Mounted officers, with their low, flat caps pulled down upon their noses, were skimming along the paths by the road-side like the wind. In the old wayside inns, in the corners of the yards the dung-hills were heaped up with entrails and skins of beasts: hides, stuffed with straw, were hanging also from the banisters of the old galleries, where we used to see washed linen hanging out to dry. Misery, unspeakable misery, and gnawing anxiety were marked upon the countenances of the people. The Germans alone looked fat and sleek in their broken boots; they had good white bread, good red wine, good meat, and smoked good tobacco or cigars: they were living like fighting-cocks.
At a certain former time, these people had complained bitterly of our invasion of their country, without remembering that they had begun by invading ourselves. And yet they were right. At the close of the First Empire, the French were only fighting for one man; but the Germans had since had their revenge twice, in 1814 and 1815, and for fifty years they had always been coming to us as friends, and were received like brothers: we bore no malice against them, and they seemed to bear none against us; peace had softened us. We only wished for their prosperity, as well as for our own; for nations are really happy only when their neighbors are prospering: then business and industry all move hand in hand together. That was our position! We said nothing more of our victories; we talked of our defeats, so as to do full justice to their courage and their patriotism; we acknowledged our faults; they pretended to acknowledge theirs, and talked of fraternity. We believed in their uprightness, in their candor and frankness: we were really fond of them.
Now hatred has arisen between us.
Whose the fault?
First, our stupidity, our ignorance. We all believed that the Plébiscite was for peace; the Ministers, the préfets, the sous-préfets, the magistrates, the commissioners of police, everybody in authority confirmed this. A villain has used it to declare war! But the Germans were glad of the war; they were full of hatred, and malice, and envy, without betraying it: they had long watched us and studied us; they endured everlasting drill and perpetual fatigue to become the strongest, and sought with pains for an opportunity to get war declared against themselves, and so set themselves right in the eyes of Europe. The Spanish complication was but a trap laid by Bismarck for Bonaparte. The Germans said to one another: "We have twelve hundred thousand men under arms; we are four to one. Let us seize the opportunity! If the French Government take it into their heads to organize and discipline the Garde Mobile, all might be lost.... Quick, quick!"
This is the uprightness, frankness, and fraternity of the Germans!
Our idiot fell into the trap. The Germans overwhelmed us with their multitudes. They are our masters; they hold our country; we are paying them milliards! and now they are coming back, just as before, into our towns and cities in troops, smiling upon us, extending the right hand: "Ha! ha! how are you now? Have you been pretty well all this long while? What! don't you know me? You look angry! Ah! but you really shouldn't. Such friends, such good old friends! Come, now! give me a small order, only a small one; and don't let us think of that unhappy war!"
Faugh! Let us look another way; it is too horrible.
To excuse them, I say (for one must always seek excuses for everything) man is not by nature so debased; there must be causes to explain, so great a want of natural pride; and I say to myself—that these are poor creatures trained to submission, and that these unfortunate beings do as the birds do that the birdcatcher holds captives in his net; they sing, they chirp, to decoy others.
"Ah! how jolly it is here! how delightful here in Old Germany, with an Emperor, kings, princes, German dukes, grand-dukes, counts, and barons! What an honor to fight and die for the German Fatherland! The German is the foremost man in the world."