THE GERMANS THAT ROSE FROM THE DEAD

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[159]

I

LORD BRYCE ON GERMAN METHODS

In presenting the facts that follow of the behavior of the German Army, I am fortunate in being able to introduce them with a statement written for me by Lord Bryce. The words of Lord Bryce carry more weight with the American people than those of any other man in Europe, and his analysis of the methods of the German Staff is authoritative, because he was the Chairman of what is known as the "Bryce Committee," which issued the famous report on German "frightfulness." When I told him that our country would respond to a statement from him, he asked me to submit questions, and to these questions he has written answers.

The first question submitted to Viscount Bryce was this:

"America has been startled by Cardinal Mercier's statement concerning the deportation of Belgian men. Our people will appreciate a statement from you as to the meaning of this latest German move."

Lord Bryce replied to me:

"Nothing could be more shocking than this wholesale carrying away of men from Belgium. I know of no case in European history to surpass it. Not even in the Thirty Years War were there such things as the German Government has done, first and last in Belgium. This last case is virtual slavery. The act is like that of those Arab slave raiders in Africa who carried off negroes to the coast to sell. And the severity is enhanced because these Belgians and the work forcibly extracted from them are going to be used against their own people. Having invaded Belgium, and murdered many hundreds, indeed even thousands, among them women and children, who could not be accused of 'sniping,' the German military government dislocated the industrial system of the community. They carried off all the raw materials of industry and most of the machinery in factories, and then having thus deprived the inhabitants of work, the invaders used this unemployment as the pretext for deporting them in very large numbers to places where nothing will be known of their fate. They were not even allowed to take leave of their wives and children. Many of them may never be heard of again. And von Bissing calls this 'a humanitarian measure.' Actually, it is all a part of the invasion policy. They defend it as being 'war,' as they justify everything, however inhuman, done because the military needs of Germany are alleged to call for it. It shows how hard pressed the military power is beginning to find itself at this latest stage of the war. It is said that Attila, when he was bringing his hosts of Huns out of Asia for his great assault on Western Europe, forced the conquered tribes into his army, and made them a part of his invasion. I can hardly think of a like case since then. In principle it resembles the Turkish plan when they formed the Janissaries. The Turks used their Christian subjects, taken quite young and made Moslems, and enrolled them as soldiers (to fight against Christians) to fill their armies, of which they were the most efficient part. These Belgians are not indeed actually made to fight, but they are being forced to do the labor of war, some of them probably digging trenches, or making shells, or working in quarries to extract chalk to make cement for war purposes. The carrying off of young girls from Lille was terrible enough, and it seemed to us at the time that nothing could be worse. But the taking away of many thousand of the Belgian population from their homes to work against their own countrymen, with all the mental torture that separation from one's family brings—this is the most shocking thing we have yet heard of. I have been shown in confidence the reports received from Belgium of what has happened there. The details given and the sources they come from satisfied me of their substantial truth. The very excuses the German authorities are putting forward admit the facts. In Belgian Luxemburg I hear that they have been trying to stop the existing employment in order to have an excuse for taking off the men."

The second question read:

"How are such acts of German severity to be accounted for?"

Lord Bryce replied:

"When the early accounts of the atrocious conduct of the German Government in Belgium were laid before the Committee over which I presided they seemed hardly credible. But when we sifted them, going carefully through every case, and rejecting all those that seemed doubtful, we found such a mass of concurrent testimony coming from different sources, and carefully tested by the lawyers who examined the witnesses, that we could not doubt that the facts which remained were beyond question. You ask how German officers came to give such orders. The Committee tried to answer that question in a passage of their report. They point out that for the German officer caste morality and right stop when war begins. The German Chancellor admitted that they had done wrong in invading Belgium, but they would go on and hack their way through. The German military class had brooded so long on war that their minds had become morbid. To Prussian officers war has become, when the interests of the State require it, a sort of sacred mission: everything may be done by and for the omnipotent State. Pity and morality vanish, and are superseded by the new standard justifying every means that conduces to success. 'This,' said the Committee, 'is a specifically military doctrine, the outcome of a theory held by a ruling caste who have brooded and thought, written and talked and dreamed about war until they have fallen under its obsession and been hypnotized by its spirit.' You will find these doctrines set forth in 'Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege,' the German Official Monograph on the usages of war on land, issued under the direction of the German Staff. What military needs suggest becomes lawful. You will find in that book a justification for everything the German Army has done, for seizing hostages, i. e., innocent inhabitants of an invaded area, and shooting them if necessary. You will find what amounts to a justification even of assassination. The German soldiers' diaries captured on prisoners offer the proof that the German officers acted upon this principle. 'This is not the only case that history records in which a false theory, disguising itself as loyalty to a State or a Church, has perverted the conception of Duty, and become a source of danger to the world.' This doctrine spread outside military circles. I do not venture to say that it has infected anything like the whole people. I hope that it did not. But national pride and national vanity were enlisted, and it became a widespread doctrine accepted by the military and even by many civilians. The Prussians are far more penetrated by the military spirit than the Americans or English or French, and such a doctrine ministered to the greatness of the power of Prussia. It was part of Prussian military theory and sometimes of practice a century ago. But in the rest of Germany it is a new thing. There was nothing of the kind in southern Germany when I knew it fifty years ago.

"In an army there will be individual cases of horrible brutality—plunder, rape, ill-treatment of civilians. There will always be men of criminal instinct whose passion is loosed by the immunities of war conditions. Drunkenness, moreover, may turn a decent soldier into a wild beast. But most of the crimes committed in Belgium were not committed by drunken troops. The German peasant, the 'Hans' whom we know, is a good, simple, kindly sort of fellow, as are the rural folk in every country. But remember in the German army there is a habit of implicit obedience. The officers are extremely severe in military discipline. They will shoot readily for a minor infraction. It is the officers more than the private soldiers that were to blame. And some of the officers were shocked by what they were forced to do. 'I am merely executing orders and I should be punished if I did not execute them,' said more than one officer whose words were recorded. How can an officer in war time disobey the orders of the supreme military command? He would be shot, and if he were to say he could not remain in an army where he was expected to commit crimes, to retire in war time, if he were permitted to retire, would mean disgrace to his name. It is the spirit of the Higher German Army Command that is to blame. The authority that issued the orders is guilty. The German people as a whole are not cruel, but many of them have been infected by this war spirit.

"And we little realize how strict is the German censorship. The German people have been fed with falsehoods. So far are they from believing in the record of their own army's cruelties, that they have been made to believe in cruelties alleged to have been committed by French and English troops. They have been fed on stories of soldiers with their eyes put out by Belgians. The Chancellor of the German Empire in a press communication said:

"Belgian girls gouged out the eyes of the German wounded. Officials of Belgian cities have invited our officers to dinner and shot and killed them across the table. Contrary to all international law, the whole civilian population of Belgium was called out, and after having at first shown friendliness, carried on in the rear of our troops terrible warfare with concealed weapons. Belgian women cut the throats of soldiers whom they had quartered in their homes while they were sleeping.

"There was no truth at all in these stories."

The next question was submitted as follows:

"Has the German Government made any effort to prove their general charges and to disprove the detailed charges of your report and the report made by the French Government?"

Lord Bryce writes in reply:

"The diaries of German soldiers referred to have been published throughout the world, and no question has been raised of their authenticity. They contain testimony to outrages committed in Belgium and France that is overwhelming. No answer is possible. The German Government have never made a reply to the Report of the British Committee. They attempted to answer some of the reports made by the Belgian Government. But their answer was really an admission to the facts, for it consisted in allegations that Belgian civilians had given provocation. They endeavored to prove that Belgian civilians had shot at them. It would not have been strange if some civilians had shot at those who suddenly burst into their country, but no proof has ever been given of more than a few of such cases, nor of the stories of outrages committed by Belgian priests, women and children on German soldiers. Even if such occasional shooting by civilians had taken place, as very likely it did, that did not justify the wholesale slaughter of innocent persons and the burning of whole villages. In the burning of the 26 houses at Melle, which you tell me you witnessed, no allegations were made of shooting by civilians. The little girl murdered at Alost, to whom you refer, had not shot at the Germans. The woman, eighty years old, had not shot at them. These severities were committed as a method to achieve an end. That end was to terrorize the civilian population, and destroy the spiritual resources of the nation."

The final question was this:

"As the result of this war, what hope have we of reconstruction and an altered policy in Germany?"

Viscount Bryce answered:

"It is to be hoped and expected that the Allies will so completely defeat Germany as to discredit the whole military system and the ideas out of which the horrors of German war practice have developed. It is essential to inflict a defeat sufficiently decisive in the eyes of the German people that they will have done with their military caste and its nefarious doctrine, and it is essential to discredit the methods themselves—discredit them by their failure—in so thorough a manner that no nation will ever use them again. The way, then, of ending what is called 'frightfulness' is by a complete victory over it. It is our task to show that shocking military practices and total disregard of right do not succeed. We must bring to pass the judgment of facts to the effect that such methods do not avail. In this determination our British people are unanimous as they have never been before. The invasion of Belgium, the atrocities committed there, and the sinking of the Lusitania—these three series of acts united the whole British people in its firm resolve to prosecute the war to a complete victory. Now on the top of these things and of isolated crimes of the German Government, like the shooting of Miss Cavell and Captain Fryatt, come these abominable deportations of Belgians into a sort of slavery."

In all communication with Lord Bryce, one feels the accurate fair-minded scholar. He is without heat and partisanship. He added in a note:

"We know that our British soldiers fight hard, but they fight fair, and they have no personal hatred to their enemies. I have been at the British front and have seen their spirit. I was told that our men when they take a prisoner often clap him on the back and give him a cigarette. There is no personal hatred among our officers or men. Efforts are properly made here at home to keep bitterness against the German people as a whole from the minds of our people, but it is right that they should detest and do their utmost to overthrow the system that has produced this war and has made it so horrible."

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II

SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES

I have seen the original diaries of the German soldiers in the army which devastated Belgium and Northern France. Things tumble out just as they happened, hideous acts, unedited thoughts. Phillips Brooke once spoke of the sensation there would be if the contents of our minds were dumped on Boston Common for people to see. Here is the soul of the German people spilled out into writing. This is what Germany was in the year 1914. This record left by dead men and by captured men is a very living thing to me, because I saw these German soldiers at their work of burning and torture. Here they have themselves told of doing the very thing I saw them do. We must not miss the point of their proof, written and signed by the perpetrators themselves. It is the proof of systematic massacre, systematic pillage, systematic arson.

These diaries found on the field of battle were brought to the French General Staff along with the arms and equipments of the dead and the prisoners. They are written by the soldiers because of Article 75 of the German Instruction for Campaign Service (Felddienst-Ordnung), which states that "these journals of war serve for information on the general operations, and, by bringing together the various reports of active fighting, they are the basis for the later definitive histories of the campaigns. They should be kept daily." No words could be more exactly prophetic. Those diaries will be the basis of all future histories of the war. The keeping of them is obligatory for the officers, and seems to be voluntary on the part of the men, but with a measure of implied requirement. So stern did some of the soldiers feel the military requirement to be that they kept on with their record up to the point of death. Here is the diary of a soldier of the Fourth Company of the Tenth Battalion of Light Infantry Reserves, which he was writing at the moment he was fatally wounded.

"Ich bin verwundet. BehÜte dich Gott. KÜsse das Kind. Es soll fromm sein." And then the pencil stops forever. The writing on that final page of all is regular and firm up to the "Ich bin verwundet." Those last four sentences are each just a line long, as if each was a cry. He wrote the word "KÜsse" and could hardly rally himself. His pencil slips into three marks without meaning, then he writes "das Kind." I trust my German readers will not deny me the use of this diary. It is the only one of which I have not seen the original. The photographic reproduction is my only evidence of this flash of tenderness among a thousand acts of infamy.

The diaries are little black-covered pocket copybooks: the sort that women in our country use for the family accounts. They contain about 100 pages. They average five inches in length and three in width. A few of the diaries, and those mostly belonging to officers, are written in ink. But most of them are in pencil, occasionally in black, but the large majority in purple.

Many of the diaries are curt records of daily marches and military operations. The man is too tired to write anything but distances, names of places, engagements. That was what the Great German General Staff had in mind in ordering the practice. They could not foresee what would slip through into the record, because in all their calculations they have always forgotten the human spirit. Once again we are indebted to German thoroughness. The causes, the objects, the methods of this war, will not be in doubt, as in other wars of the past. History will be clear in dealing its judgments. Like the surgeon's ray on a fester, German light has played on the sore spots. So the soldiers have gone on making their naked records of crimes committed and their naÏve mental reactions on what they did, till all too late the German machine forbade further exposure of the national soul. But the faithful peasant fingers had written what all eternity cannot annul.

"These booklets, stained, bruised, sometimes perforated by bayonet or torn by splinters of shell, the pencilings in haste, day by day, in spite of fatigue, in spite even of wounds"—they are the most human documents of the war.

This privilege of working with the originals themselves was extended by the Ministry of War. The General Staff issued a Laissez-Passer, and gave me an introduction to the fine white-haired old Lieutenant, who is a Russian and German scholar. Together we went word by word over the booklets. I was impressed by the fair-minded attitude of my co-worker. "An honest man," he said, when we came to Harlak's record. "Un brave soldat," he declared of the old reservist, who protested against murder. He was not trying to make a case. He had no need to make a case. The pity of it is that the case has been so thoroughly made by German hands. These diaries have not been doctored in the smallest detail. There they are, as they were taken from the body of the dead man and the pocket of the prisoners. The room where we worked is stuffed with the booklets of German soldiers. Shelves are lined with the black-bound diaries and the little red books of identification carried by each soldier. They overflow upon tables. In this room and a suite adjoining sit the official translators of the French General Staff. I have purposely selected certain of my examples from the official reports of the French Government. I wanted to verify for American "neutrals" that no slightest word had been altered, that no insertions had been made.

My first diary was that of a Saxon officer of the Eighth Company, of the 178th Regiment, of the XII Army Corps. He makes his entry for 26 August, 1914.

"The lovely village of GuÉ-d'Hossus, apparently entirely innocent, has been given to the flames. A cyclist is said to have fallen from his machine, and in so doing his rifle was discharged, so they fired at him. Accordingly the male inhabitants were cast into the flames. Such atrocities are not to happen again, one hopes."

The German phrases carry the writer's sense of outrage: "Das wunderschÖne Dorf GuÉ-d'Hossus soll ganz unschuldig in Flammen gegangen sein. ... Man hat mÄnnliche Einwohner einfach in die Flammen geworfen. Solche Scheusslichkeiten Kommen hoffentlich nich wieder vor."

He adds: "At LÄffe, about 200 men have been shot. There it was an example for the place; it was inevitable for the innocent to suffer. Even so there ought to be a verification of mere suspicions of guilt before aiming a fusillade at everybody."

In the village of Bouvignes on August 23, 1914, he and his men entered a private home.

"There on the floor was the body of the owner. In the interior our men had destroyed everything exactly like vandals.... The sight of the inhabitants of the village who had been shot beggars any descriptions. The volley had nearly decapitated certain of them. Every house to the last corner had been searched and so the inhabitants brought out from their hiding-places. The men were shot. The women and children put in the convent. From this convent shooting has come, so the convent will be burned. Only through the giving up of the guilty and the paying of 15,000 francs can it save itself."

The German phrases of frightfulness have a sound that matches their meaning:

"Hatten unsere Leute bereits wie die Vandalen gehaust." "MÄnner erschossen."

I opened the diary of Private Hassemer of the VIII Corps, and in the entry at Sommepy (in the district of the Marne) for September 3, 1914, I read:

"3/9 1914. Ein schreckliches Blutbad, Dorf abgebrannt, die Franzosen in die brennenden HÄuser geworfen, Zivilpersonen alles mitverbrandt."

("A hideous bloodbath (massacre), the village totally burned, the French hurled into the burning houses, civilians, everybody, burned together.")

An unsuspected brutality is here revealed. To these men a peasant of another race is not a father and husband and man. He is as a dog. He is "AuslÄnder," beyond the pale—a thing to be chased with bayonets and burned with fire, to the rollicking amusement of brave soldiers. Back of the slaughter lies the basic idea of a biological superiority in the German people, a belief that their duty calls them to a sacred war to dominate other races, and create a greater Germany. They think they are a higher order of beings, who can kill creatures of a lesser breed, as one slays the lower order of animals in the march of progress. Other races have had dreams of grandeur, but never so mad a dream, so colossal in its designs on world dominion, so cruel in its methods of achieving that supremacy.

Soldat Wilhelm Schellenberg, of 106 Reserve Infantry of the XII Reserve Army Corps, gives his home as Groitzsch bei Leipzig, "am Bahnhof," first floor, number 8. "Frau Martha Schellenberg" is to be notified. His diary is innocent.

I held in my hands the diary of Erich Harlak of the II Company, 38 Fusilier Regiment of the Sixth Army Corps. There is a cut through the cover and pages of the pamphlet—probably the stab of a bayonet. Harlak is a Silesian. On the first page he writes in German "Bitte dieses Buch gÜtigst meinen Eltern zusenden zu wollen." Then in French "Je prie aussi Les FranÇais de rendre, s'il vous plait, cet livre À mes parents. Addresse Lehrer Harlak." "Meinen lieben Eltern gewidmet in Grune bei Lisser in Posen."

He writes, "I noticed how our cavalry had plundered here." He gives an instance of how the men broke to pieces what they could not carry away. "La Guerre est la Guerre." He writes that in French. He runs his table of values.

1	kleiner sous	=	4	pfennig.
1	grosser sous	=	8	"
1/2	sous	=	2	"

He has a vocabulary of French words in his own handwriting. His record is one of honest distress at the pillage done by his comrades.

When the French soldiers say "C'est la Guerre"—"that's the way it is with war"—they refer to the monotony of it, or the long duration, or some curious ironic contrast between a peaceful farmyard scene and a Taube dropping bombs. The Germans say it again and again in their diaries, sometimes in the French phrase, sometimes "Das ist der Krieg," and almost always they use it in speaking of a village they have burned or peasants they have shot. To them that phrase is an absolution for any abomination. It is the blood-brother of "military necessity."

Carl Zimmer, Lieutenant of the 57th Infantry of the VII Corps, has a diary that runs from August 2 to October 17, 1914. On August 29 he tells of marching through a village of Belgium.

"Very many houses burned whose inhabitants had shot at our soldiers. 250 Civilians shot."

At the head of his diary he writes: "Mit Gott fÜr KÖnig und Vaterland." His record is in ink. Bielefeld in Westphalia is his home town.

Prussia has Prussianized Germany. These diaries cover the Empire. The writers are Rhenish Pomeranian and Brandenburgian, Saxon and Bavarian. And the very people, such as the Bavarians and Saxons, whom we had hoped were of a merciful tradition, have bettered the instruction of the military hierarchy at Berlin. What Prussia preached they have practiced with the zeal of a recent convert eager to please his master.

Fahlenstein, a reservist of the 34 Fusiliers, II Army Corps, writes on August 28th:

"They (the French troops) lay heaped up 8 to 10 in a heap, wounded and dead, always one on top of the other. Those who could still walk were made prisoners and brought with us. The severely wounded, with a shot in the head or lungs and so forth, who could not make further effort, received one more bullet, which ended their life. That is indeed what we were ordered to do."

("Die schwer verwundeten ... bekamen dennoch eine Kugel zu, dass ihr Leben ein Ende hatte. Das ist uns ja auch befohlen worden.")

His unwillingness to do the wicked thing must be subordinated to the will of the officer.

Corporal Menge of the Eighth Company of the 74th Reserve Infantry, 10 Reserve Corps, writes in his diary for August 15:

"Wir passieren unter dreimaligen Hurra auf unsern Kaiser u. unter den KlÄngen d. Liedes Deutschland Über alles die Belgische Grenze. Alle BÄume ungefÄllt als Sperre. Pfarrer u. dessen Schwester aufgehÄngt, HÄuser abgebrannt."

("We passed over the Belgian border under a three times given Hurrah for our Kaiser, and under the Strain of the song Deutschland Über alles. All the trees were felled as barricades. A curÉ and his sister hanged, houses burned.")

This is a neatly written diary, which he wishes to be sent to Fraulein F. Winkel of Hanover.

Penitential days are coming for the German Empire and for the German people. For these acts of horror are the acts of the people: man by man, regiment by regiment, half a million average Germans, peasants and clerks, stamped down through Belgium and Northern France, using the incendiary pellet and the bayonet. In the words of the manifesto, signed by the 93 Wise Men of Germany, referring to the German army, "Sie kennt keine zuchtlose Grausamkeit": it doesn't know such a thing as undisciplined cruelty. No, these are the acts of orderly procedure, planned in advance, carried out systematically. Never for an instant did the beautiful disciplined efficiency of the regiment relax in crushing a child and burning an inhabited house. The people of Germany have bowed their will to the implacable machine. They have lost their soul in its grinding.

Private Sebastian Weishaupt of the Third Bavarian Infantry, First Bavarian Corps:

"10.8.1914—Parie das erste Dorf verbrannt, dann gings los; Dorf nach dem andern in Flammen; Über Feld und Acker mit Rad bis wir dann an Strassengraben kamen, wo wir dann Kirschen assen."

("Octobre 8, 1914. Parux is the first village burned, then things break loose: 1 village after another to the flames; over field and meadow with cycle we then come to the roadside ditches, where we ate cherries.")

It is all in the day's work: the burning of villages, the murder of peasants, the eating of cherries. Travelers among savage tribes have told of living among them for years, and then suddenly in a flash the inmost soul of the tribe has revealed itself in some sudden mystical debauch of blood. There is an immense unbridled cruelty in certain of these German soldiers expressing itself in strange, abnormal ways. This is the explanation of some of the outrages, some of the mutilations. But, for the most part, the cruelty is not perversion, nor a fierce, jealous hate. It is merely the blind, brutal expression of imperfectly developed natures, acting under orders.

GÖttsche, now commissioned officer of the 85 Infantry Regiment, 9 Army Corps, writes:

"The captain summoned us together and said: 'In the fort which is to be taken there are apparently Englishmen. I wish to see no Englishmen taken prisoner by the company.' A universal Bravo of agreement was the answer."

("'Ich wÜnsche aber Keinen gefangenen EnglÄnder bei: der Kompagnie zu sehen.' Ein allgemeines Bravo der Zustimmung war die Antwort.")

Forty-three years of preparedness on every detail of treachery and manslaughter, but not one hour of thought on what responses organized murder would call out from the conscience of the world, nor what resistances such cruelty would create. It is curious the way they set down their own infamy. There is all the naÏvetÉ of a primitive people. Once a black man from an African colony came to where a friend of mine was sitting. He was happily chopping away with his knife at a human skull which he wore suspended from his neck. He was as innocent in the act as a child jabbing a pumpkin with his jack-knife. So it has been with the Germans. They burn, plunder, murder, with a light heart.

There are noble souls among them who look on with sad and wondering eyes. What manner of men are these, they ask themselves in that intimacy of the diary, which is like the talk of a soul with its maker. These men, our fellow-countrymen, who behave obscenely, who pour out foulness—what a race is this of ours! That is the burden of the self-communion, which high-minded Germans have written down, unconscious that their sadness would be the one light in the dark affair, unaware that only in such revolt as their own is there any hope at all of a future for their race.

The most important diary of all is that of an officer whose name I have before me as I write, but I shall imitate the chivalry of the French government and not publish that name. It would only subject his family to reprisal by the German military power. He belongs to the 46th Reserve Infantry Regiment, 5 Reserve Corps. He has a knack at homely details. He enters a deserted house where the pendulum of the clock still swings and ticks and sounds the hours. He believes himself under the direct protection and guidance of God. He sees it when a shell explodes, killing his comrades. He speaks of the beauty of the dead French officers, as he sees them lying in a railway station. He is skeptical about the lies told against French and Belgians. He realizes that the officers are whipping up a fury in the men, so that they will obey orders to kill and burn. In his pages you can see the mighty machine at work, manufacturing the hate which will lead to murder. The hand on the lever at Berlin sets grinding the wheels, and each little cog vibrates and moves in unison. He is a simple, pious man, shocked by the wickedness of his soldiers, offended by the cruelty of the officers, hating war, longing for its end. He plans to publish his memoirs of the campaign, with photographs, which he will return to France to make after the war. He is a natural philosopher. Most of all, he loves his quiet smoke, which keeps him good-humored. He has written a page in his diary in praise of tobacco.

"I smoke about ten cigars a day. And if it hadn't been for these cigars my good-humor in these dangers and fatigues would be much less. Smoking gives me to a degree calm and content. With it I have something to occupy my thoughts. It is necessary for one to see these things in order to understand."

Later he writes:

"October 15, 1914. It had been planned at first that we should go into quarters at Billy (Billy sous-Nangiennes), where the whole civil population had been already forced out, and whatever was movable had been taken away or made useless. This method of conducting war is directly barbarous. I am astonished how we can make any complaint over the behavior of the Russians. We conduct ourselves in France much worse, and on every occasion and on every small pretext we have burned and plundered. But God is just and sees everything. His mills grind slowly, but exceedingly small."

("Diese Art kriegfÜhrung ist direkt barbarisch ... bei jeder Gelegenheit wird unter irgend einem Vorwande gebrannt und geplÜndert. Aber Gott ist gerecht und sieht alles: seine MÜhlen mahlen langsam aber schrecklich klein.")

These extracts which I have given are from diaries of which I have examined the originals, and gone word by word over the German, in the penciling of the writer. The revelation of these diaries is that the Germans have not yet built their moral foundations. They have shot up to some heights. But it is not a deep-centered structure they have reared. It is scaffolding and fresco. We shall send them back home to begin again. Sebastian Weishaupt and Private Hassemer and Corporal Menge must stay at home. They must not come to other countries to try to rule them, nor to any other peoples, to try to teach them. Their hand is somewhat bloody. That is my feeling in reading these diaries of German soldiers—poor lost children of the human race, back in the twilight of time, so far to climb before you will reach civilization. We must be very patient with you through the long years it will take to cast away the slime and winnow out the simple goodness, which is also there.

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III

MORE DIARIES

In former European wars foul practices were committed by individual members of armies. But the total army in each country was a small hired band of men, representing only the fractional part of one per cent of the population. It was in no way representative of the mind of the people. Of the present German Army, Professor Dr. Max Planck, of the University of Berlin, a distinguished physicist, has recently written:

"The German Army is nothing but the German people in arms, and the scholars and artists are, like all other classes, inseparably bound up with it."

We must regard the acts of the German Army as the acts of the people. We cannot dodge the problem of their misbehavior by saying they have not committed atrocities. We have the signed statements of a thousand German diaries that they have practiced frightfulness village by village through Belgium and Northern France. We cannot say it was a handful of drunken, undisciplined soldiers who did these things. It was "the German people in arms." It was an army that "knows no such thing as undisciplined cruelty." It was a nation of people that burned and murdered, acting under orders. Now, we have arrived at the heart of the problem. Why did they commit these horrors?

Irritated by an unexpectedly firm resistance from the Belgian and French Armies, fed on lies spread by German officers concerning the cruelty of French and Belgians, they obeyed the commands to burn houses and shoot civilians.

These commands released a primitive quality of brutality.

On August 25th, 1914, Reservist Heinrich Bissinger, of the town of Ingolstadt, of the Second Company, of the First Bavarian Pioneers, writes of the village of Orchies:

"A woman was shot because she did not stop at the word Halt, but kept running away. Thereupon we burn the whole place."

("SÄmtliche Civilpersonen werden verhaftet. Eine Frau wurde vershossen, weil sie auf Halt Rufen nicht hielt, sondern ausreissen wollte. Hierauf Verbrennen der ganzen Ortschaft.")

One wonders if Heinrich Bissinger would wish the treatment he and his comrades accorded to Orchies, to be applied to his own home town of Ingolstadt. If some German peasant woman in Ingolstadt failed to understand a word in a foreign tongue, and were killed, and then if Ingolstadt were burned, would Heinrich Bissinger feel that "military necessity" exonerated the soldiers that performed the deed?

Private Philipp, from Kamenz, Saxony, of the First Company, of the first Battalion of the 178th Regiment, writes: "Kriegs Tagebuch-Soldat Philipp, 1 Kompanie (Sachsen)," at the head of his diary. On August 23 he writes of a village that had been burned:

"A spectacle terrible and yet beautiful. Directly at the entrance lay about 50 dead inhabitants who had been shot, because they had traitorously fired on our troops. In the course of the night many more were shot, so that we could count over 200. Women and children, lamp in hand, had to watch the horrible spectacle. Then in the middle of the corpses we ate our rice; since morning we had eaten nothing. By search through the houses we found much wine and liquor, but nothing to eat."

("Im Laufe der Nacht wurden noch viele erschossen, sodass wir Über 200 zÄhlen konnten. Frauen und Kinder, die Lampe in der Hand, mussten dem entsetzlichen Schauspiele zusehen. Wir assen dann inmitten der Leichen unsern Reis, seit Morgen hatten wir nichts gegessen.")

German soldiers obey these orders because their military training and their general education have made them docile. They have never learned to exercise independent individual moral judgment on acts ordered by the state. The state to them is an organism functioning in regions that lie outside the intellectual and moral life of the individual. In every German there are separate water-tight compartments: the one for the life he leads as a husband and father, the other for the acts he must commit as a citizen of the Empire and as a soldier of the Army. In his home life he makes choices. In his public life he has no choice. He must obey without compunctions. So he lays aside his conscience. In the moral realm the German is a child, which means that he is by turns cruel, sentimental, forgetful of the evil he has done the moment before, happy in the present moment, eating enormously, pleased with little things, crying over a letter from home, weary of the war, with sore feet and a rebellious stomach, a heavy pack, and no cigars. I am basing every statement I make on the statements written by German soldiers. We do not have to guess at German psychology. They have ripped open their subconsciousness.

The lieutenant of the 5th Battalion of reserves of the Prussian Guard writes on August 24 at Cirey:

"In the night unbelievable things have taken place. Warehouses plundered, money stolen, violations simply hair-raising."

("In der Nacht sind unglaubliche Sachen passiert. LÄden ausgeplÜndert, Geld gestohlen, Vergewaltigungen, Einfach haarstrÄubend.")

This diary of the lieutenant's has a black cover, a little pocket for papers, a holder for the pencil. It is written partly in black pencil and partly in purple. Thirty-two pages are written, 118 are blank. It covers a space of time from August 1 to September 4, 1914.

Mrs. Wharton has brought to my attention the chronicle of Salimbene, a Franciscan of the thirteenth century, wherein similar light-hearted crimes are recorded.

"On one day he (Ezzelino) caused 11,000 men of Padua to be burnt in the field of Saint George; and when fire had been set to the house in which they were being burnt, he jousted as if in sport around them with his knights.

"The villagers dwelt apart, nor were there any that resisted their enemies or opened the mouth or made the least noise. And that night they (the soldiers) burned 53 houses in the village."

The orders given by the German commanding general to his officers, far from recommending prudence and humanity, impose the obligation of holding the total civil population collectively responsible for the smallest individual infractions, and of acting against every tentative infringement with pitiless severity. These officers are as specialized a class as New York gunmen or Paris apaches. Their career lies in anti-social conduct. "This wild upper-class of the young German imperialistic idea" are implacable destroyers. Their promotion is dependent on the extent of their cruelties.

I have seen an original copy of the order for the day (Korps-Tagesbefehl) issued on August 12, 1914, by General von Fabeck, commanding the 13th Army Corps. He says:

"Lieutenant Haag of the 19th Regiment of Uhlans, acting as chief of patrol, has proceeded energetically against the rioting inhabitants, and as agreed has employed arms. I express to him my recognition for his energy and his decision."

("Ich spreche ihm fÜr seinen Schneid und seine Umsicht meine Anerkennung aus.")

What that gives to Lieutenant Haag is the power of life and death over non-combatants, with praise for him if he deals out death.

Let us hear General von Fabeck speak again. Here are his instructions for his troops on August 15, 1914 (I have held the original in my hands):

"As soon as the territory is entered, the inhabitants are to be held responsible for maintaining the lines of communication. For that purpose the commander of the advance guard will arrange a strong patrol of campaign gendarmes (Feldgendarmerie-Patrouille) to be used for the interior of the locality held by our troops. Against every inhabitant who tries to do us a damage, or who does us a damage, it is necessary to act with pitiless severity."

"Mit rÜcksichtsloser Strenge."

This order is on long sheets of the nature of our foolscap. It is written in violet ink.

The copy reads:

gez. v. Fabeck
FÜr die Richtigkeit der Abschrift
Baessler
Oberlt. und Brig-Adjutant.

Baessler is the aide-de-camp.

Two violations of the rights of non-combatants are in that order. The requisitioning of inhabitants on military work where they are exposed to the fire of their own nation; pitiless severity applied to every non-combatant on the least suspicion of a hostile act.

Actually the state which the simple soldiers obey so utterly is an inner clique of landed proprietors, captains of industry, and officers of the army—men of ruthless purpose and vast ambitions. The sixty-five millions of docile peasants, clerks, artizans and petty officials are tools for this inner clique.

"The theories of the German philosophers and public men are of one piece with the collective acts of the German soldiers. The pages of the Pan-German writers are prophetic. They are not so much the precursors as the results, the echoes of a something impersonal that is vaster than their own voice. Here we have acted out the cult of force, creator of Right, practiced since its dim origins by Prussia, defended philosophically by Lasson, scientifically by Haeckel and Ostwald, politically by Treitschke, and in a military way by General von Bernhardi."

The modern Germany is the victim of an obsession. Under its sentimental domestic life, its placid beergarden recreation, its methodical activities, its reveries, its emotional laxity fed on music, it was generating destructive forces. Year by year it was thinking the thoughts, inculcated by its famous teachers, until those ideas, pushed deep down into the subconscious, became an overmastering desire, a dream of world-grandeur. For once an idea penetrates through to the subconsciousness, it becomes touched with emotional life, later to leap back into the light of day in uncontrolled action.

I can produce one of the original bills posted on the walls of LiÈge by General von Bulow. Here is the way it reads:

Ordre.

A la population LiÈgeoise.

La population d'Andenne, aprÈs avoir tÉmoignÉ des intentions pacifiques À l'Égard de nos troupes, les a attaquÉes de la faÇon la plus traÎtresse. Avec mon autorisation, le GÉnÉral qui commandait ces troupes a mis la ville en cendres et a fait fusilier 110 personnes. Je porte ce fait À la connaissance de la ville de LiÈge, pour que ses habitants sachent À quel sort ils peuvent s'attendre s'ils prennent une attitude semblable.

LiÈge, le 22 AoÛt, 1914.

GÉnÉral von Bulow.

("The inhabitants of the town of Andenne, after having testified to their peaceful intentions in regard to our troops, attacked them in a fashion the most treacherous. By my authorization, the General who commanded the troops has burned the town to ashes and has shot 110 people. I bring this to the knowledge of the town of LiÈge, in order that the inhabitants may know what fate they invite if they take a like attitude.")

It is only in victorious conquest that the German is unendurable. When he was trounced at the Battle of the Marne, he ceased his wholesale burnings and massacres throughout that district, and continued his campaign of frightfulness only in those sections of Belgium around Antwerp where he was still conquering new territory. His dream of world conquest will die in a day, when the day comes that sends him home. In defeat, he is simple, kindly, surprised at humane treatment. He ceases to be a superman at the touch of failure. All his blown-up grandeur collapses, and he shrinks to his true stature.

This return to wholesomeness is dependent on two things: a thorough defeat in this war, so that the German people will see that a machine fails when it seeks to crush the human spirit, and an internal revolution in the conception of individual duty to the state, so that they will regain the virtues of common humanity. The water-tight compartments, which they have built up between the inner voice of conscience in the individual life and the outer compulsion of the state, must be broken through.

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IV

THE BOOMERANG

One of the best jokes of the war has been put over on the Germans by themselves. Here I quote from a German diary of which I have seen the original. It is written by a sub-officer of the Landwehr, of the 46th Reserve Regiment, the 9th Company, recruited from the province of Posen. He and his men are on the march, and the date is August 21. He writes:

"We are informed of things to make us shudder concerning the wickedness of the French, as, for instance, that our wounded, lying on the ground, have their eyes put out, their ears and noses cut. We are told that we ought to behave without any limits. I have the impression that all this is told us for the sole purpose that no one shall stay behind or take the French side; our men also are of the same opinion."

On August 23 he writes:

"I learn from different quarters that the French maltreat our prisoners; a woman has put out the eyes of an Uhlan."

By August 24 all this begins to have its effect on the imperfectly developed natures of his comrades, and he writes:

"I find among our troops a great excitability against the French."

There we can see the machinery of hate in full operation. The officers state the lies to the soldiers. They travel fast by rumor. The primitive, emotional men respond with ever-increasing excitement till they readily carry out murder.

Let us see how all this is working back home in the Fatherland. I have seen the photographic reproduction of a letter written by a German woman to her husband (from whose body it was taken), in which she tells him not to spare the French dogs ("Hunden"), neither the soldiers nor the women. She goes on to give her reason. The French, she says, men and women, are cruel to German prisoners. The story had reached her.

The German Chancellor in September, 1914, stated in an interview for the United States:

"Your fellow countrymen are told that German troops have burned Belgian villages and towns, but you are not told that young Belgian girls have put out the eyes of the defenseless wounded on the field of battle. Belgian women have cut the throats of our soldiers as they slept, men to whom they had given hospitality."

The final consecration of the rumor was given by the Kaiser himself. On September 8, 1914, he sent a cable to President Wilson, in which he repeated these allegations against the Belgian people and clergy. Of course, he knew better, just as his Chancellor and General Staff and his officers knew better. It was all part of the play to charge the enemy with things akin to what the Germans themselves were doing. That makes it an open question, with "much to be said on both sides." That creates neutrality on the part of non-investigating nations, like the United States.

But what he and his military clique failed to see was that they had discharged a boomerang. The comeback was swift. The German Protestants began to "agitate" against the German Roman Catholics. The old religious hates revived; a new religious war was on. Now, this was the last thing desired by the military power. An internal strife would weaken war-making power abroad. Here was Germany filled with lies told by the military clique. Those lies were creating internal dissension. So the same military clique had to go to work and deny the very lies they had manufactured. They did not deny them out of any large love for the Belgian and French people. They denied them because of the anti-Catholic feeling inside Germany which the lies had stirred up. German official inquiries have established the falsity of the atrocity charges leveled against the Belgians.

A German priest, R. P. Bernhard Duhr, S. J., published a pamphlet-book, "Der LÜgengeist im VÖlkekrieg. KriegsmÄrchen gesammelt von Bernhard Duhr, S. J.," (MÜnchen-Regensburg, Verlagsanstat, Vorm. G. J. Manz, Buch und Kunstdruckei, 1915). Its title means "The spirit of falsehood in a people's war. Legends that spring up in war-time." His book was written as a defense of Roman Catholic interests and for the sake of the internal peace of his own country. This book I have seen. It is a small pamphlet of 72 pages, with a red cover. The widest circulation through the German Empire was given to this proof of the falsity of the charges laid to the Allies. Powerful newspapers published the denials and ceased to publish the slanders. Generals issued orders that persons propagating the calumnies, whether orally, by picture or in writing, would be followed up without pity. So died the legend of atrocities by Belgians. The mighty power of the Roman Catholic Church had stretched out its arm and touched the Kaiser and his war lords to silence.

The charges are treachery, incitement to murder and battle, traitorous attacks, the hiding of machine guns in church towers, the murder, poisoning and mutilation of the wounded. The story ran that the civil population, incited by the clergy, entered actively into hostilities, attacking troops, signaling to the Allies the positions occupied by the Germans. The favorite and most popular allegation was that women, old people and children committed atrocities on wounded Germans, putting out their eyes, cutting off their fingers, ears and noses; and that priests urged them on to do these things and played an active part in perpetrating the crimes. Putting out the eyes became the prize story of all the collection.

The German priest, Duhr, runs down each lie to its source, and then prints the official denial. Thus, a soldier of the Landwehr sends the story to Oberhausen (in the Rhine provinces):

"At Libramont the Catholic priest and the burgomaster, after a sermon, have distributed bullets to the civil population, with which the inhabitants fire on German soldiers. A boy of thirteen years has put out the eyes of a wounded officer, and women, forty to fifty years old, have mutilated our wounded soldiers. The women, the priest and the burgomaster have been all together executed at TrÈves. The boy has been condemned to a long term in the home of correction."

The German commander of the garrison at TrÈves writes:

"Five Belgian francs-tireurs who had been condemned to death by the court martial were shot at TrÈves. A sixth Belgian, still rather young, has been condemned to imprisonment for many years. Among the condemned there were neither women, nor priests nor burgomaster."

This communication is signed by Colonel Weyrach.

Postcards representing Belgian francs-tireurs were placed on sale at Cassel. The commander of the district writes:

"The commanding general of the XI Army Corps at Cassel has confiscated the cards."

Wagner Bauer, of the Prussian Ministry of War, writes of another tale:

"The story of the priest and the boy spreads as a rumor among troops on the march."

The Herner Zeitung, an official organ, in its issue of September 9, printed the following: "Among the French prisoners was a Belgian priest who had collected his parishioners in the church to fire from hiding on the German soldiers. Shame that German soil should be defiled by such trash! And to think that a nation which shields rascals of that sort dares to invoke the law of humanity!"

Frhr. von Bissing, commanding general of the VII Army Corps, writes:

"The story of a Belgian priest, reported by the Herner Zeitung does not answer at any point to the truth, as it has since been established. The facts have been communicated to the Herner Zeitung concerning their article."

The Hessische Zeitung prints the following under title of "Letters from the Front by a Hessian Instructor":

"The door of the church opens suddenly and the priest rushes out at the head of a gang of rascals armed with revolvers."

The Prussian Ministry of War replies:

"The inquiry does not furnish proof in support of the alleged acts."

The Berliner Tageblatt, for September 10, has a lively story:

"It was the curÉ who had organized the resistance of the people, who had them enter the church, and who had planned the conspiracy against our troops."

The Prussian Minister of War makes answer: "The curÉ did not organize the resistance of inhabitants; he did not have them enter the church, and he had not planned the conspiracy against our troops."

The dashing German war correspondent, Paul Schweder, writes in Landesbote an article, "Under the Shrapnel in Front of Verdun." He says that he saw:

"A convoy of francs-tireurs, at their head a priest with his hands bound."

The German investigator pauses to wonder why every prisoner and every suspect is a franc-tireur, and then he goes on with his inquiry, which results in a statement from the Prussian War Minister:

"Deiber (the priest) had nothing charged against him, was set at liberty, and, at his own request, has been authorized to live at Oberhaslach."

The Frankfurter Zeitung, September 8, has a spirited account of a combat with francs-tireurs in Andenne, written by Dr. Alex Berg, of Frankfort:

"The curÉ went through the village with a bell, to give the signal for the fight. The battle began immediately after, very hotly."

The military authority of Andenne, Lieutenant Colonel v. Eulwege:

"My own investigation, very carefully made, shows no proof that the curÉ excited the people to a street fight. Every one at Andenne gives a different account from that, to the effect that most of the people have seen hardly anything of the battle, so-called, because they had hidden themselves from fear in the cellars."

Finally, the War Ministry and the press wearied of individual denials, and one great blanket denial was issued. Der VÖlkerkrieg, which is a comprehensive chronicle of review of the war, states:

"It is impossible to present any solid proof of the allegation, made by so many letters from the front, to the effect that the Belgian priests took part in the war of francs-tireurs. Letters of that kind which we have heretofore reproduced in our record—for example, the recital of events at Louvain and Andenne—are left out of the new editions."

Der Fels, Organ der Central-Auskunftstelle der katholischen Presse, states:

"The serious accusations which I have listed are not only inaccurate in parts and grossly exaggerated, but they are invented in every detail, and are at every point false."

And, again, it says:

"All the instances, known up to the present and capable of being cleared up, dealing with the alleged cruelties of Catholic priests in the war, have been found without exception false or fabrications through and through."

Turning to the "mutilations," we have the Nach Feierabend publishing a "letter from the front" which tells of a house of German wounded being burned by the French inhabitants. Asked for the name of the place and the specific facts, the editor replied that "you are not the forum where it is my duty to justify myself. Your proceeding in the midst of war of representing the German soldiers who fight and die as liars, in order to save your own skin, I rebuke in the most emphatic way."

But the Minister of War got further with the picturesque editor, and writes:

"The editorial department of the Nach Feierabend states that it hasn't any longer in its possession the letter in question."

Now we come to the most famous of all the stories.

"At a military hospital at Aix-la-Chapelle an entire ward was filled with wounded, who had had their eyes put out in Belgium."

Dr. Kaufmann, an ecclesiastic of Aix-la-Chapelle, writes:

"I send you the testimony of the head doctor of a military hospital here, a celebrated oculist whom I consulted just because he is an oculist. He writes me:

"'In no hospital of Aix-la-Chapelle is there any ward of wounded with their eyes put out. To my knowledge absolutely nothing of the sort has been verified at Aix-la-Chapelle.'"

The KÖlnische Volkzeitung, October 28, gives the testimony of Dr. VÜlles, of the hospital in Stephanstrasse, Aix-la-Chapelle, in reference to the "Ward of Dead Men," where "twenty-eight soldiers lay with eyes put out." The men laughed heartily when they were asked if they had had their eyes put out.

"If you wish to publish what you have seen," said Dr. VÜller, "you will be able to say that my colleague, Dr. Thier, as well as myself, have never treated a single soldier who had his eyes put out."

Professor Kuhnt, of the clinic for diseases of the eye at Bonn, writes:

"I have seen many who have lost their sight because of rifle bullets or shell fire. The story is a fable."

The Weser-Zeitung has a moving story of a hospital at Potsdam for soldiers wounded by the francs-tireurs, where lie officers with their eyes put out. "Young Belgian girls, of from fourteen to fifteen years of age, at the incitement of Catholic priests, have committed the crimes."

The commander at Potsdam writes:

"There is no special hospital here for soldiers wounded by the francs-tireurs. There are no officers here with eyes put out. The commander has taken measures to correct the article under dispute, and also in other publications."

So perish the lies used against Belgium. Lies manufactured by the General Staff and taught to their officers, to be used among the soldiers, in order to whip them to hate, because in that hate they would carry out the cold cruelty of those officers and of that General Staff. Lies put out in order to blind the eyes of neutrals, like the government at Washington, to the pillage, the burning and the murder which the German army was perpetrating as it marched through Belgium and Lorraine. Lies that later had to be officially denied by the same military power that had manufactured them, because those lies were stirring up civil strife at home, and because the Roman Catholic Germans investigated the sources and silenced the liars.

The Kaiser cabled to our country:

"The cruelties committed in this guerilla warfare by women, children and priests on wounded soldiers, members of the medical staff and ambulance workers have been such that my generals have at last been obliged to resort to the most rigorous measures. My heart bleeds to see that such measures have been made necessary and to think of the countless innocents who have lost their life and property because of the barbarous conduct of those criminals."

Now that he knows that those stories are lies he must feel sorrier yet that his army killed those countless innocents and burned those peasant homes.

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