Frank H. Simonds

“ Today is not a day for anger or passion. It is not in panger or in passion that civilized men go forth to deal with wild animals, to abolish the peril which comes from the jungle or out of the darkness. We do not hate Germans and we shall not hate Germans because on this day a year ago American men, women and children were slain willfully, wantonly, to serve a German end, slain without regard to sex or condition, slain in the broad daylight by German naval officers and men whose countrymen hailed the killing as the supreme evidence of German courage, manhood and Kultur. ”

“ Between the two is the black district of the Marne and Nancy battles. It is the district of ruined villages, destroyed farms; it is the region where every hillside—so it will seem to the traveller—is marked by these pathetic crosses. It is a region in which the sense of death and destruction is abroad. Go forty miles north again and draw two more lines, and this is the region not of the death and destruction of yesterday, but of to-day; this is the front, where the graves are still in the making, the region of the Oise to the Meuse, from Noyon to Verdun. ”

“ We have not yet as a nation, or as a people, perceived that the German phenomenon is an attack upon civilization by barbarism, a barbarism which combines the science of the laboratory with the savagery of the jungle, but a barbarism because it denies all those doctrines and principles which have been accepted after long years as the proof of human progress and the glory of mankind's advance. ”

“ For a hundred miles there have been only women and old men, but now there are only soldiers; they fill the streets; they crowd the doorways of the houses. The fields are filled with tents, with horses, with all the impedimenta of an army. The whole countryside is a place of arms. Every branch of French service is about you—Tunisians, Turcos, cavalry, the black, the brown, and the white—the men who yesterday or last week were in the first line, who rest and will return to-morrow or next day to fight again. ”

“ But as we view the thing without passion we must see it without illusion. If the German idea prevails, all that we believe in government, in humanity, in the thing we call civilization, is doomed. If Germany succeeds in this war then it is not again time, as Pitt said after Austerlitz, "To roll up the map of Europe," but it is time to burn our ancient parchments and dismiss our hard won faith. ”

“ He said: "The defense as a form of fighting is stronger than the attack, but in the conduct of war as a whole, the offensive is by far superior to the defensive, especially in modern warfare." He meant, of course, that Germany, to win the war, must defeat her foes in detail, otherwise industrial paralysis might compel surrender while her frontiers were still unforced, since with England against her, the control of the sea would be lost, and with Russia and France standing with England the ultimate advantage of numbers would also be against her. ”

“ Coincidentally there appear along the roadside, in the fields, among the plough furrows, on every side, the crosses that mark the graves of those who died for France—or for Germany. Along the slope you may mark the passage of a charge by these crosses; those who fell were buried as they lay, French and Germans with equal care. Indeed, there is a certain pride visible in all that the French do for their dead foes. ”

“ But German strategy could not impose these conditions upon the Allies, because German resources were not large enough; the statesmen had set a task for the soldier beyond his strength. Napoleon with supreme genius failed at the same task in 1814 in his most splendid campaign. He wrote: "When Napoleon, who so often and so brilliantly had beaten superior numbers with weaker bodies, wanted to enforce victory with an army so much weaker than those of his enemies that even the most famous local victories could no longer change the proportionate numbers, he succumbed, and he was bound to succumb." ”

“ Time and again Americans have been murdered, time and again our government, our people, have had recourse to the ordinary machinery and the ordinary conceptions of civilized life. But each time we have beheld the utter collapse of every appeal based upon reason, justice, common humanity. The Germans who slew our women and our children flung us back the challenge that they and not we possessed the true civilization, and that their civilization, their Kultur, was expressed in their works, which were altogether good and right. ”

“ Nancy is calm with the calmness of all France, but with just a touch of something more than calmness, which forty-six years of living by an open frontier brings. Twenty-one months ago it was the gauge of battle, [142] and half a million men fought for it; a new German drive may approach it at any time. Out toward the old frontier there is still a German gun, hidden in the Forest of Bézange, which has turned one block to ashes and may fire again at any hour. Zeppelins have come and gone, leaving dead women and children behind them, but Nancy goes on with to-day. ”

“ Where the German has gone he has carried physical death, but he has done more, he has carried spiritual death to all that is essential in our own democratic faith, which derives from that of Britain and France.
This war in Europe is going on until the German idea is crushed or conquers. The world cannot now exist half civilized and half German. Only one of two conceptions of life, of humanity, can subsist. ”

“ In the hearts of all the people of this beautiful city there is a single and a simple faith. Nancy turns her face toward the ancient frontier, she looks hopefully out upon the shell-swept Grand Couronné and beyond to the Promised Land. And the people say to you, if you ask them about war and about peace, as one of them said to me: "Peace will come, but not until we have our ancient frontier, not until we have Metz and Strassburg. ”

“ We still have much to learn, but the primary truth is coming home to many day by day. This German phenomenon which fills the world is a new thing and an old thing; it is new in our generation, it is new in recent centuries; but it is as old as that other barbarism which, descending upton the Roman civilization, beat upon it and spread destruction until it was conquered and tamed amidst the ruins and desert it had created. ”

“ Soldiers have their day; Joffre, Castelnau, Foch, all retain much of the affection and admiration they have deserved, but at the moment it is the man who has held Verdun that France thinks of, and there was the promise for us that at Souilly we should see the man whose fame had filled the world in the recent great and terrible weeks. Upward and downward over the hills, through more ruined villages, more hospitals, more camps, our march took us until after a short hour we came to Souilly, general headquarters of the Army of Verdun, of Pétain, the centre of the world for the moment. ”

“ But so far as human nature is able to tell, she can only rely on being successful if she is absolutely determined to break the superiority of her enemies by a victory over one or the other of them before their total strength can come into action."
In other words, the German problem was to crush France before Russia could come up, or Russia before both France and England had their full strength in the field. Conversely, France, Russia and England were bound to strive to escape defeat in detail, until all three were in full strength. ”

“ To start for the battlefield from a busy, peaceful city, to run for miles through suburbs as quiet and lacking in martial aspect as the regions beyond the Harlem, at home, was a thing that seemed almost unreal; but only for a brief moment, for war has come very near to Paris, and one may not travel far in Eastern France without seeing its signs. ”

“ In France the people will show you the atrocities of Germany commited not upon human beings, but upon the inanimate things, the destruction of the village church and the Rheims Cathedral, of the little thing of beauty quite as well as the larger and more famous thing, with far more emphasis than they will recount the horrors suffered by women and children. In the assault upon things beautiful because they are beautiful, an assault provoked neither by lust nor by passion, they recovnise the revelation of that which is essential barbarism. ”

“ Unmistakably, too, you feel that this is the business of war; you are in a factory, a machine shop; if the product is death and destruction, it is no less a matter of machinery, not of romance, of glamour. ”

“ On the anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania it is natural and fitting that Americans should review all that has happened since a wanton murder first brought to this side of the Atlantic a nascent realization of the issue that was being decided on a world battlefield.
There will be no anger and no passion in American minds. We have never asked, never desired, that the slaughter should be avenged. ”

“ All that there is in the German idea was expressed in the Lusitania Massacre, it was expressed in the killing of women and children, innocent of all offense, entitled to all protection as helpless, unoffending, as the children of a race not at war, at least entitled to immunity which hitherto was reckoned the right of women and children, neutral or belligerent.
The war that is being fought in Europe is a war for civilization. The battle of Great Britain, of France, of Russia, is our battle. ”

“ And the French soldier of this war has not been the man of charge or of dash—not that he has not charged as well as ever in his history, a little more bravely, perhaps, for machine guns are new and something worse than other wars have had. What the French soldier has done has been to stand, to hold, to die not in the onrush but on the spot. ”

“ Will the French not give up from sheer exhaustion of strength?" I do not think so, now that I have seen the faces of these hundreds of men as they marched to the trenches beyond Verdun. France may bleed to death, but I do not think that while there are men there [39] will be an end of the sacrifice. No pen or voice can express the horror that these men, that all Frenchmen, have of this war, of all war, the weariness. They hate it; you cannot mistake this; but France marches to the frontier in the spirit that men manned the walls against the barbarians in the other days; there is no other way ”

“ It is this writing that we should study on this anniversary; it is this fact that we should grap today, not in anger, not in any spirit that clamors for vengeance, but as the citizens of a nation which has inherited noble ideals and gallant traditions, which has inherited liberty and light from those who died to serve them, and now stands face to face with that which seeks to extinguish both throughout the world. ”

“ Before I visited Verdun I had seen many cities and towns which had been wholly or partially destroyed, either by shell fire or by the German soldiers in their great invasion before the Marne. One shelled town is much like another, and there is no thrill quite like that you experience when you see the first. ”

“ Doubtless on occasion we shall have many more descriptions of the destruction of this town, descriptions meant to impress Americans or encourage Germans. The material for such fires is not exhausted. The cathedral on the top of the hill is hardly shell-marked at all, and it will make a famous display when it [60] is fired as was Rheims, as were the churches of Champagne and Artois. But there is something novel in the thought of a city burned, not to make a Roman or even German holiday, but burned to make the world believe that the Battle of Verdun had been a German victory. ”