its most precious possessions, its energies, its genius, its ardors of heroic devotion, which is sacrificing all these things to the murderous and stupid idols of war. I am heartbroken at the absence of any divine message, any divine spirit, any moral leadership, which might upbuild the City of God when the carnage is at an end. The futility of my whole life has reached its climax. If I could but sleep, never to reawaken." Frequently, in this torment of mind, he desired to return to France; but he knew that he could be of no use there. In youth, undersized and delicate, he had been unfit for military service. Now, hard upon fifty years of age, he would obviously be of even less account. The merest semblance of helping in the war would have been repugnant to his conscience, for his acceptance of Tolstoi's teaching had made his convictions steadfast. He knew that it was incumbent upon him to defend France, but to do so in another sense than that of the combatants and that of the intellectuals clamorous with hate. "A great nation," he wrote more than a year later, in the preface to _Au-dessus de la mêlée_, "has not only its frontiers to protect; it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which war lets loose. To each his part. To the armies, the protection of the soil of their native land. To the thinkers, the defense of its thought.... The spirit is by no means the most insignificant part of a people's patrimony." In these opening days of misery, it was not yet clear to him whether and how he would be called upon to speak. Yet he knew that if and when he did speak, he would take up his parable on behalf of intellectual freedom and supranational justice.