War Letters from the Living Dead Man Read Online Free PDF

gradually to see the superior right of that gentleness which does not use its might to coerce him when further coercion is unnecessary.
    I have stood in German households since the war began, I have entered into and for the time being have become German men and German women, and I understand them and love them. I even admire them, for their devotion to their own is immense. Once let that strength go out in real brotherhood to all mankind, and these people would be truly great. Is it possible? All things are possible to the human soul, and these people are very human. The defect is in their vaunted education. They teach themselves that they are the chosen people. When they learn that they are not the chosen people in war, the very force of the shock may upset the pillar of egotism that stands upright in the center of the German soul. The world should not let that pillar fall with a crash, but softly ease the blow—not too softly, lest mercy be mistaken for war weariness. The World-Mother has a hard and erring child. It has to be punished, but not refused a seat at the family table.
    I have said these things to you because, if you do not shrink, I have things to tell you in my next letter which will need fortitude for you to receive, fortitude and charity, whose other name is love.
    March 24

Letter 8
    Spectres of the Congo
    I have been in Poland and I have been in Serbia; but now I want to write of Belgium and of karma, race karma, karma old and new. With and behind the invading Germans, urging them on to murder, pillage and destruction, rape and burning, were not only the devils from the outer vast, whose time for activity had come; but with and behind the German army was a horde of undeveloped and earthbound spirits who had suffered in the Congo. Karma, always karma! The world knows something about what has been done in Belgium, something of what Germans have done there.
    I have seen men, women, and little children murdered in cold blood. I have witnessed the soul of a murdered man tearing at a soldier who was violating the murdered man’s wife. I have seen the soul of a mother wringing her hands as she would have wrung them on earth when her little daughter was being maltreated by brutes who were blind with madness. An old man out here followed a soldier for days until he saw revenge accomplished by means of a Belgian bayonet; then as the German soul came out he grappled with it again, and the two were torn by each other, the soldier not knowing he had left the body and feeling that he was at grips with an enemy still on earth. There was much of what is called Voodoo in the Congo. Its practitioners do not go to sleep for a long time. They go on and on in the invisible world, making their evil preparations and weaving their spells. They gather round spilled blood, they absorb vitality from it, and that vitality they use to bring evil and death upon anything toward which they direct their will. Did you fancy that will was weakened when man lays aside the brain? It is weakened in the sense that there is less freedom of choice; but there is tremendous will in following a choice already set up when the physical base of the brain was attached to the will.
    But now all the evil karma of Belgium is lived out, and she stands like a new soul in the face of time. Another race has taken up the load that she laid down. Will that too be expended soon, or late? Germany has woven round herself a shirt of evil causes that will cling to her and chafe her flesh for generations. “It must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.” The karma of nations is known to the Masters and Adepts. The karma of England! Have you ever thought about the karma of England? Granting that she has done much wrong, as all old nations have, yet she has allowed herself to be used by the world-will. She, more than all the other old races, has been an instrument in the unifying of the races. Did you fancy that the British Empire