FRANCE PACING GERMANY 21?
To-day, in the mud and water of the trenches,
every Frenchman is giving himself wholly, in
spontaneous exaltation, to any act of heroism, nor
can he discover anything in his own bravery be-
yond the natural fulfilment of the simplest duty.
From the battle of the Marne, which was his real
entrance into the line, he has made the enemy
feel his presence, and since that day there has
been no massed attack, succeeding artillery fire
however violent, that has been able to shake him.
Everywhere he has stood fast. At every point
where chance has given him the opportunity he
has forced the enemy back. What are the German
strategists to do on the two fronts in Poland and
France, where for weeks past they have been able
to gain nothing 1 The answer is simple. They
are going to begin over again. Already formid-
able attacks are announced to us, as if we did not
know the full strength of German aggression
from having repulsed it. We hear of heavy artil-
lery that is being painfully brought up to the
Yser for the purpose of renewing the enterprise
of the famous drive which was to take the Kaiser
to Calais, but which left him dangerously em-
barrassed at Nieuport. Arras, Soissons, Roye,
Vailly, we are told, are again to witness furious
offensives such as we were able to arrest defi-
nitively. So be it.
On both these sectors, and on others also, if
necessary, the onrush will be met as has been the
case before, and the French lines, far from break-
ing, will continue, slowly perhaps, but irresistibly,
to advance. Despatches from Belgium announce,
moreover, that great movements of troops are
218 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
taking place toward Eastern Prussia, where Kus-
sia is energetically pressing upon the enemy.
The military forces with which Wilhelm II is
trying to dazzle us will have abundant work.
November 27, 1914.
The Opinion of the Trenches
The Germans do not know us. If they have
proposals of peace to make, why have they not
sought to know, first of all, whom to address? I
have informed them very frequently in my
articles, when I have written that the French
people have taken their own affairs in hand and
are on their way to save themselves without
troubling themselves overmuch as to the measure
in which they will be aided in the work. As
Professor Ostwald repeats, the people of Wilhelm
II are an "organized" people, in the sense that
they are distributed, regimented, ticketed, in
categories of subordination in which is mani-
fested a series of mechanical motions which they
call their life, and beyond which they understand
nothing.
What they call their "Kultur" being nothing
but mechanical method automatically functioning
through the parts of a hierarchic whole, these
men, or mannikins, cannot conceive a higher
ideal for the human species than to make itself,
in turn, into a Teutonic machine. It is this that
possibly explains the ingenuousness of their
scientists, who, considering men as the inert sub-
stances of their dreams, declare that their com-
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 219
patriots liave reached a high stage of chemical
combination in which it seems good to crystallize
them. And since they are crystallizing them-
selves according to plans predetermined, the good
order of the universe requires that all mankind
do likewise. From minds so profound this idea
may seem to be of a simplicity rather discon-
certing, but we must understand our enemy if
we would conquer him completely.
Whatever in our eyes constitutes the worth of
human nature, — the independence of conscience,
the freedom of the ego, the liberty of personality
under the sanction of a corresponding responsi-
bility, — -all this is, in their eyes, only " individual-
ism," that is to say, an evidence of social weak-
ness. What is beautiful to them, what is grand
and noblest, is for the individual to efface himself
in order to glorify himself by falling to the rank
of an insensible particle in a whole that is " colos-
sal,' ' pompously so called. Thus the servant is
seen swelling with pride at the grandeur of the
master who holds him under the law.
The phenomenon is as old as the world. When
M. Lintilhac, in the tribune of the Senate, tried
to convert me to the suppression of the right to
teach by citing Aristotle's doctrine that every
citizen is the property of the state, he was carry-
ing back considerably the origins of the great
discovery that the Germans have made in the
last fifty years (that is to say, since Sedan),
according to Professor Ostwald, to whom the
child's toy of a Nobel prize seems the supreme
achievement of mankind. And as I am fairly
sure that Aristotle did nothing but reproduce, in
220 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
the opinion mentioned, the fundamental idea of
the aged Asiatic despotisms in which his mad
Macedonian pupil had gone to seek intoxication
as far as the hanks of the Indus, this miracle of
intellect, in which German "Kultur" is epito-
mized, might easily bring us nothing but a return
to the primitive brutality which could see in man
only a passive instrument of higher wills whose
sole title to rule is in the sword which rules over
an organized militarism.
When, by virtue solely of the fact that they
had annihilated the army of Napoleon III at
Sedan, the peoples of Germania had once accom-
plished this incredible marvel of spontaneously
returning to the ideas of barbarous autocracy
which stunned and paralyzed and condemned to
lasting weakness the admirable intellectual im-
pulse of the ancient civilizations of Asia, it was
but a little thing, surely, that, so proud of the
triumphant reaction which led them back several
thousands of years behind the European idea of
social progress as coming from the ennoblement
of each individual, our pan-Germans should judge
that their mission here below was the pan-Ger-
manizing of humanity.
The difficulty is that the Greco-Eoman civiliza-
tion, from which we issued, has turned us
unwaveringly, after dramatic vacillations, to-
ward the endowment of that personality which
Professor Ostwald scornfully denominates the
"individual," and which we respectfully call
"man," with an enlarging number of rights,
through which, ceasing to be the property of one
or more masters (or even of the state), men form
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 221
and establish a unity in independence of a higher
worth than all the combinations of brute will
which have aspired to place them under subjec-
tion.
I am setting theory against theory, and with-
out forgetting — for history reminds us but too
cruelly — that the distance is often very great be-
tween the noblest aspirations and the pitiful ac-
complishments which incapable human nature
permits us to realize. There was no more justice
in the French Eevolution than in any battle. But
in the gigantic upheaval there appeared the
formidable force of a popular explosion which, in
the total overthrow of Europe, succeeded in build-
ing the first foundations of a new order. And
this is something that the peoples of the world,
except, we must believe, the Germans, have not
yet forgotten.
It is the peculiar mark of our nation that the
ruling classes, at all times, have failed them. Our
warlike nobility failed in their historical duties
in many a battle. Louis XIV ruined and enslaved
them. Louis XV sank a marvelous movement of
thought into the quicksands of demoralization
which on the morrow were to throw up before
the army of Coblentz the debris of a vanished
grandeur. There remained, and remain still, the
soldiers of the year II, who, aroused in mass by
the devastating tempest, were inspired to gain,
and in the universal battle did gain, a victory
for freedom. Their bourgeoisie failed them, as
the nobles had failed their fathers; to understand
the failure, only compare this story with that of
the English governing classes. But they fought
222 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
battles which are decisive dates in the history
of man. If a conqueror, haunted by the history
of Borne, did try to rebuild, with these same men,
and with forms bearing new names, the edifice
of the past, this enterprise, which no genius could
have saved from failure, has only the importance
of a magnificent episode. The French armies, as
all the world has said, were the direct expression
of the French people. The unchangeable hero
of the Revolution was that peasant in wooden
shoes who rushed to the frontiers to cry to
Brunswick, while gnawing at his cartridge, * ' You
shall not pass!" He simply stood and died, but
they did not pass. And because he was dead,
we thought he could not reappear. Unpardon-
able misunderstanding of our race! The soldier
of the year II had left children.
Legitimate children, the true heirs of his in-
stincts, of his mind, of his great heart, who can-
not bargain about any sacrifice for their country!
In the Vendee the whites used to insult the blues
with the epithet of patriot; it is our title of
honor. In this glorious hour they are all there,
whites and blues, mingling in the trenches. The
new soldier of the year II finds himself supported
by those of his brothers whom an unhappy destiny
had made his enemies. There is but one people
now, one life in action, one force of feeling and
of will, against which all the assaults of the
German masses, made into a military machine,
must shatter themselves.
There is great advantage, yes, in methodical
science, in incessant foresight, in meticulous
preparation of everything for the achievement of
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 223
a single plan, in omitting nothing in calculations
. . . except the force of the incalculable. And
it is exactly the incalculable that springs to view
on the Gallic soil, in the form of the bantering
little soldier who, in the mud of the trenches,
sometimes envies his ancestor those wooden shoes,
but would refuse to admit that he cannot do
even greater deeds than his ancestor. Toward
him also, as toward his brothers of former days,
the rulers have been at fault. He feels it, he
sees it more or less clearly, but he does not pause
for such unworthy thoughts. He has seen his
duty so clearly that all the rest of the picture
has vanished. That implacable duty requires,
from moment to moment, the sacrifice of All.
And putting aside, with many precious realities,
illusions without number, hopes without end,
affections unweakened, everything which en-
lightens and warms and inflames his life, he
proudly asks himself if this will be enough. For
he needs still more to satisfy his superhuman
ardor, and from his way of speaking and acting
you may be sure that he will find something to
express the inexpressible with which his heart
is fired. Let us take pity on the man who burns
the midnight oil to find phrases for such heroic
simplicity, and restrain ourselves in wonder at
the sublime deed from which men will reap their
profit to-morrow.
Yesterday, in the saddest hospital of Bordeaux,
a Eed Cross nurse was entertaining the soldiers
with a phonograph. The Marseillaise, the Chant
du Depart, and the Marche de Sambre-et-Meuse
224 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
aroused the enthusiasm of all, and one of them
suddenly cried out:
"Ah! Thank you, madame; that makes a man
understand why he is here!"
Tell me, phrase-making lovers of tradition,
whether this fellow has not found the path his
fathers trod. He felt, he understood, he spoke:
and all these noble cripples, waving stiff arms
under formless bandages, cried out:
"That's it — that's it! That makes a man un-
derstand!"
Out under the shells they had made it clear
enough that they understood. But in the tortur-
ing monotony of the hospitals, far from the field
of sacrifice that they long for with all their
hearts, they burn with the enthusiasm of those
ancestors who had shown them the way!
Such are our Frenchmen, professionals in
German butchery! They know how to kill, in
their own way, and to die, since you require it of
them, but in contrast with your master, and with
you yourselves, unfortunately, they fight to let
live, to set free, to bring to men more liberty.
When you want peace it is to them that your
Excellencies must speak. On peace and on war
they will have conquered the right to speak, for
they are France militant. They have not exerted
more than human virtues in order to serve as a
theme for popular speech-making. They have de-
termined to do something that counts. They are
inspired by the idea that aroused their ancestors
■— the creation of a new Europe for the better uses
of humanity, and a higher life. They will accept
no German peace and leave behind them condi-
FRANCE FACING GEEMANY 225
tions pregnant with disaster. A French peace,
a peace that will establish a lasting destiny for
Europe by reducing to impotence the leaders of
savagery, that is the peace desired by our soldiers.
That is the opinion of the trenches.
December 2, 1914.
The Yellow Book
. . . Already the treatment of the events
which led to the declaration of war has become a
task for history. We were too familiar with them
to need to revive them. The Yellow Booh may
confirm the French in what they know already,
whether from the Blue Booh or from the daily
reading of the papers. It is for foreigners to
search here for authoritative documents on which
they may be able to found a definitive opinion.
... Of the military preparations of the
Kaiser, in which he had obtained the complicity
even of the socialists, pretended friends of peace,
we have nothing to say. The story of them has
been told us many times. In exciting at every
opportunity the extravagant Chauvinism which
takes the place of public opinion in Germany, in
invoking the memory of 1813 and 1814, it was easy
to influence men to let themselves be drawn into
the adventure of war which was to place all the
peoples under the rule of the Kaiser. In this,
Wilhelm II was assured of a too facile success.
An official and secret report of which we had a
communication in March, 1913, insisted on the ne-
226 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
cessity of preparing for the war, without awaken-
ing distrust, in such a way that "A declaration
of it would seem like a deliverance. . . . We must
imbue the people with the idea that our armaments
are an answer to the armaments and the policy
of the French. We must accustom them to think
that an offensive war on our side is necessary to
withstand the threats of the adversary." From
that date, therefore, the rulers of France had their
warning. In that document there was a study of
ways and means to excite uprisings in Egypt, at
Tunis, at Algiers, in Morocco, and the principle
was formulated that small states must be forced
to follow Germany or be subjected. To begin,
an ultimatum with a short time-limit must be fol-
lowed immediately by invasion. They could not
hesitate, because, "The provinces of the ancient
German Empire, Burgundy, and a good part of
Lorraine, are still in the hands of the Franks, and
thousands of our German brothers in the Baltic
provinces are groaning under the Slavic yoke."
In the month of May, 1913, M. Jules Cambon,
renewing the former warning, notified us that
General von Moltke, chief of the German general
staff, had, in a gathering of Germans, uttered the
following words: "We must ignore the common-
places about the responsibility of the aggressor.
. . . We must get ahead of our principal adver-
sary, and as soon as there are nine chances in ten
of having war we must begin it, without more
delay, in order to beat down all resistance by brute
force."
Six months later, on November 22, 1913, our
ambassador at Berlin addressed to his minister a
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 227
critical letter, the importance of which is so great
that I think it should be given here in its entirety.
M. Jules Cambon, Ambassador of the French
Republic at Berlin, to M. Stephen Pichon,
Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Berlin, November 22, 1913.
I have obtained, from an absolutely trustworthy
source, the account of a conversation which the
German Emperor is said to have had with the
King of the Belgians in the presence of General
von Moltke, Chief of Staff, a fortnight ago, a con-
versation which, it appears, strongly impressed
King Albert. I am by no means surprised at his
impression, for it corresponds to what I have
myself felt for some time : the hostility against us
is increasing, and the Emperor has ceased to be
an advocate of peace.
The interlocutor of the German Emperor had
thought until now, as did everyone, that Wilhelm
II, whose personal influence has been often ex-
erted, in critical circumstances, for the mainte-
nance of the peace, was still in the same frame of
mind. This time he seems to have found him
completely changed. The German Emperor is no
longer, to his mind, the champion of peace against
the bellicose tendencies of certain parties in Ger-
many. Wilhelm II has come to think that war
with France is inevitable and that he must come
to it sooner or later. Naturally he believes in the
overwhelming superiority of the German army
and in its certain success.
General von Moltke spoke exactly like his sover-
228 FEANCE FACING GERMANY
eign. He also declared that the war was neces-
sary and inevitable, but lie displayed even more
certainty of success, for, he said to the King,
' ' This time we must make an end of it, and your
Majesty cannot doubt the irresistible enthusiasm
which, when the day comes, will inspire the whole
German people."
The King of the Belgians protested that it was
a travesty of the intentions of the French govern-
ment to interpret them as the Germans did, and
to be misled concerning the sentiments of the
French nation by the manifestations of certain
excited minds or of unscrupulous intriguers.
The Emperor and his Chief of Staff persisted
none the less in their opinion.
In the course of their conversation the Emperor
had appeared, moreover, tired and irritable. In
proportion as the years weigh upon Wilhelm II,
the family traditions, the reactionary sentiments
of the court, and above all, the impatience of the
military party, gain greater empire over his mind.
Perhaps he feels some jealousy of the popularity
that has been acquired by his son, who flatters the
passions of the pan-Germans and thinks that the
situation of the Empire in the world is not equal
to its power. Perhaps, also, the reply of France
to the last increase in the German army, the object
of which was to establish an incontestable German
superiority, has something to do with his bitter-
ness, for, whatever may be said, it is felt that
things cannot go on as they are much longer.
One naturally wonders what was the object of
this conversation. The Emperor and his Chief of
Staff may have had the intention of impressing
FEANCB FACING GERMANY 229
the King of the Belgians and of influencing him
against opposing his resistance in case a conflict
with us should come about. Perhaps, also, it is
desired that Belgium should be less hostile to cer-
tain ambitions which are manifested here in
regard to the Belgian Congo, but this last hypoth-
esis does not seem to me to explain the presence
of General von Moltke.
It should be added that Emperor Wilhelm is less
fully master of his fits of impatience than is com-
monly believed. More than once I have seen him
allow his secret thought to escape him. Whatever
may have been the object of the conversation
which has been reported to me, the confidence is
none the less of the most serious nature. It cor-
responds to the precariousness of the general sit-
uation and to the condition of a certain section of
opinion in France and in Germany.
If I were allowed to draw conclusions, I should
say that it is well to keep in mind the new fact
that the Emperor is growing favorable to certain
ideas which were formerly repugnant to him, and
that, to borroiv from him an expression which he
is fond of using, we should keep our powder dry.
Jules Gambol.
... There was no need of these irrefutable
documents to establish the premeditation that is
demonstrated by forty years of methodical prep-
aration. None the less, the documents prophesied,
a short time ahead, the fatal culmination of a long
series of incessant efforts carried on with remark-
able perseverance toward the single end of a Euro-
pean conquest which should open for Germany;
230 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
the gate to universal domination. AH the rest is
but a logical development of an enterprise as to
which one hardly knows whether to wonder most
at the folly of its conception or at the coolness
of its execution.
If we had leisure to consider these things from
the purely objective point of view, we could give
ourselves up to an interesting study of a phenome-
non of national psychology for which I can find
no precedent. But since we are the first victims
of it, we are under the necessity of looking at the
problem from quite another angle. The power of
will that was capable of assembling, organizing,
and developing the greatest stores of instruments
of war that history mentions, needed, in order to
bring on the present catastrophe, the concurrence
of a no less stupefying series of faults and errors
among those who have been able to live for half a
century under the menace -of a crushing blow
without rising to the resolution to improve all
chances for success upon their side.
Let me be permitted to say that this phenome-
non is not less disconcerting than the other. Pos-
sibly it is more so, for if it is the nature of man
to attempt incessantly to master others, a natural
law also opposes to this irrepressible fatality a
response in concerted defense. The miracle is
that so much premeditation on one side could be
answered by so much systematic unpreparedness
on the side of three great peoples whose annals
are in no wise inferior to those of Germany. This
will be the marvel that will arrest the attention
of the historians.
To consider only our own case, our soldiers are
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 231
on the way to redeem so marvelously the faults
which are not theirs, that the flame of French
ardor will but appear perhaps the purer and more
beautiful for it. At the price of how much blood !
At the price of what ruin, and suffering, and de-
spair ! How could we forget it, when ten Depart-
ments of France are still under the German heel?
If it seems good to me to recall these things, it is
because I wish everyone to understand that the
salvation of France will come by abandoning our
old ways of carelessness, which have brought us
so much suffering, and by bringing our governors
to such noble deeds of bravery and in devotion as
those of which the humble children of the people,
whom history will not know, are giving the world
a miraculous exhibition to the glory of the French
blood.
December 4, 1914.
Those at the Fkont
. . . The man who is under fire lives a multi-
plied life, necessitated as much by the imminence
of danger as by the necessity of exacting hourly
from his physical and moral resources a maximum
of result. Civilized life prepares us in an imper-
fect way for the sudden exertions of supreme
energy. Our private crises are those of personal
feeling far more often than of external violence,
and in the lands of "individualism," as the Ger-
mans say — that is, in the lands where man is con-
sidered the social reality, not a metaphysical en-
tity in the imperialized state — the effective prepa-
ration for war is lightened of its cares because one
232 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
counts too freely on the resources of personal
force which will spring up in the individual who
has grown strong from a superior gymnastics of
liberty and free will.
The idea of the great sacrifice remains dim to
us. The frenzy of living does not permit us to
pause over it. And then, all of a sudden, because
Austria and Serbia have said certain things, in-
stead of certain others, the country, endangered,
calls its children to the guns, and there comes the
spectacle of men eager to offer their lives for a
cause higher than that to which, until this mo-
ment, they held themselves attached.
From day to day the springs of our emotions
and our actions are changing. Things and beings
that once filled our hearts, that still hold them by
so many strong ties, are becoming dimmer to us.
Nothing of the past is abolished. But the im-
portance of the hour has become so great that its
shadow is on everything, obscuring, without pos-
sible remedy, what is not of the present. Out of
the man has sprung the soldier, purified in soul,