Our soldiers know it well, and I say nothing here of letters from the front which tell us of compassion and kindness between the combatants. But the civilians who are outside the combat, who do not fight, but talk, who write and embroil themselves in a factitious and lunatic agitation and are never exhausted; these are delivered over to the winds of feverish violence. And there is the danger. For they form opinion, the only opinion that can be expressed (all others are forbidden). It is for these that I write, not for those who are fighting (they have no need of us!). And when I hear the publicists trying to rouse the energies of the nation by all the stimulants at their disposal for this one object, the total crushing of the enemy nation, I think it my duty to rise in opposition to what I believe to be at once a moral and a political error. You make war against a State, not against a people. It would be monstrous to hold sixty-five million men responsible for the acts of some thousands--perhaps some hundreds. Here in French Switzerland, so passionately in sympathy with France, so eager both in its sympathies and in the duty of restraining them, I have been able for three months, by reading German letters and pamphlets, to examine closely the conscience of the German nation. And I have been able thus to take account of a good many facts which escape the greater part of the French people. The first, the most striking, the most ignored, is that there is not in Germany as a whole any real hatred of France (all the hatred is turned against England). The especial pathos of the situation lies in the fact that the French spirit only really began to exercise an attraction upon Germany some two or three years ago. Germany was beginning to discover the true France, the France of work and of faith. The new generations, the young classes that they have just led to the abattoir of Ypres and Dixmude, numbered the purest souls, the greatest idealists, those most possessed by the dream of universal brotherhood. If I say that for many among them the war has been a laceration, "a horror, a failure, a renunciation of every ideal, an abdication of the spirit," as one of them wrote on the eve of his death--if I say that the death of Péguy has been mourned by many young Germans, no one would believe me. But belief will be a necessity the day I publish the documents which I have collected.