Excerpt from The Martyred Towns of France
In one sense, all the towns of France were martyred in the Great War; not one of them that did not pour out her life-blood to bear witness to the faith that is in France and to enable mankind to live more freely, more abundantly.
But the towns whose history, whose "personality," I endeavour to sketch in the ensuing chapters, are some of those which have paid a price greater than the shedding of blood and of tears, for the world's salvation. They are towns which have endured the hot shame of occupation; the wrenching agony of deportations; the torment of unceasing bombardment; the blood-lustful massacre of innocents; the bestial spoliation of womanhood; the barbaric fury of destruction-for-destruction's sake; the worse-than-barbaric assaults of an enemy bent upon the enslavement of the human race and the obliteration of all that memorialized its long, slow struggle upward toward self-mastery.
There can be no doubt of Germany's intent not merely to terrorize France, in the immediate interest of subjugating her and the ultimate interest of holding her in subjection, but also to denude her of inanimate things which might remind her of the centuries when she was working out her salvation.
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