Today it is a question of the life or death of the European soul.  Do you not believe that this soul is more endangered at the hands of the hordes of stub-nosed Slavs than of the phalanx of those whom you, Rolland, call Huns?  Your sense must give you the right to answer.  Recall the terrible story of Russian incendiarism for the last hundred years, which has torn to pieces in ever-increasing lust for murder bodies and souls; recall the eternally perjured and law-defying regiment of grave diggers; and then blush that you have characterized as a heavy crime a manfully confessed act of self-defense on the part of the Germans, the temporary occupation of Belgium!  Blush that you have forgotten the Russian Moloch now loosed upon us, drunk with the blood and tears of alien peoples as well as of its own children!  That you have forgotten all that, in order to lament over buildings which we have been forced in self-defense—­again in self-defense—­to sacrifice!  And blush for those of your people who have become accomplices of that Moloch!  Those who are sinning against the Holy Ghost of Europe, in order to attempt belated vengeance against Germany!  Do you know what the ancients, the very Greeks and Romans from whom you have drawn your blood and temperament, called that sin?  Blood-guiltiness is the name of that horror.  And do you know how it is atoned for?  I shrink to ask further, yea, even to think further; for horror falls upon me, and I see the unspeakable.

Today, battling against you allies of the swarms of Muscovites, we Europeans are battling also for that France which you are threatening—­you, not we!

German Intellectuals “All Afire."

Yes, Romain Rolland, try, Frenchman that you are, to look into the mysteries of the time.  Ask yourself, marvel, how it comes to pass that we, the intellectuals among the Germans, take part without exception in this dreadful war; take part with body and soul.  None of us ambitious, none of us a politician, not one of us who, till this war, busied himself about anything except his idea, the Palladium of his life!  And now we are all afire, with all our hearts, with our whole people, all full of determination and prepared for the last.  All our youth in the field, every man among us thrilled with faith in our God and this battle of our God, every man among us conscious of the sacred necessity that has driven us, every man among us consecrated for timely death!  Are these incendiaries?  Are these slaves, whom a despot points the way to the rolling dead?  Every one knows it is our all that is at stake; it is a matter of the divine in humanity, a matter of our preservation and that of Europe.

And so we stand amid death and ruins under the star—­one federation, one single union.  This I have had to tell you, whether you will listen to it, whether Europe has ears to hear it, or not.  From now on, may our deeds be our words!

Are We Barbarians?