then and had suffered the last humiliations which may be inflicted
upon a proud nation. But she had recovered miraculously, and
gradually even her desire for revenge, the passionate hope that one
day she might take vengeance for all those indignities and cruelties,
had cooled down and died. Not even for vengeance was war worth
while. Not even to recover the lost provinces was it worth the lives of
all those thousands of young men who must give their blood as the
price of victory. Alsace and Lorraine were only romantic memories,
kept alive by a few idealists and hotheads, who once a year went to
the statue in the Place de la Concorde and deposited wreaths and
made enthusiastic speeches which rang false, and pledged their
allegiance to the lost provinces--"Quand même!" There was a good
deal of blague in these annual ceremonies, laughed at by Frenchmen
of common sense. Alsace and Lorraine had been Germanized. A
Frenchman would find few people there to speak his own tongue. The
old ties of sentiment had worn very thin, and there was not a party in
France who would have dared to advocate a war with Germany for
the sake of this territory. Such a policy would have been a crime
against France itself, who had abandoned the spirit of vengeance,
and had only one ambition--to pursue its ideals and its business in
peace.


3


There was no wild outbreak of Jingo fever, no demonstrations of
blood-lust against Germany in Paris or any town of France, on that
first day of August, when the people waited for the fateful decision
which, if it were for war, would call every able-bodied man to the