Stéphane Lauzanne

“ Know that if for months we have held our heads below the level of the muddy trench and offered our breasts to death, it is that you may be freed from the wild beasts that have burst forth from the German forests. For your sakes our homes are not in ruins and our towns are not vassals to the enemy. It is all for you, so that when we shall return you need not throw your arms around conquered necks. Our country, women of France, is made up of our homes, our churches, and our fields, and of your beloved faces. ”

“ On the second, of April, 1917, in his immortal declaration of war, he formally declared that "no autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within a partnership of nations or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and render account to no one, would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only a free people can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own." ”

“ Canton-Baccara, "the soldier who is complaining or the peasant who is weeping for the farm that has been pillaged, a woman's smile ought to console and her voice ought, under all circumstances, to be ready to recall to him that above these sufferings and troubles, above the paltry struggles of interest and ambition, there is, above all this, France, our France, which matters before all else." ”

“ Five other words sufficed to explain everything:
"Civilians fired on our troops."
Not one village in flames, not one desecrated monument, not one organized killing, not one tortured city that does not fall under the scope of one or the other of those justifications, "War is war," or "Civilians fired on our troops."
Doctors, savants, officers, Bavarians, Saxons, and Prussians have adopted the double excuse with a marvelous unity: they advance it in a certain tone of voice. It is firmly embedded in what is left of their consciences as firmly as the iron cross is riveted on their necks. ”

“ The Germans have been entrenched on the left side of the Butte, the French on the right. And day and night for four years there has been an incessant battle over its summit of grenades, bombs and shells; a terrible hand-to-hand fight in which neither one of the contestants yields an inch of ground. A brook of blood runs its interrupted course on each slope. On the south slope it is red with German blood; with French blood on the north. ”

“ Let us ask the Virgin, I said to her, to create young women in France so brave, so strong, and so devoted that they will gladly and proudly consent to marry the poor, injured men and to be not only their hearts but the limbs which will aid them to make their daily bread; leaving to the men the privilege of loving them, of respecting their presences and of guiding their lives. ”

“ It is not only France who has sworn to herself to recover Alsace-Lorraine—it is all the Allies who have sworn to France that she should recover it.
"We mean to stand by the French democracy to the death," solemnly declared Mr. Lloyd-George on the 5th of January, 1918, "in the demand they make for a reconsideration of the great wrong of 1871, when, without any regard to the wishes of the population, two French provinces were torn from the side of France and incorporated in the German Empire." ”

“ Tell her that when a man is in an attack he can not write to those he loves. He must be content with thinking of them. And if time passes and she hears nothing from me, let her live in hope. Help her. And if you learn at last that I have fallen on the field of honor, let the words come from your heart that will console her, my dear Jeanne.
This morning I attended mass and communion with faith. It was held some yards away from the trenches. If I am to die, I shall die a Christian and a Frenchman.
I believe in God, in France and in Victory. I believe in beauty and youth and life. ”

“ The old walls which, in times of peace, separated parties and men, have crumbled into dust at the same time when the German shells crumbled [Pg 93] into dust the little village churches. An infinite cathedral, a cathedral that is invisible and great has risen on high. It is the cathedral of the faith of France, in which all faiths commune in the same hope—a cathedral which time and suffering and death itself shall not destroy. ”

“ Slit the throats of your millions of enemies. Raise a monument of their smoking corpses that will rise to the heavens!
Germany, arm yourself with brazen armor and pierce with your bayonet the heart of every enemy. Take no prisoners! Strike them dumb. Transform into deserts the lands that lie near you!
Hate, Germany! Victory will come from your anger. Shatter their skulls with blows from your [Pg 42] ax and the butt of your musket. These brigands are timid beasts.... They are not men.... May your fist perform the judgment of God! ”

“ Just as France will not accept peace without restitution, she will not accept peace without reparation.
Germany can never make reparation for all the ruin, all the destruction, all the sacrilege she has wrought. There can be no reparation for the Cathedral of Rheims, for the Hotel de Ville at Arras, for the deaths of thousands of innocent beings, for the slaughter of women and children. ”

“ The dreadfulness of the sights, the stench in the air, the tragic presence of death has not gripped their souls, their courage or their nerves. They are no less confident and merry than the others and, in the evening, when the setting sun adds the purple of its shadows to the red of all the blood that has been shed on the Butte, they sing from the depths of their charnel house sweet love songs.... ”

“ They lie there, an indistinguishable mass on the ground, and the men are unlucky who watch by night in the listening posts or the trenches. They think they are stumbling against a stone, and it is a skull their feet are touching; they think they are picking up the branch of a tree, and they have hold of the arm of a corpse.
However, in the shadow of this human charnel house, at the edge of this bloody sewer, some little French soldiers come and go, eat and sleep for months at a time. ”

“ The horrible hope Germany had formed of emptying France of her strength, of leaving her, fighting for breath and conquered, beaten to the earth for centuries to come, has not been realized. France always stands upright, her arm is still strong, her muscles vigorous and her blood rich. ”

“ I regret nothing and I am as happy as a king. I am glad to pay my debt that my country may be free. Tell my friends that I go on to victory with a smile on my lips, happier than the stoics and the martyrs of all time. For a moment we are beyond the France that is eternal. ”

“ I have seen [he writes] our women at the front and behind the lines, in the hospitals, the railway stations, the automobile service, the canteens, the factories, in relief work and in charity work. I have met nurses, unmoved under a bombardment. I have tested the spirit of fellowship which unites them, including as it does the names of the most aristocratic French families and the most modest citizens. There is no false pride among those in high places nor envy among those lower in the social scale. ”

“ If the society of nations had existed in 1914 and if Germany had violated its laws, the entire world would have taken military action against Germany by means of war, economic action by means of blockade and of depriving her of the necessities of life. The entire world would have been at war with her and her allies. And in order that the league of nations might continue to exist, in order that the rule of justice, scarcely outlined, could have continued to exist, the victory of the entente powers would have been as necessary as it is today. ”

“ But one religion has united and solidified them all—the religion of their country, the religion of Liberty, the religion of civilization. All speak the same prayer, all have the same faith in their hearts, all fall martyrs in the same cause. ”

“ And Paris was doubtless the first city in France to comprehend the significance of this war, which is a war of civilization against barbarism, a sacred war in which the forces of humanity raise a rampart of human breasts against the violent reappearance of primitive savagery. ”

“ The French are not only defending their soil, their homes, the tombs of their ancestors, their sacred memories, their ideal works of art and faith and all the graceful, just, and beautiful things their genius has lavished forth: they are defending, too, the respect of treaties, the independence of Europe, and human freedom. ”

“ The Union des Femmes de France has won 39 Croix de Guerre. And last comes the glorious list of martyrs of the societies: 110 nurses have died in the devoted performance of their duties.
The heroism of these valiant women, many of whom remained in the occupied territories, will be the eternal pride of France. Madame Perouse, President of the Union des Femmes de France wrote to M. Louis Barthou telling him the number of women who had risked their liberty, their life, their honor even, to protect in the face of the ferocious enemy the sacred rights of the French wounded. ”

“ What international tribunal's verdict could have the force of this avowal from the lips of the guilty man? However, the world has not moved, the world has not trembled, the world is not now up in arms. And who would guarantee that another time when the case will be perhaps less flagrant, the crime more obscure, the aggressor less cynical, the world will tremble and rise in arms? ”

“ In that tormented, feverish France where the ardor of the Revolution still boils, there were, before the war, different parties, cliques, groups and churches. The war has leveled, united and bound them all together. ”

“ To destroy the lie that France is bled white, we must let figures, facts, statistics and definite proofs speak. The public shall judge for itself....
A nation that is worn out and bled white has no army to defend itself. France not only still has an army, but she has an army that is numerically and materially stronger than it was at the war's beginning. In 1914, at the Marne, France had an army of 1,500,000 men; today, after four [Pg 97] years of war, France has on her battle front, in the war zone, an army of 2,750,000 men. ”

“ When I think of my own men, when I think of all the men floundering and fighting in this mud, I can find no other means of [Pg 61] expression than the words that have already served the Commander in Chief of the French Army, General Pétain, on the evening of his great victory at the Chemin des Dames. In receiving the American newspapermen, he said to them:
"Do not speak of us, the generals and the officers. Speak only of the men. We have done nothing; the men have done everything. Our men are wonderful; we, their leaders, can only kneel at their feet." ”

“ We do not demand that the economic war shall continue after the actual warfare is at an end, but we can demand that the Allies shall not lay aside their economic arms when the Germans shall have laid aside their fighting arms. In other words, we can demand that the Allies do not give Germany wool, copper and money if they know that this wool, money and copper are to feed the war machine. This war machine cost the German Empire nearly four hundred millions of dollars according to the budget of 1914. ”

“ The two slopes of the Butte have been so raked by firing that they have not a single tree, bush, or blades of grass on them; they stand out sinister [Pg 57] and frightful in their nakedness, seeming to cry out to the men of the plain:
"See, all of you, the scourge of God has passed over this place."
They are dented, furrowed and blown into crevasses by the explosions of mines; they are sown over with the enormous funnels in which the fighters take shelter; they are covered with an incessant smoke from the projectiles that plow them up. ”

“ The peasants and the workingmen who have come out from their care will have learned that luxury does not exclude goodness, that beauty is not always a sterile gift, that youth is not altogether callow, that a woman can be pretty and generous, delicate and courageous, rich and sympathetic, and that the mothers whose children are dead excel in lavishing the care of their hands and the tenderness of their hearts on the wounded children who are suffering far from their mothers. ”

“ This is the first of all the reasons why it is necessary now to fight, and to fight to the death; because these men will understand the abominable nature of "frightfulness" only when they see that "frightfulness" does not pay; only when they see the uselessness of unchaining horror and of beginning another war. Let an assassin go at liberty and he will commence his killing all over again ”