The philosopher Bergson expressed this sublime confidence in the cause thus (I give the substance of his words from memory): "Not all wars can be avoided--perhaps nine out of ten can. But this one, no! For it is a war of principles. It will be a long war because the enemy is strong and we were unprepared. But we can wait the end confident in the result. The Germans have created a false belief, a wrong idea, and have carried that idea into action with extraordinary thoroughness. But the belief rests upon error. When the day comes that they meet reverses, when their idol of force no longer works miracles for them, then they will collapse, from within. There will be a general breakdown of personality from realizing the falsity of their idea. There lies our victory."
The philosopher's belief is based on the faith that the principles of justice, of law, of humanity are stronger, more enduring than any organization of force no matter how efficient, for this is a moral world. And the individual or nation who relies upon might to enforce wrong must in the end, perceiving the irrationality of his world, collapse. The grinding of the mill may be heart-breakingly slow, but the grist is as sure as life itself.
Similarly, the statesman Hanotaux has expressed "The Moral Victory": "It is the noblest, the highest of causes which has been submitted to the arbitrament of arms. Its grandeur justifies the terrible extent of the drama and the immense sacrifices it imposes. The material results of victory will be immense, the moral results will be even greater.... Moral forces are superior to physical forces, and in spite of all they will have the last word.... Our youth has gone to the front in the serene conviction that it was fighting not only for the _patrie_, but for humanity, that this war was a sort of crusade, that they could claim place beside St. Louis and Jeanne d'Arc."
It is that heroic consciousness of a righteous martyrdom that I read on the faces of the black-robed women in the street, too proud for tears; in the silent figures on the hospital beds, suffering without protest an agony too deep for words. And when I encountered a file of soldiers in the muddy trenches, flattening themselves out against the earth walls to let me pass, carrying pails of soup to the comrades up front, or sitting motionless beside their burrows along the trench wall, their hands clasping their rifles,--dirty, grimed, and bearded,--I saw the same thing in their tired eyes, their drawn faces. Mute martyrs in the cause of humanity, in _my_ cause, they were giving their lives for others, for _me_, not merely that the German might be driven from France, but that justice and honor and peace between men might prevail in the world!