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The Franco-German War, the Athanasian Creed, the Ritualistic prosecutions, the case for Home Rule, and the misdeeds of the Sultan have in turn produced from his pen pamphlets which have rushed into huge circulations and swollen to the dimensions of solid treatises. Canon MacColl is genuinely and ex animo an ecclesiastic; but he is a politician as well.
"The Chief of the General Staff had his eye fixed from the first upon the capture of the enemy's capital, the possession of which is of more importance in France than in other countries. . . . It is a delusion to believe that a plan of war may be laid for a prolonged period and carried out in every point." VON MOLTKE, The Franco-German War.
Yet they, too, had their ideals. I remember in 1871, the year after the Franco-German War, meeting a party of Germans who were unveiling a tablet by the Pasterze Glacier in memory of a comrade fallen in the war Karl Hoffman, a pioneer of mountaineering in the Glockner district and hearing their impassioned speeches.
It is a well-known fact that a Frenchman's cult for his mother is a trait of the national character, and that a Frenchwoman almost always places her child before her husband. But what struck me particularly during the Franco-German War was that the anxieties and mental sufferings of the French officers were much keener than those of the men.
See Justin McCarthy's Modern Leaders; Kinglake's Crimean War; History of the Franco-German War; Lives of Bismarck, Moltke, Cavour; Life of Lord Palmerston; Life of Nicholas; Life of Thiers; Harriet Martineau's Biographical Sketches; W.R. Greg's Life of Todleben.
Lloyd George and the Franco-German agreement of November 1911, whereby Germany recognized a French protectorate in Morocco in return for concessions of territory in the French Congo. These are the bare facts of the Moroccan episode. Much, of course, is still unrevealed, particularly as to the motives and intentions of the Powers concerned.
Whenever letters were found on the bodies of men who fell during the Franco-German War, they were, if this man was a Frenchman, more usually letters from his mother, and, if he was a German, more usually letters from his sweetheart. Many such letters found their way into print during the course of the war.
Fortunately, however, I was reading an account of the Franco-German War in 1870, and there I found that the same system of inventing successes was carried on by the French press right up to, and even after, the Emperor's capitulation at Sedan.
The condition of Europe in particular, the divided state of Germany enabled him to maintain a leading influence for a score of years in European politics. The unification of Germany, which began in the triumph of Prussia over Austria, was completed in Napoleon's downfall through the Franco-German war.
"It was strange enough to see the half-dozen lines of a bet by a marquis whose great-grandson bet on the Franco-German War; that the Government which imposed the tea-tax in America would be out of power within six months; or that the French Canadians would join the colonists in what is now the United States if they revolted.
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