"Come, a truce to this game of death! Are we not men and brothers? Come out of your shelters and let us shake hands." But it is only too well known that if their voices are human and their faces too, more or less, it is not so with their souls. They lack the vital moral senses, loyalty, honour, remorse, and that sentiment especially, which is perhaps noblest of all and yet most elementary, which even animals sometimes possess, the sentiment of pity. I remember a phrase of Victor Hugo which formerly seemed to me exaggerated and obscure; he said: "Night, which in a wild beast takes the place of a soul." To-day, thanks to the revelation of the German soul, I understand the metaphor. What else can there be but impenetrable, rayless night in the soul of their baleful Emperor and in the soul of their heir apparent, his ferret face dwarfed by a black busby with the charming adornment of a death's head? All their lives they have had no other thought than to construct engines for slaughter, to invent explosives and poisons for slaughter, to train soldiers for slaughter. For the sake of their monstrous personal vanity they organised all the barbarism latent in the depths of the German race; they organised (I repeat the word because though it is not good French alas! it is essentially German), they "organised," then, its indigenous ferocity; organised its grotesque megalomania; organised its sheep-like submissiveness and imbecile credulity. And afterwards they did not die of horror at the sight of their own work! Can it be that they still dare to go on living, these creatures of darkness? In the sight of so many tears, so many torments, such vast ossuaries, that infamous pair continue peacefully sleeping, eating, receiving homage, and doubtless they will pose for sculptors and be immortalised in bronze or marble--all this when they ought to be subjected to a refinement of old Chinese tortures. Oh, all this that I say about them is not for the sake of uselessly stirring up the hatred of the world; no, but I believe it to be my duty to do all that in me lies to arrest that perilous forgetfulness which will once again shut its eyes to their crimes. So much do I fear our light-hearted French ways, our simple, confiding disposition. We are quite capable of allowing the tentacles of the great devil-fish gradually to worm their way again into our flesh. Who knows if our country will not soon be swarming again with a vermin of countless spies, crafty parasites, navvies working clandestinely at concrete platforms for German cannon under the very floors of our dwellings. Oh, let us never forget that this predatory race is incurably treacherous, thievish, murderous; that no treaty of peace will ever bind it, and that until it is crushed, until its head has been cut off--its terrible Gorgon head which is Prussian Imperialism--it will always begin again.