The Guilty

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...