Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/128

Counter-Currents instinct is not a common one. It exists, and it crops up where we least expect to find it,—in professors of political economy, in doctors who have spent their existence keeping people alive, and in clergymen who preach the religion of the meek. But it is too rare to be a controlling force, and it had little or no place in the hearts of the thousands of men who were marched to their deaths on the battlefields of Poland and Flanders.

It was not the fascination of war that brought the Tyrolean and Bavarian peasants down from their mountain farms. What did these men know or care about Belgrade, or Prussia's wide ambitions? What to them was "the fate-appointed world-task of Germany, under the sacred dynasty of the Hohenzollern"? They were summoned, and they obeyed the summons. If the women who talk so glibly about the pleasure men take in fighting had seen these conscripts saying good-bye to 112