The Responsibility of the Leaders
At the beginning of this book we noted the fatal teachings of the most famous military writers of Germany, writers who formed the war-school in which was developed the military spirit of the officers of 1914. These teachings were theories of war carried on in defiance of international law. The putting to death of captured soldiers and defenceless civilians is latent in such doctrines.
If, then, we wish to sum up in a word the system practised by German officers, during the course of a war which is still in progress, we may describe it as the system of terrorising the enemy on the plea of military necessity.
German officers showed themselves liberal in their estimate of the urgency, extent, and oftener still of the bare existence of such necessity. Therein we find the source of so many cowardly cruelties and crimes. “War! it is war,” they say. As the French Commission of Inquiry observes, for all their exactions, even for all their crimes, there was no redress; and if any unfortunate dared to beg an officer to deign to intervene and spare his life, or protect his property, he received no other reply, if he was not met with threats, than this invariable formula, accompanied by a smile and ascribing to the inevitable disasters of war the most cruel atrocities.
The German officer, therefore, has made himself responsible for the cruelties that have been committed: (1) either by ordering them or suggesting them to his subalterns or his men; (2) or by himself performing them: (3) or, finally, by tolerating them when they were committed under his eyes, or by not punishing the guilty when he was informed about their crime. By acting in one of these three ways the German officer has justified the English writer who uttered the following judgment of the conduct of the Germans in 1870: “The world at least is indebted to the Germans for having thrown light upon war … in which the soldier, the thief and the assassin can hardly be distinguished” (J. A. Farrer, Military Manners and Customs, chap. iv., p. 119). It is true, and we cannot avoid saying so, that in the present war the German officer has shown an essentially criminal mind. And we now make this accusation, which we have established by facts; our investigations, and the profound study which we have made of the subject, allow us completely to justify the declaration of the French Commission of Inquiry, “the higher command, up to its most exalted personalities, will bear before the world the crushing responsibility of crimes committed by the German army.”