They had employed the favorite method of the thesis, antithesis and synthesis in order to demonstrate that Germany ought to be the Mistress of the World; that Belgium was guilty of her own ruin because she had defended herself; that true happiness consisted in having all humanity dominated by Prussia; that the supreme idea of existence consisted in a clean stable and a full manger; that Liberty and Justice were nothing more than illusions of the romanticism of the French; that every deed accomplished became virtuous from the moment it triumphed, and that Right was simply a derivative of Might.  These metaphysical athletes with guns and sabres were accustomed to consider themselves the paladins of a crusade of civilization.  They wished the blond type to triumph definitely over the brunette; they wished to enslave the worthless man of the South, consigning him forever to a world regulated by “the salt of the earth,” “the aristocracy of humanity.”  Everything on the page of history that had amounted to anything was German.  The ancient Greeks had been of Germanic origin; German, too, the great artists of the Italian Renaissance.  The men of the Mediterranean countries, with the inherent badness of their extraction, had falsified history. . . .

“That’s the best place for you. . .  You are better where you are buried, you pitiless pedants!” thought Desnoyers, recalling his conversations with his friend, the Russian.

What a shame that there were not here, too, all the Herr Professors of the German universities—­those wise men so unquestionably skilful in altering the trademarks of intellectual products and changing the terminology of things!  Those men with flowing beards and gold-rimmed spectacles, pacific rabbits of the laboratory and the professor’s chair that had been preparing the ground for the present war with their sophistries and their unblushing effrontery!  Their guilt was far greater than that of the Herr Lieutenant of the tight corset and the gleaming monocle, who in his thirst for strife and slaughter was simply and logically working out the professional charts.

While the German soldier of the lower classes was plundering what he could and drunkenly shooting whatever crossed his path, the warrior student was reading by the camp glow, Hegel and Nietzsche.  He was too enlightened to execute with his own hands these acts of “historical justice,” but he, with the professors, was rousing all the bad instincts of the Teutonic beast and giving them a varnish of scientific justification.

“Lie there, in your sepulchre, you intellectual scourge!” continued Desnoyers mentally.

The fierce Moors, the negroes of infantile intelligence, the sullen Hindus, appeared to him more deserving of respect than all the ermine-bordered togas parading haughtily and aggressively through the cloisters of the German universities.  What peacefulness for the world if their wearers should disappear forever!  He preferred the simple and primitive barbarity of the savage to the refined, deliberate and merciless barbarity of the greedy sage;—­it did less harm and was not so hypocritical.