Page:Rolland - Above the Battlefield.djvu/13

 so that the great and simple truth, “love of our country,” be understood? It would seem, then, that love of our country can nourish only through the hatred of other countries and the massacre of those who sacrifice themselves in the defence of them. There is in this theory a ferocious absurdity, a neronian dilettantism which repels me in the very depths of my being. No! Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and slay those noble and faithful souls who also love their country, but rather that I should honour them and seek to unite myself with them for our common good. You Christians will say—and in this you seek consolation for having betrayed your Master’s orders—that war exalts the virtue of sacrifice. And it is true that war has the privilege of bringing out the genius of the race in the most commonplace of hearts. It purges away, in its bath of blood, all dross and impurity; it tempers the metal of the soul; of a niggardly peasant, of a timorous citizen it can make a hero of Valmy. But is there no better employment for the devotion of one people than the devastation of another? Can we not sacrifice ourselves without sacrificing our neighbours as well? Many of you, I know, yield your own blood more readily than you shed that of others. But this is, in its essence a weakness. For you who are undismayed by bullets and shrapnel yet tremble before the dictates of racial frenzy—that Moloch that stands higher than the Church of Christ. You Christians of to-day would not have refused to sacrifice to the gods of Imperial Rome, you are not capable of such courage! Your Pope Pius X died of grief at the outbreak of this war—so it is said The Jupiter of the Vatican hurled thunderbolts upon those inoffensive priests who believed in the noble chimaera of modernism. What did he do against those princes and those criminal rulers whose measureless ambition has given the world over to misery and death? May God inspire the new Pontiff who has just ascended the throne of St. Peter with words and deeds which will cleanse the Church from the stain of this silence.

You socialists on both sides claim to be defending liberty against tyranny—French liberty against the Kaiser, German