best effort of which it is capable is to calculate—by spelling out the vague discourses of ministers, by twisting the sense of the words uttered by sovereigns, by contorting the words ascribed to diplomats and reported by the newspapers at the uncertain risk of their information—whether it is tomorrow or the day after, this year or next year, that we shall be crushed. We should, indeed, seek in vain in
It is pointed out that the power is in the hands of those who are ruining themselves, in the hands of the separate individuals forming the mass; it is pointed out that the source of evil is in the state. It would seem clear that the contradiction of the consciousness and of life has reached the limit beyond which it is impossible to go and after which its solution must ensue.
But the author does not think so. He sees in this the tragedy of human life, and, having pointed out all the terror of the situation, concludes that human life must take place in this terror.
Such is the second relation to war of those men who see something fatal and tragical in it.
The third relation is that of men who have lost their conscience, and so their common sense and human feeling.
To this class belong Moltke, whose opinion is quoted by Maupassant, and the majority of military men, who are educated in this cruel superstition, who live by it, and so are often naively convinced that war is not only an inevitable, but even a useful matter. Thus, judge also nonmilitary, so-called learned, cultured, refined people.
Here is what the famous Academician, Doucet, writes in the number of the Revue des Revues in which the letters about war are collected, in reply to the editor’s inquiry as to his views on war: