Various

“ War is a bad thing; it is a reversal, sudden and complete, to barbarism. That is what I would get at in this article. One day there is civilization, authentic, complex, triumphant; comes war, and in a moment the entire fabric sinks down into a slime of mud and blood. In a day, in an hour, a cycle of civilization is canceled. What you saw in the morning was suave and ordered life; and the sun sets on howling savagery. In the morning black-coated men lifted their hats to women. Ere nightfall they are slashing them with sabres and burning the houses over their heads. ”

“ THE Emperor, who is absent with the army, has charged me to transmit his best wishes and cordial greetings to the German Reichstag, with whom he is known to be united till death in the stress of danger and in the common concern for the weal of the Fatherland.
Our first thought goes out to the Kaiser and the army and navy—our soldiers who are fighting for the honor and greatness of the empire. Full of pride and unshakable confidence, we look to them and to our Austro-Hungarian comrades in arms, who are firmly united to us, to fight great battles with brilliant bravery. ”

“ Drops of water (or blood) do not more naturally flow into each than did the English hatred of Caesarism blend with the high French hatred of the evil thing; and when the palaces have done fighting, the cottages of Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Black Sea to the Hebrides, will proclaim its destruction.
And you will see it; you will see Caesarism drowned in the very blood it has shed. And the German, mark you, will not be the least bitter of the foes of militarism. He will be indeed a relentless foe.
Reversal to barbarism, say you? A shuddering lapse into savagery? ”

“ My sympathy is not with the Jews as Jews, but as the suppressed and ill-treated.
I am the man who a generation ago wrote: "We love Poland, not in the same way that we love Germany or France or England, but as we love liberty. For what is to love Poland but to love liberty, to feel a deep sympathy with misfortune and to admire courage and combative enthusiasm? Poland is the symbol of all that which the supreme among mankind have loved and for which they have fought." ”

“ War makes men brave and courageous? Rubbish! It fills them with the cruelty of hysteria and the panic of the unknown. I am not talking of battle, which is a different thing. But I say the men who guarded the German frontier—and I dare say every other frontier—in the first stress of war, were wrenched and shaken with veritable hysteria. At St. Ludwig and Constance those husky soldiers in ironmongery, with shaved heads and beards and outstanding ears, fell into sheer savagery, not because they were bad and savage men, but simply because they were hysterical. ”

“ Look at the diminution in the number of unemployed. The unemployed of yesterday are the army of today—their spirit is that of the soldier of yesterday and of today—the one spirit that animates us all.
When this spirit, this moral greatness of the people, when the proved heroism of our troops is called by our enemies militarism, if they call us Huns and barbarians, we can be proud enough and need not worry. This wonderful spirit in the hearts of the German people, this unprecedented unity, must and will be victorious. ”

“ In a time of barbarism those who suffer are always the weak. War is in its essence (as said Nietzsche, the German philosopher of "world power") an attack upon weakness. The weakest suffer most.
I saw children born on cinder heaps, and I saw them die; and the mothers die gasping like she dogs in a smother of flies.
Some day the story of what was done in Alsace will be written and the stories of Visé and Aerschot and Onsmael and Louvain will seem pale and negligible; but not now—five generations to come will whisper them in the Vosges. ”

“ Assuredly a great and a Christian comfort is the thought that not only among our own men, but in any belligerent army whatsoever, all who in good faith submit to the discipline of their leaders in the service of a cause they believe to be righteous are sharers in the eternal reward of the soldier's sacrifice. And how many may there not be among these young men of 20 who, had they survived, might possibly not have had the resolution to live altogether well, and yet in the impulse of patriotism had the resolution to die so well? ”

“ They have not been able to believe, as I for my part cannot believe, that the last outcrop of nationalism in Russian Poland is more than a temporary epidemic.
How could Russian Poles in the long run be unfaithful to the only powers they have been able to appeal to, the only powers which took an interest in them? How can they who are fighting for their liberty after so many years' ill-treatment be willing to seize an opportunity to ill-treat the only people who (to its misfortune) is in their power, the only people who have suffered far more and twenty times as long as they themselves ”

“ Germany shall fight on and continue to sacrifice herself on the altar of civilization and progress and patriotism until she shall have secured a guarantee from all that none henceforth shall disturb—shall dare to disturb—the peace of this, our German land. ”

“ Only from the lips of soldiers or from their pens when they snatch a few moments from the business of war to write to their people at home come such naïvely graphic accounts of trivial but illuminative incidents.
In many an American family is treasured a packet of yellow papers, on which are written, in ink fast fading away, brief and intimate impressions of the civil war by men who waged it. Every war has thus its unknown, unhonored chroniclers, who send to their little home circles narratives that for startling realism no highly paid special correspondent could surpass. ”

“ We may now say, my brethren, without unworthy pride, that our little Belgium has taken a foremost place in the esteem of nations. I am aware that certain onlookers, notably in Italy and in Holland, have asked how it could be necessary to expose this country to so immense a loss of wealth and of life, and whether a verbal manifesto against hostile aggression, or a single cannon shot on the frontier, would not have served the purpose of protest. But assuredly all men of good feeling will be with us in our rejection of these paltry counsels. ”

“ Men long unaccustomed to prayer are turning again to God. Within the army, within the civil world, in public, and within the individual conscience, there is prayer. Nor is that prayer today a word learned by rote, uttered lightly by the lip; it surges from the troubled heart, it takes the form, at the feet of God, of the very sacrifice of life. The being of man is a whole offering to God. This is worship, this is the fulfillment of the primal moral and religious law—the Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and Him only shalt thou serve. ”

“ Von Emmich makes the most instant appeal to an American. Short and stockily built and looking every inch a fighter, he gives you the impression of possessing tremendous, almost Rooseveltian vitality, with a saving sense of humor. Von Emmich is the General with a winning smile. He could have been a successful machine politician if he had emigrated to America instead of remaining in Germany and becoming the most popular General in the German Army, among the men, for he has the rare gift of inspiring his followers with a sense of personal loyalty. His troops idolize him. ”

“ Wengler that the French placed a battery a hundred yards from the cathedral also is interesting. The cathedral stands in a maze of twisting narrow lanes. From no spot within a quarter of a mile of it could you drive a golf ball without smashing a window a hundred feet distant. To place a battery of artillery a hundred yards from the Rheims Cathedral with the intent of firing upon the German position would be like placing a battery in Wall Street with the idea of shelling Germans in the Bronx. Before your shells reached the Bronx you first would have to destroy all of Northern New York. ”

“ Then away across a bend of the valley are more of our trenches, with the German parapets 200 yards away beyond. And over these our shells are bursting, fired by guns on the slope of the hill beneath me; they whistle softly as they skim through the air over my head, and I hear the burst as they land. Further away to the west is one of the enemy's strongholds, and there bigger shells are bursting, throwing up clouds of black smoke and dust. ”

“ Their fields have been devastated and furrowed by the trenches, their animals have been taken away, their savings have been wasted, and all their chattels destroyed. The prosperity of millions has been destroyed and men have been turned into homeless beggars without a morsel of bread.
The flight of these people is beyond description. One cannot fail to realize the stupefying horrors of such a deep and overwhelming national calamity. The strokes of fate have come down upon the people of Poland with a most merciless cruelty. ”

“ But we need not yet retire into the desert and deliver ourselves to be bound hand and foot by civilized Germans. Russia also wields a sword—a charmed sword, blunt in an unrighteous cause, but sharp enough in the defense of right and freedom. And this war is indeed our "Befreiungskrieg." The Slavs must have their chance in the history of the world, and the date of their coming of age will mark a new departure in the growth of civilization. ”

“ Let the patriotism of our army, the heroism of our King, of our beloved Queen in her magnanimity, serve to stimulate us and support us. Let us bemoan ourselves no more. Let us deserve the coming deliverance. Let us hasten it by our virtue even more than by our prayers. Courage, brethren! Suffering passes away; the crown of life for our souls, the crown of glory for our nation, shall not pass! ”

“ Already the seed of national pride and of hatred, widely sown by her, has awakened a magnificent growth. This hatred may spread like wildfire among other nations, and then will resound the voice of those blinded by wrath, the voice of those demanding vengeance, the voice of those repudiating everything great and beautiful among the creations of the German genius to the rejoicing and for the benefit of all mankind. ”

“ The German declaration of war on Russia at once dispersed all doubts and hesitations in the many millions of the population of the Russian Empire. Some may put in the forefront of this war the struggle with the uncivilizing militarism of Prussia. Others may see in it, above all things, a struggle for the national principle and for the inured rights of nationalities—Serbians, Poles, and Belgians. Others, again, see in the war the only means of securing the peaceful future of Russia and her allies from the extravagant pretensions of Germany. ”

“ He is doubtless the only man who does not recognize that fact, as, simple as the simplest of his soldiers, he stands in the trenches and puts new courage, by the serenity of his face, into the hearts of those of whom he requires that they shall not doubt of their country. The foremost duty of every Belgian citizen at this hour is gratitude to the army. ”