“The difference in the effect of the abbreviated text of the Ems telegram as compared with that produced by the original was not the result of stronger words but of the form which made this announcement seem decisive, _while Abeken’s version would only have been regarded as a fragment of a negotiation still pending, and to be continued at Berlin_. “After I had read out the concentrated edition to my two guests, Moltke remarked: ‘Now it has a different ring; it sounded before like a parley; now it is like a flourish in answer to a challenge.’” Bismarck then explained what he would do with his “concentrated edition.” “This explanation brought in the two generals a revulsion to a more joyous mood, the liveliness of which surprised me. They had suddenly recovered their pleasure in eating and drinking, and spoke in a more cheerful vein. Roon said: ‘Our God of old lives still, and will not let us perish in disgrace.’ Moltke so far relinquished his passive equanimity that, glancing up joyously towards the ceiling, and abandoning his usual punctiliousness of speech, he smote his hand upon his breast and said: ‘If I may but live to lead our armies in such a war, then the devil may come directly afterwards and fetch away the “old carcase.”’” If the God of Roon, the God of falsified telegrams, was the same God with whom Bismarck “settled matters” regarding his eighty thousand slain, that strange compact of reconciliation is readily intelligible. Otherwise, no! If Bismarck made cruelty his sacrament, in the gross, he was far from neglecting details. No torch lit a village in France, no finger pulled a trigger against non-combatants, that was not sped by his counsel. I first read his words in Belgium as the stories of Liége, and Visé, and Aerschot, and Louvain poured in-- “True strategy consists in hitting your enemy and hitting him hard. Above all, you must inflict on the inhabitants of invaded towns the maximum of suffering, so that they may become sick of the struggle, and may bring pressure to bear on their government to discontinue it. You must leave the people through whom you march only their eyes to weep with. “In every case the principle which guided our general was that war must be made terrible to the civil population so that it may sue for peace.” And when Favre, coming out from the heroic defence of Paris, appealed to him in name of that “brotherhood which binds the brave of all the earth,” the Wotan of modern Germany replied-- “‘You speak of your resistance! You are proud of your resistance. Well, let me tell you, if M. Trochu were a German general, I would shoot him this evening. You have not the right--do you understand?--in the face of God, in the face of humanity, for mere military vainglory, to expose to the horrors of famine a city of two millions.... Do not speak of your resistance, it is criminal!’” Abeken, who was called “Bismarck’s Pen,” wrote of his chief--