DEDICATED
BY PERMISSION
TO
WOODROW WILSON
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
"_Speaking of Prussians--_"
I
I believe it to be my patriotic duty as an American citizen to write
what I am writing, and after it is written to endeavour to give to it as
wide a circulation in the United States as it is possible to find. In
making this statement, though, I am not setting myself up as a teacher
or a preacher; neither am I going upon the assumption that, because I am
a fairly frequent contributor to American magazines, people will be the
readier or should be the readier to read what I have to say.
Aside from a natural desire to do my own little bit, my chief reason is
this: Largely by chance and by accident, I happened to be one of four or
five American newspaper men who witnessed at first hand the German
invasion of Belgium and one of three who, a little later, witnessed
some of the results of the Germanic subjugation of the northern part of
France. I was inside Germany at the time the rush upon Paris was checked
and the retreat from the Marne took place, thereby having opportunity to
take cognisance of the feelings and sentiments and the impulses which
controlled the German populace in a period of victory and in a period of
reversals.
I am in the advantageous position, therefore, of being able to recount
as an eyewitness--and, as I hope, an honest one--something of what war
means in its effects upon the civilian populace of a country caught
unawares and in a measure unprepared; and, more than that, what war
particularly and especially means when it is waged under the direction
of officers trained in the Prussian school.
Having seen these things, I hate war with all my heart. I am sure that I
hate it with a hatred deeper than the hate of you, reader, who never saw
its actual workings and its garnered fruitage. For, you see, I saw the
physical side of it; and, having seen it, I want to tell you that I
have no words with which halfway adequately to describe it for you, so
that you may have in your mind the pictures I have in mine. It is the
most obscene, the most hideous, the most brutal, the most malignant--and
sometimes the most necessary--spectacle, I veritably believe, that ever
the eye of mortal man has rested on since the world began, and I do hate
it.
But if war had to come--war for the preservation of our national honour
and our national integrity; war for the defence of our flag and our
people and our soil; war for the preservation of the principles of
representative government among the nations of the earth--I would rather
that it came now than that it came later. I have a child. I would rather
that child, in her maturity, might be assured of living in a peace
guaranteed by the sacrifices and the devotion of the men and women of
this generation, than that her father should live on in a precarious
peace, bought and paid for with cowardice and national dishonour.