The Steam Roller, the final method, now operating in Belgium to flatten her for all time, is the most deadly and universal of the three. It is a calculated process to break the human spirit. People speak as if the injury done Belgium was a thing of the past. It is at its height now. The spy system with its clerks, waiters, tourists, business managers, reached directly only some thousands of persons. The atrocities wounded and killed many thousands of old men, women, and children. But the German occupation and sovereignty at the present moment are denationalizing more than six million people. The German conquerors operate their Steam Roller by clever lies, thus separating Belgium from her real friends; by taxation, thus breaking Belgium economically; by enforced work on food supplies, railways, and ammunition, thus forcing Belgian peasants to feed their enemy's army and I was still in Ghent when the Germans moved up to the suburbs. "I can put my artillery on Ghent," said the German officer to the American vice-consul. That talk is typical of the tone of voice used to Belgians: threat backed by murder. The whole policy of the Germans of late is to treat the Belgian matter as a thing accomplished. "It is over. Let bygones be bygones." It is a process like the trapping of an innocent woman, and when she is trapped, saying, "Now you are compromised, anyway, so you had better submit." A friend of mine who remained in Ghent after the German occupation, had German officers billetted in his home. Daily, industriously, they For a year, our Red Cross Corps worked under the direction and authority of the Belgian prime minister, Baron de Broqueville. The prime minister in the name of his government has sent to this country an official protest against the new tax levied by the Germans on his people. The total tax for the German occupation amounts to $192,000,000. He writes: "The German military occupation during the last fifteen months has entirely prevented all foreign trade, has paralyzed industrial activity, and has reduced the majority of the laboring classes to enforced idleness. Upon the impoverished Belgian population whom Germany has unjustly attacked, upon whom she has brought want and distress, who have been barely saved from starva GASPAR
The Belgian Legation has protested unavailingly to our Government that Germany, in violation of The Hague Conventions, has forced Belgian workmen to perform labor for the German army. Belgian Railway employees at Malines, Luttre and elsewhere refused to perform work which would have released from the transportation service and made available for the trenches an entire German Army Corps. These Belgian workmen were subjected to coersive measures, which included starvation and cruel punishments. Because of these penalties on Belgians refusing to be traitors, many went to hospitals in Germany, and others returned broken in health to Belgium. After reading the chapter on the German spy system, a Belgian wrote me: "That spying business is not yet the worst. Since then, the Germans have succeeded in outdo It is evil to murder non-combatants. It is more evil to "rationalize" the act—to invent a moral reason for doing an infamous thing. First, Belgium suffered a vivisection, a veritable martyrdom. Now, she is officially informed by her executioners that she was the guilty party. She is not allowed to protest. She must sit quietly under the charge that her sacrifice was not a sacrifice at all, but the penalty paid for her own misbehavior. This is a more cruel thing than the spying that sapped her and the atrocities practised upon her, because it is more cruel to take a man's honor than his property and his life. "If the peasants had stayed in their houses, they would have been safe." When they stayed in their houses they were burned along with the houses. I saw this done on September 7, 1914, at Melle. "The peasants shot from their houses at the advancing German army." I saw German atrocities. The peasants did not shoot. It is the old familiar formula of the franc-tireur. That means that the peasant, not a soldier, dressed in the clothing of a civilian, takes advantage of his immunity as a noncombatant, to secrete a rifle, and from some shelter shoot at the enemy army. The Bishop of Namur writes: "It is evident that the German army trod the Belgian soil and carried out the invasion with the preconceived idea that it would meet with bands of this sort, a reminiscence of the war of 1870. But German imagination will not suffice to create that which does not exist. "There never existed a single body of francs-tireurs in Belgium. "No 'isolated instance' even is known of civilians having fired upon the troops, although there would have been no occasion for surprise if any individual person had committed an excess. In several of our villages the population was exterminated because, as the military authorities alleged, a major had been killed or a young girl had This lie—that the peasants brought their own death on themselves—was rehearsed before the war, as a carefully learned lesson. The army came prepared to find the excuse for the methodical outrages which they practised. In the fight in the Dixmude district, a German officer of the 202,e Infantry had a letter with this sentence on his body: "There are a lot of francs-tireurs with the enemy." There were none. He had found what he had been drilled to find, in the years of preparedness. The front lines of the Yser were raked clear by shell, rifle, and machine-gun fire. The district was in ruins. I know, because I worked there with our Red Cross Corps through those three weeks. The humorous explanation of this is given by one of the Fusilier Marin Lieutenants—that the blue cap and the red pompon of the famous fighting sailors of France looked strangely to the Germans, who took the wearers for francs- The picture projected by the Great German Literary Staff is too imaginative. Think of that Army of the Invasion with its army corps riding down through village streets—the Uhlan cavalry, the innumerable artillery, the dense endless infantry, the deadly power and swing of it all—and then see the girl-child of Alost, and the white-haired woman, eighty years old—aiming their rifles at that cavalcade. It is a literary creation, not a statement of fact. I have been in Then, as the blue-gray uniforms appeared at the head of the street, with sunlight on the pikes and helmets, came the cry—half a sob, "Les Allemands." The German fabrications are unworthy. Let the little slain children, and the violated women, sleep in honor. Your race was stern enough in doing them to death. Let them alone, now that you have cleared them from your path to Paris. Doctor George Sarton, of the University of Ghent writes me: "During the last months, the Germans have launched new slanders against Belgium. Their present tactics are more discreet and seem to be successful. Many 'neutral' travelers—especially Americans and Swiss—have been to Belgium to see the battlefields or, perhaps, to get an idea of what such an occupation by foreign soldiers exactly amounts to. Of course, these men can see "When the good folks of Belgium recollect the spying business that was carried on at their expense by their German 'friends,' they are not likely to trust much their German enemies. They know that the Germans are quite incapable of keeping to themselves any fact that they may learn—in whatever confidential and intimate circumstances—if this fact is of the smallest use to their own country. As it is perfectly impossible to trust them, the best is to avoid them, and that is what most Belgians are doing. "American tourists seeing Belgium through German courtesy are considered by the Belgians just as untrustworthy as the Germans themselves. This is the right attitude, as there is no possibility left to the Belgians (in Belgium) of testing the morality and the neutrality of their visitors. The result of which is that these visitors are entirely given up to their German advisers; all their knowledge is of German origin. Of course, the Germans take advantage of this situation and make a show of German efficiency and organization.—'Don't you know: the Germans have done so much for Belgium! Why, everybody knows that this country was very inefficient, very badly managed ... a poor little country without influence.... See what the Germans have made of it.... There was no compulsory education, and the number of illiterates was scandalously high,' (I am sorry to say that this at least is true.) 'They are introducing compulsory and free education. In the big towns, sexual morality was rather loose, but the Germans are now regulating all that.' (You should hear German officers speak of prostitution in Antwerp and "The Belgians do appreciate American generosity; they realize that almost the only rays of happiness that reach their country come from America. They will never forget it; that disinterested help coming from over the seas has a touch of romance; it is great and comforting; it is the bright and hopeful side of the war. The Belgians know how to value this. But, as to what the Germans are doing, good or not, they will never appreciate that—what does it matter? The Belgians do not care one bit for German reforms; they do not even deign to consider them; they simply ignore them. There is one—only one—reform that they will appreciate; the German evacuation. All the rest does not count. "The Germans are very disappointed that a certain number of Belgians have been able to escape, either to enlist in the Belgian army or to live abroad. Of course, the more Belgians are in their hands, the more pressure they can exert. They are now slandering the Belgians who have left their country—all the 'rich' people who are 'feasting' abroad while their countrymen are starving. "The fewer Belgians there are in German hands, the better it is. The Belgians whose ability is the most useful, are considered useful by the Germans for the latter's sake. Must it not be a terrible source of anxiety for these Belgians to think that all the work they manage to do is directly or indirectly done for Germany? It is not astonishing that she wants to restore 'business, as usual' in Belgium, and that in many cases she has tried to force the Belgian workers to earn for her. Let "If I were in Belgium, I could say nothing; I would have to choose between silence and prison, or silence and death. Remember Edith Cavell. An enthusiastic, courageous man is running as many risks in Belgium now, as he would have in the sixteenth century under the Spanish domination. The hundred eyes of the Spanish Inquisition were then continually prying into everything—bodies and souls; one felt them even while one was sleeping. The German Secret Service is not less pitiless and it is more efficient. "The process of slander and lie carried on by the Germans to 'flatten' Belgium is, to my judg "Belgium may slumber, but die—never." When men act as part of an implacable machine, they act apart from their humanity. They commit unbelievable horrors, because the thing that moves them is raw force, untouched by fine purpose and the elements of mercy. When I think of Germans, man by man, as they lay wounded, waiting for us to bring them in and care for them as faithfully as for our own, I know that they have become human in their defeat. We are their friends as we break them. In spite of their treachery and cruelty and cold hatred, we shall save them yet. Cleared of their evil dream and restored to our common humanity, they will have |