You cannot salve the broken heart. You cannot restore the tortured spirit. But so far as material reparation can be made, it shall be made to the uttermost farthing. I pledge every man here to play a man's part to make that good.
On December 2, in the Reichstag, the German Chancellor said, "The world must learn that no one can hurt a hair on the head of a German subject with impunity." In his New Year's message to the Army and Navy, the Kaiser told his forces that behind them stands the entire German nation, prepared to sacrifice its heart's blood for its sacred domestic hearth. There you have the modern German spirit in excelsis. Germany may, in defiance of its pledged word, carry fire and sword through Belgium; it may torture, burn, destroy, murder, outrage. But Germany's domestic hearth is sacred. No hair on the head of a German subject must be touched. What the German has to be taught is this, that the Belgian domestic hearth is just as sacred as his; that the hairs on the Belgian head must be treated with the same respect as he claims for his own. That simple principle of justice the modern German, hypnotized as he is by Prussian militarism, doesn't understand. But he will before we've done with him. He will come out of all this painfully conscious of the fact that his dreams of a German world-empire lie shattered amidst the Belgian ruins. After that, if he is wise, he'll forget Bernhardi and go back to Beethoven. There is no empire for the one; there is an empire for the other—a world-empire.
Germany reckoned without plucky Belgium's heroic stand. It reckoned without France's determination no longer to bend the knee to the bully of Europe. It reckoned without the stone-wall pluck and endurance of a little British Army. Over its first cunningly conceived masterplan failure, ignominious and complete, is written. Be the struggle long or short, that failure sealed Germany's fate.
Carry your minds back five months. What was this swaggering, swollen-headed super-soldier to have accomplished? He was to have been in Paris by the early days of September—in Calais a few days later; whilst by this time an effete and degenerate British mob—masquerading as a democracy—was to have been clasping his legs with piteous appeals for mercy!
That was the boast. What is the fact? What has been accomplished by this sword-clanking bully? He has sacked Louvain; laid the great cathedral of Rheims in ruins; destroyed right and left in Belgium for the mere savage joy of
