character. It is their
age, they think, an age in which the qualities of the old peoples,
England and France, are obsolete. They make war, after their own
pattern, and we have only to suffer it as long as we can. But France has
learned what she needs from Germany so that she may fight the German
idea as well as the German armies; and when the German armies were
checked before Paris there was an equal check to the German idea. Then
the world, which was holding its breath, knew that the old nations, the
old faith and mind and conscience of Europe, were still standing fast
and that science had not utterly betrayed them all to the new barbarism.
Twice before, at Tours and in the Catalaunian fields, there had been
such a fight upon the soil of France, and now for the third time it is
the heavy fate and the glory of France to be the guardian nation. That
is not an accident, for France is still the chief treasury of all that
these conscious barbarians would destroy. They knew that while she
stands unbroken there is a spirit in her that will make their Kultur
seem unlovely to all the world. They know that in her, as in Athens long
ago, thought remains passionate and disinterested and free. Their
thought is German and exercised for German ends, like their army; but
hers can forget France in the universe, and for that reason her armies
and ours will fight for it as if the universe were at stake. Many forms
has that thought taken, passing through disguises and errors, mocking at
itself, mocking at the holiest things; and yet there has always been the
holiness of freedom in it. The French blasphemer has never blasphemed
against the idea of truth even when he mistook falsehood for it. In the
Terror he said there was no God, because he believed there was none, but
he never said that France was God so that he might encourage her to
conquer the world. Voltaire was an imp of destruction perhaps, but with
what a divine lightning of laughter would he have struck the Teutonic
Antichrist, and how the everlasting soul of France would have risen in
him if he could have seen her most sacred church, the visible sign of
her faith and her genius, ruined by the German guns. Was there ever a
stupidity so worthy of his scorn as this attempt to bombard the spirit?
For, though the temple is ruined, the faith remains; and whatever war
the Germans may make upon the glory of the past, it is the glory of the
future that France fights for. Whatever wounds s