“It is useless for you to go on, Engineer,” Settembrini interrupted him. “The soldier’s existence⁠—I say this without intending the slightest offence to Lieutenant Ziemssen⁠—cannot be cited in the argument, for the reason that, as an existence, it is purely formal⁠—in and for itself entirely without content. Its typical representative is the infantry soldier, who hires himself out for this or that campaign. Take the soldiers of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, for instance, or of the various revolutionary armies, the Napoleonic or Garibaldian⁠—or take the Prussian. I will be ready to talk about the soldier when I know what he is fighting for .”

“But that he does fight,” rejoined Naphta, “remains the distinctive feature of his existence as a soldier. Let us agree so far. It may not be enough of a distinction to permit of his being ‘cited in the argument’; but even so, it puts him in a sphere remote from the comprehension of your civilian, with his bourgeois acceptation of life.”