The Duel Between France and Germany by Charles Sumner
page 41 of 83 (49%)
page 41 of 83 (49%)
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own lips. It was France that first in history adopted this method
of war. Long ago, under Louis the Fourteenth, it became a favorite; but it has not escaped the judgment of history. Voltaire, with elegant pen, records that "this art, carried soon among other nations, served only to multiply human calamities, and more than once was dreadful to France, where it was invented." [Footnote: Siecle de Louis XIV., Ch. XIV.: (Euvres, (edit. 1784- 89,) Tom. XX. p. 406.) The bombardment of Luxembourg in 1683 drew from Sismondi, always humane and refined, words applicable to recent events. "Louis the Fourteenth," he says, "had been the first to put in practice this atrocious and newly invented method of bombarding towns,....of attacking, not fortifications, but private houses, not soldiers, but peaceable inhabitants, women and children, and of confounding thousands of private crimes, each one of which would cause horror, in one great public crime, one great disaster, which he regarded as nothing more than one of the catastrophes of war." [Footnote: Histoire des Francis, Tom. XXV. pp. 452-53.] Again is the saying fulfilled, "All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." No lapse of time can avert the inexorable law. Macbeth saw it in his terrible imaginings, when he said,-- "But in those cases We still have judgment here,--that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague the inventor." And what instruction more bloody than the bombardment of a city, |
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