Is answered only by the gallant few.
Come, then, betimes, and on her altar lay
Your sacrifice to-day!
O. S.
UNWRITTEN LETTERS TO THE KAISER.
No. VII.
(From the President of the French Republic.)
Bordeaux.
Sire,—You will pardon me, I know, if for a moment I break in upon the serious occupations and meditations in which your time must be spent. I like to picture you to myself in the midst of your Staff, working out for them and your armies great problems of strategy and devising those movements which, so far, have overwhelmed not your foes so much as the minds of your fellow-countrymen. You too, Sire, sanguine and impetuous as is your nature, are no doubt beginning to realise that a great nation—let us say France, for example—is not to be overcome by mere shouting and the waving of sabres, or by the making of impassioned speeches in which God, having been acclaimed as an ally, is encouraged to perform miracles for the benefit of the Prussian arms. I do not deny that your soldiers are brave and that your armies are well equipped; but our Frenchmen too have guns and bayonets and swords and shells and know how to make use of them, and their portion of courage is no smaller than that of the Prussians, or even of the Bavarians whom you have lately been vaunting. Moreover—and this you had perhaps over-looked—they have something which is deadlier and more enduring than shot and shell and steel—the unconquerable spirit which leaps up in the hearts of men who are gathered to defend their country from invasion and their national existence from destruction.