Page:René Marchand - Why I Side with the Social Revolution (1920).pdf/81

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xation of Alsace Lorraine to France, with or without autonomy, that is to say with or without a customs line and, according to the degree of their fears for a formidable competition, they declared themselves „patriotically“ in favour of an immediate reparation of the wrong done in 1871, or „democratically“ in favour of a plebescite of the population of Alsace-Lorraine.

In Turkey, it was an whole people, unhappy and loyal, that they were desirous of strangling, purely and simply, of exterminating once for ail from the map.

In Bulgaria bayonets were used to maintain the Czar Boris on a bankrupt throne, fearing that the Bulgarian people, exhausted and reduced to the greatest misery, might take the arrangement of its own destinies into its own hands.

In Govermnet circles in Italy, there was a wave of annexation, which on the Dalmatian side, quickly found itself in conflict with the rising tide of Serbian ambitions, where the people were dying of famine and sickness, and on the Adriatic side, in conflict with the French flag which our squadrons were flying.

In neutral countries where, as in belligerent countries, a handful of people had become immoderately and immorally rich, and where the masses were crying out from hunger, misery, exhaustion, as well as their imperious need for order and justice, everywhere it was the same painful outcry of sufferings,—an outcry mixed with imprecation and revolt which grew louder, as a final warning to those fools who continued their mad course towards the abyss and exterminated, in their insatiable greed of