War With Germany Near, Says M. Mun

New York Times 100 years ago today, September 29, 1912:
Veteran of the Conflict of 1870 Protests Against Talk of Entente with Foe.
ALSACE IS NOT FORGOTTEN
Behind the Rhine, It Is Declared, the Cloud of Iron Thickens, and France Must Beware.
By Marconi Transatlantic Wireless Telegraph to The New York Times.
    PARIS, Sept 28.— A powerful impression has been caused here by the appearance in the Figaro of a two-column article entitled "It Will Be To-morrow," by Comte Albert de Mun of the Académie Française.
    The article is a commentary on a recent tour made through Germany by a Figaro representative in order to ascertain the present state of German feeling toward France, M. Mun insists that the statements of good will and admiration, and of eager desire for a better understanding, made by those whom the Figaro man interviewed, are not to be believed, and that the idea of a Franco-German entente is a mere dream.
    War between the two countries is, he says, more than a probability, and he holds, as the title indicates, that France stands on the brink of the event.
    In referring to the photograph recently published in the European press of the Kaiser at the Swiss manoeuvres shaking the left hand of Gen. Pau, who has lost his right arm, M. Mun says:
    "It is a symbolic picture. We are like that. All the handshakes that the Germans give us with a smile go to our left hand. The right has been cut off for the last forty-two years."
    The author, who won his cross at Metz, is especially bitter against the German suggestions that Frenchmen make a sincere effort to resign themselves to and forget the loss of Alsace-Lorraine.
    "Alas!" he says, "for thirty years those who have governed France have by criminal aberration done their best to this end. But without success. The blood of the race has rejected the prison. A new generation has sprung up, whose souls have suddenly appeared full of the memories which we thought abolished. Who dare now speak to them of resignation?"
    "The wound of France," he continues, " is as open after forty years as on the first day, and is ceaselessly touched to the raw by the hands which made it.
    "French unity has been broken by Teuton iron, and the French ideal should, by national necessity, be to reconstruct it."
    M. Mun quotes with the highest approval the statement of a well-known German critic, that in the soul of every German exist two feelings — attraction toward France and the desire for war — and the result of these emotions is estimated in Germany to be the annihilation of France and a war indemnity — $1,000,000,000.
    "We waste our money," he concludes, "in political expenses while our strategic railways remain unfinished.
    We are allowing cosmopolitan financiers to push us, without saying so, toward an entente with Germany, which will leave us friendless, and, while behind the Rhine and the Meuse the cloud of iron thickens, we waste our strength and lose our time in internal quarrels and religious discord."