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 a more profound sorrow growing out of this war than any other people, for Belgium and France only suffered these things, but the great German race committed them.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER
When I went to Belgium, friends said to me, "You must take 'Baedeker's Belgium' with you; it is the best thing on the country." So I did. I used it as I went around. The author doesn't give much about himself, and that is a good feature in any book, but I gathered he was a German, a widely traveled man, and he seems to have spent much time in Belgium, for I found intimate records of the smallest things. I used his guide for five months over there. I must say right here I was disappointed in it. And that isn't just the word, either. I was annoyed by it. It gave all the effect of accuracy, and then when I got there it wasn't so. He kept speaking of buildings as "beautiful," "one of the loveliest unspoiled pieces of thirteenth century architecture in Europe," and when I took a lot of trouble and visited the building, I found it half down, or a butt-end, or sometimes ashes. I couldn't make his book tally up. It doesn't agree with the landscape and the look of things. He will take a perfectly good detail and stick it in where it doesn't belong, and leave it there. And he does it all in a painstaking way and with evident sincerity.
His volume had been so popular back in his own country that it had brought a lot of Germans into Belgium. I saw them everywhere. They were doing the same thing I was doing, checking up what they saw with the map and text and things. Some of them looked puzzled and angry, as they went around. I feel sure they will go home and give Baedeker a warm time, when they tell him they didn't find things as he had represented.
For one thing, he makes out Belgium a lively country, full of busy, contented people, innocent peasants, and sturdy workmen and that sort of thing. Why, it's the saddest place in the world. The people are not cheery at all. They are depressed. It's the last place I should think of for a holiday, now that I have seen it. And that's the way it goes, all through his work. Things are the opposite of what he says with so much meticulous care. He would speak of "gay café life" in a place that looked as if an earthquake had hit it, and where the only people were some cripples and a few half-starved old folks. If he finds that sort of thing gay as he travels around, he is an easy man to please. It was so wherever I went. It isn't as if he were wrong at some one detail. He is wrong all over the place, all over Belgium. It's all different from the way he says it is. I know his fellow-countrymen who are there now will bear me out in this.
Let me show one place. I took his book with me and used it on Nieuport. That's a perfectly fair test, because Nieuport is like a couple of hundred other towns.
"Nieuport," says Herr Baedeker, "a small and quiet place on the Yser."
It is one of the noisiest places I have ever been in. There was a day and a half in May when shells dropped into the streets and houses, every minute. Every day at least a few screaming three-inch shells fall on the village. Aëroplanes buzz overhead, shrapnel pings in the sky. Rifle bullets sing like excited telegraph wires. If Baedeker found Nieuport a quiet place, he was brought up in a boiler factory.