When Charles IX of France was urged to kill Coligny, he finally consented, in these words, "Assassinate Admiral Coligny, but leave not a Huguenot alive in France to reproach me." That first assassination made the later atrocities inevitable. When the Kaiser and his War Staff determined to kill, they delayed for a time, but once their hands were dripping with blood, the first massacres made it necessary to go on, and kill the Belgians and Frenchmen who had witnessed the crimes. So came the unspeakable atrocities of the Germans.

"Take heed that ye offend not against one of my little ones. If any man offend against one of my little ones, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."—The Gospel of Matthew (Jesus Christ).

All Americans who have journeyed through Belgium and France this year have returned home permanently saddened men. German cruelty has cut a bloody gash in the heart, and while there are Dakin solutions that heal wounds in the arms and legs, there is no medicine that can heal the wounds in the heart. Some German-Americans still insist that the alleged German atrocities represent English lies, Belgian hypocrisies and French delusions, but all possibility of evasion or denial has been destroyed. Modern courts are satisfied with two forms of testimony, but the German atrocities are evidenced by five kinds of indubitable proof. There is the testimony of men and women telling what their own eyes have seen, and their own ears have heard,—that is a high form of evidence. There is the testimony of little children, children too innocent to invent what they are old enough to describe. Legal authorities tell us that because children are unprejudiced their testimony is the highest form of proof known to modern courts. Third, there is the testimony of the photograph,—photographs taken often before the massacred bodies had grown cold, and immediately after the German retreat from the town they had pillaged. The sunbeams move in straight lines; they tell no lies; they cannot be bribed; they have no prejudice for or against the Germans. No one can look at the hundreds of photographs of mutilated bodies without confessing that the sunlight, like a recording angel, has given a damning testimony that cannot be gainsaid by the monsters who not only killed men who defended the honour of their wives, but hacked these young husbands into shreds, mutilating the body in ways that can only be mentioned by men to men and in whispered tones.

The Germans Convict Themselves

Another form of proof is found in the journals and diaries of the German soldiers. The German has climbed into the witness stand, and given conclusive testimony against himself. Had his statements been made by Belgians, French or English, we would have denied or questioned the words, but when diaries have been taken from the dead bodies of German soldiers, and when these different journals contain substantially the same statements as to the atrocities committed at a given day in a given town, it becomes impossible for an American student to deny the daily records of German soldiers, with the confession of deeds committed sometimes by their fellows, sometimes by themselves. There is also the testimony of mutilated bodies that have been preserved in certain morgues against the day of judgment when arbitrators will behold the proof, hear the witnesses, and weigh the guilt of the Germans. The Day of Judgment is coming when these witnesses will rise literally from the grave and indict the German Kaiser and his War Staff for atrocities that are the logical and inevitable result of the ceaseless drill of their officers and privates in the science of murder, as a method of breaking down the nervous resources of the armed soldiers of Belgium and France.

Overwhelming Evidence

No horrors in history are so overwhelmingly evidenced as the German atrocities. The nature, the number, and the extent of their crimes have been documented more thoroughly than the scalpings of settlers by Sioux Indians, the horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, or the cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition. No American to-day can cross the threshold of Belgium or Northern France, Poland or Serbia, without recalling the words that Dante saw above the gate of Hell: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." Not since Judas and his fellow conspirators crucified Jesus has there been a ruler, a War Staff or an army, that has deliberately revived the cross, as an instrument of torture, to further the ends of military efficiency. The Germans have literally fulfilled the Kaiser's charge in 1899, and reproduced in 1914, upon various cards for the Kaiser's soldiers: "You will take no prisoners; you will show no mercy; you will give no quarter; you will make yourselves as terrible as the Huns under Attila." All scholars know that the Kaiser was referring to Attila's well-known motto, "Where my feet fall, let grass not grow for a hundred years."

A Catalogue of Crimes

The catalogue of German atrocities, now documented, in legal reports, with the accompanying photographs, preserved in the Department of Justice of the various nations, makes up the blackest page in human history. Long days and nights spent over the reports in the various capitals, and in courts of justice, journeys to and fro amid the ruined villages along a battle front six hundred miles in length, leave the head sick and the heart faint. The traveller would become utterly hopeless and broken-hearted, and give himself up to black despair, were it not that everything that German savagery has done to destroy one's faith in the divine origin of the human soul has been more than recovered by the gentleness, the self-sacrifice, the fortitude, the sympathy, the heroism of the British, the Belgians, and the French. The Germans have at last compelled all unprejudiced minds to recognize the atrocity as the German notion of scientific efficiency. It is not by chance that the first atrocities were begun on practically the same day, August 17th, of 1914, and ended about September 19th, and along a line extending from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier, just as the murders and mutilations, the rapes and the pillaging began and ended at the same time in Poland, Rumania and Serbia, and are now being repeated in more malignant forms in Northeastern Italy.

These Horrors Do Not Represent Drunkenness

Nor were these atrocities committed in moods of drunkenness, hours of anger, nor by the occasional degenerate, like Jack the Ripper of Whitechapel Road. Allen White and Arnold Toynbee are doubtless right in asserting that most of the attacks upon little girls and young women were made by German officers, nevertheless, all must confess that the German soldiers were not less culpable, as they pillaged the land, guided by the deliberate, cold, precise, scientific, ordered policy of German frightfulness.

The story of German occupancy of Belgium and France is a long, black story of unspeakable crimes. These brigands broke into banks, looted factories, pillaged houses, burned the farmers' machinery, chopped down orchards and vineyards. In the face of their newly-signed treaties with the Allied nations, pledging the safeguarding of all buildings dedicated to education and religion, with the lives and property of non-combatants, the Germans made their treaties mere scraps of paper, sneered at the most solemn obligations given by men to men, burned cathedrals, colleges and libraries, mutilated old men and women, violated little children, nailed a child to a farmer's barn door upon which they found a calf skin drying in the sun, and beneath wrote the word "zwei." They crucified Canadian officers and Roman Catholic nuns. They bombed hospitals and Red Cross buildings. They thrust women and little children between themselves and the Belgian and French soldiers defending their native land. The affidavits, photographs, and mutilated bodies are witnesses that destroy forever the last shred of doubt and incredulity. For men who are open to testimony, the German atrocities are more surely established than any of the hideous cruelties recorded in history. Now, for the first time, wildest savagery has been reduced to a science, and damned into existence under the name of German efficiency.

The Philosophy of the German Atrocities

At the beginning of the war the American people questioned all these alleged horrors, saying that all war is hell, and abuses are common to all armies. Americans looked upon these alleged abominations as being intellectually absurd and morally monstrous, and therefore we doubted the evidence. But at last all alike perceive that the German war-deeds differ from the usual abuses of war, as a cunning fiend differs from a drunken man. Germany believes in militarism, in forty-two centimeter guns, in submarines, in liquid fire and poisoned gases. This republic and our Allies believe in the manufacture of souls of good quality. We believe in schools, colleges, libraries, churches, factories, banks, fruitful fields and a self-sufficing, intelligent and moral manhood. From the Allied view-point, the very thought of Germany's asking other nations to produce property while once in a generation, with her standing army, she goes forth to pillage and loot the wealth that industrious French or Belgians have created, is for us a monstrous thought. From the German view-point, however, atrocities represent military efficiency. Just as the German War Staff perfected in advance rifles and cannon as legitimate warfare, so they prepared in advance certain outrages from which they expected the greatest possible results, in terms of conquered territory.

The German Handbook of Military Tactics

That their officers and soldiers might understand in advance the use of the atrocity as a military instrument, the General Staff of the German army, in 1902, published a handbook of military tactics, entitled "The Laws of War on Land." This handbook sets forth a deliberate system of atrocity, and prepares the way for every species of villainy. In clear and unmistakable language, the War Staff presents principles that embody the ideas of savages. Witness the statements on page 35: "By steeping himself in military history an officer will be able to guard himself against excessive humanitarian notions. It will teach him that certain severities are indispensable to war. What is permissible includes every means without which the object of the war cannot be attained." Witness also the savagery outlined on page 52: "A war conducted with energy cannot be directed merely against the combatants of the enemy states and the positions they occupy, but it will and must in like manner seek to destroy the total intellectual and material resources of the latter. Humanitarian claims,—such as the protection of men's lives and their property, can be taken into consideration only in so far as the nature and object of the war will permit." Their Handbook of Military Tactics is, therefore, nothing other than the science of atrocity. With an army steeped in these vicious teachings, with private soldiers trained by this handbook that teaches crime as an art, and with the exhortation of their Kaiser to make themselves as terrible as the Huns under Attila, the rape of Belgium, the crucifixion of Poland, and the assassination of Northern France were logical and inevitable results.

The German Motive for Massacre an Overwhelming One

To-day, Germans find it difficult to forgive Bethmann-Hollweg for his confessions when, at the beginning of the war, he acknowledged they were committing a wrong against Belgium, that their designs made necessary, by "hacking the way through." We now know that the motive of the Kaiser and his War Staff for massacring Belgium was an overwhelming motive. They had staked everything upon a short war. "Brussels in one week, Paris in two weeks, London in two months,"—that was the programme. The stubborn opposition of the Belgian army, standing on a frontier whose sanctity the Kaiser, by the most solemn treaties, had just pledged himself to safeguard, stalled the German military machine, made impossible a crushing victory over France, and threatened their dreams of a series of hurricane victories over England.

Then the German War Staff put into operation the instructions to "frightfulness" against aged men and women, girls and little children. Should the average American return home at night to find that his wife and children had been massacred and mutilated during his absence, he would not go to the office on the following morning. The horror of "a great darkness" would fall upon him, the tool would drop from his hand, and weeks would pass before he could steel his hand to the accustomed task. Now the German War Staff fully realized the true value of the atrocity as a military instrument. Their soldiers ran no risk in killing aged men or raping young girls, but they hoped that when the news of their crimes reached the armed opponent, the atrocity committed upon his wife or child would break his nerve, and leave him helpless to fight. It took only three and a half weeks to spread the black wave of terror and frightfulness over Belgium, in order to break the nerve forces of the Belgian army.

The Number of Atrocities

The full extent of this can never be known. More than one hundred thousand people are simply reported as "missing," other multitudes were burned or thrown into pits. Only in towns from which the German armies hurriedly retreated were inquests possible, and in those towns affidavits were prepared and photographs of the mutilated bodies taken. The fact that these atrocities all along the battle line began on practically the same day in August and ended on about the same day in September does not prove, but does suggest plan and prearrangement. After the German troops had passed through, it became possible for the village school-teacher, priest or banker, the aged women and the children who had escaped to creep out of pits, the caves in the fields, or the edge of the woods, where they had been hiding, and return to survey the scene of desolation behind them. In those towns where the soldiers encountered no opposition by the inhabitants, for the reason that there were no men left in the village, the Germans speedily wrought their devastation and departed. Then the French authorities hurried forward their authorized representatives, inquests were held, photographs taken of the mutilated bodies, and testimony taken and sent to the Department of Justice. What took place in those Belgian towns and cities that are still in German hands will never be known until the German officers and soldiers stand before the Great Judgment Throne and give their account unto God.

The German War Staff's Report Acknowledges Their Atrocities

The value of the atrocity as a military instrument for sending the simoom of terror across the land is set forth in scores of diaries taken from the dead bodies of German soldiers, and also from the occasional reports of German officers to the War Staff, that were printed in Berlin and found their way into this country by way of Denmark, Norway or Sweden.

In the "summarizing report by the General War Staff," published December 31, 1914, the German chief says in explanation of the Belgian campaign: "The need of the German army to push through Belgium was imperative. Our starting point was that the tactical object of the Twelfth Corps was to cross the Meuse with speed. To at once overcome the opposition of the inhabitants was a military necessity, and something to be striven for in every way." And what does "every way" mean? Let the German Staff themselves answer. "The flourishing town of Dinant with its suburbs was burnt, and made a heap of ruins, and a large number of Belgian lives lost." "About 220 inhabitants were then shot, and the village was burned. Just now, six o'clock in the afternoon, the crossing of the Meuse begins near Dinant; all the suburbs, chateaux and houses were burned down during this night. It was a beautiful sight to see the villages burning all around us in the distance." "The town appeared to be perfectly peaceful, nevertheless, for the sake of security, a number of the inhabitants were made prisoners by the grenadiers." "Later, we decided to assemble all the male hostages against the garden wall, where we shot them."

Hundreds of witnesses called in one town, after the Germans had passed on, show that the German officers and soldiers were engaged in one horrible orgy of pillage, drunkenness, lust and murder. They began by breaking open all wine cellars and soon the officers went reeling and staggering through the streets, firing their revolvers into the windows of houses and stores. They blasted the safes open with dynamite. They carried goods from the shelves to the freight trains, and as fast as the town was pillaged, burned the houses. During four days they looted and burned twelve hundred houses, stores, factories, schools and churches. They left lying on the ground seven hundred dead bodies, chiefly women and children. Two trains laden with the men and women who were strong enough to work were carried off to Germany. All the manufactories where the artisan class were wont to work were systematically destroyed. Marching away from towns that were blazing furnaces, the German soldiers drove in advance a long line of women and children, with a few aged men, and used them as screens behind which they could march into the next town that was to be looted.

The Looting of Louvain

In justifying the use of the atrocity as a military instrument more efficient in breaking down the morale of the Belgian army than cannon and liquid fire could possibly be, a German army officer's letter uses these words: "The ruthless use of severities upon the civilians has now succeeded in scattering the wretched Belgian army." But concerning what atrocity is this officer writing? He wrote these words at the end of the third day, after the Germans had pillaged Louvain, thus serving notice on all the Belgian and French cities, rich in historic monuments, libraries, galleries, cathedrals, and art treasures, that unless they immediately surrendered, their whole city would be ruined.

And ruined after what manner? Let Cardinal Mercier, the Primate of Belgium, tell the story. "At Louvain the third part of the city has been destroyed; one thousand and seventy-four dwellings have disappeared; in addition, in the suburbs Kesselloo, Herent and Herberle, one thousand, eight hundred and twenty-eight houses have been burned. In this dear city of Louvain, ever in my thoughts, the magnificent church of St. Peter will never recover its former splendour. The ancient college of St. Ives, the art schools, the commercial and consular schools of the University; the old markets; our rich library, with its collections, its unique and unpublished manuscripts, its archives, its gallery of great portraits of illustrious rectors, chancellors, professors, dating from the time of its foundation, which preserved for masters and students alike a noble tradition, and were an incitement to good work—all this accumulation of intellectual, historic, and artistic richness, the fruit of the labours of five centuries, all, all is in ashes."

Breaking Down the Conscience of Their Men

More terrible still the scheme invented by the Kaiser and the War Staff for breaking down the conscience of the German soldier. The simple peasants of Bavaria, the artisans of Saxony, until a generation ago, were reared in the morals of Martin Luther. By common consent Luther is one of the great men of modern times. At a critical moment in history he stood forth affirming Paul's statement that every man must give an account of himself unto God. Since Pope Julius could not give his account unto God, Martin Luther claimed religious liberty as to creed and conduct for himself. Since no kaiser could give his account unto God, Martin Luther claimed the right of self-government, through political democracy. Since no philosopher could give his account, Luther demanded liberty of thought and speech. Carrying out this principle, when three hundred years had passed, the free nations stood forth clothed with political democracy, educational democracy, religious democracy, industrial democracy. Just as we trace some river back to a spring on the mountainside, so we trace these great institutions of the Reformation back to Martin Luther, who received his ideas from Paul and John, from Huss and Savonarola, reinforced by John Calvin and Erasmus.

The Soldier's Token

But Luther's ethics were the ethics of Moses. For several generations the German peasants had been taught that it was criminal to kill, steal, burn, rape and pillage. They knew by heart the words of Jesus, "Woe unto him who offends against one of my little ones; it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea." Plainly the Ten Commandments stood squarely in the pathway of the Kaiser's ambition. Unless his ambitions for world rule were to be defeated, some scheme had to be invented to free the German soldier from conscience, and break the fetters of divine law.

Therefore the soldier's token was invented. It comes under Jesus' special condemnation, in that not only the Kaiser and the War Staff pursued crime, but "taught men so." These tokens are made of stiff cardboard or of aluminum. At the top is a portrait of Deity as the Kaiser conceives him to be; in one hand the Kaiser's God holds a sickle, for the death-harvest. Beneath, the Kaiser and his War Staff wrote these words, "Strike him dead; the Day of Judgment will not ask you for reasons."

The soldier might read this: "You can slay, pillage, loot, burn, rape, leave thousands of bodies massacred and mutilated on the ground, but remember that your Kaiser and your War Staff will stand between you and the avenging God, and will see to it that the Judge of all the earth makes you no trouble on the great day of accounting." The Kaiser's God, however, is our Devil. For three years the Kaiser has had the Devil all mixed up with God,—being unable to distinguish between them. Whenever the Kaiser uses the word "Gott," Americans always substitute the word "Devil." With one change the soldier's token is quite accurate,—"Strike them dead,—old men, girls and children,—the Devil will not ask you for reasons. Hell and damnation are fully satisfied with all you Germans have done."

Eitel Anders

But when the German soldier boy took this token out of his pocket, and looked at his license to crime, what effect did it have upon him? Here is the diary of Eitel Anders. It is believed that he belonged to the 14th Bavarian regiment. The diary was taken from his body upon the battle-field, and is similar to hundreds of others. "We crossed the bridge over the Maas at 11:50 in the morning. We then arrived at the town of Waendre. When we went out of the town, everything was in ruins. In one house a whole collection of weapons was found [the Mayor had ordered the women to bring to his house every weapon that they could find, that the Germans might have no excuse for saying that any one had struck their soldiers or fired a gun]. All the inhabitants, without exception, were brought out and shot. This shooting was heart-breaking, as they all knelt down and prayed, but praying is no ground for mercy. A few shots rang out, and they fell back into the green grass and slept forever. It is real sport." But how did Eitel Anders sleep that night? We know that Macbeth did not sleep after he murdered Duncan and Banquo. Did the Kaiser succeed in stultifying conscience in Eitel Anders? The next day the soldier made another entry;—mark the opening words: "This morning, in happy mood and high spirits, we passed through Taturages. But before this we cleaned up the suburb of Mons, and burned the houses. The inhabitants came out of the houses into the open plain. Here many heart-breaking scenes occurred. It was really terrible to watch."

Plainly the soldier's token and the Kaiser's scheme succeeded. Having stated that he had murdered men, young Eitel Anders sleeps well at night, and the "next morning in happy mood and high spirits" wakened to plan fresh crimes. Macbeth had no German soldier's token to help him sleep at night. Conscience became the whisper of God in his soul. Sleep forsook his eyes, and slumber his eyelids. Shakespeare's murderer did not dare trust himself out under the stars that blazed with anger, but Eitel Anders' sleep was not disturbed by the blood upon his hands, because he really believed the Kaiser would be able to stand between him and the Great Day of Judgment.

After General Clauss shot fifteen aged men in the streets of GerbÉviller, too, that officer rode away with a light heart, quite free from the remorse that unseated the reason of Macbeth. Plainly the Kaiser's scheme succeeded. It destroyed conscience in many German officers and soldiers alike. To-day, the men of Germany without moral sense or any remorse following their crimes are like a sky that holds an empty socket where once the summer-making sun had shined. They are like human bodies out of which the intellect has passed, leaving only gibbering idiots. The German "Laws of War on Land," their Handbook of Military Tactics, has organized crime into a science, and killed in men the spiritual optic nerve. Germany to-day is an intellectual machine, and her officers and her soldiers at last can commit crimes without remorse, which proves that they are becoming moral idiots.

GerbÉviller the Martyred[1]

In August of 1914, when the German army was broken and compelled to retreat before the French, they passed through many French towns and villages in which they found no soldiers and no weapons, and where no battle, no skirmish and no shot took place. During last July and August we went slowly from one of these ruined towns to another, talking with the broken-hearted women and children, comparing the photographs taken immediately after the German retreat and almost before the mutilated bodies were cold. Slowly we sifted the evidence. On the ground we compared the full official records made at the time, with the statements of wretched survivors who live in cellars, where once stood the beautiful homes, the orchards and vineyards, but where now all is desolation and anguish.

Among the multitude of events described by witnesses who survived the martyrdom of their village are the following: When the noise of the approach of General Clauss' division of twenty thousand soldiers in full retreat was heard, an aged Frenchman stood in his open door. He had retired from business, to spend his last days midst the friends of his childhood and youth. Hearing the noise of the approaching army, the merchant stepped to his open door. As the first automobile swept by, the German officers lifted their revolvers and emptied the lead into the old man's body. He pitched forward down the stone steps, and in his death struggle worked his way to the wrought iron gate, where after the German retreat he was found dead. Before touching the body, official photographers, under the direction of their noble Prefect, took their photographs from different angles. In the garden behind the smoking cellar was found the wife, lying dead upon the grass, her left wrist tied by the clothes-line to the root of an apple tree, the right wrist tied to a clump of gooseberry bushes. She was dead, but not through dagger or pistol. Standing beside their graves we studied the photographs and talked with the families of the fifteen aged men whom General Clauss ordered shot because there were no young or middle-aged men in the village whom he could kill.

Burning of an Ambulance Driver

Most harrowing the testimony given by the mother of a Red Cross ambulance driver. The day before the Germans came, this man had returned from the front, bringing an ambulance filled with wounded soldiers. While the division of twenty thousand Germans were looting the houses, and carrying away every rug, carpet, table, chair, picture, tool, art treasure towards the Rhine, German officers entered the house of Sister Juliet, who was nursing the wounded soldiers. Finding the young Red Cross man there, they immediately shot him. Later while his mother was holding his head in her arms and staunching his wounds, a German officer approached and, seizing her hands, held them behind her back, while one of the privates poured petrol over her son's head. With two fingers this soldier ripped the clothes from the breast of the wounded man and poured oil under his shirt and then set fire to his garments. Referring to his death struggles and the photograph of the charred mass that had once been her son lying on the brick pavement, this mother exclaimed, "If I had only let him bleed to death! If I had only let him bleed to death! Then they could not have made him die twice!"

The Murder of Hereminel

In a little farming village not many miles from GerbÉviller the martyred, stands a battered square belfry, into which the Germans lifted their machine guns, hoping to hold back the pursuit of the French army, thus giving General Clauss time to retreat and "dig in" some miles to the northeast. Tying the ropes to the axle of automobile trucks, the Germans soon lifted their guns into the church tower. They then drove the French women and children into the church and used them as a screen, for no German ever exposes himself to danger if he can possibly find a woman or child behind whom he can hide. One young mother did not immediately obey, because of certain duties in connection with her little child. With two other girls this young wife was stood up against the stone wall of her own little house and shot, for the purpose of teaching French women to obey instantly when German savages command.

When all the women and children were packed into the church, a boy was sent back to tell the French that if they fired upon the guns in the church belfry, they would kill their own families. Two nights later when a storm was raging, the women slipped a little boy through the window, and sent word to the officers of the approaching French army that their wives wished them to open fire on the German guns. In blowing these weapons out of the belfry, the French killed twenty of their own wives and children, who preferred to share death with the men they loved, rather than suffer nameless indignities from German brutes. In a hundred years of history where shall you find a record of soldiers, whether red, black or yellow, save Germans, who were such sneaking, snivelling cowards that they do not dare play the game fairly and like men, but in their chattering terror use women and little children as shields against danger? Of a truth, the "Potsdam gang" has added a new word to the literature of cowardice.

The Frenchman's Love of France

Terrible also the German assassination of the land itself. All men love their native land, but the Frenchman's love has a unique quality. He speaks of La Belle France as Dante spoke of Beatrice, as Petrarch spoke of Laura, and the name of France lingers upon his lips as music trembles in the air after the song is sung.

It is love of native land that has made France beautiful just as through affection the lark, after completing its nest, makes it soft and warm by pulling the down out of her own bosom. The French people love France as Millais loved his Gleaners, as Bellini loved the missal he had illuminated, and as that young architect loved the little Roslyn chapel, upon whose delicate capitals he had lavished his very soul. For centuries the enemies of farms, houses, towns and cities have been fire, flood and earthquake. Witness the city of St. Pierre. An interior explosion blew off the cap of the mountain and a flood of gas poured down upon the lovely city, asphyxiated the citizens and left not one house standing. Witness that mighty convulsion in San Francisco that brought thousands of brick buildings crashing down in ruins. Witness the fire in Chicago that turned the great city into piles of twisted iron and ashes. In New Zealand there is a lake called Avernus, the birdless lake. Poisonous gases rise from the black flood of water, and soon the lark with its song, and the eagle with its flight fall into the poisonous flood.

But all these images are quite inadequate to explain the devastation of France upon the retreat of the Germans. About forty miles north of Paris, one strikes the ruined region. Then hour after hour passes, while with slow movement and breaking heart the investigator journeys one hundred miles to the north and zigzags one hundred and twenty-five miles south again, through that ruined region. Centuries ago Julius CÆsar described it as a wild land, rough, with forests filled with wolves. Then the Frenchman entered the scene. He subdued all the wild grasses, drained the valleys and widened the streams into canals. He enriched the fields, surrounded the meadows with odorous hedges and filled swamps with perfumed shrubs. Slowly the Frenchman threw arches of stone across the streams and carved the bridges until they were rich in art, while everything made for use was carried up to beauty. He gave to the roof of the barn its lovely lines; the approach to the house was upon a curved road, the highways were shaded by two rows of noble trees. The stony hillside was terraced, and there the vines grew purple in the sun. How simple was his life! What a sanctuary his little home! With what rich embroidery of wheat he covered all the hills! He was prudent without being stingy, thrifty without being mean. The French peasant saves against old age with one hand and distributes to his children with the other.

What Hate Can Do

And having lavished all their love upon the little farmhouse, the granary and the garden, having pruned these grape-vines with their clusters of white and purple, the time came when each vine seemed like a friend, dear as that miraculous picture was to Baucis and Philemon. For these reasons all France was invested with affection and beauty.

The French peasants loved their land and then lost it. One morning the Hun stood at the gate. The farmers with their pruning knives were no match for Germans with their machine guns, and down they fell under the plum trees they were pruning. The devastated regions of France are like unto a world ruined by devils. The Germans cut down the apples, the pears, and all the peaches. They did not spare the cherry, the quince, the gooseberry and currant, or the vineyards. Gone also all the beautiful bridges—they have been dynamited! Gone all the lovely and majestic Thirteenth Century churches! Gone all the galleries, for some of the finest art treasures in the world have perished.

The land has been put back to where it was when Julius CÆsar described it two thousand years ago—a wild land, and waste, growing up with thorns and thistles. That proclamation on a wall tells the whole story. "Let no building stand, no vine or tree. Before retreating see that the wells and springs are plentifully polluted with corpses and with creasote." The spirit was this, "Since we Germans cannot have this land, no one else shall."

Prince Eitel's Crime

But there is more. One of the historic chateaux is that of Avricourt, rich in noble associations of history. It was one of the class of buildings covered by a clause in the international agreements between Germany, France and the United States and all the civilized nations, safeguarding historic buildings. For many months it was the home of Prince Eitel, the Kaiser's second son.

When a judge and jury held inquiry at the ruins of the chateau, the aged French servant, who understood the electric lighting and had charge of the gas plant during Eitel's occupancy, stated that he heard the German officers telling Eitel Frederick that he would disgrace the German name if he destroyed a building that had no relation to war, that could be of no aid or comfort to the French army, and that he would make his own name, and that of his family, a name of shame and contempt, of obloquy and scorn. But the man would not yield. He brought in his auto trucks and carried to the freight cars every historic object in the splendid chateau. Having pledged himself to leave the building uninjured, the prince stopped his car at the gates of the exit, ran back to this historic house, filled his firebrand, spread the flames upon the halls, waited until the flames were well in progress, and then ordered his men to light the fuse of dynamite bombs. A few days later inquiry was held and testimony of aged servants and little children was taken. The degeneracy of this German Prince as then revealed has not been equalled since the first chapter of Romans catalogued the unnatural crimes of the men of the ancient world. Germany has no artistic sense. Her own poet, Heine, predicts that she will yet pull in pieces her one fine cathedral. The German poet does not think any beautiful thing is safe so long as it is in German hands. This gifted Hebrew had the vision that literally saw the German pounding to pieces the Cathedral at Louvain and Ypres, in Arras, in Bapaume, in St. Quentin, and Rheims.

Rheims Cathedral

One of the atrocities that has horrified the civilized world has been the ruin of Rheims Cathedral. Germany, of course, was denied by nature any gift of imagination. The German mind is a hearty, mediocre mind, that can multiply and exploit the inventions and discoveries of the other races. The Germans contributed practically nothing to the invention of the locomotive, the steamboat, the Marconigram, the automobile, the airplane, the phonograph, the sewing machine, the reaper, the electric light. Even as to the weapons with which she fights, Americans invented for Germany her revolver, her machine gun, her turreted ship, and her submarine. In retrospect it seems absolutely incredible that Germany could have been so helplessly and hopelessly unequal to the invention of the tools that have made her rich.

But imagination is not her gift. If Sheffield can give her a model knife, Germany can reproduce that knife in quantities and undersell Sheffield. The German people keep step in a regiment, in a factory and on a ship, and therefore are wholesalers. The French mind is creative. It stands for individual excellence, and is at the other extreme from the German temperament. The emblem of the German intellect is beer; the emblem of the English intellect is port wine; the emblem of the French mind is champagne; the emblem of an American intellect like Emerson's is a beaker filled with sunshine—but Germany has a "beer" mind. It is this lack of imagination that explains Nietzsche's statement that for two hundred years Germany has been "the enemy of culture" while Heinrich Heine insists that "the very name of culture is France."

It is this total lack of any appreciation of art and architecture that explains Germany's destruction of some of the noblest buildings of the world. She cannot by any chance conceive how the other races look upon her vandalism. Her own foreign secretary expressed it publicly in one of her state papers, "Let the neutrals cease chattering about cathedrals. Germany does not care one straw if all the galleries and churches in the world were destroyed, providing we gain our military ends." Guizot in his history of civilization presents three tests of a civilized people: First, they revere their pledges and honour; second, they reverence and pursue the beautiful in painting, architecture and literature; third, they exhibit sympathy in reform towards the poor, the weak and the unfortunate.

Now apply those tests to the Kaiser and his War Staff, and you understand why Rheims Cathedral is a ruin.[2] No building since the Parthenon was more precious to the world's culture. What majesty and dignity in the lines! What a wealth of statuary! How wonderful the Twelfth Century glass! With what lightness did these arches leap into the air! Now, the great bombs have torn holes through the roof; only little bits of glass remain; broken are the arches, ruined these flying buttresses, the altar where Jeanne d'Arc stood at the crowning of Charles is quite gone. The great library, the bishop's palace, all the art treasures are in ruins. But ancient and noble buildings do not belong to a race, they belong to the world. Sacred forever the threshold of the Parthenon, once pressed by the feet of Socrates and Plato! Thrice sacred that aisle of Santa Croce in Florence, dear to Dante and Savonarola. To be treasured forever the solemn beauty of Westminster Abbey, holding the dust of men of supreme genius.

In front of the wreck of the Cathedral of Rheims, all blackened with German fire, broken with the German hammer, is the statue of Jeanne d'Arc. There she stands, immortal forever, guiding the steed of the sun with the left hand, lifting the banners of peace and liberty with the right. By some strange chance, no bomb injured that bronze. That figure seems a beautiful prophecy of a day when the spirit of liberty, riding in a chariot of the sun, shall guide a greater host made up of all the peoples who revere the treasures of art and architecture, and law and liberty, and will ride on to a victory that will be the sublimest conquest in the annals of time.

The Devastation of the French Home

But the ruin of his cathedrals, his galleries, his schoolhouses, his libraries, his farmhouses, his vineyards and orchards, is the least of sorrows of the Frenchman. In a little village near Ham dwelt a man who had saved a fortune for his old age, 100,000 francs. When the invading army, like a black wave, was approaching, he buried his treasure beneath the large, flat stones that made the walk from the road up to the front step of his house. Then, with the other villagers, the old man fled. Many months passed by, while the Germans bombarded the village. At last the German wave retreated, and once more the old man drew near to his little village. There was nothing, nothing left. After a long time, he located the street, which was on the very edge of the town, but could not find the cellar of his own house. Great shells had fallen. Exploding in the cellar, they had blown the bricks away. Then other shells had fallen hard by and blown dirt that filled up what once had been a cellar. The very trees in front of his house had been blown away and replaced by shell pits. In one of his reports Ambassador Sharp states that the aged man had up to that time failed to locate his house, much less his buried treasure. But what trifles light as air are houses in contrast with other forms of desolation!

Ruined Homes and Hopes

At the officers' headquarters, one night after returning from the front, several officers were recounting to us their dramatic experiences. Many harrowing tales were told. During the winter of 1915, in the trenches at the foot of Vimy Ridge, several English officers and a French captain were down in a safety cellar having their pipes together and recounting the events of the day. Rain was falling and they delayed their stay. Finally the moment came to return to their trenches above. At that moment an English sentinel exclaimed: "One week from to-day and I will be home in England with my wife and baby. One more week! The next seven days seem to me like seven eternities." The English captain congratulated the boy, saying, "In two months my permission will come and I will have eight days home with my family." Then the English officer noticed the French officer's agitation. Turning to him, the English captain exclaimed, "And when do you go, Captain?" "When do I go home," exclaimed the Frenchman bitterly, "when do I go home? You Englishmen do not understand! Your land has never been invaded. Go home! To what could I go? The Germans have been in my land for a year. My little town is gone, quite gone. My little house is gone, and gone my little shop! My wife is still a young woman! My little girl,—she is just a little, little girl! Why, I never thought of her as a woman! And now our priest writes me that my young wife and my little girl will have babes in two months by these brutes!" And then the storm broke. The Frenchman beat his head upon the rude table, while the two Englishmen fled into the rain and night, knowing that the rain was nothing against those tears of pain, for that man's hopes were dead forever. That lieutenant's only task was to recover France and then transfer all his ambitions to God in Heaven.

Such devastations of the soul are why there must be no inconclusive peace. Unconditional surrender is the only word. Whether this war goes on one year or five years it must go on until the Hun repents and makes restitution—so far as possible. Alas, a myriad of these German outrages are irremediable! Thoughtful men doubt whether the German will ever learn the wickedness of his own atrocities and the crimes of militarism until his own land is laid waste, until he sees the horrors of war with his own eyes, and hears the groans of his own people with his own ears, sees his own land laid desolate, finds his own heart crushed under anguish. Yet retribution in kind would be unthinkable for the Allies!

The Foul Crime Against Women

Many Americans have looked with horror upon the photograph of the mutilated bodies of women. Sacred forever the bosom of his mother, and not less sacred the body of every woman. Not content with mutilating the bodies of Allied officers, of Belgian boys, they lifted the knife upon the loveliness of woman. The explanation was first given by the Germans themselves. When the Hun joins the army, he must pass his medical examination. A few drops of blood are taken from the left arm, and the Wassermann blood culture is developed. If free from disease, the soldier receives a card giving him access to the camp women, who are kept in the rear for the convenience of the German soldier. If, however, the Wassermann test shows that the German has syphilis, the soldier bids him report to the commanding officer. The captain tells him plainly that he must stay away from the camp women upon peril of his life, and that if he uses one of their girls he will be shot like a dog. Having syphilis himself, the German will hand it on to the camp girl, and she in turn will contaminate all the other soldiers, and that means that the Kaiser would soon have no army. Therefore, the soldier that has this foul disease must stay away from the camp women on peril of his life. Under this restriction the syphilitic soldier has but one chance, namely, to capture a Belgian or French girl; but using this girl means contaminating her, and she in turn will contaminate the next German using her. To save his own life, therefore, when the syphilitic German has used a French or Belgian girl, he cuts off her breast as a warning to the next German soldier. The girl's life weighs less than nothing against lust or the possibility of losing his life by being charged with the contamination of his brother German.

Insane Through Pain and Grief

One pathetic and dramatic story ran up and down the trenches upon a line twenty miles in length. Told by different soldiers, that tragic story never varies in the essential facts. When the Germans ruined a village near Ham, they carried away some fifty-four girls and women between the ages of fourteen and forty. These girls were held behind the lines among the camp women, kept for the Huns. One chilly morning last April a French boy, lying on a board on the bottom of his trench, heard the wild shrieks of a girl. Standing on tiptoe he peeped over the top to find the French soldiers in the one trench and the Boches in the other had forgotten the peril of the sniper's bullet, and were staring at a young girl out in No Man's Land. One week of cruelty had driven the girl insane. The German soldiers had lifted her out of their trench, and with their bayonets had pushed her in the direction of the French lines, and were shouting to her to go over to her friends among the French.

What the French soldiers saw was a young woman, clothed in a dark blue skirt, her waist torn, her bosom exposed, her hair loose upon her shoulders. She was standing bewildered in No Man's Land. Now she poured forth the pealing laughter of a maniac, and now she seemed to be talking to herself. Suddenly her eye caught sight of a human body, wearing the garb of a French soldier. The girl did not know that it was a French boy who in the darkness had been cutting the barbed wire, and in the midst of the German flare had been caught by a bullet. Mistaking the dead boy for that of her young husband, the girl ran forward, fell upon her knees, and lifted the body that was already cold into her arms. From time to time she would take an arm grown stiff and try to put it around her neck and then gaze upon it, not understanding why the cold hands did not clasp her around in the dear accustomed way. Suddenly her eyes saw his coat, lying near by; but she did not know that the boy in his death struggles had torn that coat from his body. She thought that garment, already stiff with blood, was her own little babe. Picking up the coat, she dropped upon her knees, lifted it to her breast, and began to sway to and fro, and soon the French soldiers heard a lullaby, familiar and dear to every Frenchman whose mother with that song charmed the fear out of the eyes and the terror from the heart. So terrible was the scene that for the moment the Frenchman and German alike forgot all warfare! Finally, a German lifted his rifle to the shoulder, and as the girl, rising to her feet, flung the bloody coat away, and screamed, "The Boche! the Boche!" his rifle cracked, and the young woman sank slowly down. A moment later, all helmets, German and French alike, disappeared behind the trenches. Silence rested on No Man's Land, and events went on as before. But for France the world will never be the same again. German crimes have lighted a flame of sacred anger that will never burn out until German cruelty has been utterly consumed. That is why the fire sparkles in the eyes of the Allied soldiers whenever you suggest peace by negotiation, or a peace without victory.

A Wounded German Colonel

Last winter, a German colonel was shot through the spinal cord. His lower limbs were completely paralyzed, and the paralysis began to extend to his hands. The wounded man developed the theory that if he could only be carried back to Germany recovery was possible. Lifted into an ambulance, he was carried twelve miles to the northeast, towards the Rhine. Unable to endure the agony of the rough road, he commanded the ambulance driver to stop in front of the priest's house, near ——. Two aged French women cared for the wounded man during January, February and March. Little by little the wings of the angel of death fanned away the mist before the eyes of the German officer. For two and a half years he had carried an aluminum token with a portrait of the German Kaiser's conception of God, and the words, "Strike them all dead. The Day of Judgment will not ask you for reasons." But at last a moment had come when he lost confidence in the pledge of the Kaiser and the War Staff to stand between him and an outraged God. One morning a little French boy waited after mass to tell the priest that the German officer wanted him to come at once. The important message proved to be a warning that the von Hindenburg line was nearly completed, that the orders for retreat had gone out, that every church, bank, factory, house, was to be looted and then burned, and the whole region turned into a desolation. "These two aged women and you yourself have been very kind to me, and this pass will take you through the German lines to a place of safety." And then the dying officer advised the priest to take the two women and go away at once. The news utterly crushed the kindly man of God. Touched by the grief of the white-haired priest, and perhaps terrified by memory and remorse, words of righteous wrath and repentance fell from the lips of the officer. These were his last words, as that old priest transcribed them from the lips of this dying German. "Curses upon our army! Curses upon our Kaiser, and our War Staff! Ten thousand curses upon the Fatherland! Either God is dead or Germany is doomed!" Going out of the door, the last words the aged priest heard were the dying curses of an officer, whose soul had been debauched by his Kaiser and his War Staff, and who upon the brink of the Day of Judgment realized that for every crime he must give an account unto God. "Woe unto him who offends one of my little ones; it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."

That conscience-smitten dying German packed the genius of the moral universe into the curse he pronounced upon the Kaiser, the War Staff and the Fatherland. When the veil was taken away from his eyes he saw that the stars in their courses were fighting against the Kaiser. In the awful hour of death he learned at last that God is not dead, but that because of her atrocities, Germany is doomed.

[1] "In this village, from which the Germans had just retreated, I saw a proclamation by the German officer, saying that every Frenchman who refused to work should receive twenty blows of the whip; the women, fifteen blows, and the boys and girls under fifteen years of age, ten blows."—Extract from letter of the American violinist, Albert Spalding, now a lieutenant serving in France.