III
Yet how near, how fearful, was the fierce reality of the unpardonable war! Belgium was invaded by the Germans, an hour or two away from us. At any moment their troops might be tempted to take the short cut through the narrow strip of Dutch territory which runs so far down into Belgium; and then the neutrality of Holland would be gone! The little country would be part of the battle-field. Holland has always been resolved to fight any invader.
All through August and September, 1914, that fear hung over the Dutch people. It recurred later again and again—whenever a movement of German troops came too close to the borders of Holland; whenever a newspaper tale of impending operations transpired from Berlin or London. Once or twice the anxiety rose almost to a popular panic. But I noticed that even then the stock-market at Amsterdam remained calm. Now, the Dutch are a very prudent folk, especially the bankers. Therefore I concluded that somebody had received strong assurances both from Germany and Great Britain that neither would invade the Netherlands provided the other abstained.
But all the time there was that dreadful example of the "scrap of paper"—the treaty which had been no protection for Belgium—to shake confidence in any pledge of Germany. And all the time the news from just beyond the border grew more and more horrible. Towns and villages were looted and burned. Civilians were massacred; women outraged; children brought to death. Heavy fines and ransoms were imposed for slight or imaginary offenses. (They amounted to more than $40,000,000 in addition to the "war contribution" exacted, which by August, 1917, had reached $288,000,000.) Churches were ruined. Priests were shot. The country was stripped and laid waste. All the scruples and rules by which men had sought to moderate the needless cruelties of war were mocked and flung aside. Ruin marked the track of the German troops, and terror ran before their advance.
On August 19 Aerschot was sacked and 150 of its inhabitants killed. On the 20th Andenne met the same fate and the number of the slain was 250. On the 23d Dinant was wrecked and more than 600 men and women were murdered. On the 25th the university library at Louvain was set on fire and burned. The pillage and devastation of the city and its environs continued for ten days. More than 2,000 houses were destroyed, and more than 100 civilians were butchered. Time would fail me to tell of the industrious little towns and the quaint Old World hamlets that were wrecked, or of the men and women and young children who were tortured, and had trial of mockings and bonds and imprisonment, and were slain by the sword and by fire. Is it not all set down by sworn witnesses in the great gray book of the Kingdom of Belgium, and in the blue book of the committee of which Lord Bryce was the head? Have I not heard with my own ears the agony of those whose parents were shot down before their eyes, whose children were slain or ravished, whose wives or husbands were carried into captivity, whose homes were made desolate, and who themselves barely escaped with their lives?
Find an explanation for these Belgian atrocities if you can. What if a few shots were fired by ignorant and infuriated civilians from the windows of houses? It has not been proved. But even if it were, it would be no reason for the martyrdom of a whole population, for the destruction of distant and unincriminated towns, for the massacre of evidently innocent persons.
Was it the drink found in the cellars of the houses that made the German officers and soldiers mad? Perhaps so. But that makes the case no better. It was stolen drink.
Was it the carrying out of the cold-blooded policy of "frightfulness" as a necessary weapon of war? That is the wickedest excuse of all. It is really an accusation. The probable truth of it is supported by what happened later, when the Germans came to Poland, and when the Turks, their allies and pupils in the art of war, slaughtered 800,000 Armenians or drove them to a slow, painful death. It means just what the title of this article says. The Werwolf was at large.
The first evidence of this spirit in the German conduct of the war that came to my personal knowledge was on August 25. Two or three days before, our American Consul-General in Antwerp, which was still the temporary seat of the Belgian Government, had written to me saying that he was absolutely destitute and begging me to send him some money for the relief of his family and other Americans who were in dire need. The Tennessee was lying off the Hook of Holland at that time, and there were several of our splendid army officers ready and eager for any service. One of the best of them, Captain Williams, offered himself as messenger, and I sent him in to Antwerp, with three thousand dollars in gold in a belt around his waist, on August 24. He had a hard, slow journey, but he went through and delivered the money.
That very night, while he was in the city, a Zeppelin air-ship, the first of its devilish tribe to get into action, sailed over sleeping Antwerp dropping bombs. No military damage was done. But hundreds of private houses were damaged and sixty destroyed. One bomb fell on a hospital full of wounded Belgians and Germans. Scores of innocent civilians, mostly women and children, were killed. "In a single house," writes an eye-witness, "I found four dead: one room was a chamber of horrors, the remains of the mangled bodies being scattered in every direction."
Mark the exact nature of this crime. The dropping of bombs from aircraft is not technically illegal. The agreement of the nations to abandon and prohibit this method of attack for five years unfortunately expired by limitation of time in 1912 and was not renewed. But the old-established rules of war among civilized nations have forbidden and still forbid the bombardment of populous towns without due notice, in order that the non-combatants may have a chance to find refuge and safety. This German monster of the air came unannounced, in the dead of night, and, having wrought its hellish surprise, vanished into the darkness again. This was a crime against international law as well as a sin against humanity.
My captain returned to The Hague the next morning, bringing his report. He had seen the horror with his own eyes. More: with the care of a true officer he had made a map of the course taken by the air-ship in its flight over the city. That map showed beyond a doubt that the aim of the marauder was to destroy the principal hospital, the hotel where the Belgian Ministers lived, and the palace in which the King and Queen with their children were sleeping.
I cabled the facts to Washington at once, and sent the map with a fuller report the next day. I felt deeply (and ventured to express my feeling) that the United States could, and ought to, protest against this clear violation of the law of nations—this glaring manifestation of a spirit which was going to make this war the most cruel and atrocious known to history. The foreboding of a return to barbarism has been fulfilled, alas, only too abominably!
In every step of that downward path Germany has led the way, by the perfection of her scientific methods applied to a devilish purpose.
Take, for example, the use of poisonous gas in warfare. This was an ancient weapon, employed long before the beginning of the Christian era. It had been abandoned by civilized nations, and was prohibited by one of the Hague conventions, for a period of five years. But that period having expired, and the convention being only a "scrap of paper," Germany revived the ancient deviltry in a more scientific form. On April 22, 1915, she sent the yellow clouds of death rolling down upon the trenches of Ypres, where the British defended the last city of outraged Belgium. The suffocating horrors of that hellish method of attack are beyond description. The fame of this achievement of spectacled barbarism belongs to the learned servants of the predatory Potsdam gang. But we cannot blame the Allies if they were forced reluctantly to take up the same weapon in self-defense.