firm, in whom is summarily filtered all the flood of
former sentimentalities, leaving only an un-
changeable residue of will resolved on action in
which shall be summed up all the inspiration of a
life.
For rushing into the shellfire, for entire f orget-
fulness of self, and, alas! of those to whom one
has given the best of his being (and who thus are
in their own right a part of the total sacrifice),
because it is imperative before all else to sweep
the earth clear of the barbarians whose violence
is turned against the right to one's home, to his
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 233
free speech, to the august history of his ancestors,
turned against the right of a noble race to its tra-
ditions, its thought, its age-long hopes, against its
right to its native land, to put all in one word —
for this, it had seemed, the ease and soft solici-
tudes of modern society had insufficiently pre-
pared the men of to-day. Undoubtedly they knew
that there was something above the common com-
forts of a civilization more or less refined. They
had been told so from infancy, they had repeated
it on every occasion, but what a difference when
voices from within and from without brusquely
arrested them in the monotony of every day to
proclaim to them that the moment had come to
follow the examples of the great! The examples
of the great, what was more beautiful in the books !
It is a long way from books to action, the call
to which resounds everywhere in thrilling words :
it is to-day!
To-day ! France cries out her need for her chil-
dren to give their lives that she may live. It is
the great cry that descends from the hills and re-
sounds through the valleys and fills the plain over
beyond the horizon. And the young men rush to
answer, proud to think they are going to make
history, are going to condense in a moment of
time sensations higher and nobler than centuries
of numberless commonplace lives could give them ;
proud in their youth with the secret thought that
they will do better than their ancestors.
They did not say it. They have done it. A noble
answer to those who had been able to doubt them.
Possessed with their duty, they had even shown
themselves capable of silence. And some persons
234 FKANCE FACING GERMANY
wretchedly misunderstood them. Look at them
now. No common fellows fixing their eyes on the
ground — it is with heads high that they face you.
Never a complaint from them — nothing but mes-
sages of hope and gaiety. From the pedestal of
Rude bursts forth the miracle of Galatea. The
stone has taken life for the achievement of mar-
vels that our sorry skepticism never expected to
see again. The heroes of older times have sprung
forth from the conquering arch to show the path
to the heroes of to-day. They have found each
other, they have joined arms and weapons, wills
and hearts. In the night, in the trenches, they
hold silent communion with the motherland. In
the day their confident daring renders her splen-
did. Enraptured with great deeds, certain that
they will expend the utmost of their forces, and
happy to feel that one must do more than kill
them in order to conquer them, they rush into the
field of battle forcing a frightened Fortune to fol-
low in their steps.
Through the endless centuries of history there
have been others who have known how to give
up their lives nobly — lives that were rich in
hopes, though but too poor in realization. To
the generations of the present has been be-
queathed the magnificent heritage of all the
treasures of the past; and if the first human
hordes, in dying, lost nothing but their life of
savagery, the man who inherits all the labor of
the centuries has seen growing, along with the
value of his own life, the grandeur of the causes
which, to ennoble generations still to come, exact
of him a larger sacrifice.
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 235
What a sorry lot was that of the Philip of
Macedon whom Demosthenes shows us, with an
eye gone, a shoulder broken, and a thigh slashed,
throwing his members to Fortune in order that
with what remained he might live gloriously!
The glory of the conqueror is not glorious enough
for the humblest of our French soldiers, who
leave to lesser breeds the atavistic hunger for
the lands of other men. For their honor, for the
glory of their work, they would make of the
country that they have saved and liberated, the
most noble force for conquests of benevolence and
culture, and I am none too certain that if the
task is rendered harder by the indolence of in-
capable administrators, they do not experience
a prouder satisfaction in feeling that there was
need of them to be all-sufficient.
Such a superhuman sentiment, though it is
judged by them, in their simplicity, to be quite
natural, is what transports them beyond the com-
mon nature of man and causes them, at the very
moment when many of them, perhaps, are yet
ignorant of their glory, to appear to us so mag-
nificent; just as if the long silhouette that
stretches across the field at sunset had suddenly
stood up alive while the real object, shrinking,
had taken its place in the dust. Such I see them.
Such they are. They are saving France, saving
her with their blood, consecrated by a force
within them that makes them capable of every
transport. One and all, fraternally devoted to
the leader as to the humblest of their comrades,
laughing at the cold of the trenches or cutting
their path at the point of the bayonet, through
236 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
the strongest masses of the human avalanche be-
fore them, they reveal to us the fact that the
most miraculous legends of the great combats of
our race were no more than simple truths.
December 15, 1914.
Thoughts on the War
... I have said it very often. We also, we of
the rear, have our part in this enormous adven-
ture. It is to suffice in everything. It is to rise
above all considerations of party, without allow-
ing the partizans of an older school, under the
favor of our disinterestedness, to seek to profit
by the opportunity to lead us back into reaction-
ary ways. It is to discipline ourselves strictly,
that we may do nothing to diminish in the
slightest degree the full force of our military
effort. It is to allow nothing to be injured in
our republican institutions, for which so much
excellent blood has been sacrificed, to see that
nothing of our liberty is proscribed or of our
right to full parliamentary control; and these
we must hold fast only that our soldiers may
fully profit by them. If, in a word, the magnitude
of this tragedy is beyond the powers of the minds
in our government, we must hold fast always for
the law and the right in the aim of materially
and morally strengthening our military forces —
by saving precious lives threatened by our in-
capability; by keeping high the morale of men
who will go to the sacrifice with good will only
if they feel that the equality of all in the face
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 237
of danger has ceased to be betrayed by the
caprices of special favor; and by seeking to make
certain the unity of all Frenchmen, not in bursts
of rhetoric, but in the confidence, necessary to
every man who would do his duty, that his neigh-
bor, whether great or small, whether cabinet
minister or private in the ranks, cannot shirk his
own.
January 17, 1915.
The Supeeme Eesistance
. . . The supreme importance of this terrible
war — the most overwhelming barbarity that the
world has ever seen — lies in the certainty, al-
ready established, that no continent will ever have
to submit, after our victory, to the domination
of a conqueror, of a master-people, peace with
whom would entail a series of new dangers for
a future more or less near at hand. No tri-
umphant victor imposing his will even on his
auxiliaries, whose mistrust might already have
been aroused! Only the victory of the higher
principles of civilization! Whoever wishes to
share the struggle may do so. We call all the
peoples to a glorious cause— the greatest with
which history has yet tempted them. Let him
who wishes to be great rise. The more they are,
the greater will be the chances, from this day, for
a higher society of mankind. Italians, Greeks,
Eoumanians, let them come, if they have the
proud feeling that the high aspiration of their
race destines them for a place in the terrible and
supreme conflict; and so all neutral peoples, who
238 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
must be weary of standing with folded arms
while, in the greatest of terrestrial struggles,
their dearest interests — it is not possible for them
to be ignorant of it — are manifestly at stake.
All! A common front against the devastating
monster who sees nothing in man except an auto-
matic machine for the crushing of his fellow-
man!
January 30, 1915.
The Two Sides of the Shield
The vista of history is extensive enough to
show that the evolution of peoples toward a
liberation from their ancestral chains is incon-
testable. With all her scientists regimented,
with all the forces of an admirable economic de-
velopment, with the sovereign efficiency of an
absolute government bent on setting all those
forces at work, Germany has made one mistake, —
one only, but one that is irreparable, — that of
proclaiming herself enemy to the irresistible
movement of men toward a greater freedom and,
with it, a higher dignity. She is great, she is
strong; against the union of modern nations she
is but feeble. Sadowa and Sedan were fortunate
strokes of victory. It is another thing to stand
as an obstacle, in the path of their historical de-
velopment, against all men and all assembled
peoples. Where Napoleon himself came to ruin,
neither von Kluck nor von Hindenburg, with
their Kaiser and their Crown Prince, is great
enough to succeed. Against a law of nature the
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 239
greatest of human forces can but dash itself to
pieces.
As for us, with our territory invaded, we have,
besides a far superior moral force, certain mili-
tary advantages which have demonstrated them-
selves rather remarkably — soldiers whom nothing
can beat down, and generals who have not yet
shown their full powers, although some of them
have already done remarkable things. We have
confidence in them, leaders and men. We have
forgotten whatever may have divided us. We
shall continue to uphold all of them, in the dark-
est days of their trial, strong in the great his-
torical lessons of the traditions of the year II.
On all the fronts at once we are seeing the soldiers
of the Kaiser straining in an unprecedented effort
to submerge us. To the might of their attempts
we oppose an unconquerable resistance. Like the
symbolic Blucher, which, ripped open by the
British cannon, ordered her last batteries to thun-
der, while her last men clamored, until the moment
of foundering. Germany is firing from every port-
hole, but a relentless fate is already raising the
great waves that will engulf her.
January 31, 1915.
Gaeibaldi !
After many years I once more saw, yesterday,
my noble friend General Bicciotti Garibaldi,
whose name alone calls up so many memories of
glory, dear to France and Italy alike. For
modern Europe, the life of his great ancestor
240 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
will remain a landmark in history. Should we be
surprised if, in the terrible days when the Latin
idea and the civilization of the world which is-
sued from it are menaced anew by the Teuton
hordes, ail those among us who remain faithful
to the ancestral tradition of high Roman virtue
turn spontaneously towards the simple and gen-
erous hero whose valor and grandeur encourage
us to all the sacrifices which the honored race of
our ancestors demands of us?
Giuseppe Garibaldi was one of those magicians
who give the word of command to peoples, as
to their pretended sovereigns. Such men are the
real workers of miracles, for they do not reckon
upon human powers when a superhuman force
urges them to deeds of mad audacity which come
to be, through them, those of perfect reason.
It is insensate of anyone to speak ill of the
laborious creators of ideal doctrines which are
the very foundations of our civilization. Re-
ligion, science, philosophy are among the in-
credible marvels of constructive thought. Only,
no amount of labor will give life to them without
an enthusiasm of the heart, informing the in-
tellect, and a resolution of the will, animating all
our machinery of thought.
Those who know, or think they know, will
speak. But words are not life. It is human
nature to follow, by instinct, the men who rise,
in the junctures of history for which we know
no rule, to accomplish in heroic simplicity just
those things that "reason" had not foreseen.
Prophets, leaders of men lifted above the crowd
by an irresistible force which makes them seem
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 241
like creatures of a higher sphere, such men leave
behind them, as it were, a great trail of light
through the chaotic ruins of the past. And all
those who trembled with fear or joy at the wind
of the meteor that nothing stops find that they
have lived a life more strenuous, in a moment
of time, than the many other lives whose forces
are wasted away in carelessly following the cur-
rents of the day.
To achieve this marvel, the man is necessary.
Change the places in the centuries of Christ and
Mohamet, and there is another page of history to
turn. Garibaldi appeared at his moment, but of
that moment he was, in the highest degree, the
lofty expression. Ingenuously tormented by an
idea, he was never willing to see an obstacle or
to recognize an impossibility. He merely said
to himself, "I shall succeed," and he did suc-
ceed. It seems simple enough to us to-day. Why
had not others come to do it before him? He
passed, giving the crown to those who begged
for royalty, and went away to hide himself in his
island, fleeing the importunity of glory in the
charm of the azured vault of his rapturous Medi-
terranean.
He had set free; it was for freedom to do her
work. It did not please him to have another
reason for existence. And yet, if a cloud on the
horizon announced to him some tempest at large,
if a great cry came through the air to him, if
the waves brought to him the plaints of a tor-
tured people, his clear and tender eye suddenly
showed fire again.
"Let us go," said his calm voice. And the
242 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
bark, of its own will, carried him off, confident,
to the unknown.
It was thus that we saw him appear in our
France on the battlefield of Dijon, gathering from
the ancient soil new laurels of victory when
feeble hearts had thought the garland was ex-
hausted. You were there, my good Eicciotti,
worthy son of a hero, with the noble phalanx
which lavished its generous blood to make a mock
of destiny. The decision, alas, could not be re-
versed. . . .
Proudly persevering in his smiling pursuit of
oblivion, the man who would not accept defeat
entered gaily into history, like the divine figure
of the Parthenon whose glorious chariot sinks
with its dazzling equipage into the waves of
ocean, but only to prepare for the renewal of the
next dawning.
And fifty years have not yet passed before
there comes about, again upon our soil, on the
same pediment, that renewal of which the vision
gave us the image. Again the same enemy — still
the same combat ! If we look at it closely, perhaps
it is but a continuation of the last. On our dev-
astated plains the star whose coursers rise from
the eternal gulf finds again these same French-
men, sons of Athens and Eome, and these same
Germans in their dark barbarism, who were not
capable of conquering Athens and Kome without
falling fatally under the invincible law of the
Greco-Roman genius.
France and Germany face each other once more
on the tired soil of the Gauls. Every man is at
his post. Garibaldi is there also. Six young
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 243
soldiers from Italy and France together answer
the call of the great name, and the heroic ardor
in their blood sends them into the thickest of the
battle. Two have fallen on the field of honor, and
Ricciotti, who is going to receive them in his
sacred Rome, for a triumphant funeral, says to
them : ' ' It is well ; I am pleased with yon. ' ' And
the four survivors look on them with an eye of
envy.
. . . Garibaldi gave all he possessed without
ever thinking of a recompense. He who gave so
much was not capable of seeking an equivalent
return. His highest joy came from receiving
nothing and lavishing his all. Make them un-
derstand that, if you can, those stunted little
creatures who are ambitious solely to shine by
the foolishness of others.
. . . But if Garibaldi could have survived, the
finest of rewards would have been reserved to
him in the ineffable joy of seeing his blood con-
tinue to flow in a heroic race whose monuments
we shall add, some day, to his statue in Nice.
We may marvel at the power of an ideal force
which the great acts of such a life were not suffi-
cient to exhaust — at the admirable prolongation
of one of the most beautiful manifestations of an
age gone by.
. . . France was the "soldier of God" — a fine
title, for it was the name of the ideal of the age
of history when it was current. Her thinkers
and her Revolution maintained her, or, if you will,
244 FKANCE FACING GERMANY
confirmed her, through her development, in the
role of the champion of ideas. That is why all
the rage of these savage hordes is turned against
us. The Garibaldis are at our side, as a presage
of Italy. A salutation to them! Their place was
clear in such a combat. They bring us their
hearts ; they bring us their swords. May sad days
be shortened by their efforts! Italy must come
into being, as well in her Latin conscience as in
her territorial integrity. Is it not so, Rieciotti?
February 20, 1915.
On the Arduous Path
Since this war is one of the entire world, on
account of the universality of the principles in-
volved in it, there has been unprecedented activity
in the diplomatic sphere during the full tide of
hostilities.
Of course, it has always been questions of
supremacy which have thrown peoples and
sovereigns into bloody conflicts. The peculiarity
of the present case is that at the point of world-
wide civilization to which we have come, with all
the peoples, even of the most distant continents,
living in the same ideas and under a plan of
organization very nearly common, that one of
them who launches upon an enterprise of general
domination, with the effect of bringing the great
powers to swords' points, at once appears as a
universal menace to the industrious peace which
is the righteous aspiration of the entire world.
I say nothing of the grand conquerors of Asia,
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 245
whose impulse to conquest was destroyed by the
resistance, more or less passive, of amorphous
tribes between whom no bond of solidarity was
as yet manifested. Moreover, they lacked fer-
tile lands, since they were barred by moun-
tains or oceans which, in those times, were
insuperable obstacles. Alexander was stopped
by the Indus, so easy to-day for us to reach.
The work of the great Eoman conquests, sym-
bolized in Caesar, however far it might ex-
tend, found itself held in cheek by strict bound-
aries which the indolent traveler of to-day may
cross without even giving a thought to those who
have opened a path for him. The Orient closed
itself to Alexander, and Europe opened itself to
Csesar, but already it was no longer for the
uncontrolled domination of a master, but for early
organizations of civilized society which were go-
ing to live and grow at the expense even of Some,
herself the generating force of the law and
justice on which modern societies were to be
founded.
After long centuries during which the passion
for oppression was ingloriously exalted above the
obscure need of honoring and liberating the in-
dividual, there appeared the marvel of the wars
for freedom of the French Revolution, which it
was Napoleon's supreme error to misunderstand
so fully that he sought in them only the occasion
to reestablish, in new forms, the power of domina-
tion that was irretrievably condemned. He was
magnificently capable of turning his people into
machines for slaughter, but it was a personal
enterprise far more than one of the French spirit;
246 FEANCE FACING GEEMANY
though the French mind was long enthusiastic
over the military tradition and unwilling to un-
derstand how far astray from its original purpose
the great Corsican oppressor had led it.
After that enormous earthquake, the leaders of
nations and the nations themselves sought an
equilibrium, more or less, without succeeding in
obtaining it. Wrapped in her great memories,
France above all was dreaming, Britain was or-
ganizing continents for her own prosperity, and
Germany was advancing vigorously in militarism.
It was from this tangle of ambitions for economic
and military conquest that the great conflict of
Europe, and through Europe of all the world,
was inevitably to burst forth. Everyone felt it
vaguely, but very rare were the men who dared
to submit the problem as it stood to public con-
sideration. For my own modest part, obsessed
by the growing menace since the peace of Frank-
fort, I fearlessly faced the pathetic anger of those
politicians enamored of colonization who, without
discoverable colonists, wasted, in money and in
men, more than it would have been necessary, from
the first, to assemble, concentrate, and utilize to
high efficiency, in order to be able to meet the
formidable drive which so many signs showed to
be in preparation against us.
Far from that, a few days before the declara-
tion of war, we were loftily discussing the ques-
tion as to how far it might be well to weaken
our troops of first resistance while still preserving
a proper appearance of military organization on
paper.
February 24, 1915.
FRANCE FACING GERMANY 247
Destiny
... It is obvious enough, at the end of seven
terrible months, that this war is one of endurance,
in which great surprises will probably remain
impossible. To judge objectively, it is unde-
niable that Germany, with soldiers from whom
much can be required, and with an accumulation
of military resources beyond precedent, is evin-
cing a remarkably obstinate resistance. But what-
ever the supreme convulsions of mad ambition
in disappointment may do, whatever damages
they may still inflict on us, we have and are
developing each day, over Germany, the superior-
ity of a cause in which all the interests of justice
and even of existence are combined. The sudden
change at the Marne, which was above all one
that took place in the soldiers, that is to say, in
a people armed, has given us, for a definitive ad-
vantage, such complete confidence in our military
and moral forces that we should find, in a tempo-
rary reverse, only an occasion for sacrifice even
greater yet than we have made so far.
If it were not an injustice to our soldiers of
the first hour, I should say that our young recruits
surpass, in the impulses of their irresistible dar-
ing, all the renown that our greatest soldiers had
gained up to this day. All the soul of the France
of history is in them. In brief moments of hero-
ism incessantly renewed, they epitomize the
legendary nobility of a people whose impress upon
civilization could not be effaced except by a uni-
versal return of the human species to savagery.
Glory to this young generation in whom we have
248 FRANCE FACING GERMANY
put tlie best of ourselves, and who are unspar-
ingly giving the fulness of their lives before they
have even lived! These men know what they
desire, what they do, and what they will leave
imperishable behind them. They would per-
petuate France — France living and beautiful, in
that life and beauty which she has inherited from
the great names of her past.
We had made enough mistakes to disunite her
when she appeared. We do not deny our many
divergent efforts towards the high ideal, on the
paths to which the noblest conscience may go
astray. France is such as we inherited her, such
as we have preserved her,- — extreme in enthusi-
asms, for which the very first condition is that
cold calculation is excluded. More fruitful are
these fragmentary efforts at liberty than full
unity in a servitude 6f passive weakness, — but on
condition, only, that on the day when fate wills
it, the nation, the entire nation, recover its power
of undivided will. That day has finally come,