The Occult War: The Judeo-Masonic Plan to Conquer the World is a work of conspiracy history written by Count Léon de Poncins and Emmanuel Malynski, published in French in 1936 and in Italian in 1939 in a translation by Julius Evola, who added his own introduction. Its subject is the long revolutionary upheaval that, in the authors’ telling, runs from the French Revolution through Napoleon, Metternich’s Holy Alliance, the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, the First World War, the Paris peace conference, and the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. The book presents itself as an exposé of hidden direction behind these events, and it argues its case through historical narrative, polemic, and a running metaphysical interpretation of revolution as a religious war against Christian civilization.
“The genius who has presided over this global disruption is he whom Christ calls a ‘liar from the beginning’.”
The authors’ central claim is that the revolutionary phenomenon is not a series of spontaneous outbreaks but a single, deliberately directed campaign—”vectorial” in Evola’s word—steered by occult forces working through Freemasonry, international finance, and Jewry. Against this stands what they call the Christian front, whose great missed opportunities (the Congress of Vienna, the Holy Alliance, the failure to crush the 1848 revolutions) opened the road to 1917. The book is less a chronicle than an indictment: it reads the nineteenth century as a war in which one side knew what it was doing and the other did not.
The Document, Its Authors, and Evola’s Frame
The Book’s Frame and Its Two Authors
The volume opens with the apparatus of a recovered document: title pages, a translator’s note, and an editor’s remark that the Italian version was the work of Julius Evola, who rendered the French original into his own language and appended an introduction. Evola, the editor warns, sometimes trimmed or rewrote passages of the French text, and these interventions are flagged in footnotes. Two appendices follow—Evola’s 1938 essay on the occult war and René Guénon’s 1936 review of the French edition.
De Poncins Introduces Malynski
Count Léon de Poncins supplies a preface describing his co-author, Emmanuel Malynski, as a man who spent thirty years watching the revolutionary movement at close range. Born in Russian Poland under near-feudal conditions, Malynski saw industrial capitalism rise and “pave the way to Bolshevism,” watched Tsarism collapse and Bolshevism triumph, and observed the postwar Polish land reforms. A fencer and early aviator, he travelled through India, Japan, America, the eastern European ghettos, New York, and Palestine, where he studied Zionism. He foresaw events years ahead and was dismissed in his own day. De Poncins credits him with grasping, before Max Weber or Werner Sombart, the Jewish essence of modern capitalism and its kinship with Bolshevism, with seeing how exaggerated nationalism serves international subversion, and with recognising the movement’s metaphysical core as a religious war between two opposed worldviews. Ill in 1935, Malynski handed over his notes and manuscripts; de Poncins re-edited the book in 1938 without altering its substance.
Evola’s Frame: History’s Hidden Dimension
Evola’s introduction insists that fighting Communism, collectivism, Jewry, and Freemasonry demands a different angle of vision. Culture, he says, is the last bastion, and reactionary forces foolishly treat it as harmless. Positivist “objective” history denies the third dimension—intention, hidden plan—and so blinds people to the real forces at work; evolutionism dresses the race toward the abyss as progress, a hypnosis inherited from humanism, encyclopedism, and Masonic rationalism. Evola points to Guénon’s Crisis of the Modern World and his own Revolt against the Modern World as the map of this fall from Aryan and Hyperborean civilization into anti-Tradition. He presents The Occult War as historical evidence for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, praising its “aristocratic and Catholic radicalism” and its central thesis: the vectorial unity of revolution, induced and steered by obscure forces, a “demonic” tradition of subversion—Guénon’s counter-initiation—arrayed against genuine spirituality. He closes with a sketch of Malynski’s life, dead at Lausanne in May 1938, and of de Poncins’s career as author and editor of Contre-Révolution.
The Siege of the Citadel
The main text opens with an image: an underground struggle that began with the French Revolution, backed by the Illuminati assembled at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad under the Bavarian professor Weishaupt. The city had been besieged for decades—since Voltaire, Rousseau, the Encyclopédie, and the spread of Masonic lodges—and one of its finest districts was stormed, its inhabitants drafted to attack the surrounding areas. In Napoleonic times the besieged retook that quarter after fierce fighting; the assailants withdrew but left a contagious germ that spread, making France the enfant terrible of nineteenth-century Europe. The deep history of the century down to the World War is the story of this largely mute struggle between attackers who knew what they were doing and a besieged party that did not.
From Vienna to the War of the Low Against the High
The process ran from 1815 to 1917 and produced two results: one-sixth of the world became a revolutionary hotbed steeped in Freemasonry and Judaism, while the rest became a weak, divided realm, drained by capitalism, shaken by socialism, and split by misunderstood nationalisms. In 1813 traditional Europe chose to react against Napoleon—fighting the illness, not France—and the Congress of Vienna’s victors squandered their victory, leaving France intact and restored to an honourable monarchy. The divinely appointed monarchs were expiating a guilt of short-sightedness, yielding to petty national rivalries instead of standing as one man. The nineteenth-century war, the text argues, was between overlapping strata: universal democracy against the universal elite, the Low against the High—and where democracy triumphed, the Low became the High and had to defend itself against something lower still, down to rock bottom. Only Russia reached absolute zero, where revolution stands still.
Palmerston, Napoleon III, and the Pretext for War
Hostility to Tsarism began as something abstract, “Platonic,” until a pretext drew British interests into action—too slight to move a conservative government, but enough for Lord Palmerston, who opened his offensive against the Russian Empire “heeding the call of his blood.” He found an unlikely partner in Napoleon III: the Turkish question gave Britain its grounds, but France needed different justification, found in the opposition between Russian autocracy and the French Revolution. A footnote sketches the background of Jean Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati, as an example of aristocratic initiatory orders decaying into political-revolutionary sects; “Nubius” appears as a pseudonym shaping early secret societies from the Carbonari onward. Editorial notes record Evola’s own revisions—dropped phrases, altered wording, a chapter retitled “The First Wars for the Occult Front: The Crimean War.”
The First Democratic War
The Crimean War of 1853 marks the turning point. It cancelled the Holy Alliance and replaced its principle with its opposite: a war for democracy, the first in history, in which two monarchies served as mercenary champions of revolution. Earlier French Revolutionary wars had been defensive; Napoleon’s wars sprang from one man’s ambition; 1853 was “the first openly and genuinely democratic war.” Young men killed one another not for countries or princes but so that “scum on both sides, instigated by the tumultuous Jew,” could tread on their corpses—an outcome made possible by “freedom,” which represses genuine personalities and forces the “free” to die for “the devil himself or the interests of Jewish capitalism,” branded traitors if they refuse. Michelet is quoted calling it a clash between “the barbarian Christianity of the East” and “the young social faith of the civilised West,” a religious war demanding hundreds of thousands of deaths so Christians would destroy Christianity and clear the way for Bolshevism in the East and capitalism in the West.
Nicholas I and the Fall of Tsarism
Russia was unprepared. The Tsar and his ministers were men of the ancien régime, not apocalyptic visionaries; selfless wars for democracy or international capitalism were unintelligible to followers of “barbarian Christianity.” No one expected a clash in Crimea; troops crawled across European Russia with few railways and poor roads. The army of Moscow, its 1813 reputation overinflated, was defeated; the Tsar fell ill en route and died—officially of flu, commonly believed to have poisoned himself from humiliation by democracy, others saying he was murdered. With Nicholas I died a living embodiment of Tsarism, yet he lived in his people’s hearts: adored by soldiers, generous to the loyal, merciless against revolt, whose significance he grasped. When revolt’s rumble once reached the Winter Palace windows, he stepped onto the balcony and shouted “On your knees!”—and the people knelt. His successor Alexander II professed a vague liberalism, was well regarded by democrats who tolerate weak monarchs, and under him the Empire’s decay began, never to end. The Congress of Paris was Napoleon III’s triumph, read as revenge for Vienna and Waterloo—hard to explain except that it was held in Paris; France would receive similar satisfaction in 1919. The rest went to democracy, which truly triumphed, since Nicholas I had never endangered France—only threatened the Revolution.
Austria as the Citadel of the Old Order
With Russia temporarily brought down, attention turned to Austria, which the revolution understood perfectly: hatred, like love, is driven by instinct toward its opposite. Austria was most hated as the embodiment of Catholicism, the ancien régime, personal property, the Holy Roman Empire’s heritage, and hierarchical Christendom under one sceptre—the opposite of capitalism, democracy, and nationalism. It was a country of the ancien régime not merely politically: capitalism might have contented itself with a monarchy of bankers, but Austria was a federation of self-sufficient economic monarchies under a sovereign who was a great landowner free of debts, an independent ruler; these monarchies compensated one another for basic goods. Trade, moneylending, and agiotage existed almost exclusively in big cities and remained secondary; the economy rested on production, consumption, and exchange, and the economic rulers were landowners, often industrialists, producing most food with farmers’ help. There were no complaints, poverty, or strikes, because the ruling class was patriarchal, visible, and personally accountable from father to son, and because landowners had no fixed-term creditors holding knives to their throats; they were debt-free and paid all taxes, the state being relatively undemanding and not indebted as today’s states are. The Jew played a role but did not take “the lion’s share—one big enough for the Lion of Judah.”
The Great War and the Peace of Democracy
The Cult of the Unknown Soldier and the Hidden Aims of the War
The book opens this stretch with the Unknown Soldier, arguing that the man under the tomb was statistically certain to have been an ordinary fellow, and that this cult was designed to manufacture an anonymous popular champion—a counterweight to the prestige of named leaders and heroes, whose very existence refutes the democratic claim that every person is merely an expression of the collective. Democracy, it concedes, showed a certain frankness in the war’s last eighteen months, pursuing its ends by open onslaught. Those ends, as conceived by anonymous circles hungry for a “total” conflict, are then catalogued: the destruction of the feudal Hapsburg empire and its replacement by radical, economically unviable republics at the mercy of the Jew; the corrosion of the Tsarist Asian empire into a hotbed of Jewish world revolution; a democratic Poland whose absurd borders would leave it in latent conflict with Germany, feared as a possible counter-revolutionary awakening spreading eastward—Poland serving as a western buffer for the “Judeo-Satanic orgy of Moscow.” Add the democratic inversion of traditional values, turning Europe into a broth for microbes spreading from Russia; the capitalist-socialist turn through state control and collective economy; and mounting debt that enriched international Jewry while nations financed the cause of their own misfortunes. The ultimate aim was exhaustion and confusion on both sides, so that no state would intervene against the infection centred in Moscow. After three years that stage was reached; subversive cells spread their influence through speeches and writings, and the “clan of international subversion” rejoiced—cautiously, while Tsarism might still rise again, until that scruple vanished. Wilson became its herald, voicing a new state of mind like a forest fire smouldering in the soil before blazing up. Democracy gained its foothold, flanked west by American democracy and east by the “Judeo-Muscovite model,” with the “young” democratic states—Poland, Bohemia, Croatia, Lithuania—expressing democracy rather than nationalism. By 1917 democracy could speak openly: the war among nations was really Revolution against Counter-Revolution. Passing from theory to practice, it then produced an unprecedented fiasco, proving its incapacity and its harm.
The Peace Treaties as a Criminal Court of History
The Paris Conference, the book argues, existed to legalise conquests through a “Jewish peace”—the advance of revolution and democracy, not French, British, or Italian gain. Unlike Vienna in 1815, Paris in 1855, or Berlin in 1878, it presented itself as a criminal court of history judging the world by democracy, with Scripture inverted: sheep on the Left, goats on the Right. Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey stood as the criminals; allies like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Serbia hovered uncertainly, like believers barred from the church. No great men remained—no kings, ministers, courtiers—only peoples speaking through Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau at the Quai d’Orsay. These three formed a supreme court judging by a democratic justice independent of natural law, the Decalogue, and Roman law, claiming infallibility as “peoples,” a lie fed by the Jewish or Judaised press. Parliaments fell silent while they sliced Europe and Asia like a pie, concerned only to please the Jew. Their work: create the largest number of sovereign nations with conflicting interests; limit them until those interests became irreconcilable; and erect the League of Nations, a Platonic assembly without power or sanctions, reconciling the irreconcilable by playing on fear. Europe’s chaos follows logically from the Conference, not from anyone’s malice or wartime rancour. Hungary was dismembered for Czechoslovakia and Romania; Hungary and tiny Austria cannot feed themselves, dependent on neighbours for transit; Czechoslovakia cannot reach the world except through the German Elbe; Germany is split by Poland and surrounded; Poland reaches the sea only by an artificial corridor; Italy is cramped with no prospect but war. The result is compulsory war of all against all, with privileged nations as demanding creditors and debtors bleeding themselves through taxes—a form of socialisation—while Muscovite socialism and American capitalism are each manipulated by the Jew. The only common interest left is war; peace persists only through common fear, which wanes as generations forget. No nation is satisfied with the treaties, yet all fear change would worsen things, failing to see the treaties will bring a new cataclysm. The work is absurd for the majority but brilliant for a certain category. French and Polish educated men blame Germany; Germans blame France and Britain, or Italy now anti-revolutionary; Moscow is mentioned only regarding Communism, never its backstage connections to those with no enemies on the Left.
The Fall of Tsarism
The Void After Stolypin
With Stolypin dead, the machinery of state remained formally intact—the ministers, the Duma, the bureaucracy—and the intention to continue his course was probably sincere. Yet everything had changed, because the murdered man had been the only leader of a hundred million people. Chaos spread outward from the Imperial court, and the author insists this would continue not merely until the regime fell, which “meant little,” but until a new leader arose. That leader turned out to be Lenin, whose arrival marked the end of the agony and the beginning of Hell.
Nicholas II’s weakness deepened after the murder. Finding no support, he could not tell whether he or the world was swaying. Born on the feast of Saint Job, he read the coincidence as a fatal sign; his divided family left him praying for inspiration, trusting only oracles, spiritualists, clairvoyants, and self-appointed magicians clustering around Tzarskoye Selo, which the Imperial couple scarcely ever left.
March 1917 and the Fall of the Tsar
The author claims the Jews of both hemispheres prepared to put “sentenced Russia” to the sword while the capital and provinces partied amid an indefinable unease. On 8 March 1917 revolution broke out, drawing at least moral support from the Entente; future Provisional Government members met in the office of British ambassador Sir George Buchanan, and when the Tsar complained to Britain, London replied that no one could replace Buchanan. Citing the “fanatical Jewish author” Rappoport, the text notes that the Social Democratic, Socialist Revolutionary, and Polish Socialist parties all counted Jews among their leaders, that Plehve was perhaps right that political emancipation and the Jewish question were practically identical, and that Jews were “the artisans of the Revolution of 1917.”
The Tsar fell amid a delirious cry of joy, the Entente press unanimously against him. Princess Paley reports Lloyd George claiming one aim of Britain’s war had been met; Vandervelde wrote that the world’s democracies stood behind Russia. Despite talk of a “bloodless” revolution, soldiers killed officers, the fleets at Helsinki, Kronstadt, and Odessa saw butchery, Admiral Nepenin was assassinated and his body insulted for three days, and Admiral Viren was tied to a stake and burned alive before his daughter.
Abdication and the Grand Duke Michael
Between eleven and midnight on 15–16 March, Nicholas signed his abdication. The revolutionaries prudently hid their real face: had they spoken of a republic, generals would never have abandoned the Tsar had they known Tsarism would fall too. Gutchkov came to Pskov and asked for the abdication; Nicholas handed over the signed act and told an aide-de-camp that if Stolypin had still been around, none of this would have happened. Unexpectedly, he abdicated not in favour of his sickly son but of his brother Michael, making him lawful Emperor rather than regent. Michael, weak and naive, had married morganatically against the family head’s will and been exiled until the war; two days later Duma leaders persuaded him to postpone accession pending the Constituent Assembly. The author comments: “Vox populi vox Dei”—no one suspected the vox Dei could only have been the vox Judei. Tsarism thus ceased to exist in two stages within a week, a conjuring trick impossible in one. At Tzarskoye Selo Nicholas learned he had abdicated in favour of the republic, that the Empress was interned, and that he was a prisoner in his own palace.
Lvov, Milyukov, and the Veiled Revolution
The Duma’s committee gave way to a Provisional Government nominally led by Prince Lvov, whose lineage supposedly reached back to Rurik. The author suspects Lvov dreamed of founding a new dynasty, believing nothing had changed since Boris Godunov’s day, while cleverer men manoeuvred him through a left-hand chain leading to Jews by blood or spirit, preparing a plan strangely similar to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The eight months of preliminary revolution are compared to Isis gradually removing her veils. Historian Milyukov, head of the constitutional democrats, took Foreign Affairs; he enjoyed the friendship of Jacob Schiff, the Jewish-American financier and personal enemy of Tsarism, whose life was spared but who was thrown out once his services were no longer required. The myth of two distinct revolutions—good March, bad November—is dismissed.
Kerensky Between Two Fires
Kerensky’s efforts to bring democratic peace through agreement among socialist parties failed. Had Russia continued the war to the end, the revolution too would have continued to the end. He feared counter-revolution should a central European emperor win, reasoning as a man of the far Left devoted to Jewry, not knowing the world conspiracy’s final verdict.
The November Coup and Its Hidden Authors
The assault on the Winter Palace came at once. The ministers of the provisional government had gathered there under Kerensky’s presidency, and the Kronstadt sailors seized the Aurora, anchored on the Neva, and opened fire on the old imperial residence while the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress across the river stayed silent. Armed men entered the meeting hall and arrested every minister but Kerensky, who slipped away. Trotsky’s followers credit their man for the coup; Stalin’s credit the committee Stalin chaired. Evola grants that both versions hold some truth, since nobody that day knew what was happening—Lenin himself, hiding in a suburb, learned only at the last moment that he was already master of Russia, just as Kerensky did not yet know he had ceased to be.
The quarrel over credit does not interest him. Behind Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, as behind Milyukov, Guchkov, Kerensky, and Chernov before them, stood Jacob Schiff and the international Jewish consortium. The work had been underway long before the visible author of the revolution appeared, and other servants will replace Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin in turn; the leaders pass, the plan endures. Alone in a small room at the Smolny Institute, Lenin drafted a decree expropriating the land of the nobles, the Church, and the state, telling the visiting Stalin: “If we are still in time to issue it, no one will ever manage to drive us out of here.” The time sufficed.
The Red Tsar
On the evening of 8 November 1917 the insurrection triumphed. At 8:40 the hall erupted as the Soviet committee entered Smolny, Lenin at its head, master of the hour. He rested against the platform ledge, scanned the crowd with flashing eyes, and when the ovation died said only: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” The decree was issued amid another roar. The sun rose over a city in fervour and confusion, over a nation carried off by a tremendous storm—the age of the final apocalypse beginning.
Inflation, Cultural Subversion, and the Methods of Occult War
Inflation and Cultural Subversion
With Bolshevism installed and the treaties signed, events outran any overview. The anti-traditional bloc—Masonic and Jewish, democratic, capitalist, socialist-Communist—seemed to hold undisputed hegemony: three great monarchies destroyed, revolutions in victor and vanquished lands alike meant to finish the War’s work. Inflation, Evola insists, was neither impersonal nor accidental; the notion that it simply happened is itself a tale spread by the subversive front. By plundering liquid wealth it broke the independent financial power of nations and drove the masses into misery, passive material for agitators—high finance’s indirect manoeuvre converging with the direct revolutionary one. On the cultural front, “cultural Bolshevism” in art, theatre, criticism, cinema, and intellectual life, spread essentially by Jews, heaped disrepute on authority, tradition, race, family, heroism, religion, and idealism while exalting internationalism, so that all nations might be stripped of independence.
The Methods of Occult War
Evola’s closing essay, first published in 1938, urges that his view be taken not as speculation but as an aid to action. Quoting the Protocols on the “brute mind of the GOYIM,” he warns that men of action see cause and effect only in gross material fields, like a fully equipped mountaineer leaping into a lake. Occult war works among imponderables, manipulating existing forces rather than opposing them; Wundt’s “heterogeneity of ends” means forces pursuing one aim foster another, so the gap between willed and actual outcomes reveals history’s real forces. He catalogues the tactics: positivism as a suggestion blinding a civilization to anything beyond economic and social factors; surrogates such as “becoming” and “life” as bait; counterfeits that let reactions borrow traditional symbols only to distort them—”traditionalism” confused with custom, materialist notions of race, rhetoric in place of Rome’s soul; inversion, which diverted supernatural aspirations into Theosophy and Spiritualism, discrediting genuine doctrine and channelling forces toward the sub-natural; the ricochet attack, turning one tradition against another, as with the nationality principle mobilising coloured nations against Europe; the scapegoat, which he warns against among anti-Semites seeing the Jew everywhere; dilutions that push forces back to earlier, less visible stages of the crisis; and the replacement of principles by people, whereby attacks on degenerate aristocrats become attacks on aristocracy itself, and anti-capitalism became the pretext for proletarian usurpation. No area is untouched, he closes, and the least likely areas demand the greatest caution; no leader of counter-subversion is prepared without discerning this underground network of causes in the age of the final struggle.
The Book’s Dualism, Its Politics, and Its Economy
The book’s intellectual frame is a stark dualism. History, in the authors’ account, is the theater of two “force-ideas”—Christianity and its antithesis, Judaism—and everything else converges toward one of these two currents. This is why they insist that the revolutionary movement must be understood as a religious war rather than a political contest: its agents, they argue, pursue evil out of a negative love, a hatred of all that stems from God, and this hatred is permanent and impersonal where ordinary human hatreds are not. The claim borrows openly from Catholic theology, which alone, the text says, can explain selflessness directed toward destruction. It also borrows from René Guénon’s notion of a “counter-initiation,” a demonic tradition of subversion mirroring genuine spirituality. Evola’s introduction leans hard on this framework, presenting the book as historical evidence for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and urging readers to combine it with his own Revolt against the Modern World.
The political analysis rests on a theory of descending hierarchy. Revolution, the authors argue, always moves downward: democracy against aristocracy, the “Most Low” against the “Most High,” each level of society turned against the one above it until nothing remains but “scum led by the Jew.” The people, on this account, are the object and never the subject of the process—a claim the text drives home with the image of artillery that would exterminate a herd without consulting it. From this follows the book’s admiration for Metternich, the one statesman said to have grasped that a total conspiracy requires a total reaction, and its contempt for Nicholas I, who could have crushed the 1848 revolutions and did not. The Crimean War, in this reading, was the first “war for democracy,” in which two monarchies fought as mercenary champions of revolution. Bismarck fares little better: a great Prussian but a small European, who turned a feudal state capitalist and crowned Mammon while believing he was serving the King of Prussia.
The economic argument is inseparable from the political one. Capitalism, the authors maintain, is “nothing but a front for Jewry,” and its spread—through debt, credit, and the circulation of capital—dissolves the patriarchal, land-based order that once resisted subversion. Austria serves as the counter-model: a federation of self-sufficient economic monarchies under a debt-free sovereign, hated precisely because it embodied the Catholic thesis of unity in diversity. Against this, the book sets Stolypin’s agrarian reforms as the one constructive alternative the old order produced—a program of small property, eastern colonization, and industry subordinated to agriculture that, had it been completed, might have forestalled both the war and the revolution. The portrait of Stolypin, the providential man cut down by an assassin’s bullet, is the book’s nearest approach to a hero.
Modern war, in the authors’ telling, is the revolution’s chosen instrument. The First World War is presented as a “front” for advancing subversion: the Marne and Tannenberg foretold four years of butchery, and the war’s real damage was the imposition of socialist practice—rationing, requisition, the militarization of factories, the treatment of persons as state property—under the cover of national defense. The Paris Conference of 1919 then legalized the conquests of democracy, slicing Europe “like a pie” to produce a chaos of unsatisfied nations whose only common interest is war. The League of Nations appears as the new Babel, a parliament of parliaments presided over by the spirit the authors identify with “a liar from the beginning.”
What gives the book its place in the literature of conspiracy is not the quality of its evidence but the consistency of its vision. It belongs to the interwar genre of Catholic and traditionalist polemic that read modern history as the execution of a hidden plan, and its influence runs through later conspiracy writing rather than through academic historiography. Evola’s editorial hand—his footnotes flagging where he altered the French original—makes the book a document of Italian traditionalism as much as of French counter-revolutionary thought. Readers approaching it today will find a closed system: every event confirms the thesis, every opponent is either duped or complicit, and the absence of evidence becomes itself a sign of the conspiracy’s depth. That is the book’s method and its limitation, and it is why The Occult War is read now chiefly as a specimen of the mentality it describes.
