tack upon liberty, all Europe indignant at mon-
strous treachery, and even Asia, in astonishment,
speaking of lending her redoubtable legions to
the cause.
Against what is this revolt of all, this rebellion
of human conscience, this insurrection of ideas?
Against a Teutonism delirious in megalomania,
ambitious to realize what Alexander, Caesar,
Napoleon could not accomplish: to impose upon
a world that desires to be free the supremacy of
steel. It is not a thing for our age; men have
too much suffered from it. The modern idea is
the right of all, and victory for us could not mean
oppression, even for those who fought against us,
FEANCE FACING GERMANY 123
since Germany has valiantly conquered, like so
many other states, her rightful place in the world,
and since, if we are fighting the arrogance of
tyranny, it is not in order to embrace it in our
turn.
And now to arms, all of us ! I have seen weep-
ing among those who cannot go first. Everyone 's
turn will come. There will not be a child of
our land who will not have a part in the enormous
struggle. To die is nothing. We must win. And
for that we need all men's power. The weakest
will have his share of glory. There come times,
in the lives of peoples, when there passes over
them a tempest of heroic action.
August 5, 1914.
The Two Flags
A whole people stands erect. From the depths
of its traditional life, of its sensations, of its
thoughts, all the manifestations of its being, there
springs up a common power to will and to do
which nothing can overcome. They have had
faults which were not slight. They would not
have conquered, by their enthusiastic idealism, by
their self-sacrifice in the service of grand ideas
for the betterment of men, one of the highest
positions of the world, unless they had risen, by
higher and higher bounds, above their periods of
weakness in which the representatives of human
baseness had saluted the precursory signs of their
decadence.
A whole people stands erect, and it is the
French people, against whom all the invasions of
124 FEANCE FACING GERMANY
hostile peoples have "been hurled only to be ab-
sorbed for the creation of a race, vigorous and
productive, which is the execration of men who
do not live nobly enough to understand it, and
the hope of those who dream of increasing human
grandeur. By its faults, and sometimes also by
movements not always wisely controlled but still
praiseworthy, this people has made itself many
enemies in the world. Having called men to de-
liverance before being itself capable of freedom,
it abandoned itself under an iron will to the giddy
dream of domination — survival of those notions
of the past which were beginning to succumb
under its blows — and this error, redeemed by so
much native heroism and conquering generosity,
it has dearly paid for, without ever forfeiting its
own esteem, without ever permitting a blot to
remain upon its name. What is still more, it has
paid for the unpardonable folly of the irrespon-
sible government of a daj with a part of its living
flesh cut off by the saber of the conqueror.
It has borne its misfortune nobly. During
forty years it has kept silence while from the
crests of the Vosges there came the groans of
its mutilated land, during forty years it has re-
pressed the but too lively beatings of its heart,
during forty years it has created for itself, by
hard toil, a new right to life, and by painful
patience a new right to honor. It has submitted
to every insult, to every provocation, with its
head high, without quailing. Like old swords of
an unalterable temper in which the hammer of the
forge reawakens a disdained virtue, it has laid its
soul upon the anvil for the tests which destiny
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 125
announced, and behold, at the day appointed, the
new man arises in the pure simplicity of grand
resolution.
Out of the obscure strife of parties the French-
man of this hour has leaped forward incorrupt,
greater and stronger, silent, smiling, with an eye
charged with invincible energy which proclaims
that the history of France shall not come to an
end. Women have seen him depart and have not
wept. Little children have grown grave. Youth
anticipates its call, and those whose age betrays
them will find a way to reach the post of danger.
It is the mysterious hour when something is pass-
ing within us which casts away all dross to make
room for the great molding of metal which
neither steel nor diamond can cut. And on the
day when, after superhuman trials, all these souls,
weary of heroism, shall meet again under the
great blue vault of a reborn country, many hearts
that were inimical to us must become friendly
to the France in which the elements of dissension,
which are in the nature of life, will be gathered
together, firmly anchored in a fundamental una-
nimity so strong that nothing can shake it. A more
glorious country shall come out of the crucible.
The same news from every point in the country.
Everywhere the mobilization is taking place in
admirable order, on which we congratulate the
minister of war and especially General Joff re, who
prepared it. There comes to us from this strong
organization, so perfect in its method, a comfort
for to-day, a hope for to-morrow. Blessed are the
dissensions of the past if they have done nothing
but arouse in us a more lively emulation for the
126 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
great cause which must render us superior to our-
selves.
But if the administration of the system is good,
what of the individuals? What heart, at sight
of our youths so simple in their heroism, does not
leap up before these noble makers of history?
All the representatives of France, momentarily
united yesterday, had but one voice. Happy in
their pride, to give them their due honor, and
with smiles like children: these are the sons that
we dedicate to our country. Yesterday, meeting
a troop of them, I could not restrain myself from
silently removing my hat. And I had the honor
of a fine military salute, without a word, without
a gesture of French gaiety, a salute that spoke—
* 'forward!"
The soldiers of the year II, those of whom
. . . Fame chantait dans leurs clairons d'arain,"
were not finer, were not grander. A sublime folly
possessed them. These of to-day, mute and
gentle, are imposing. How has it been communi-
cated from one end of France to the other, this
spontaneous inspiration which has suddenly
steeled all these young souls in the simplicity of
duty? How have they all come to know at once
that there was nothing more to say, since the hour
was one for action? Men of Brittany, of Gironde,
of Gascony, of Provence, of Auvergne, of Nor-
mandy, of Savoy, of Flanders with one motion
came together, all welded into one, with a high
gesture which would express a thought and a
will beyond the reach of human power. There
is nothing more beautiful in our history, nor in
that of any people. Simplicity in heroism has
a
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 127
usually been the rare privilege of the few. To-
day it is the miraculous gift of a whole people,
ready to offer their life that France may live.
Hail, noble children! Pass on your way in a
train of glory! Die, and you will have lived what
is highest in life; live and you will uplift your
land, whom it is your dream to make more
beautiful than the France of your ancestors!
A nation is a soul, a soul of varied flowering,
springing from one aged trunk twisted by the
ages, embossed by the scars of steel, with bare
roots that plunge, in search of life into the night of
things. Men have tried to annihilate peoples by
systematic massacre, to sell them like herds of
beasts, men have dismembered them, torn them
in pieces, rent them asunder, dispersed them,
buried them. As long as men have not extirpated
every source of life there will be a sprig shooting
from the ground, and then a crop of others to
testify that above the savage will of individuals
there are forces in mankind which do not accept
death.
In truth we are of those who will not and can-
not disappear, because we carry in the harmony
or the discord of the world a note of thought and
of action which has been and still is of consider-
able value to mankind. We should all have to
be annihilated before some sprout of the French
soul, revivified by the blood of the dead, should
fail to rise again from the ancient soil. That is
what is in the depths of consciences from which
men draw their firmness, valor, and hope in the
hour when they go to stand immovable under
the hostile hail of shot.
128 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
They have a cause to defend, a cause which
ennobles them and for which no sacrifice is too
great. What could our prisoners of war say if
we asked them why they went into combat?
What thought inspires them?
Who is hurling them against us? After the
conclusion of peace, in 1871, I went to Strassburg
with Scheurer-Kestner. When I arrived at the
house of my friend, Louis Durr, the good citizen
of Strassburg who could not hear the name of
German without shivering, I found him rudely
haranguing one of the soldiers of Wilhelm to
whom, against his will, he was giving lodgment.
"Yes, it is you," he was saying, "who are the
authors of this wretched work. You have come
here among us where you are not wanted. You
want to live among us. You will not be able to
do it, for we cannot endure it. What have you
come to do in Alsace? Say why you are here!"
All of them listened, stupidly, and one of them
pitifully murmured: "It is not my fault. I did
nothing but obey."
Durr, who was afraid of nothing, was running
the risk of being shot, but he had forced upon the
enemy the acknowledgment that he was nothing
but a machine of murder, without conscience. If
he were still in the world and could repeat the
question, how much more decisive would be the
manifestation on both sides. At that time it was
but a question of dismembering France. Now the
design is to assassinate her!
What do you say of it, soldiers of Germany,
who came upon our territory, without having any
complaint against us, to accomplish this high act
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 129
of civilization? Tell us, I beg of you, what wrong
we can have done to yon, beyond living reproach
which the people of Alsace and Lorraine cast npon
yon, throngh the single fact that they are on the
earth by the same title that yon enjoy. Yon,
the philosophers, who classify all yonr notions
of the world in hard and fast categories ; yon, the
scholars, who desire laborious methods to pene-
trate into the night of the unknown; you, the men
of affairs, who can make and unmake the ma-
chinery of things ; you, artists of ideals with wings
of lead; you, the social democrats who want
justice among men: come into full session, all of
you, and tell us, if you can find it, the name of
your cause against us. You do not fight for your
fatherland. We have endured all your outrages,
all your aggressiveness for forty-four years with-
out attacking you. You are not even defending
your ally Austria, since up to this hour she is
still not at war with us, and since she was ac-
cepting the mediation of England on the very day
when you declared war on Russia. Try to search
out an honorable pretext, a decent lie which may
give an illusion to the most obtuse minds, and you
are in such a parlous state that you cannot find
one. That is the judgment of a people, in very
truth. You are fighting to obey, and not to be
free.
Also behold how from every side assistance is
coming to us in arms and sympathies! England
is rising against you, Italy will not follow you.
You menace Holland and Switzerland, you out-
rage Belgium, because the map of the world
would be more beautiful in your eyes if you could
130 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
swell yourselves with the domains of others, like
the gamester who, even when he has won a good
prize, tries to appropriate the stakes of those near
him. That has a name in the French language,
and even in yonrs, but you would not dare to
inscribe it on your banners. History will have
less scruple, and when your fighters, who are
doubtful in their darkened conscience, of the jus-
tice of their cause, shall feel their courage weak-
ening at the idea of dying for the achievement
of designs which you dare not formulate, the
banners will tremble in their hands, while ours
will rule the battle, calling all hearts to sublime
sacrifice for the soul and body of their nation.
August 6, 1914.
Fkom the Othee Side
... It is a great day which is dawning, one of
the greatest which can inspire mankind, for we
are to see what the force of human conscience
can avail against those who glory in outraging it.
It is the most evident sign of progress in human
society that the right of men and of peoples is
beginning to draw the fire, against which, con-
trary to what we have seen in the past, it must
defend itself. Yes, force of arms is going to clash
with force of arms, but on one side there will be
the highest moral power, and on the other only
the lowest shamelessness of brutality.
The victory will be decided on the field of
battle, not only by the number of artillery pieces
or the sum of men engaged, but by the weight,
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 131
above all, of the sentiments which have put arms
into the hands of the combatants. One man is not
equal to another, selected at random. There is
in each one an individual soul, of strength or
weakness, with the expansion of energy that
derives therefrom. The strength is in the con-
sciousness of a superior nobility; the weak-
ness, in the unworthiness of the sentiments
which have led the man into battle. That is why
we are strong, we Belgians, we French, we Rus-
sians, we Britons. That is why, Germans, we
know that Destiny has already pronounced the
supreme verdict against you.
. . . Even if you are to drive us back, on cer-
tain days, the higher laws, which for our honor,
govern human history, decree that we shall repel
you, by an accumulation of irresistible efforts,
beyond your frontiers and bring you to bay. You
despised the Belgians, and they have held you in
check, in your first onrush, while your cruel losses
tell you clearly enough against what arms and
hearts you have hurled yourselves. The Mexico
of Maximilian of Austria, the Spain of Napoleon
have shown what men can do when they fear
nothing but that they may not do enough for the
defense of their country. The Belgians are add-
ing a new page to this noble history and all of
them know well that they will not be abandoned.
So far as concerns us, I am going to tell you
where you have erred, men of Germany. You
have childishly thought to honor yourselves by
humbling us in the sight of Europe. You have
basely slandered us, outraged us, vilified us,
132 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
taunted us, and because we remained calm under
provocation, you have foolishly concluded that our
hearts are weak. And because in our great un-
dertaking of the construction of a democracy in
justice and freedom we have too often calum-
niated one another, you have thought, in your
native stupidity, that our dissensions would
cause weakness in our resistance. And you have
been the first dupes of your own lies, of your
infamous calumnies against the French nation.
Since you once succeeded in surprising us, you
said that we had degenerated from our ancestors,
who so many times had hurled you back on the
field of battle, and having said it you believed it,
and perhaps to-day you are still waiting for the
sword to fail in our hands. I should be mortally
ashamed to pronounce, at this hour, a word of
boasting. You will soon be able to judge us in
the test.
Meantime I behold you held in check by the
Belgian army, before reaching us in the north;
I see Austria ridiculously arrested before the open
city of Belgrade, while 500,000 Serbs, who have
forced the admiration of their Balkan allies, will
let the world hear of them before long; to say
nothing of England, whose cannon will not be
delayed. Send us some of your parliamentarians
and let us uncover their eyes at the door of our
recruiting offices. They will see our most fero-
cious socialists there demanding their place in
the battle, they will see long lines of men of every
age and every country, who are come to take
service in order to rid the world of the oppressive
power that has held Europe, for more than half
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 133
a century, under the menace of its armaments.
They will see monks there; yes, monks that we
chased out of the country, as they say, with some
exaggeration. And this act of simple nobility,
and the oppressing memory of the poor village
priest whose cassock you rifled with your bullets,
and the two children whom you shot at Morfon-
taine, and the non-commissioned French officer,
wounded, whom you dispatched in your coward-
ice, all that is welding more firmly together the
hearts that you thought divided. We are con-
strained to adjourn all engagements until the
mobilization is completed, and our men are in
despair because they cannot yet depart. All of
independent Europe is on our side. Who is with
you? Whose sympathy remains to you except
that of Austria, expelled from the German con-
federacy and subjected after Sadowa? The birth-
rate of the French has decreased? We shall have
too many soldiers. I was mistaken, really, in
inviting you to come and see them leaving; you
will meet them on your arrival.
August 7, 1914.
A State of Mind
It is revolting to think that these barbarous
acts of the Germans, which leave an eternal
stain on their name, are accomplished according
to a premeditated plan. Open the book of von der
Goltz on the Nation in Arms and you will see, on
one of the first pages, that it is necessary by the
use of every means to exercise terror* upon a
populace in order to reduce them more quickly
134 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
and with a view to shortening the war in the
interest of humanity. I have not the vohime at
my hand, but I make affirmation that this stands
written by the man whom the Germans consider
one of their greatest war-lords, and I defy any
contradiction. It is just the kind of thing that
marks the German mind, the reduction of all
questions to problems in mechanics in which man
appears only as an insensible element, to whom
no more attention need be given than to the ore
in the mold. The barbarians of the age of bar-
barism were children of nature, in whom the in-
stinct of murder and destruction knew no check.
Our civilized barbarians are creatures of meta-
physical refinement who intend, in virtue of a
logic from which all human consideration is ex-
cluded, to lead us by the worst atrocities of
savagery, made into a doctrinal system, to the
heights of their civilization.
As long as this was a mere aberration in theory,
an objective study of man would hardly allow
us to be astonished at it. For there is no line
of reasoning which, projected into infinity, with-
out taking account of contingencies which are
part of the unknown, does not lead to derange-
ment of the intellect. It is thus that so many
religions have resulted in bloody sacrifices, glori-
fications of our native cruelty, and that the Chris-
tian doctrine of love came to accommodate itself
to an eternal hell.
. . . Well, let the experiment in bloody philan-
thropy follow its course. As for us, we shall not
dispatch the wounded. On the contrary, our
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 135
women will proudly make all efforts to save them,
and when we are on enemy territory we shall aid
the weak instead of shooting them. Only on the
field of battle do we accept the war of extermina-
tion which is imposed on us. Since the people
who assume the right to rule the world by force
of arms know no other right than that of supe-
riority in murder, we shall pursue the battle in
the conditions which they have themselves laid
down, reserving for ourselves only the advantage
over them of a higher morality which commands
fair play. Yes, it is the benefit of a higher
morality which I entreat for the men of the
"modern Babylon," as the austere degenerates
of Sodom and Gomorrah used to call it in 1870.
I have seen their Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, roll-
ing all the night in a filthy torrent of nameless
animality sodden with beer, tobacco, and bestial
lewdness, and I rejoiced — though knowing only
too well our own faults — in affirming that riches
too easily acquired had never degraded us to that.
I rejoiced because I saw in that degeneracy of
our conquerors the beginning of the revenge.
But this was not enough. We had a right to
receive the comfort of their deeper degradation.
And the campaign had not yet opened before
virtuous Germany was hastening to put herself
beyond the pale of civilization. In the full view
of a watching world she lied impudently, through
the mouths of her Emperor, her ambassadors, and
her agents of every rank, when she proclaimed
that she desired to keep the peace and was in-
volved in the conflict only to the degree in which
her interests were attached to the cause of
136 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
Austria by the alliance. She lied, because she
began the hostilities, at the very hour when
Austria was accepting Sir Edward Grey's pro-
posals of mediation. She lied, because Austria
only yesterday declared war on Eussia, and has
not even yet declared it against France at the
moment when the German army is shattering
Liege with its bombs, in cynical violation of
treaties. She lied when she argued that she was
coming to defend Belgium against us. She lied,
and she had ordered her soldiers to lie, when,
entering Luxembourg, they cried to the inhab-
itants: "We have come to defend you. Where
are the French?"
She lies because she sees in lying a means of
power, and because no qualm of conscience serves
notice on her of the infamy of dishonesty. She
lies, as she assassinates, because it seems advan-
tageous to her. And she is not capable of the
idea that a nausea of man and nations is pre-
paring against her a general insurrection of all
outraged consciences. She has a presentiment of
it, perhaps, because it is in the scientific data of
human experience, but she repeats to herself, in
travesty, the phrase of Mazarin: "They will cry,
but I will kill." Even here she deceives herself.
She cannot kill enough, for she would have to
destroy, even in her children, the last vestige of
the conscience in which the anguish of remorse,
even in victory, would finally arise.
August 8, 1914.
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 137
Mulhausen, Liege, and the Right
The charm is broken. All our people have
thrilled. The French are at Miilhausen. I had
been awaiting the news, like everybody else, for
forty-eight hours. And yet when it came, my
stupid eyes remained fixed on the letters which
I spelled out one by one to make sure that I was
not deceiving myself. Yet, it was true, Miil-
hausen, that sterling French city had, after
Altkirch, seen the French soldiers entering. Only,
at Altkirch it was the battle — an intrenched
German brigade put to rout, at the point of the
bayonet, by a French brigade — while at Miil-
hausen it was the celebration. I was there less
than two years ago. Everywhere were out-
stretched hands and beating hearts. I looked in
silence on those ancient stones of France and said
to them, without daring to fix my hope, "When
will you see them again, those little soldiers who,
all the way from Brittany to Provence, only await
the signal to come back to you 1 ' ' Well, they have
come, caps on their ears, laughing, weeping, do-
ing all manner of unreasonable things, but wild
with joy at the idea that they are there, with only
the one sorrow that they did not come sooner.
And I see them again, all those good people of
Miilhausen, trembling with an emotion which
strains at their throats and stretching infatuated
hands toward the tricolor which is passing, though
they cannot find the strength to utter a sound.
I know that this is not a great military action,
I know that this pretty French escapade is no
important part of our plan of strategy, and that
138 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
we must not expect any military consequences
from it. But all the same it was a joy that was
due us before the curtain should rise on the great
tragedy. And if our young army had contracted
this debt to us, it has paid it in good fashion,
at the right moment.
. . . Whatever may be the issue of that little
promenade, which was only an adventure of war, it
will none the less uplift hearts all over France, and