I am not now in a position to investigate the very damaging information which has been transmitted to me, in the best of faith, concerning the organization and activities of the Great Orient Lodges. Secret and public political organizations have played important parts in the life of peoples and states, ever since history has existed. Some of them have been beneficial: most of them have been destructive, if they had to have secret passwords which shunned the light of day. The most dangerous of these organizations hide under the cloak of some ideal object or other--such as active love of their neighbors, readiness to help the weak, and poor, and so forth--in order that, with such pretexts as a blind, they may work for their real secret ends. It is certainly advisable to study the activities of the Great Orient Lodges, since one cannot adopt a final attitude toward this worldwide organization until it has been thoroughly investigated. I shall not take up the war operations in this work. I shall leave this task all the more readily to my officers and to the historians, since I, writing as I am without a single document, would be able to describe events only in very broad outline. When I look back upon the four arduous war years, with their hopes and fears, their brilliant victories and losses in precious blood, what is uppermost in my mind is the feeling of ardent gratitude and undying admiration for the unequaled achievements of the German Nation in arms. PROUD OF GERMAN ARMY Just as no sacrifice in endurance and privation was too great for those staying at home, so also the army, in defending itself during the war criminally forced upon us, did not merely overcome the crushing superiority of twenty-eight hostile nations, but likewise, on land and water and in the air, won victories whose glory may have paled a bit in the mists of the present day, but, for that very reason, will shine forth all the more brightly in the light of history. Nor is that all. Wherever there was distress among our allies, German intervention, often with weak forces, always restored the situation and often won noteworthy successes. Germans fought on all the battlefields of the far-flung World War. Surely the heroic bravery of the German nation deserved a better fate than to fall a victim to the dagger that treacherously stabbed it from behind; it seems to be the German destiny that Germans shall always be defeated by Germans. Recently I read the unfortunately not entirely unjustified words: "In Germany every Siegfried has his Hödur behind him." Finally, let me say a word concerning the German "atrocities" and give two instances thereof!