Now why was that script ever engraven? (The date was 1909.) Against whom was this ephemeral Prussian king going to use his argument—his last argument? I carry back my mind to 1909, and I can remember no one against whom at that moment he was preparing to argue in such a fashion. It was a quiet time. There was no worry within the Prussian state; Agadir had not been heard of. Yet that was the date and that was the motto. And there was the eagle and there was the inscribed flourishing initial, and there was the crown.
I know very well that some, perhaps most, of my readers—of those who do me the honour to read this rambling—will think me a fool for what I am next to say. But I confess a sentimentality towards that gun. When I was a boy and they were teaching me to drive in the artillery school at Toul they used to give us a sort of vile body on which to experiment our horses and ourselves: old guns of '48—old bronze guns. And these the French had made with great art. They were beautiful things. What touched me most about them was that each of them had a name. One was called "Liberty," another "The Voice of the People," another "Equality," and so on. It is a human instinct and a just one to give names to things. It is part of the truth that we ourselves are made in the image of God. Why, even my boat, which is but a material, inanimate body (may She forgive me), has a name. I must tell you, though you ridicule me, that when I saw that German gun I wished it also had a name.
And what sort of name should it have had? It could not have had a name for an abstract virtue or idea, like a French gun. It might have had the name of a great German man, but the names of such men are soon exhausted. It might have had the name of a jest, for jests are innumerable; but then the reader would have had to understand the jest which would probably have been local—like "Grandmamma" or "Archie" or the huge French gun I knew in my youth, which the men of my youth called "Silence in the Ranks"—an enormous piece on the top of a fort. Indeed, I cannot conceive what name could have been given to this one gun out of so many guns. Still I wish it had had a name.
If it had had a name I could look back on it, now that I have left it, and say to myself: "What fun I had in those few minutes before the train came in, examining the outward expression of ——, his character, his toilet, his elevation, and all the rest of it!"
But the gun had no name, and so I must still carry it in my mind anonymously as "the German gun."
Of all the hundreds of guns that I have seen lying about or being carried on trucks or drawn by horses, or standing in the great factories during these years, only one gun has touched me more, and this also was a German gun. I saw it in February, 1915. It lay derelict in a ditch close to the road near the river Ourcq, within an hour of Meaux, and Paris not forty miles away. It was perhaps the extreme gun of all the invasion; the mark of the high tide. It lay pitifully on one side, like the corpse in Beaudelaire's poem. One wheel it had not at all, but only the axle sticking up into the air, and the other wheel was rotted into the ground. And there lay the poor dead German gun like a fool.
I said to my companion: "Why does not some one of the peasants take it away and keep it for a relic?" To which my companion answered in the hard French fashion (which differs so much from the more human English way): "Why should he?"