[Illustration: FROM LIÈGE TO AIX-LA-CHAPELLE]
The feature that will stamp Prussian War for ever, and make this group
of campaigns stand out from all others, is the _character_ of its
murder and pillage.
Of all the historical ignorance upon which the foolish Pacifist’s case
is founded, perhaps the worst is the conception that these abominations
are the natural accompaniment of war. They _have_ attached to war when
war was ill organised in type. But the more subject to rule it has
become, the more men have gloried in arms, the more they have believed
the high trade of soldier to be a pride, the more have they eliminated
the pillage of the civilian and the slaughter of the innocent from its
actions. Those things belong to violent passion and to lack of reason.
Modern war and the chivalric tradition scorned them.
The edges of the Germanies have, in the past, been touched by the
chivalric tradition: Prussia never. That noblest inheritance of
Christendom never reached out so far into the wilds. And to Germany,
now wholly Prussianised--which will kill us or which we shall
kill--soldier is no high thing, nor is there any meaning attached to
the word “Glorious.” War is for that State a business: a business only
to be undertaken with profit against what is certainly weaker; to be
undertaken without faith and with a cruelty in proportion to that
weakness. In particular it must be a terror to women, to children, and
to the aged--for these remain unarmed.
This country alone of the original alliance has been spared pillage. It
has not been spared murder. But this country, though the process has
perhaps been more gradual than elsewhere, is very vividly alive to-day
to what would necessarily follow the presence of German soldiery upon
English land.