What need have we of further witness? Out of their own mouths the Germans are condemned, for the thousandth time. The war was deliberately provoked, though “like any war,” it might have been avoided. The excuse for it, invented long beforehand, that it was to put an end to the alleged oppression of Germans in Russia, Austria, England, America, and all other countries, was as false as the pretence that any such oppression existed. The real object, the aggrandizement of Germany, not only by the oppression but by the suppression of all the weaker Latin and German races of Europe, was exhibited naked and unashamed, for all the world to see, long before the would-be oppressor drew the sword. It remains to-day more than ever the real object of the war, now that it is unsheathed. No possible special pleading can maintain, much less prove, that the suppression of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland (to say nothing of the partial suppression of France, England, Russia, Italy, and Servia), is right. The mere suggestion of such an idea is an abominable wrong, which God will not defend, and because of it Great Britain will not tolerate, in any shape or form, the establishment of a Greater Germany. We are going to win this war. But let every man of the Allies and above all every Englishman, reflect on this undoubted fact. Because it is a war between right and wrong, between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, we shall not win it until we have learnt its great lesson, until we know as a nation—and we do not know it yet—that its particular message to our own country is the duty of self-sacrifice.
* * * * * *
It is the first day of the New Year. Last night the Old Year, the saddest and most terrible that the world has ever seen, came to its appointed end.
Five or six miles from where I am writing French and Germans were facing each other in unwonted silence under the dark night in the unending vigil of the trenches. A few days and nights ago the roar of the guns at Hartmannsweilerkopf, at Thann, at Altkirch, at Pfetterhausen, at Moos, was more violent and more continuous than anything that has been heard here since the war began. Now there was not a sound. Only in the last few minutes of 1915 a sudden squall of wind and rain swooped down from a cloudless sky. Moaning and weeping like a suffering child that cannot sleep, like a broken-hearted old man worn out by the anguish of life, the Old Year passed away to make room for the New. To-day in a glorious burst of sunshine, the New has come—and every second the air quivers to the shock of the heavy guns. For the weary fight has begun again. The end is not yet. Perhaps even here, through this peaceful valley, so little removed from the actual field of battle, the German hosts may make their last despairing unavailing effort to reach the heart of France. But they will never reach it. The way is barred by the dead, the uncounted glorious dead whose graves stretch from here to the English Channel in an unbroken line. For their sakes, and the sake of all they fought and died for, France and England can never put up the sword till the victory is won. “Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Delémont,
January 1st, 1916.
EPILOGUE
By Monsieur Léon Mirman,
Prefect of the Department of Meurthe et Moselle.
[M. L. Mirman, who is a Fellow of the University of Paris and was a Mathematical Lecturer at the Lycée of Reims, was elected Deputy for Reims in 1893. He represented the city in Parliament till 1905, when he resigned his post as Deputy to become Directeur de l’Assistance et de l’Hygiène Publiques. Interesting as this office was in time of peace, it did not agree in time of war with his ideas of active work, and at the beginning of the month of August, 1914, he was appointed, at his own request, to the frontier post of Prefect of Nancy.—G. F. C.]