The Bavarian assassins were decorated by the Kaiser, for their crimes, with the Iron Cross. The French Government at my request granted to M. Benoit the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and a few days later I presented it to him with my own hands.
Those are the principles with which, on one side and the other, we began the war, and these two incidents, taken at random from a hundred of the same kind, seem to me to show accurately the difference between the two methods, the difference between the Civilization on which Thomas Mann heaps his contempt, jeering at its “reason, its gentleness, and its emancipation,” and the Kultur which, according to him, is “above morality, reason, and science,” the Kultur which he hails as “die Subliemerung des Dämonischen.”
Have these principles been modified? Those of the Germans, no; our own, yes. The Germans have systematically continued the practical application of their gentlemanly instincts. After the crimes of Lorraine and Belgium came the unpardonable outrage of the Lusitania, followed by others so numerous and so varied that I must give up the idea of finding room for them in this letter; a whole volume would not be long enough to give a full list of them.
If the principles of the Boches have remained the same and have incited them every day to the commission of fresh outrages, ours—I say it frankly—have changed.
We want three things—to-day reprisals of defence—to-morrow compensations—finally, to save the future, punishment.
Reprisals? Most certainly. There are two kinds of reprisals, those of vengeance and those of defence. The first I reject; the second I demand. I should be proud if French soldiers and their brothers-in-arms kept their hands clean when they penetrate into Germany. I swear that no violence could have stained them if the Boches had not been piling up provocations for months and months. In any case I am quite sure that if, contrary to my hopes, they were to give way to these provocations, our dear soldiers would never commit a tenth part of the acts of violence which have been suffered by our unhappy populations; they would dismiss with horror the idea of setting fire to ambulances, or of massacring old men and women and children.
But there are reprisals of defence. These I hope for, and our Nations demand them. We have got to defend our soldiers and our civilians. To reply, in the trenches, to grenades with oranges, to gases which kill with gases which make the eyes smart, to liquid fire with cold water, would not only be idiotic, it would be criminal. In battle, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Abel must fight with the same weapons as Cain. However varied the forms of human folly may be, I imagine that no one will dispute this necessity. If, however, any soft-hearted philanthropists raise a protest and entreat us not to answer gas by gas and fire by fire, it would be easy to form a few gangs of them and place them in the front-line trenches, with instructions, when asphyxiating gases of the enemy arrive, to disperse the clouds by blowing upon them, and to put out the flames of the liquid fire with their gentle tears.
We have also got to defend civilians. Intoxicated by their philosophers the Boches can only understand the arguments of force. They laugh ponderously at our protests in the name of right. Blows are the only things that they can feel. We ought thoroughly to convince them that every time that one of our open towns is bombarded by cannon, by Zeppelin, or by aeroplanes, one of our aeroplanes, while we are waiting for something better, will bombard one of theirs. An excellent effect was produced by the operations at Carlsruhe and Stuttgart. Let us equip hundreds of aeroplanes for purposes of bombardment, and let each outrage of the Boches on our towns be followed by an immediate riposte, frankly announced in the newspapers to the whole world. Is that cruelty? I would accept that reproach from no one. I have immense pity in my heart—pity for our children and our women who are the victims of German assassins, pity for our children and our women whom it is our duty to protect, and whom we can protect in this way only! That, I repeat, is not a reprisal of vengeance, but a reprisal of defence. The people who protest against the use of such means ought not to remain far from the danger zone. Let them go—not alone, that would be too easy, but with their family, their old mothers, their wives, their children—let them go and take up their abode in the open towns which serve most often as targets, to Reims, to Pont-à-Mousson, to Nancy, to Dunkerque; let them go and live there in the houses of the poor, which are crushed like walnuts by big shells and split from top to bottom by Zeppelin bombs, or else let them take a berth for a few months on a transatlantic steamer; when they have been there long enough, when they have observed at close quarters the acts of the Boches, when they have seen some loved one fall by their side, when they have felt on their own brow the wind of a Camarde, then, if they still demand that the Allies should not engage in reprisals of defence, their advice, though it may not be wise, will at least be worthy of respect. In the meantime, in the name of the women and children already assassinated, and that the list of these pitiable victims may not be lengthened, those people had better be silent who, from the asylum of their safe and comfortable homes, invite us to reply to crime by diplomatic notes or by prayers, and to counter actions that kill with words that lull to sleep!
I said that from to-day our wish is for reprisals of defence, and that to-morrow we shall want compensation and punishment.