TMANN

_Saturday, August 29, 1914._[4]

I am not, Gerhart Hauptmann, one of those Frenchmen who regard Germany
as a nation of barbarians. I know the intellectual and moral greatness
of your mighty race. I know all that I owe to the thinkers of old
Germany; and even now, at this hour, I recall the example and the words
of _our_ Goethe--for he belongs to the whole of humanity--repudiating
all national hatreds and preserving the calmness of his soul on those
heights "_where we feel the happiness and the misfortunes of other
peoples as our own_." I myself have labored all my life to bring
together the minds of our two nations; and the atrocities of this
impious war in which, to the ruin of European civilization, they are
involved, will never lead me to soil my spirit with hatred.

Whatever pain, then, your Germany may give me, whatever reasons I may
have to stigmatize as criminal German policy and the means it employs, I
do not attach responsibility for it to the people which is burdened with
it and is used as its blind instrument. It is not that I regard, as you
do, war as a fatality. A Frenchman does not believe in fatality.
Fatality is the excuse of souls without a will. War springs from the
weakness and stupidity of nations. One cannot feel resentment against
them for it; one can only pity them. I do not reproach you with our
miseries; for yours will be no less. If France is ruined, Germany will
be ruined too. I did not even raise my voice when I saw your armies
violating the neutrality of noble Belgium. This flagrant breach of
honor, which incurs the contempt of every upright conscience, is quite
in the political tradition of your Prussian kings; it did not surprise
me.

But when I see the fury with which you are treating that magnanimous
nation whose only crime has been to defend its independence and the
cause of justice to the last, as you Germans yourselves did in 1813 ...
that is too much! The world is revolted by it. Keep these savageries for
us Frenchmen, your true enemies! But to wreak them against your
victims, against this small, unhappy, innocent Belgian people ... how
shameful is this!

And not content to fling yourselves on living Belgium, you wage war on
the dead, on the glories of past ages. You bombard Malines, you burn
Rubens, and Louvain is now no more than a heap of ashes--Louvain with
its treasures of art and of science, the sacred town! What are you,
then, Hauptmann, and by what name do you