and sons into death, that has led home countless German men, amid a
thousand dangers, from foreign lands, to battle for their threatened
Fatherland, by declaring in common with the women of hostile States that
the national spirit of self-sacrifice of our men is insanity and a
psychosis? Shall we psychologically attack in the rear the men who are
defending our safety by scoffing at and deprecating the internal forces
that are keeping them up? Whoever asks us to do that cannot have
experienced what thousands of wives and mothers have experienced, who
have seen their husbands and sons march away.

Just as in these fundamental questions the women of the belligerent
States must feel differently from those of neutral States, so, too,
there is naturally a difference of opinion among the women of the
different belligerent States concerning the time of the conclusion of
peace. Inasmuch as the prospects of the belligerent States depend upon
the time of the conclusion of peace and therewith the future fate of the
nations involved in the war, there can likewise be no international
conformity of opinion on this question either.

Dear to us German women as well, are the relations that bind us to the
women of foreign lands, and we sincerely desire that they may survive
this time of hatred and enmity. But precisely for that reason
international negotiations seem fraught with fate to us at a time when
we belong exclusively to our people and when strict limits are set to
the value of international exchange of views in the fact that we are
citizens of our own country, to strengthen whose national power of
resistance is our highest task.