Page:The guilt of William Hohenzollern.djvu/46

42 were also capable of remarkable achievements in the way of thoughtlessness and arrogance. But this affair had ended, after a severe struggle, in the victory of the civil Government, while in Germany the result was the overthrow of the civil authority before the military.

Apart from this, the Zabern affair had the effect of tearing open in France the wound of Alsace-Lorraine, which had begun to heal. And thus Germany and Austria went into the world-war, loaded before all the world with the reputation of falsehood, forgery, violence, the dictatorship of the sword, the denial of civil rights to the annexed provinces.