retire in so many encounters that the magic fear
of his tusks already seems no more than the
shadow of a cloud.
This is what our soldiers have accomplished,
with the brave Belgians, even before the first
pitched battle, — those French soldiers who are
waiting at the frontier, in the silence of united
strength, for a formidable explosion of fury. The
best troops of the German Empire are coming
against us with a preliminary loss of military
prestige. If they do not succeed, as I believe they
will not, in breaking through our boundaries, the
blow struck at the renown of the Prussian soldier
and the semi-infallibility of German plans, as well
as the moral disaster which will be the conse-
quence, will come very near having, for our im-
pulsive souls, as for the hopes of peoples weary
of servitude, the significance of a definitive
victory.
So already the stake is not the same. A defeat
of our soldiers — which our generals are very far
from foreseeing — would only be one of those pre-
liminary checks promptly reparable, while for
Germany to be repulsed from our frontiers would
be, for her, a wound which many would believe
incurable and which would quickly spread discour-
agement among her people as well as in her army.
Undoubtedly the war would be far from finished,
for everything indicates that it will last until
great resources are exhausted, but it is one thing
to fight, like us, with full confidence in final suc-
cess, and another to fight in the daily anguish of
seeing one's hopes betrayed.
We have no grounds to-day for predicting the
FEANCE FACING GERMANY 155
consequences, but if this misfortune, which I wish
them with all my heart, is to be the lot of our
enemies, perhaps they will then understand too
late the strength of that magnificent rebuilding of
our forces which we knew how to accomplish in
a day when armies, government, administration,
and all organized means of action were lacking to
us. Let them try in their turn to renew, at their
expense, a "war in the provinces." Where will
be their men? Where their Gambetta, their Frey-
cinet? If they had been able to understand it,
they might have felt then that there was a re-
doubtable force which, if pushed to the extreme,
would confront them dangerously some day, and
our defeats, in that case, might have appeared to
them the presage of their own.
But they would not understand, and, just as
they dared yesterday to shoot a woman ivlio was
nursing her baby, the brutes made it their pleas-
ure to trample upon France, making gay as they
counted each new drop of blood. Then they
thought they could do what they pleased, and I
believe they are now in the way to find out their
mistake. "To the last horse," said Wilhelm II,
esthete of war. "To the last man," England and
Russia answered in a breath. And as for us, if
we said nothing, it is because we were already
preparing to speak in action.
August 20 y 1914
Ready
. . . The great blow! All the military forces
that can be concentrated, all the engines of de-
156 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
struction and fury that can be collected are to be
hurled in a supreme effort against the French
lines, which the enemy has sworn to break at any
price. The Germans know that they are in such
a situation as to give the world the impression of
a game almost irretrievably compromised if this
attack does not succeed. To overbalance all these
checks, one after another, all these prisoners —
we have already more than 6,000— all these guns
captured by the Bussians as well as by the French,
it is necessary that a battle in which carnage shall
rage in unmeasured proportions throw the peoples
of the world into a stupor that will make them for-
get everything. We have agreed to meet the on-
rush, we who are not obliged, for the opening of
the campaign, to stake all our chances on one blow.
We cannot hope to offer equal resistance all
along such a vast front. The frightful combat,
which perhaps will not exhaust itself in three or
four days, will have its successes and reverses.
But in what different conditions for the two
parties! Are we driven back at certain points!
Our soldiers have all the country in arms behind
them. The army of the second line is eager, in
its turn, to engage in battle. Youths, grown to
man's estate, only await the hour to face the
enemy. Everybody knows that our reserve sol-
diers equal those of the active army, while the
German reservist, portly from his beer and easily
fatigued by marches, is not in condition to "sustain
a bold offensive. For us it is a struggle of endur-
ance. There is not a man of France in reasonable
health who will not demand a place in the firing
line. Whatever happens we will not yield. The
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 157
British have said so with us. We have no need
to speak. We shall act.
We have not, like the German army, good sol-
diers and bad ones. All our men are willing to
give up everything to make a final reckoning with
the brutes whom the French government, in a pro-
test that has already become history, has just
fastened in the pillory as dishonoring mankind.
The Germans will find before them all our men
from the greatest to the smallest, while at the
other border of their country the Eussian armies
will push on their heavy columns toward Berlin.
What they have seen of the French recently was
enough to give them warning. They will see no
better ones, but they will see none worse. It has
been their will that the hour should come when,
under the insolence of their threats and the bru-
tality of their blows, France should be inspired to
pour out her blood to the last man for the right
of surviving in whatever may remain of her little
children. And all civilized Europe is with us.
You have ill calculated your strength. You can-
not efface France, England, and Eussia from the
map of the world.
I have adopted the supposition that is least
favorable to us. What fate awaits the Germans
on the ground to which they will be driven back?
A generous and proud people whom they have
driven to the extremities of fury, a country which,
in several regions, offers numerous obstacles, — is
it on these that they can rely in reorganizing them-
selves, at a time when we have every reason to
believe that they will have certain troops cutting
in upon their flanks?
158 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
Let the terrible days come, then, when France
must sacrifice to the dark Moloch of destiny the
purest of her blood. She is resolved to live. She
is resolved to live, not for the pleasure of mas-
sacre, like her enemies, but that she may bring
them to a peace founded on that justice which is
the sole source of human grandeur. We stand
rifle to rifle, cannon to cannon, and this time at
least — all Frenchmen stand forth to guarantee it
— it is courage which will gain the victory.
August 22, 1914.
The Preliminary Silence
What more terrible than the silence that pre-
cedes the great battle ! How much more terrible
still when it presages the uproar of war in which
the two halves of what was European civilization
are coming to clash in bloodshed such as the dark-
est days of savagery could not even dream of!
Just as we have never been able historically to
determine the occasion of the Peloponnesian War,
but are only too certain that even without the ad-
venture of the courtesans of Megara, the Doric and
the Attic states would have been tempted to come
to conclusions with each other, so no one will ever
believe that the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia is
the real cause of the armed march of all the Ger-
man people against the eastern and northern
frontiers of France.
The subjection to Prussia of Saxony, of Ba-
varia, and of the Germans in Austria, after Sa-
dowa, built up in the heart of Europe a confeder-
FEANCB FACING GERMANY 159
ation of Teutonic powers which, for forty years,
has been holding Europe under the threat of a ter-
rible explosion. I have said this often, indeed,
in the tribune and in the press, without ever being
able to obtain for my somber predictions the
credit which might have been of benefit to France.
I did not base my statements on personal infor-
mation. No one had entrusted me with confi-
dences. I was reasoning merely from the obvious
phenomena of the German mind, for to foresee the
future clearly it was necessary only to note the
growth of the appetite for omnipotence which the
Kaiser and his subjects proclaimed in every
quarter.
As early as 1875 the logical Bismarck, as-
tounded to see that we were not dead, put himself
to the task of completing our ruin. Eussia and
England interposed their veto, and the old Em-
peror, content to slumber in the glory of his un-
expected successes, did not dare to risk a new
battle. But the scheme was patent, and German
policy has never departed from it. I have no need
to tell over the provocations and aggressive acts,
known to all, which sometimes, so great was our
shortsightedness, took us unawares. We were
saved, then, in spite of ourselves, and in order
that the premeditation of the inexpressible design
might be manifest to all eyes, it was necessary that
by means of a quarrel sought by Austria against
Serbia, in the course of which Serbia conceded
everything except her right to life, Wilhelm II
should light the universal conflagration that he
needed to exhibit himself to all men as the master
of the world.
160 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
The aiidacity of the proceeding surpasses all
that has been seen hitherto. The error of tyrants
is not to reckon with the facts of human conscience
— to believe, in the weakness of their intelligence,
that they can subject the soul with the body. The
subjects of Wilhelm II have slavishly submitted
to him. He can make them fight, on whatever
day suits him, against whatever people he desires,
without owing them an explanation, without giv-
ing them a reason. He has grossly manufactured
his pretexts for war. Even the Socialists have fol-
lowed him. It is by their submission that he
judges the rest of humanity. And just as he can-
not intend to heighten the honor of his own people,
since to govern them as he does he needs to de-
grade them under iron rule, the wretch would be
unable to conceive a higher ambition than to sub-
ject, on his way round the world, all the men whom
he may encounter on his path. The Germans fol-
low him, proud to serve a master capable of im-
posing servitude on every continent, content to
return, in their attempt to beat down the free
peoples, to the primitive cruelties of savagery.
To turn all the discoveries of civilization
against civilization itself, to become the instru-
ment of the highest development of brute force in
the world — that is what Germany hopes and dares
to attempt. Sprung from the Eevolution, the con-
quering Napoleon represented in spite of himself
certain doctrines of liberation. The Kaiser prob-
ably expects to honor us by crushing us under a
tyranny that has no other title than the might of
his sword. For having resisted a similar ava-
lanche of reaction, the Greeks immortalized them-
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 161
selves at Marathon and Salamis, but here we can-
not count upon the panic of terror that miracu-
lously dispersed the enemy. The most formidable
mass of armed men that has ever been assembled
on earth is marching against our frontier to put
an end to us; to put an end to France and Bel-
gium, to England, to Russia, to the Slavic peoples,
to Poland, to the peoples of the Balkans, who, at
the price of their blood, believed themselves liber-
ated. Such an enterprise has never been seen.
To take Paris, London, and Moscow requires
powers that even Berlin does not possess. They
had tried to conciliate England in order to turn
her against France by appeasing her with a share
of the spoils. They failed. Then they promised
themselves to obtain at least the neutrality of Eng-
land while they proceeded to swallow up the
France thus isolated. They failed. They thought
they could count on the supposed weakness of
Russia, because she was slow to move. They were
much deceived. They were all prepared to hurl
Italy against us. Italy, from the first day, has let
them know that they had no right to count on her
for the accomplishment of such a design.
Well, let destiny be fulfilled. After all, with the
door of Belgium broken in, it is France which
must meet the great onrush of the German
masses everywhere at once. Let them strike
her down, let them destroy her, let them
scatter fire and steel everywhere, let them kill
the old men and women and children in her
villages, let them put the torch to her cities,
let the whole life of this people be crushed under
the sledge-hammer of the hordes that have revived
162 FBANCB FACING GERMANY
the tradition of Attila. England guards the seas,
but cannot engage the German squadrons shel-
tered by the lines of undersea mines. A hundred
thousand Englishmen are by the side of the
French in Belgium. The German army, before
gaining the French frontier, is trying to envelop
them. In the meantime Russia, at the other ex-
tremity of the Empire, is in action against three
army corps, and as many reserve divisions, with
which Germany opposes her, with all the forces of
Austria to sustain them. The Belgian resistance
has made the armies of the Kaiser lose precious
time. It only remains to see whether the invader
will have the time to disorganize the French re-
sistance sufficiently before the great Russian
masses menace Berlin too directly. As for us, we
know that Wilhelm II will not succeed.
He has gathered together all his enormous mili-
tary forces to strike one blow. This blow must be
decisive, the first and the last at once, a blow from
which we cannot rearise. Can he believe that?
Can he know us no better than that? We shall
take up the fight again after the battle. Since he
is not willing to judge us by our operations at the
opening, we will give him the opportunity of ap-
praising us all together.
August 23, 1914.
IV
FEOM CHARLEEOI TO THE MAENE
The Prime Duty
The day of the test is coming. I have never
dissimulated the fact that it would come inevi-
tably. I did not know the moment, I did not know
the circumstance. It seemed to me impossible that
serious checks should not come to us at certain
moments. Although the disappointment is great,
we must not exaggerate it. Salvation is in our-
selves, if we clearly see our duty and show our-
selves capable of fulfilling it to the end.
. . . The French people is not vanquished.
Their strength and their endurance are not ex-
hausted. They cannot be exhausted as long as
there remains of France enough for a man to set
foot on. No boasting — enough of phrases ! It is
acts that must speak for us.
... To sustain this terrible onrush valiantly,
to hold back the aggressor on our territory in a
heroic hand to hand combat that surpasses all the
energy that our historical development has per-
mitted us to accumulate, is to aid those who are
aiding us. For each French soldier struck mor-
tally but still clutching the enemy in a grip from
163
164 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
which the pretended victor cannot free himself,
there is a Kussian over there, saved from defeat,
who will bring us the victory. All to the work
of defense, then, with no arm and no heart miss-
ing ! All ! Let him go and beg his charter of Ger-
man servitude, the wretch who would hide when
it is the hour to show himself. We have shown
enough complacence to cowardice more or less
gilded. Let us have the rigor of the law for all.
It is not monuments that are needed for the heroes
of these great days. It is the unwavering support
of a government which offers work to all in the
nation's cause, and nails to the pillar of infamy
the vicious herd of degenerates who, knowing not
how to live, would show themselves unworthy to
die in grace.
As for us, we demand a government of steel,
indefectible, the inflexible armature of one of the
noblest races of history, which insists on nothing
except its right to live in independence that it may
continue its good work in the field of liberty. For
this is not a war of governments for conquests of
territory or the exploitation of subjects. It is not
even a war of peoples who do not know each other
and who manage even in fratricidal combats, such
as have occurred between us and England, to keep
open avenues more or less circuitous to the happy
relief of reconciliation.
No, Wilhelm II and his unanimous subjects can
no longer be contented with less than our exter-
mination. We did not want this war. We said
and did all that was possible to avoid it. Wilhelm
II could not even now remember all the mass of
lies that were told to bring it on. As soon as it
FEANCE FACING GERMANY 165
seemed to him that his machine of murder was
ready, that machine that was prepared day by
day, hour by hour, for forty years, he gave the
august signal for his grand steam-roller which
was to level the ground of civilized Europe for the
use of barbarism. He left Berlin swearing to put
an end, this time, to the people from whom there
came an influence for the freedom to which his
reign of force can give no quarter. And now, with
his formidable army, he is before us.
We have made mistakes, many and serious mis-
takes, which leave us open to-day to cruel blows
which it would have been easy, in the course of a
long peace, to prepare against. In 1870 we were
surprised. What we are seeing to-day could only
come from the combination of our heedlessness
and our inconstancy. I am far from any thought
of recrimination. It is not the time to judge. I
no longer know the names of those who have been
at fault. I am willing to say that all, in different
ways, have been at fault. All of us, without a
word of reproach which would only be a loss of
force, all of us will put our shoulders to the wheel
to accomplish the arduous work of national re-
habilitation.
The rehabilitation must come from the union
of all energies put at the service of the country
in a common movement of inflexible discipline;
from sacrifice, and since the event requires it, the
sacrifice of blood. The rehabilitation must come,
not by phrases which are the feeble instrument of
a degenerate romanticism, but by the acts of su-
perhuman effort which fate and the traditions of
our history demand of us and which we have no
166 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
longer the right to refuse. All of us to our duty
until death,- — and afterward, indeed, by that power
of example which makes the dead rise from their
native ground to tell the living that this is no
longer the time to be in love with life, when those
who will be the France of to-morrow require of
us the glory of having lived for something more
than to remain alive without reason for living.
If we are capable of rising to this, France will be
saved through us. If not, all the land of France,
over which will crawl creatures without souls, will
become a province of Germany. We can choose.
This even Germany has understood. At the
very hour when she is outflanking our army of
defense to enter like a thunderbolt upon our ter-
ritory, she has heard passing through the air the
great cry of invisible powers which announce to
the peoples that a tragic hour has struck. Against
whom is the verdict of destiny? Justice is noth-
ing without force at its command. It is a ques-
tion as to who will have the greatest force on his
side. Great Britain, France, and Eussia are too
powerful against Germany, even leading behind
the supposed support of the army vanquished at
Sadowa. So we see that the settling of such a
great account frightens her at the moment when,
without having yet met on our soil the second
blow of our armies of defense, she is announcing
beforehand a triumphant advance which presup-
poses that men have submitted who, whatever may
happen, will not submit. Therefore from our own
frontier is issued the order to mobilize all the men
of Germany down to boys of sixteen.
It is well. Send us the last of your children
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 167
to finish the slaughter of ours whom you shoot at
the mother's breast. Doubtless your little ones,
in their turn, must feast on blood. What! have
you come to this, that you must get ready to
throw your budding youths into the slaughter of
the battle-field, because you already feel that your
men will be too few against us? On our side,
though we are less numerous than you, we shall
not have need of this supreme effort. For you
fight only to put Europe under the yoke of your
savage race, while we are the soldiers of Western
civilization, and any man who feels his right to
liberty, to the honor of a free life, betrays himself
if he does not come to take his place in our ranks
in this uproar of battle. No Frenchman will be
missing. We have no need to call them to their
posts of combat. You had prepared everything,
foreseen everything. We are going to show you
something that you were not expecting. You will
see nothing but men welded into one by a single
thought, by a single will — the thought of France
and the will to maintain her throughout all. And
-since someone has said that for every man France
is a second fatherland, all those who expect im-
mortal deeds of us and of our comrades in arms
will wish to be in the battle where the greatest
cause of mankind is at stake. Also, against the
children of Germany, whom you are tearing from
their schools to make them fight against the idea
from which their liberation must some day come,
the men of France stand in combat, in the hope of
directing them, more or less tenderly, according
as is necessary, into the right path.
And with this said, let each Frenchman gird up
168 PRANCE FACING GERMANY
his loins for the great duty. No boasting — no
weakness. It is grand enough to be yourselves.
The country has need of all of you.
August 23, 28, 1914.
By Endueance
... A violent action near Mezieres; victorious
near Guise, we are yielding around La Fere; in
Lorraine we are said to be advancing. At least
we have now certain guiding indications, such as
we have lacked too long. All these battles which
bring no decisive results are none the less of the
highest importance, since they retard just so much
the march of the German armies on Paris.
After the surrender of Sedan and the invest-
ment of Metz, France was without an army.
There is nothing comparable in her situation to-
day. The French army keeps the field. It has
suffered severely, but it has inflicted no less heavy
losses on the enemy, and our own o eight to be
more easily reparable. It is resisting indef atigably
everywhere, with varying fortune, as in the his-
tory of every war. It has had to retreat at certain
points. It has advanced at others. And the battle
is so closely joined that even if we give ground
in certain places, the Germans do not always
easily regain their freedom in the offensive.
It appears that so long as we have all the forces
of Germany against us we cannot hope to drive
them back quickly to the frontier. To worry the
invading troops, to dispute the ground against
them, to cut them off from their base when this
becomes possible, these are appreciable achieve-
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 169
ments until the day when the risk of an offensive
operation might be taken. All the combats of
which we hear are so many efforts in this direc-
tion. They are, indeed, the opening of a cam-
paign which must not end otherwise than in the
common victory of France, Great Britain, and Eus-
sia, when they shall have closed in their pincers on
the two sides of Germany. To accomplish this,
as I have not feared to announce beforehand, will
require time, a great deal of time, and a great
deal of suffering. Already our unfortunate popu-
lation in the North has experienced it. Let us
remember this saying of a Japanese general:
"Victory comes to the man who is capable of
suffering a quarter of an hour longer than his
adversary." We have come to the hour when
we must begin the practise of this great lesson.
News comes from all directions of bands of
refugees who are leaving their burning villages
under the hail of German shells. All of us are
under great obligations to them. I have no doubt
that the government and individuals will do their
duty by them. And what can we say of those
unfortunate cities, flourishing yesterday, in heaps
of ruins to-day! All the factories have been sys-
tematically destroyed by shells and incendiary
bombs. The land is being ravaged in all the