The Revolution
friends from out of our ranks in the long years of the war, I would have thought it almost a sin to complain—were they not dying for Germany? And when I myself—in the very last days of the fearful struggle—fell victim to the creeping gas that began to eat into my eyes, and, in horror of going blind forever, I was ready for a moment to lose courage, the voice of conscience thundered at me: Miserable wretch, are you to snivel while thousands are a hundred times worse off than you? And so I bore my fate in dull silence. But now I could not help it. Now I realized for the first time how personal suffering disappears in face of the misfortune of the Fatherland.
So it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and starvation, in vain the hunger and thirst often of months without end, in vain the hours when, gripped by deathly terror, we nevertheless did out duty, and in vain the death of two millions who died as they did it. Surely the graves must open of all the hundreds of thousands who had marched out, believing in the Fatherland, never to return? Surely they must open and send forth the silent heroes, covered with mud and blood, as avenging spirits to the homeland which had so outrageously cheated them of the highest sacrifice that a man can offer to his people in this world? Was this what they had died for, the soldiers of August and September 1914; was this why the volunteer regiments followed their old comrades in the fall of the same year? Was it for this that these boys of seventeen had fallen upon the soil of Flanders? Was this the meaning of the sacrifice which the German mother made for the Fatherland when with aching heart she sent out her dearest boys, never to see them more? Was it all for this—so that now a mob of miserable criminals should dare to lay hands on the Fatherland?
Was it for this, then, that the German soldier, exhausted by sleepless nights and endless marches, hungry, thirsty and frozen, had stood fast through burning sun and driving snow? Was it for this he had gone through the inferno of drum-fire and the fever of gas attacks, never yielding, always remembering the single duty of guarding the Fatherland from the invasion of the
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