I continued. I was speaking quickly, overcoming the obscure embarrassment which usually paralyses me, when it is a question of holding the attention of an audience. I let my conviction burst forth. I poured out the arguments I had collected in an imperious flood. By expressing them I discovered in them fresh truth and amplitude. Far from becoming involved and detracting from each other, they grouped themselves into harmonious chains.
I extolled the morale of the troops; that morale at which we all expressed ourselves surprised, and Fortin most of all. Surprised? Why not say exalted? Behind us the nation gave proof of its indomitable spirit. I laid stress upon the superiority of our generals; the young blood introduced in high places, the incapables placed on the retired list; and the prodigious problem represented in a retreat of those dimensions when the whole line must keep in touch, and never cease for an instant to harass the enemy.
I suddenly shifted my ground, and reverted to the international situation which I ventured to depict in broad and summary terms. The Triple Alliance disintegrated. Austria beaten and occupied in decimating her Tchek troops. Italy, non-committal, had perhaps already made up her mind to intervene, but on our side to save her children in the Trentino, and in Trieste; the Balkans, waiting silently in the darkness, like a bird of prey, for the death rattle of the first to be conquered, to claim a share of the carcass. Turkey keeping at a respectful distance. On our side the Russian giant only inaugurating the effort which he was capable of increasing for months and years. The English contributing their incontestable mastery of the seas, the omnipotence of their gold, the land forces fed by their insular and colonial reservoirs. Belgium and Serbia, little nations with unquenchable spirits—yonder on the other surface of the globe, the Land of the Rising Sun throwing its weight into the balance. The world, in fact, in coalition against the insolent race which aimed at hegemony without in any way justifying it.
At first they had listened to me with a smile as if it were an excellent joke. Little by little the incredulous curl to their lips died away. Fortin repeatedly punctuated my remarks with "Exactly, exactly!"
A last allusion on Laraque's part to my reputation for "having people on" fell flat.
I gaily ventured on new developments. I lost sight of myself. I became really inspired. It intoxicated me to attain to such unlooked-for ardour. I do not remember quite what I said. I know that my comrades, with half-opened lips and eyes fixed on mine, hung on my words, and that for the first time in my life I endured all these gazes bent on me without false shame.
Our side was that of Justice, of international fidelity, and respect for treaties, of Morality, written or unwritten. I was not afraid of bringing up these popular commonplaces, and I clearly dissociated our cause, even from that of the Allies. We were the only nation with completely unsullied hands, and peace-loving hearts. We were the only ones who, drawn into the struggle against our will, in bearing the heaviest burden, were fighting for our very existence. I asked them to think what the French mind meant to the world, what would be missing in the progress of humanity in the future if we let ourselves be overcome. We were not only defending our immediate interests, but a certain smiling Reason, a certain completed and definite genius whose secret to-day we alone possessed. It was a decisive conflict. Fortin was right about that. If we were conquered again this time, we should always be. It would mean that our name would be scratched off the list of leading nations, our colonies sacrificed, three or four provinces torn from our Mother-country, who in future would fall a prey, every ten years, to the appetites of the conqueror.
The end of France was what the aggressors wanted. To extinguish this blazing hearth of liberty and light, to smother this ringing voice continually calling the nations to the realisation of themselves, and to those in power to respect the down-trodden.
Ah, my friends, what an hour it was to strain our faculties, to prove ourselves worthy of our humbler brothers who were showing such self-sacrifice and instinctive heroism! We others ought to be strengthened by our education. I dared to plead the memories of the soil which bore us. I evoked the rolling uplands of Champagne where we had lingered yesterday and where we might return again, summoned by the melancholy accents of the guns. How many battles had been fought and won there by men of our blood! They were the Catalonian fields, where, at the dawn of our history, the hordes of barbarians already issuing from Germany had spent themselves against the vigour of the Gauls, the allies of Aetius. And was it not just a few miles away, on the hills and in the valleys which to-morrow's prodigious engagement would perhaps gain for the enemy, that the astonishing episodes in the French campaign had been enacted, a hundred years ago! Champaubert, Sesanne, Montmirail, and again Meaux and Moret. It was there that our fathers, children of sixteen, the last class eligible for mobilisation, had held out for weeks, flying from one valley to another, inflicting defeat after defeat on an enemy five times more numerous, on the European coalition! And we, after a long peace, well-taught, well-led, animated with the breath of civism—should we not find a way to hurl back over our frontiers the enemy whom Napoleon had trodden under his heel?