VICTORY AND PEACE
Toi qui nous apportas l'épée—
Le glaive de Justice—
Et nous ordonnas de l'acheter
Fût ce an prix de nos tuniques,
Toi qui renversas les tables des marchants
Installés sous Tes portiques,
Donne à nos bras la foi et la rage à nos coeurs
Afin que la Victoire couronne de fleurs
Le front de nos enfants.—
EMILE CAMMAERTS, "Prière Pâques," 1915.
A few still perhaps remain of those who, as under-graduates at the time of the Franco-German War, remember Dean Stanley's first sermons after many years of exclusion from the Oxford University pulpit. Using in one of them his favourite plan of giving life to ancient literature by modern illustrations and conversely making modern tendencies clearer by references to ancient thought, he took the words of the Hebrew prophet, applying them to the troubles and strife of the time. "Who is this that cometh from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah?" What will emerge from the bloodshed of war and the chaos of communal revolution? The answer was given—"It may be, it must be a united Germany; it may be, it must be a regenerate France."
Truly it has been a regenerate France that, with firm resolve and calm courage, has suffered and withstood invasion, far different from the France which in 1870 went to war with light heart, excited and unprepared, anticipating easy victory. War shattered the Empire and the true soul of France was found.
Well might the "Song before Sunrise" again greet the purified France:—
Who is this that rises red with wounds and splendid.
All her breast and brow made beautiful with scars?
May we soon be able to add the conclusion!—
In her eyes the light and fire of long pain ended,
In her lips a song as of the morning stars.
The prophecy in both parts was fulfilled. Germany did indeed become united, united not only by closer political ties between all its divisions, but united in its aims and in its methods, conscious of union and of strength, marvellous in its power of organisation, fitting each member into his special position in the consolidated state, and moulding him for the place he was to occupy; drilled from earliest youth how to act and how to think, his commonest acts done, and very gestures made, according to rule. Yet they, too, had their ideals. I remember in 1871, the year after the Franco-German War, meeting a party of Germans who were unveiling a tablet by the Pasterze Glacier in memory of a comrade fallen in the war—Karl Hoffman, a pioneer of mountaineering in the Glockner district—and hearing their impassioned speeches. The mountains of Austrian Tyrol were to them "die Alpen seines Vaterlandes," and the song with the refrain, "Lieb Vaterland muss grösser sein" echoed from the rocks, "My beloved Fatherland must be greater"; may not this be the expression of a noble patriotism? But it so easily turns to "my country must have more, must take more," and becomes the very watchword of greed. "Deutschland über Alles" might perhaps mean first to the German "My country before everything to me." Corruptio optimi pessima, it easily becomes "Germany over all,"—the country which dominates an inferior world and is thus the condensed motto of supreme insolence. "Insolence breeds the tyrant," and the doom the ancient poet prophesies is the divine ordinance to be fulfilled by the action of man. "Insolence, swollen with vain thought, mounts to the highest place, and is hurled down to the doom decreed."
Insolence seems the nearest equivalent for the Greek word [Greek: hybris], which implies much more. Some