The War Comes Back

This book will earn me, and not only outside France, implacable enmities...Some will see it as an attack and others as a plea. It is neither.It is simply an effort to set out as clearly and objectively as possible - at the most critical time since the war - what I have learned, what I have seen, and what is.At no time, in the investigation whose results I bring here, and of which some passages have already appeared in L’Œuvre, L’Écho de Paris and Je suis partout, did I take sides for or against the Czechs, the Romanians or the Serbs, for or against the Croats, the Macedonians or the Hungarians.I was only interested in showing where things stand in one half of Europe, fourteen years after the peace of law, and why they stand there; in pointing out where we are heading if we are not careful, and why we are going there.The only thing that interested me when I travelled through Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Austria, the only concern that never left me for a moment, was the consequences that such and such an error, such and such an injustice, such and such a crime, could have on the security and the future of France.I have reported everything, subordinated everything to this, and each day that has passed since my return, each of the manifestations of crisis that have succeeded one another and multiplied over there for the last ten months, strengthens me in the feeling that what I have said in these pages had to be said - and no doubt said more quickly than I have done and more strongly.That is all!Everything I have written here, I have weighed every word; I have verified it on the spot, in this long tour of Europe - the fifth since the war! - which has taken me from Zagreb to Skoplje, from Sofia to Belgrade, from Salonika to Budapest, from the revolutionary organisations to the cabinets of the dictatorship, - every single fact, every single statement. Everything that is reported in it, I have seen, I have observed for myself, and anyone going where I have been would see it and observe it in his turn...I know! I will be reproached precisely for having dared to say it, for having unceremoniously lifted the veil that covered Noah’s intoxication...If I had to do it again, I would do it again!One does not have the right, when one knows even a fragment of the truth and when ignorance of this truth can be fatal to one’s own, not to shout it out, - come what may to the one who shouts it!