We have also got to defend civilians. Intoxicated by their philosophers the Boches can only understand the arguments of force. They laugh ponderously at our protests in the name of right. Blows are the only things that they can feel. We ought thoroughly to convince them that every time that one of our open towns is bombarded by cannon, by Zeppelin, or by aeroplanes, one of our aeroplanes, while we are waiting for something better, will bombard one of theirs. An excellent effect was produced by the operations at Carlsruhe and Stuttgart. Let us equip hundreds of aeroplanes for purposes of bombardment, and let each outrage of the Boches on our towns be followed by an immediate riposte, frankly announced in the newspapers to the whole world. Is that cruelty? I would accept that reproach from no one. I have immense pity in my heart—pity for our children and our women who are the victims of German assassins, pity for our children and our women whom it is our duty to protect, and whom we can protect in this way only! That, I repeat, is not a reprisal of vengeance, but a reprisal of defence. The people who protest against the use of such means ought not to remain far from the danger zone. Let them go—not alone, that would be too easy, but with their family, their old mothers, their wives, their children—let them go and take up their abode in the open towns which serve most often as targets, to Reims, to Pont-à-Mousson, to Nancy, to Dunkerque; let them go and live there in the houses of the poor, which are crushed like walnuts by big shells and split from top to bottom by Zeppelin bombs, or else let them take a berth for a few months on a transatlantic steamer; when they have been there long enough, when they have observed at close quarters the acts of the Boches, when they have seen some loved one fall by their side, when they have felt on their own brow the wind of a Camarde, then, if they still demand that the Allies should not engage in reprisals of defence, their advice, though it may not be wise, will at least be worthy of respect. In the meantime, in the name of the women and children already assassinated, and that the list of these pitiable victims may not be lengthened, those people had better be silent who, from the asylum of their safe and comfortable homes, invite us to reply to crime by diplomatic notes or by prayers, and to counter actions that kill with words that lull to sleep! I said that from to-day our wish is for reprisals of defence, and that to-morrow we shall want compensation and punishment.