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War Lies Repudiated by British Press.

War Lies Repudiated by British Press.—The following article deals with venerable subjects that have done much to inflame international hatred and misunderstandings. It is taken from the Glasgow “Forward,” of Glasgow, Scotland (1919), and will have a tendency, it is hoped, to enlighten the minds of many who have believed everything that was printed about war’s atrocities:

We are continually receiving requests for information about the Lusitania, poison gas, aerial bombs, corpse fat, and other popular stock-in-trade of the warmonger. We cannot keep repeating our exposures of wartime falsehoods and delusions, and we ask our readers to keep the following facts beside them, and refrain from subjecting us to a continual stream of postal queries.

“Was the Lusitania armed?”

No. But she was carrying munitions of war. Lord Mersey, chairman of the Court of Enquiry into the sinking of the Lusitania, said: “The 5,000 cases of ammunition on board were 50 yards away from where the torpedo struck the ship” (Glasgow “Evening Citizen” report, July17,1915).

“Did the German people rejoice?”

No. There was neither hilarity nor medals nor school beflagging. The London “Times” reported that “Vorwarts” “deeply deplored” the sinking. So did the German naval critic, Captain Persius.

Mr.John Murray, the publisher, issued last October an authoritative book from the pen of the correspondent of the Associated Press of America in Germany, Mr.George A.Schreiner, who was in Germany during the Lusitania period. Mr.Schreiner’s dispatches were extensively quoted in the patriotic British press, and his testimony is above suspicion. His book, “The Iron Ration” (pp.291-2), says:

The greatest shock the German public received was the news that the Lusitania had beensunk.

For a day or two a minority held that the action was eminently correct. But even that minority dwindled rapidly.

For many weeks the German public was in doubt as to what it all meant. The thinking element was groping about in the dark. What was the purpose of picking out a ship with so many passengers on board? Then the news came that the passengers had been warned not to travel on the steamer. That removed all doubt that the vessel had been singled out for attack.

The government remained silent. It had nothing to say. The press, standing in fear of the censor and his power to suspend publication, was mute. Little by little it became known that there had been an accident. The commander of the submarine sent out to torpedo the ship had been instructed to fire at the forward hold, so that the passengers could get off before the vessel sank. Either a boiler of the ship or (they continued) an ammunition cargo had given unlooked-for assistance to the torpedo. The ship had gone down. Nothing weaned the German public so much away from the old order of government as did the Lusitania affair. The act seemed useless, wanton, ill-considered. The doctrine of governmental infallibility came near to being wrecked. The Germans began to lose confidence in the wisdom of the men who had been credited in the past with being the very quintessence of all knowledge, mundane and celestial. Admiral Tirpitz had to go. Germany’s allies, too, were not pleased. In Austria and Hungary the act was severely criticized, and in Turkey I found much disapproval of the thing.

“The ‘Old Contemptible’ Lie.”

The “New Illustrated” (Lord Northcliffe’s latest journalistic venture) declared, in March of thisyear:

The story that the Kaiser called General French’s force a “contemptible little army” served a useful purpose in working up fierce anger against the enemy in Britain, but it was an invention. The Kaiser was not so foolish as to say what the German General Staff would have known to be nonsense.

“The Corpse Fat Lie.”

The “Times” started the lie that the Germans had built factories for extracting grease from the bodies of dead soldiers. This grease was used as margarine.

Lord Robert Cecil latterly admitted in the House of Commons that there was no evidence of the story; but, of course, he believed the Germans capable of it. The London comic (?) papers issued cartoons of a German looking at a pot of grease and soliloquizing: “Alas! my poor brother!” But the lie was finally exposed and disappeared even from the stock-in-trade of the British Workers’ League—and, God knows, they were loth to let anythinggo.

“Who first bombed from the sky?”

The National War Savings Committee issued synopses of their lantern lectures last year for propaganda purposes. Here are the synopses of the two slides dealing with the first bomb dropped on towns:

A lantern picture, entitled “War in the Air,” by C.G. Grey (editor of “Aeroplane”), issued by the National War Savings Committee, Salisbury Square, London, E.C.4 (page7).

“Slide 32—The navy’s land machines went over to Belgium and it is to the credit of the R.N.A.S. that the first hostile missiles which fell on German soil were bombs dropped by R.N.A.S. pilots on Cologne and Dusseldorf....

“Slide 35—It is interesting to note that these early raids by the R.N.A.S. were the first example of bomb-dropping attacks from the air in any way, and the only pity is that we had not at the beginning of the war enough aeroplanes.”

“Priority in poison gas.”

The Glasgow “Evening News” (January26, 1918) frankly admitted that:

It appears that mustard gas, generally believed to have been invented by the Germans, was discovered by the late Professor Guthrie at the Royal College, Mauritius.

The London “Times,” on August2, 1914, reproduced from the French government organ, “Le Temps,” a paragraph reporting that M.Turpin has offered to the French Ministry of War a shell filled with a chemical compound discovered by him, and called Turpinite. Numbers of these shells seem to have been used by the French artillery, and they were essentially such gas shells as the Germans are now using. Numerous correspondents, claiming to be eye-witnesses, reported their terrible effects in the British press during October and November, 1914. We learned that the gas liberated from the explosion of one of these shells was enough to asphyxiate an entire platoon of Germans. After death they were observed to be standing erect and shoulder to shoulder in their trenches, and, after killing them with this marvelous celerity, the gas would roll on and stifle entire flocks of sheep feeding in fields in their rear. The British press writers saw nothing to blame in the use against Germans of Turpinite; on the contrary, they openly exulted in its terrible effects. Subsequently, much to their regret, Turpinite was given up, because it was so dangerous to the munition workers who had to pour it into the shell cases. Some weeks later the Germans began to use with more success the same expedient.

The London “Illustrated News” (May13, 1915) published a “thrilling” picture of 5German officers asphyxiated by British lyddite. The descriptive lines below the picturesay:

“One of the correspondents at the front tells a thrilling story of the havoc wrought by lyddite shells used by our artillery in Flanders. The fumes of the lyddite are very poisonous, so much so that some of our troops wore masks for the nose and mouth. After one battle, in which the German trenches had been shelled with lyddite, an officer found a card party of five officers stone dead. Looking at them in the bright moonlight, he was struck by their resemblance to waxwork figures. They were in perfectly natural poses, but the bright yellow of their skins showed the manner of their death—asphyxiation by lyddite.”

The first inventor of poison gas was Lord Dundonald during the Crimean war (see “The Panmure Papers,” published in1908 by Hodder & Stoughton, and the “Candid Review,” August, 1915). It was at the time of the Crimean war rejected by the English as “too horrible.”

There were, of course, atrocities during the war—German, Austrian, Italian, British, Serbian, French. All war is an atrocity, but the hate was fanned and the murder kept going by the steady press campaigns of mendacity in every country, and here in Britain we were subjected to more than our fair share of it.

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