reservoir of men, resources, and
infinite energy on the eastern frontier of Germany, one asks truly if
the Pan-Germanists have not been the veritable plague of God for their
country; the Fatherland, which men like Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven had
made so cultured, so glorious, and which asked only to live and to
prosper, the Pan-Germanists have isolated only to deliver it to the
execration of the world. It was the same in France formerly, when she
ceded to chauvinistic influences.

*Second Letter.*

PARIS, Sept. 3, 1914.

* * * May you never witness such calamities as have fallen upon Europe.
The visions of horror, which formerly we evoked in order to terrify the
world and to try to conjure them away, are now surpassed; and we are
only at the commencement of the war! The trains, thronged with youth and
enthusiasm, which I saw leave are now returning crowded with the
wounded. They have filled all the hospitals, the barracks which had been
left empty, the lyceums, and the schools throughout France. In but a few
days they have arrived everywhere in the south, the west and the centre
of the country. At La Fleche alone we have five improvised hospitals
with 1,200 beds. Creans is a hospital annex, and so it is in all the
villages and in the dwellings which can provide one or more beds. The
wounded who occupy these beds are happy, very happy. One of them, who
has only a broken leg, but who thinks of the thousands of his comrades
who remain wounded upon the fields of battle, said to me, "I am in
heaven." * * *

The worst of all, (I have always said it, but it is even worse than I
had thought,) the worst is that each of the combatants, for the most
part incapable of cruelty under ordinary conditions, is now devoted to
the horrible work of hatred and of reprisal; and even more than the
combatants, their children, their orphans, all those who are to remain
in mourning. * * *

As far as France is concerned, our first reverses have served to exalt
the national spirit and to fortify the unanimous resolution to conquer
or to die. It is important that this be well understood in the United
States and that it be given due consideration if it is desired to
intervene without irritating the most noble scruples. * * *

It is the Prussian military system of domination with its contagion
which has done the harm and which ought to disappear, and that system
itself is the fruit of Napoleonic imperialism. The struggle is always,
and mor