This quotation is second-hand; I have taken it from the _Au-dessus de la Mélée_ of Romain Rolland. We know that he belongs to the small number of those men, if I may dare call them so, who at the moment when their family is massacred, their house set on fire, their old father shot, their sister violated, isolate themselves in a tower of ivory, from the top of which, looking on at these crimes, and striving to hold an even balance between the assassins and the victims, they proclaim themselves “Above the conflict.”... This state of mind is at least a guarantee to us of the accuracy of the expressions which he quotes from the profession of faith of his “brother” Thomas Mann. ----- And this criticism, addressed by Maximilian Harden to the German Government, after having treated as lies their distracted efforts to excuse the violation of Belgium neutrality:— “What is the use of all this fuss?... Might creates right for us. Does a strong man ever submit to the foolish pretensions or the sentimentality of a band of weaklings?” You know, my dear Campbell, the spirit in which we began this war—the same spirit as that of our English friends. For our part we were governed by respect for treaties, for international agreements, for the laws of war, for the rights of nations, for everything by which men, in their bloody struggles one against the other, had tried to raise themselves little by little above the level of wild beasts. Since the war had come, since it had been forced upon us by the enemy—who, after an elaborate preparation, had chosen his own time—we wished, while engaging in it and carrying it through, to minimize its calamities as much as possible, by strictly observing the articles of agreement by which the nations had mutually bound themselves to consider the wounded as _res sacra_, not to maltreat civilians, not to bombard open towns, and so on. We have paid dearly for the chivalrous illusions which we had at the outset. Let me give you two examples of the state of mind which prevailed in France at that moment.