Il est plus facile de faire la guerre que la paix. - Georges Clemenceau

And if our recent victory had merely been one of territorial conquests that were fated to call us out to the battlefield again to meet attempts to take revenge for our revenge, our success of the moment would have been as fruitless as every success before it. What was more to be desired in the interests of Europe striving for civilization was a victor capable of controlling himself so as to replace armed might by right in the fluid equilibrium of a peace capable of enduring.

Always watching their opportunity to hit back in every sphere, our defeated enemies demand reckonings from their conquerors, who fear nothing so much as not to give them complete satisfaction. I set down this fact in order to clear my own conscience, and especially because it is high time for the French nation to take a firmer grip on itself and to substitute a policy of determination for this confusion born of timidity, through which the threat of a compact mass of barbarism is kept hanging over our heads.

[W]hen at Versailles Brockdorff-Rantzau addressed me in the language of the bearer of a challenge, I was forced to realize that the German revolution was mere window-dressing, and that, with the aggressor of 1914 not a whit cured of his insane folly, we should continue without respite to be subjected, in a new setting, to the same attack from the same enemy.