The Battle Against Peace

Seventeen hundred thousand Frenchmen - from 14 August 1914 to 11 November 1918 - died to establish, through the defeat of German imperialism, a peace of justice and freedom, the peace of law...They died in vain.It is barely twenty years since the last of them fell, and already, from a Europe more divided, more troubled, more fraught with anxieties, aggressive ambitions, and unleashed hatreds than ever before, the war is returning to the sons of those who were victorious...It came so close to Europe on 29 September that, instinctively, the millions of mobi-lites who were watching it coming from behind every border had lowered their heads - waiting for the explosion.The lightning did not strike...But the storm that carried it is still there.It hovers around the horizon, hour by hour more extensive, more menacing and closer, ready to follow the first gust that will bring it down on us.Neither the Munich Agreement, which Germany tore up on March 15, nor the solemn and vain diplomatic declarations which followed it, none of which is worth the price of the paper on which they were drawn, nor any of the cruel concessions which we had to make last September - because everything, then, in the state of deadly unpreparedness and weakness in which the wretches and madmen who had dominated our country and isolated and disarmed it for two years had put us, was better than war - did not appease the appetites or appease the forces of madness and prey.They were only a pause on the brink of the abyss, a momentary lull before the inevitable was unleashed.The men who had the courage, in Great Britain and at home - Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Edouard Daladier, Georges Bonnet - to defend and save the peace on September 29th, not so much against Germany as against the coalition of those among their compatriots and collaborators who wanted at all costs a war which neither they nor any of their number would have waged, will not be able to save it twice!The fire which they succeeded in smothering at Munich and which - in the very words of M. Edouard Daladier, on the 9th of December, in the Chamber of Deputies, 'would have led France to war in the worst conditions in which war could be envisaged...' - is not extinguished. 'It is not extinguished.It will resume tomorrow or in a month or in six...Nothing and no one can stop it now from resuming... and nothing and no one can stifle it or extinguish it when it breaks out...