REVANCHE!

Sun (Christchurch), Volume III, Issue 868, 21 November 1916, Page 6

REVANCHE!

FRANCE'S AIMS. QUESTION OF ALSACE. [Translated from "Le Petit Journal," Paris.l Revanche! This is the fanatical word with which the Germans, ever since 1871, have tried to mock us. It has served them as an inexhaustible source from which they have drawn their heavy pleasantries. They believe or seem to believe that we wish to atone for our defeats at Metz and Sedan as a football or tennis player, who. losing at first, keeps on at the game feverishly, in order that some time he may win. Apparently they cannot conceive that war is not a sport with us and that a free people does not amuse iiself with spilling vast oceans of blood. They cannot understand, the idiots, that to France, sincerely and devoutly pacific, revenge means not the payment back for battles won, but rather the reparation of a violated and a sacred right. It means to us the freeing of our brothers in Alsace.

To-day nothing compares in importance with the question of Alsace. By our victories and those of our allies the matter will be settled shortly. Alsace, whose soul is French and who has been so true to France for two long generations, will return again to her native country. Even now the Germans, not entirely blinded by their mad presumption, see the inevitable trend of events in this direction. Their leaders have mentally accepted the sacrifice. They know they will return Alsace to France. It is no revenge. It is a restitution.

However, there will be a revenge, and that revenge we will proclaim aloud that the world may hear when the time comes.

Since the start of the war, by the invasion of Belgium, by the burning and destroying of towns, the enormities committed against women and children and old men, by brutal exactions of all sorts, the Germans have frightfully transgressed every international law. There is not perhaps a single Hague agreement which they have not trampled ruthlessly under their feet.

Our revenge will be to act quite differently. We shall not say: "They have been cruel; let us be cruel. They have treated our prisoners with inconceivable harshness; let us exceed the bounds of imagination in our treatment of their men." No!

We will revenge ourselves as did those heroes of whom .7. de Maistre tells. They remained human in the midst of insane carnage. I can state definitely that this.is the wish of our government. It is the desire of our allies. We will none of us answer their crimes with crimes of our own nor punish their barbarities with like actions.

This, indeed, is true revenge! After the war—for this war must end—the neutral countries, all the neutrals, including the people of the Americas and of Europe, will divide in their mind, and perhaps as regards the distribution of their commerce, the belligerents in two classes. As in the valley of Jehosophat there will be the good and the bad. On the one side there will be those who have clung steadily and tenaciously to law and conventions and treaties; on the other side those who have recklessly thrown aside the established order of things.

The world will see that the good will be the victors and that the bad will be the conquered. But more imperative than victory is the keeping of our flag pure and undefiled. We will conquer by arms, of course, but, too, we will win by the moral respect of all the world. And this last is not the lesser of the victories.

One hears often that this prodigious catastrophe in which we are being hurtled about is going to be fruitful in renovations. And that the most significant of these renovations will be the establishment forever of the principle, often formulated, but rarely acted upon, that no real policy can endure except it be founded on justice. As has been said more or less humorously, one may lean on the bayonet, but one cannot sit upon it.

It was an enormous, criminal error of the German militarists —and believed unfortunately by the vast majority of the nation—to have asserted that "force is sufficient for everything; victory justifies all." Success even at the most detestable price is success just the same.

Let us not imitate the sinister example which they have inaugurated. They have shown what one should not do. They have pointed out the road that one should not follow. Let us give independence to people, to all people; liberty to citizens, to all citizens. Let us be faithful to a pledged faith and respect treaties written on paper. Let us not crush, and destroy non-combatants, and even though our enemies redouble their inhumanity lei us preserve our justice, our mercy, our kindness of heart.

The recompense will be magnificent. Not only will history write our eulogy in time to come, but we shall win the admiration and love of all civilised nations. Beside being masters by war we shall be masters by peace. This is how' France understands the word revanche. To rise superior in compassion, in justice, in human;ity; these will be reprisals worthy of us.