Long ago from the deserts of Palestine a voice was lifted among the Roman multitude. It brought back to earth those transcendant archangels whom the children of Cain had banished. The archangels are named Goodness and Justice. I will not pursue the story of their martyrdom here on earth. Like harmless little animals at bay before ferocious beasts, they have suffered; their hearts and bodies have bled; and the wicked boast that they have driven them from the world.
But a nation was found to receive these two trembling angels in her maternal hands. She revived them in her bosom; from their lovely touch she got the courage to suffer, and as the first Christians threw themselves to the torture rather than deny the Divine Master, so France for more than a century, has been willing to die in behalf of her love for Liberty and Justice.
In the month of August, 1914, with sword on high and bosom bare, she defied anew the perpetrators of cruelty. Her people and her ministers were not mistaken. Whether unbelievers or religious men, their gospel and their justification are those of the Galilean. It is indeed from His divine parables, and not from the decrees of the old Germanic god, that France has gathered the flower which is planted in her crest. White and incorruptible, this flower has closed its petals during the weeks through which we are living; but the German foulness shall not soil it, the shells shall not cut its stem, and the dawn is not distant when its opened petals will shed over the world a sweet fragrance.
How beautiful France seems to me, and how much in love with her I feel to-night! Frenchmen, realize your good fortune to have been nourished by so charming a mother! In the womb of antiquity were formed two priceless treasures: Greek beauty and Christian virtue. It is our France who has saved them from death. No people, no territory, has been willing to receive these heritages. Will all our blood suffice to pay for this unhoped for splendor? Take care lest we weaken. Under my eyes in the moonlight there glide past ancient lands and islands, my memories cross the centuries, rest like arches upon the supports of these legends, and form a bridge which leads far away to Jerusalem and to Athens.
Jerusalem and Athens! The barbarous Turks and the ignorant Romans have stripped the gilt from their glory. The sons of these two cities did not know how to defend their patrimony, and two thousand years of servitude, ruin and death, have delivered their helpless peoples over to the pity of history. Let us take good care not to imitate them. Ignorant and barbarian, the Germanic hordes menace us with their claws. The gracious mind and exquisite body of France are receiving the same affront as did her ancient sisters. But in this case the same catastrophe will not follow the same weakness.
Let us forget the frivolous thought and discourse of our former days. Beauty must be strong, and one can only smile when the fist is heavy. Let us suffer; let us know how to wait. From her dying sons France demands the right to shine resplendent. How much shall we not love her at the moment when, holding her spear, she undoes her iron tunic, and offering to the world a countenance flushed with feeling and eyes profound with the agony of battle, says in a voice broken with emotion and a smile brimming with pride: “I have consented to shed blood! Let me henceforth sow flowers!”
15 December, after the bombardment of
British harbors by German cruisers.
We too could acquire this glory of slaughtering women and children. Who prevents us in the Adriatic? To-morrow, if the French sailors were bandits, the world would learn that their guns had bombarded unfortified towns and the Dalmatian Islands, and, protected by our cruisers’ strength, had eluded the vigilance of Austria.
Where on earth did the Germans learn warfare! Does naval honor no longer exist among them? I cannot believe it. There are tasks which a sailor only accomplishes with rage in his heart, and those who fired at Yarmouth, Grimsby and Scarborough would ask pardon of God for the crime which their Emperor commanded. Only this man could have persuaded sailors to destroy peaceful towns. The sound of those shells he sent against a defenseless coast will whistle through history round his accursed name.
You, commandant of the Emden, Admiral of the cruisers sunk in the Falklands, captain of the armed liners, I can imagine you shuddering in disgust. Far away from the orders of your master, you caused a spotless standard to be feared on remote seas. Your conscience followed nobly the rules of war. You conquered. You have been conquered. In the great naval fraternity, no one thinks of uttering your names without taking off his hat to you. Before your defeat I would have pressed your brave hands, happy to touch fingers which no crime had sullied. But these cruisers of the North Sea, reptiles which smell of putrefaction—let them be tracked like stinking beasts—let them be executed like apaches of the sea, let them even be assassinated, and all sailors of the world, neutrals as well as belligerents, will think their punishment too good for their crime.