twist the truth.

Those are your enemies.  All those people whose childish and odiously ridiculous disputes you hear snarling above you—­“It wasn’t me that began, it was you!”—­“No, it wasn’t me, it was you!”—­“Hit me then!”—­“No, you hit me!”—­those puerilities that perpetuate the world’s huge wound, for the disputants are not the people truly concerned, but quite the contrary, nor do they desire to have done with it; all those people who cannot or will not make peace on earth; all those who for one reason or another cling to the ancient state of things and find or invent excuses for it—­they are your enemies!

They are your enemies as much as those German soldiers are to-day who are prostrate here between you in the mud, who are only poor dupes hatefully deceived and brutalized, domestic beasts.  They are your enemies, wherever they were born, however they pronounce their names, whatever the language in which they lie.  Look at them, in the heaven and on the earth.  Look at them, everywhere!  Identify them once for all, and be mindful for ever!

* * * * * *

“They will say to you,” growled a kneeling man who stooped with his two bands in the earth and shook his shoulders like a mastiff, ’My friend, you have been a wonderful hero!’ I don’t want them to say it!

“Heroes?  Some sort of extraordinary being?  Idols?  Rot!  We’ve been murderers.  We have respectably followed the trade of hangmen.  We shall do it again with all our might, because it’s of great importance to follow that trade, so as to punish war and smother it.  The act of slaughter is always ignoble; sometimes necessary, but always ignoble.  Yes, hard and persistent murderers, that’s what we’ve been.  But don’t talk to me about military virtue because I’ve killed Germans.”