thousands of young men who must give their blood as the
price of victory. Alsace and Lorraine were only romantic memories,
kept alive by a few idealists and hotheads, who once a year went to
the statue in the Place de la Concorde and deposited wreaths and
made enthusiastic speeches which rang false, and pledged their
allegiance to the lost provinces--"Quand meme!" There was a good
deal of blague in these annual ceremonies, laughed at by Frenchmen
of common sense. Alsace and Lorraine had been Germanized. A
Frenchman would find few people there to speak his own tongue. The
old ties of sentiment had worn very thin, and there was not a party in
France who would have dared to advocate a war with Germany for
the sake of this territory. Such a policy would have been a crime
against France itself, who had abandoned the spirit of vengeance,
and had only one ambition--to pursue its ideals and its business in
peace.

3

There was no wild outbreak of Jingo fever, no demonstrations of
blood-lust against Germany in Paris or any town of France, on that
first day of August, when the people waited for the fateful decision
which, if it were for war, would call every able-bodied man to the
colours and arrest all the activities of a nation's normal life, and
demand a dreadful sacrifice in blood and tears. There was only a
sense of stupefaction which seemed to numb the intelligence of men
so that they could not reason with any show of logic, or speak of this
menace without incoherence, but thrust back the awful possibility with
one word, uttered passionately and repeated a thousand times a day:
"Incroyable!"

This word was dinned in my ears. I caught the sound of it as I walked
along the boulevards. It would come like a refrain at the end of
sentences spoken by little groups of men and women sitting outside
the cafes and reading every issue of those innumerable newspapers
which flung out editions at every hour. It was the answer I had from
men of whom I tried to get a clue to the secret movements of
diplomacy, and an answer to that question of war or peace. "C'est
incroyable!" They found it hard to believe--they would not believe--
that without any provocation from France, without any challenge,
Germany would deliberately, force this war upon the Triple Entente
and make a bloody shambles of European civilization. Beneath this
incredulity, this stupefaction, there was among most of the
Frenchmen whom I personally encountered a secr