November, 1914.

After the lapse of so many years, and in the midst of those moods of rage and anguish or of splendid exaltation which characterise the present hour, I had quite forgotten the existence of a certain enchanted isle, very far away, on the other side of the earth, in the midst of the great Southern Ocean, rearing among the warm clouds of those regions its mountains, carpeted with ferns and flowers. In our October climate, already cold, here in this district of Paris, bare of leaves and in autumn colouring, where I have lived for a month, whence you have but to withdraw a little way to the north in order to hear the cannon crashing incessantly like a storm, and where each day countless graves are prepared for the burial of the most precious and cherished sons of France—here the name of Tahiti seems to me the designation of some visionary Eden. I can no longer bring myself to believe that my sojourn in former days in that far-away island was an actual fact. It is with an effort that I recall to my memory that sea, bordered with beaches of pure white coral, the palm trees with arching fronds, and the Maoris living in a perpetual dream, a childlike race with no thought beyond singing and garlanding themselves with flowers.

Tahiti, the island of which I had thought no more, has just been abruptly recalled to my mind by an article in a newspaper, in which it is stated that the Germans have passed that way, pillaging everything. And the commander of the two cruisers, who, without running any risk to themselves, be it understood, committed this dastardly outrage on a poor little open town lying there all unsuspecting, cannot claim to have had any order issued to them from their horrible Emperor—no, indeed, since they were at the other end of the world. All by themselves they had found this thing to do, and of their own accord they did it, from sheer Teutonic savagery.

Yesterday in one of the forts of Paris garrisoned by our sailors, I met an old naval petty officer who, in former days, had on two or three occasions sailed under my orders. He seems to me to have found the name most appropriate to the Prussians and one that deserves to stick to them.

"Well you see, Commander," he said to me, "you and I have often visited together all kinds of savages whom I should have thought the biggest brutes of all, savages with black skins, with yellow skins, or with red skins, but I now see clearly that there is another sort still—those other dirty savages with pink skins like boiled pig, who are much the worst of all."

And so Tahiti the Delectable, where blood had never before been shed, a little Eden, harmless and confiding, set in the midst of mighty oceans—Tahiti has just suffered the visitation of savages with pink skins like boiled pig. So without profit, as without excuse, simply for the sport of the thing, for the pure German pleasure of wreaking as much evil as possible, never mind upon whom, never mind where, these savages, indeed "that worst kind of all," amused themselves by making a heap of ruins in that Bay of Papeete with its eternal calm, under trees ever green, among roses ever in flower.

It is true this happened in the Antipodes, and it is so trifling, so very trifling a matter, compared with the smoking charnel-houses which in Belgium and France were landmarks in the track of the accursed army. But nevertheless it is especially deserving of being brought up again as a still more peculiarly futile and fatuous act of ferocity.