while Christianity not only prohibits all killing, but demands of us the betterment of all men, regarding all men as brothers, without distinction of nationalities.
A Christian nation, we said, which engages in war, ought, in order to be logical, not only to take down the cross from its church steeples, turn the churches to some other use, give the clergy other duties, having first prohibited the preaching of the Gospel, but also ought to abandon all the requirements of morality, which flow from the Christian law.
"C'est à prendre ou à laisser," we said. Until Christianity be abolished it is only possible to attract mankind towards war by cunning and fraud, as now practised. We who see this fraud and cunning cannot give way to it.
Since, during this conversation, there was neither music nor champagne, nor anything to confuse our senses, our guest merely shrugged his shoulders, and, with the amiability of a Frenchman, said he was very grateful for the cordial welcome he had experienced in our house, but was sorry that his views were not as well received.
IX.
After this conversation we went out into the hay-field, where our guest, hoping to find the peasants more in sympathy with his ideas, asked me to translate to an old, sickly peasant, Prokophy by name—who, though suffering from severe hernia, was still working energetically, mowing with us—his plan for putting pressure on Germany from both sides, the Russian and the French.
The Frenchman explained this to him graphically, by pressing with his white fingers on either side of the mower's coarse shirt, which was damp with heat.
I well remember Prokophy's good-humoured smile of astonishment when I explained the meaning of the Frenchman's words and action. He evidently took the proposal to squeeze the Germans as a joke, not conceiving that a full-grown and educated man would quietly and soberly speak of war as being desirable.
"Well, but if we squeeze him from both sides," he answered, smiling, giving one pleasantry for another, "he will be fixed too fast to move. We shall have to let him out somewhere."
I translated this answer to my guest.
"Tell him we love the Russians," he said.
