Kirjahaku

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'OEuvre, L' cho 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

Our opinion has been so saturated with official lies," cried on August 5, 1921, "that it cannot wake up to the light and see the truth all at once... She wouldn't believe it She will believe it only little by little, by degrees, as remorse or conscience, or discord, or simply vanity, will have pushed all the witnesses, one after the other, to speak... Let us wait a little longer and we shall know, we shall understand... even if we do without what the chancelleries will have had time to destroy or fudge in their archives... " Shred by shred, in fact, for twenty years, on both sides of the barricade - like living water rushing through the stones piled up to smother it - the truth about the origins and real guilt of the war, about the cynical and lamentable underbelly of peace, has been disgorged from the legends, hypocrisies, and official lies of the time of the war. With an equal passion, an equal desire to convince the public, to clear their name or to grow in its eyes, to free their conscience or to accuse an adversary - statesmen, army chiefs, diplomats, direct actors or attentive witnesses, whom death or the years have freed from professional secrecy, from their scruples or their fears, have gradually given up their documents and their memories, spread their indiscretions or their confessions, illuminated the night... The revolutions have scattered all the secret archives of the fallen regimes in the public square in the defeated countries, a thousand abominable and shameful files. On the pre-war period, on the war - and also on this peace whose justice and reason were supposed to kill the war and whose follies of blindness, greed and violence bring it back - each day, for the last twenty years, has brought a new precision, a clarity, a stupor of surprise. Not everything has been said, however; not everything has been produced. The essential pieces, those which would establish without appeal the real causes, the determining wills, the decisive responsibilities of war and peace - and, through them, of the present situation which is entirely, in the least as well as in the most dangerous of its manifestations, the result of peace, as peace itself was only the consecration, the realisation of the appetites which had willed, prepared and unleashed the war - they have not been revealed. Some of these will be found in the following pages...

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...

Tizenh tsz zezer francia halt meg - 1914. augusztus 14-től 1918. november 11-ig - az rt, hogy a n met imperializmus legyőz s vel megteremtse az igazs g s a szabads g b k j t, a jog b k j t... Hi ba haltak meg. Alig h sz v telt el az ta, hogy az utols is elesett, s m ris egy minden eddigin l megosztottabb, nyugtalanabb, aggodalmakkal, agressz v t rekv sekkel s elszabadult gyűl lettel teli Eur p ban a h bor visszat r a győztesek fiaihoz... Szeptember 29- n olyan k zel ker lt Eur p hoz, hogy az emberek milli i, akik minden hat r m g l figyelt k a k zeled s t, szt n sen lehajtott k a fej ket a robban s előtt. A vill m nem csapott be... De a vihar, amely mag val ragadta, m g mindig ott van. A horizont k r l lebeg, r r l r ra kiterjedtebb, fenyegetőbb s k zelebb, k szen arra, hogy k vesse az első sz ll k st, amely r nk z d tja. Sem a m ncheni egyezm ny, amelyet N metorsz g m rcius 15- n sz tt pett, sem az azt k vető nnep lyes s hi baval diplom ciai nyilatkozatok, amelyek egyike sem r annyit, mint a pap r, amelyre rajzolt k, sem a kegyetlen engedm nyek, amelyeket tavaly szeptemberben kellett tenn nk - mert minden, akkor, a hal los felk sz letlens g s gyenges g llapot ban, amelybe azok a szerencs tlenek s őr ltek, akik k t ven t uralt k orsz gunkat, elszigetelt k s lefegyverezt k, jobb volt, mint a h bor - nem csillap totta az tv gyat, nem csillap totta az őr let s a zs km ny erőit. Ezek csak egy sz net voltak a szakad k sz l n, egy pillanatnyi sz net az elker lhetetlen bek vetkez se előtt. Azok az emberek, akiknek volt b tors guk Nagy-Britanni ban s otthon - Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Edouard Daladier, Georges Bonnet -, hogy szeptember 29- n megv dj k s megments k a b k t, nem annyira N metorsz ggal szemben, mint ink bb azoknak a honfit rsaik s kollabor nsok koal ci j val szemben, akik minden ron olyan h bor t akartak, amelyet sem ők, sem egyik k sem akart volna megv vni, k tszer nem fogj k tudni megmenteni A tűz, amelyet M nchenben siker lt elfojtaniuk, s amely - Edouard Daladier r szavaival lve, december 9- n, a k pviselőh zban - "Franciaorsz got a h bor ba vezette volna a legrosszabb k r lm nyek k z tt, amelyek k z tt h bor elk pzelhető... " - nem oltott k ki. Holnap folytat dik, vagy egy h nap m lva, vagy hat h nap m lva... Semmi s senki nem ll thatja meg, hogy most jrainduljon... s semmi s senki nem tudja elfojtani vagy kioltani, ha kit r...