After expending the greatest effort, and suffering the greatest sacrifices in blood in all history, we must not compromise the results of our victory… - Georges Clemenceau

A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.

If it is said that the war is won, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that there is a lull in the storm. At the very least, it is necessary to provide for all eventualities. Recent discoveries have enabled us to pierce the enemy's designs to a greater extent than hitherto. They were not merely a dream of military domination on the part of Prussia, but a definite conspiracy expressly aiming at the extermination of France. Industrially France is extremely difficult to reconstruct, whereas Germany has kept her factories intact and ready to start working efficiently forthwith. Indeed, industrially and commercially, as between France and Prussia, the victory is the latter's. ... the war debt of Germany is almost entirely domestic and can easily be repudiated, while that of France must be paid. In the immediate future we shall have to pay regularly abroad immense sums, by way of interest solely, out of our internal resources.

To-day Germany is once more trying to construct, by methods of peace, a Germanic Empire that she failed to bring into being by means of war. That she could never do without eventualities that may change the destinies of a France exposed to every hostile enterprise. What will become of us in this welter of countries the development of whose strength in the future no man can foresee? There are nations that are beginning. There are nations that are coming to an end. Our consciousness of our own acts entails the fixing of responsibilities. France will be what the men of France deserve.