Beside this scene, which is not without its grandeur, we must set others of a very different type. In many German souls, those of officers and men alike, the war has aroused the predatory instincts of their ancestors. Rifling the invaded country, ransacking houses, great and small, from cellar to loft, organizing convoys of booty to be sent to Germany—this is the seamy side of the fighting of to-day. This atavism, as persistent as original sin, is certainly not a thing to be proud of. And if only the war had done nothing worse than inflame these ugly greeds! Alas! it has stirred up the ancestral cruelty that still lurked in the human slime of the hostile armies. The high command at Berlin knew its men, when it enjoined the corps commanders to show no mercy, and these officers were fully aware, for their part, that their orders would be obeyed to the letter. Twelve centuries of Christianity, long years of peace, educational progress, and the blessings of civilization—all this has not succeeded in curing the German soldier of that thirst for blood which has reappeared, time and again, like some ineradicable taint. IV. The war-philosophy of the university professors and the influence it has had on generations of students would deserve a volume to itself. Whence comes this implacable hatred of France among those who lived through the war of 1870 and among their pupils? We could understand it more easily if we found it in a conquered nation. And why have these intellectuals such a loathing for England? It is not enough to say that France, forty-five years ago, was not weakened enough to satisfy them, and that in the English they detest the rulers of a colonial empire which they covet for themselves. The origin of these hatreds may be traced, and their lastingness may be ascribed, to the teaching of history as it is practised in the universities, under the impulse of the Prussian school of historians, from Niebuhr, Ranke, Mommsen, and Siebel, down to Treitschke, Giesebrecht, Häuser, Droysen, Lamprecht, and Delbrück. If mere teachers in secondary schools and _Gymnasien_ train their boys to hate foreign races, which they depict as enemies or rivals, the fact is highly deplorable; but has not the same excess of blind patriotism, unfortunately, been observed in other countries as well? What is peculiar to German universities is the way in which their experts in historical criticism have directed their teaching of the history of their country to a definite object.