Now It Can Be Told

were the equals of the fighting-men in valor. They fought with despair, through many black months, and did not yield. They did the work of their men in the fields, and knew that many of them⁠—the sons or brothers or lovers or husbands⁠—would never return for the harvest-time, but did not cry to have them back until the enemy should be thrust out of France. Behind the German line, under German rule, the French people, prisoners in their own land, suffered most in spirit, but were proud and patient in endurance.

“Why don’t your people give in?” asked a German officer of a woman in Nesle. “France is bleeding to death.”

“We shall go on for two years, or three years, or four, or five, and in the end we shall smash you,” said the woman who told me this.

The German officer stared at her and said, “You people are wonderful!”

Yes, they were wonderful, the French, and their hatred of the Germans, their desire for vengeance, complete and terrible, at all cost of life, even though France should bleed to death and die after victory, is to be understood in the heights and depths of its hatred and in the passion of its love for France and liberty. When I think of France I am tempted to see no greater thing than such patriotism as that to justify the gospel of hate against such an enemy, to uphold vengeance as a sweet virtue. Yet if I did so I should deny the truth that has been revealed to many men and women by the agony of the war⁠—that if civilization may continue patriotism is “not enough,” that international hatred will produce other wars worse than this, in which civilization will be submerged, and that vengeance, even for dreadful crimes, cannot be taken of a nation without punishing the innocent more than the guilty, so that out of its cruelty and injustice new fires of hatred are lighted, the demand for vengeance passes to the other side, and the devil finds another vicious circle in which to trap the souls of men and “catch ’em all alive O!”

To deny that would also be a denial of the faith with which millions of young Frenchmen rushed to the colors in the first days of the war. It was they who said, “This is a war to end war.” They told me so. It was they who said: “German militarism must be killed so that all militarism shall be abolished. This is a war for liberty.” So soldiers of France spoke to me on a night when Paris was mobilized and the tragedy began. It is a Frenchman⁠—Henri Barbusse⁠—who, in spite of the German invasion, the outrages against his people, the agony of France, has the courage to say that all peoples in Europe were involved in the guilt of that war because of their adherence to that old barbaric creed of brute force and the superstitious servitude of their souls to symbols of national pride based upon military tradition. He even denounces the salute to the flag, instinctive and sacred in the heart of every Frenchman, as a fetish worship in which the narrow bigotry of national arrogance is raised above the rights of the common masses of men. He draws no distinction between a war of defense and a war of aggression, because attack is the best means of defense, and all peoples who go to war dupe themselves into the belief that they do so in defense of their liberties, and rights, and power, and property. Germany attacked France first because she was ready first and sure of her strength. France would have attacked Germany first to get back Alsace-Lorraine, to wipe out 1870, if she also had been ready and sure of her strength. The political philosophy on both sides of the Rhine was the same. It was based on military power and rivalry of secret alliances and imperial ambitions. The large-hearted internationalism of Jean Jaurès, who with all his limitations was a great Frenchman, patriot, and idealist, had failed among his own people and in Germany, and the assassin’s bullet was his reward for the adventure of his soul to lift civilization above the level of the old jungle law and to save France from the massacre which happened.

In war France was wonderful, most heroic in sacrifice, most splendid in valor. In her dictated peace, which was ours also, her leaders were betrayed by the very evil which millions of young Frenchmen had gone out to kill at the sacrifice of their own lives. Militarism was exalted in France above the ruins of German militarism. It was a peace of vengeance which punished the innocent more than the guilty, the babe at the breast more than the Junker in his Schloss, the poor working-woman more than the war lord, the peasant who had been driven to the shambles more than Sixt von Arnim or Rupprecht of Bavaria, or Ludendorff, or Hindenburg. It is a peace that can only be maintained by the power of artillery and by the conscription of every French boy who shall be trained for the next “war of defense” (twenty years hence, thirty years hence), when Germany is strong again⁠—stronger than France because of her population, stronger then, enormously, than France, in relative numbers of able-bodied men than in August, 1914. So if that philosophy continue⁠—and I do not think it will⁠—the old fear will be reestablished, the old burdens of armament will be piled up anew, the people of France will be weighed down as before under a military regime stifling their liberty of thought and action, wasting the best years of their boyhood in barracks, seeking protective alliances, buying allies at great cost, establishing the old spy system, the old diplomacy, the old squalid ways of international politics, based as before on fear and force. Marshal Foch was a fine soldier. Clemenceau was a strong Minister of War. There was no man great enough