But it is only too well known that if their voices are human and their faces too, more or less, it is not so with their souls. They lack the vital moral senses, loyalty, honour, remorse, and that sentiment especially, which is perhaps noblest of all and yet most elementary, which even animals sometimes possess, the sentiment of pity.
I remember a phrase of Victor Hugo which formerly seemed to me exaggerated and obscure; he said:
"Night, which in a wild beast takes the place of a soul."
To-day, thanks to the revelation of the German soul, I understand the metaphor. What else can there be but impenetrable, rayless night in the soul of their baleful Emperor and in the soul of their heir apparent, his ferret face dwarfed by a black busby with the charming adornment of a death's head? All their lives they have had no other thought than to construct engines for slaughter, to invent explosives and poisons for slaughter, to train soldiers for slaughter. For the sake of their monstrous personal vanity they organised all the barbarism latent in the depths of the German race; they organised (I repeat the word because though it is not good French alas! it is essentially German), they "organised," then, its indigenous ferocity; organised its grotesque megalomania; organised its sheep-like submissiveness and imbecile credulity. And afterwards they did not die of horror at the sight of their own work! Can it be that they still dare to go on living, these creatures of darkness? In the sight of so many tears, so many torments, such vast ossuaries, that infamous pair continue peacefully sleeping, eating, receiving homage, and doubtless they will pose for sculptors and be immortalised in bronze or marble—all this when they ought to be subjected to a refinement of old Chinese tortures. Oh, all this that I say about them is not for the sake of uselessly stirring up the hatred of the world; no, but I believe it to be my duty to do all that in me lies to arrest that perilous forgetfulness which will once again shut its eyes to their crimes. So much do I fear our light-hearted French ways, our simple, confiding disposition. We are quite capable of allowing the tentacles of the great devil-fish gradually to worm their way again into our flesh. Who knows if our country will not soon be swarming again with a vermin of countless spies, crafty parasites, navvies working clandestinely at concrete platforms for German cannon under the very floors of our dwellings. Oh, let us never forget that this predatory race is incurably treacherous, thievish, murderous; that no treaty of peace will ever bind it, and that until it is crushed, until its head has been cut off—its terrible Gorgon head which is Prussian Imperialism—it will always begin again.
When in the streets of our towns we meet those young men who are disabled, mutilated, who walk along slowly in groups, supporting one another, or those young men who are blinded and are led by the hand, and all those women, bowed down, as it were, under their veils of crape, let us reflect:
"This is their work. And the man who spent so long a time preparing all this for us is their Kaiser—and he, if he be not crushed, will think of nothing but how he may begin all over again to-morrow."
And outside railway stations where men are entrained for the front, we may meet some young woman with a little child in her arms, restraining the tears that stand in her brave, sorrowful eyes, who has come to say good-bye to a soldier in field kit. At the sight of her let us say to ourselves:
"This man, whose return is so passionately longed for, the Kaiser's shrapnel doubtless awaits; to-morrow he may be hurled, nameless, among thousands of others, into those charnel-houses in which Germany delights, and which she will ask nothing better than to be allowed to begin filling again."
Especially when we see passing by in their new blue uniforms the "young class," our dearly loved sons, who march away so splendidly with pride and joy in their boyish eyes, with bunches of roses at the ends of their rifles, let us consider well our holy vengeance against the enemy who are lying in wait for them yonder—and against the great Accursed, whose soul is black as night.
From that roofed-over redoubt where we are at present, whose iron flaps we have to raise if we would look out, the mall is still visible with its green grass; the mall, lying there so peaceful in the dim light of evening. The barbarians are no more to be heard; they have stopped talking; they do not move or breathe; and only a sense of uneasy sadness, I had almost said of discouraged sadness, remains, at the thought that they are so near.