Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star: War-time Editorials

by Theodore Roosevelt

II

On Thanksgiving Day, 1914, I visited the American Hospital in Munich, a military hospital supported by contributions from the United States. While talking with three men in one room I was actually saying to myself that such as these could not be guilty of atrocities, when one of them told me a story which forced me to change my mind.

“I was a member of a relief company marching in the Vosges,” he said. “As we were about to halt for lunch, we came upon a French priest in a wood who was judged quickly to be a spy by our officers. These turned him over to us and we had great amusement after we had finished eating. I laugh still whenever I think of it. We tied a rope around his neck and threw it over a limb of a tree. Some comrades pulled and up went the priest while the rest of us stood around and jabbed him with our bayonets. ‘Higher, higher!’ we shouted. And then we had a jumping contest to see which could thrust his bayonet highest.”

The man told me the story because he thought it funny and his eyes danced with happy recollections as he told it.

NO GUNS

General Pétain, commander, French army, said: “Send guns; so that some of us may be alive to fight by your side, when at last America is ready.”

What! in France and no guns!
Have I sent forth my sons
With proud boasts of great deeds—
And fallen down at plain needs?
Who proclaimed to the world
With my banners unfurled
The dread foe will succumb,
I, America, come!
In France, and no guns!
And I’ve sent forth my sons
With those wolves of the Huns at their throats,
While the Kaiser and Hindenburg gloat,
And France, stricken France,
Fills the breach, while my lance
I sent flaming with pride
Hangs behind, not beside!
In France! and no guns,
Empty hands, and my sons
Who would tear out their hearts for my fame,
Are held up to derision and shame,
Because statesmen so small
Hew out roads to a wall
While the fire bells of death
Crash souls out, and breath!
In France, and no guns!
Why, you’re worse than the Huns,
You men who are shaming my honor
When the stress of the Nation’s upon her.
With your quibbles and greed
Can the trampled be freed?
Oh, my heart’s sick with scorn,
I, America, suborned.
In France, and no guns!
Let’s forever be done
With our boasts and our brags, and succumb
To the scorning before which we’re dumb.
When at last France is free
And her glory acclaimed
Let none look at me,
At America, shamed.

Henrietta Keith, Minneapolis

We live such sheltered lives here, three thousand miles away from the war, that most of us don’t even yet realize what Germany has done and has stood for in this war and what a terrible menace she is to us and to all civilization. The other day I met a very able writer and observer who at the outbreak of the Great War spent many months with the German and Austrian armies and then lived in Germany until it became impossible for a self-respecting American longer to stay there. He is Mr. D. Thomas Curtin. His father was born in Ireland. He is himself a Catholic. I mention these facts merely because they refute the cheap and vicious falsehoods so often promulgated by the pro-Germans to the effect that the accounts of the German atrocities are due to English propaganda.

I ask all good Americans, whatever their creed, and I especially ask American women, to read these two straightforward statements by Mr. Curtin, the account of the killing by torture of the priest who fell into the hands of the German soldiers and the account of the fearful brutality of an Austrian German to a poor old woman. These were not isolated cases of brutality. They were both part of the policy of deliberate horror, which Mr. Curtin speaks of as “the system.” All in America who have played the game of Germany, from Hearst and the Germanized Socialists and the German-American Alliance at one end of the line to foolish pacifist preachers at the other end of the line, have been, according to their power, working to bring about the day when we here in this country would see our own women and helpless non-combatant men and our own children exposed to such hideous wrongs and torture as is described by Mr. Curtin. I very seriously ask our people to read what Mr. Curtin says and to ponder the full meaning of the facts he sets forth.

In the next place, I ask them to read the poem—and it is a real poem, not merely verse—of Mrs. Keith, a Minneapolis woman, called “No Guns.” Well-meaning, foolish people, and some people who in ordinary relations of life are not foolish, are fond of telling us not to point out the defects in the army, because this encourages Germany, and because anyhow it is a case of spilt milk, and there is no use of crying over spilt milk. The answer is twofold. In the first place, Germany knows all our shortcomings. Inasmuch as we have wickedly refused to go to war with Turkey and Bulgaria, we have left open avenues by which it is absolutely certain that Germany gets full knowledge of everything she wishes to know about this country. It is only our own people who are kept in ignorance. In the next place, as regards the spilt-milk proposition, the trouble is that we have kept on spilling the milk and that only by pointing out that it has been spilled is it possible to solder the milk cans and stop further spilling. Until Senator Chamberlain and his committee boldly and truthfully pointed out the evil caused by the delays and shortcomings of the War Department, the Administration made not the slightest effort to remedy them. Some of the more salient of these shortcomings have been remedied, and this fact is primarily due to the courage and patriotism of these public servants, Senator Chamberlain and his committee.

If fourteen months ago our people had been willing to demand the truth and to listen to those who told the truth, we would at this moment have four times the force we now have in France; and we would have guns and airplanes, and auto rifles of our own make with it; and we would have had plenty of ships to carry our men across and to give them food and munitions. The reason why our fighting army at the front in France is no larger, and the reason why we have had to get the necessary field guns, airplanes, and auto rifles for that army from the French, is because we, as a people, were not willing to insist upon knowing the truth. It is precisely because certain men are now telling the truth that there is reason to hope that gradually the milk spilling will be stopped; that gradually we shall get the guns, the airplanes, and auto rifles for our men, and above all the ships that are vitally necessary. I ask the mothers of this country whose sons are now in the army, or may go into the army, to read and ponder this poem by a woman, and to cast the weight of their great influence in favor of demanding that every ounce of energy we as a Nation possess be used to speed up the war, to relieve our allies of the burden of supplying us with weapons of war, and to see that the American troops abroad are furnished from this country with American-made weapons of the highest type.

The don’t-cry-over-spilt-milk appeal represents unpardonable wrong to America and to civilization.