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hatred and preserving his soul serene in those heights "where one feels
the joys and sorrows of all peoples as one's own." It has been the labor
of my life to bring together the minds of our two nations; and the
atrocities of impious war shall never lead me to soil my heart with
hatred.

Whatever reason I may have, therefore, to suffer through the deeds of
your Germany and to judge as criminal the German policy and the German
methods, I do not hold responsible the people who submit thereto and are
reduced to mere blind instruments. This does not mean that I regard war
as a fatality. A Frenchman knows no such word as fatality. Fatality is
the excuse of souls that lack a will.

No. This war is the fruit of the feebleness of peoples and of their
stupidity. One can only pity them; one cannot blame them. I do not
reproach you for our sorrows. Your mourning will not be less than ours.
If France is ruined, so also will be Germany. I did not even raise my
voice when I saw your armies violate the neutrality of noble Belgium.
This forfeit of honor, which compels the contempt of every
right-thinking mind, is too well within the political tradition of
Prussian Kings to have surprised me.

But the fury with which you treated that generous land whose one crime
was to defend, unto despair, its independence and the idea of
justice--that was too much! The world revolts in wrath at this. Reserve
for us your violence--for us French, who are your enemies. But to
trample upon your victims, upon the little Belgian people, unfortunate
and innocent--that is ignominy!

And not content with assaulting the Belgium that lives, you wage war on
the dead, on the glory of past centuries. You bombard Malines, you put
Rubens to flame, Louvain comes from your hands a heap of ashes--Louvain
with its treasures of art and knowledge, the holy city! Who indeed are
you and what name do you conjure us to call you, Hauptmann, you who
reject the title of barbarian?

Are you the children of Goethe or of Attila? Do you wage war against
armies or against the human spirit? Kill men if you must, but respect
man's work. For this is the heritage of the human race. And you, like
us, are its trustees. In making pillage of it as you have done you prove
yourselves unworthy of this great inheritance, unworthy of holding rank
in the small European army which is the garde d'honneur of civilization.

It is not to the sense of the rest of the world that I appeal against