re already girdling
Paris, that flabby Cyclops, Gambetta, was to mouth his monstrous
platitudes, and brood over the battle-smoke, a nightmare of
pomposity and fanfaronade--in a balloon. All France was bowed
down in shame at the sight of the grotesque convoy, who were
proclaiming her destiny among nations, and their destiny to lead
her to victory and "la gloire." A scorched, blood-soaked land, a
pall of smoke through which brave men bared their breasts to the
blast from the Rhine, and died uncomplainingly, willingly,
cheerfully, for the mother-land--was it not pitiful?

The sublime martyrdom of the men who marched, who shall write it?
And who shall write of those others--Bazaine, Napoleon, Thiers,
Gambetta, Favre, Ollivier?

If Bazaine died, cursed by a nation, his martyrdom, for martyrdom
it was, was no greater than that of the humblest French peasant,
who, dying, knew at last that he died, not for France, but
because the men who sent him were worse than criminal--they were
imbecile.

The men who marched were sublime; they were the incarnation of
embattled France; the starving people of Metz, of Strassbourg, of
Paris, were sublime. But there was nothing sublime about Monsieur
Adolphe Thiers, nothing heroic about Hugo, nothing respectable
about Gambetta. The marshal with the fat neck and Spanish
affiliations, the poor confused, inert, over-fed marshal caged in
Metz by the Red Prince, harassed, bewildered, stunned by the
clashing of politics and military strategy, which his meagre
brain was unable to reconcile or separate--this unfortunate
incapable was deserving of pity, perhaps of contempt. His cup
was to be bitterer than that--it was to be drained, too, with the
shouts of "Traitor" stunning his fleshy ears.

He was no traitor. Cannot France understand that this single word
"traitor" has brought her to contempt in the eyes of the world?
There are two words that mar every glorious, sublime page of the
terrible history of 1870-71, and these two words are "treason"
and "revenge." Let the nation face the truth, let the people
write "incapacity" for "treason," and "honour" for "revenge," and
then the abused term "la gloire" will be justified in the eyes of
men.

As for Thiers, let men judge him from his three revolutions, let
the unknown dead in the ditches beyond the enceinte judge him,
let the spectres of the murdered from Pere Lachaise to the
bullet-pitted terrace of the Luxembourg judge this meddler, this
potte