On the 24th of February terms of peace were arranged, and on the 15th of March peace was signed. Before I tell you how France was punished by her conqueror, I wish to introduce to you two men who fought in this war—the one a Frenchman, the other an Englishman. If you were to see the Frenchman to-day you would find him a sturdy, thick-set man, with a heavy white moustache, huge eyebrows, and teeth that flash when he speaks. His head is massive, his neck is short and thick, and he gives you the idea of a trustworthy watch-dog. He is General Joffre,[137] Commander-in-Chief of the French army.
General Joffre, Commander-in-Chief of the French Armies.
He was a lad of eighteen, a cadet at a military school, when the Franco-German War broke out. At once he was promoted second lieutenant and attached to a regiment of artillery. During the siege of Paris he fought his gun bravely against the Germans. Since that time he has seen much fighting, and his countrymen know him to be strong and silent—"a great soldier and a great man." He now commands the armies of France against the foe with whom he fought as a boy of eighteen. France and her soldiers have laid to heart the lessons of those terrible days, and the present war sees them no less brave, but far better prepared to meet their old enemy.
When the war began, an English boy of twenty, a cadet of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, was staying with his father in Brittany. Without waiting to consult his father or his masters at Woolwich, he enlisted in the French army as a private, and joined the 2nd Army of the Loire. An attack of pneumonia put an end to his services, but not before he had realized the terrible peril which a nation runs when unprepared for war. One of his experiences with the French army was a perilous ascent in a war balloon; forty-three years later he made his first aeroplane flight.
That boy is now Field-Marshal Earl Kitchener,[138] the British Secretary of State for War, the man whom we all regard as our organizer of victory. Since the days when he fought against the Germans in France he has seen warfare in many lands, especially in Africa. In 1898 he overcame the Mahdi[139] in the Sudan, and it was largely due to him that the Boers were forced to make peace after the long war of 1899-1902. A German general who was with him in the Sudan said: "Lord Kitchener was cool and perfectly calm; he gave his orders without in the least raising his voice; he always made the right arrangements at the right moment. He seemed to be absolutely indifferent to personal danger, and never did anything out of bravado. Acting is out of the question with him; he is always perfectly natural." Such is the man who is the Secretary for War at this time of national stress and anxiety. The Germans were his first foes. Let us hope that they will be his last.
France paid dearly for her defeat. Germany demanded £200,000,000, and ordained that a German army should remain on French soil until this huge sum was paid. It seemed at first sight quite impossible for France to find the money; but so rich is her soil, and so thrifty are her peasants, that the whole of it was paid by the end of the year 1874. To most Frenchmen this was by no means the heaviest blow which France suffered. When Germany took back Eastern Lorraine and Alsace, which, you will remember, had once been her own, there was the deepest shame and sorrow throughout the land, and thousands of Frenchmen swore they would never rest until these provinces had been recovered. Though forty-three years have come and gone since that black day, Frenchmen have never forgotten the shame which they then endured. They have mourned without ceasing for Alsace and Lorraine, and that is why the statue of Strassburg in the Place de la Concorde has been draped in black for so many years. Every patriotic Frenchman believes that, when the present war is over, the tricolour will once more wave from the towers of Alsace and Lorraine.
