One of the dangerous Belgian franc-tireurs, who made it necessary for the German Army to burn and bayonet babies and old women. His name is Gaspar. He is three years old.
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 outdoing all that. The basest and the worst that one can dream of is it not that campaign of slander and blackmail which they originated after their violation of Belgium's neutrality? Of course they did it—as a murderer who slanders his victim—in the hope to justify their crime."
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."