as soldiers against soldiers!"

The Latin is sometimes cruel--he has within him the capacity for
cruelty--and the history of Latin peoples is stained here and there
with ferocity. But the Latin has never organized cruelty methodically,
has never elevated terrorization into a principle of warfare, a weapon
of statecraft. For one thing he is too intelligent: he knows that
cruelty begets reprisals, that brutality breeds hate. After Alsace
the German should have known too much to try the same method in harsher
forms upon Belgium and invaded France. But the barbarian learns no
spiritual lessons. Persian atrocity, Saracen atrocity, Indian atrocity,
Spanish atrocity--they have all failed. An enduring triumph was never
won on that principle of "indispensable severity."

It is barbarism as well as the barbarian which France is fighting,
and the French know it, are profoundly conscious of it, from the
cool, dispassionate philosopher, like Bergson or Boutroux or Hovelaque,
to the girl conductor on the tram, the dirty _poilu_ in the trench.
For more than a generation the French world has suffered from the
fear of this new barbarian, and the time has come again, as it has
come so many times before in history, for the momentous decision with
the barbarian. Again as before it must come on the fields of France
where the ancient curse of barbarism has been met and destroyed.




IV