'The cannon makes the pavement of the big city ring with a dull sound.... Make way for the cannon, and hats off! It is going to clear a passage for civilisation and humanity.
'These Prussians, too, have said that you were drawing back! France drawing back; 'tis like the sun standing still. And who is this new Joshua who shall make the sun of France stand still! Moltke, perhaps!'
And the 'leader' (what an abuse of the word) winds up with a prayer 'to the God who has said that they who take the sword shall perish by the sword, and who ordains that liberty's furrows should be blood-watered, since no otherwise can the germ of freedom be developed.' Many have been offended during the war with the tone of Emperor William's telegrams; but even the Standard must confess that they are infinitely preferable to the blasphemous hiccoughings of the Figaro.
The strangest part of it, perhaps, is the monstrous lying; Austria (we are told) is thirsting for revenge:—'The Austrian aristocracy is wild about the insolence of these Brandenburg margraves, these parvenu, princes' (the appropriateness of the epithet from a Bonaparte of a Hohenzöllern deserves remark).... 'Frankfort has shut all its shops, and its trade won't recover the shock for many years.... Prussia has withdrawn all the able-bodied men out of Hanover for fear of an outbreak.' The truth being that, except a portion of the highest class, and a very few of the lowest, the whole Hanoverian population went in heart and soul for German unity.
This incredible ignorance of other nations is matched by an equal ignorance of the French army and its belongings:—'War can bring us no annoying surprises, for we have the most marvellous body of éclaireurs in Europe,' is an assertion repeated over and over again towards the end of last July, at a time when the Uhlans were already beginning to show what they were capable of, and when French officers were finding out that they had nothing provided in the way of maps, except out-of-date plans of East Prussian fortresses. The absurd vanity which could write in this way when the Prussians were showing that they knew every inch of French soil, is only equalled by the craven way in which Figaro's readers gave in whenever Prussian audacity, backed by Prussian knowledge of their country, enabled Uhlans or regulars to make a dash. The Cornhill tale, 'How the Prussians took Mousseux-les-Caves' (under the guidance of a sub-lieutenant who had been clerk to a wine merchant there), is a story which has been acted out to the letter, not once but fifty times, to the confusion of those who were boasting all the while about their 'admirable corps d'éclaireurs.' The boasting was about as well-grounded as that which, a fortnight later, declared that of Prince Frederick Charles's army nothing was left but the remnants, and that the whole corps of Bismark's white cuirassiers had been cut off to a man.
The companion piece to all this senseless exaggeration, encouraged, we must remember, and endorsed by the highest authority—first by the Emperor himself and then by Count Palikao—is Victor Hugo's dithyramb aforesaid. It appeared in the Electeur Libre of 3rd October, and surpasses anything which Walt Whitman, in his wildest moments, ever dreamt of:—
'We are but one Frenchman, but one Parisian, but one single heart; there is but one citizen left, 'tis you, 'tis I, 'tis all of us. Where the heart is, there will be our breasts to make a barrier.
'Resistance to-day, deliverance to-morrow: that sums up everything. We are no more flesh, but stone. I don't know my own name any more, I am called, "Country, forward on the foe!" We are called, "France, Paris, stand like a wall."...
'The Pantheon wonders what it can do to make room beneath its dome for all this people who have a right to lie there.... Each time the shells fall, and the grape-shot roars, what see we in our streets? women tripping by with a smile. O Paris, thou hast crowned the statue of Strasburg with flowers; history will crown thee with stars!'