What a shame that there were not here, too, all the Herr Professors of
the German universities--those wise men so unquestionably skilful
in altering the trademarks of intellectual products and changing the
terminology of things! Those men with flowing beards and gold-rimmed
spectacles, pacific rabbits of the laboratory and the professor's
chair that had been preparing the ground for the present war with their
sophistries and their unblushing effrontery! Their guilt was far greater
than that of the Herr Lieutenant of the tight corset and the gleaming
monocle, who in his thirst for strife and slaughter was simply and
logically working out the professional charts.
While the German soldier of the lower classes was plundering what he
could and drunkenly shooting whatever crossed his path, the warrior
student was reading by the camp glow, Hegel and Nietzsche. He was too
enlightened to execute with his own hands these acts of "historical
justice," but he, with the professors, was rousing all the bad
instincts of the Teutonic beast and giving them a varnish of scientific
justification.
"Lie there, in your sepulchre, you intellectual scourge!" continued
Desnoyers mentally.
The fierce Moors, the negroes of infantile intelligence, the sullen
Hindus, appeared to him more deserving of respect than all the
ermine-bordered togas parading haughtily and aggressively through the
cloisters of the German universities.
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