Our Part in the Great War

by Arthur Gleason

II

SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES

I have seen the original diaries of the German soldiers in the army which devastated Belgium and Northern France. Things tumble out just as they happened, hideous acts, unedited thoughts. Phillips Brooke once spoke of the sensation there would be if the contents of our minds were dumped on Boston Common for people to see. Here is the soul of the German people spilled out into writing. This is what Germany was in the year 1914. This record left by dead men and by captured men is a very living thing to me, because I saw these German soldiers at their work of burning and torture. Here they have themselves told of doing the very thing I saw them do. We must not miss the point of their proof, written and signed by the perpetrators themselves. It is the proof of systematic massacre, systematic pillage, systematic arson.

These diaries found on the field of battle were brought to the French General Staff along with the arms and equipments of the dead and the prisoners. They are written by the soldiers because of Article 75 of the German Instruction for Campaign Service (Felddienst-Ordnung), which states that "these journals of war serve for information on the general operations, and, by bringing together the various reports of active fighting, they are the basis for the later definitive histories of the campaigns. They should be kept daily." No words could be more exactly prophetic. Those diaries will be the basis of all future histories of the war. The keeping of them is obligatory for the officers, and seems to be voluntary on the part of the men, but with a measure of implied requirement. So stern did some of the soldiers feel the military requirement to be that they kept on with their record up to the point of death. Here is the diary of a soldier of the Fourth Company of the Tenth Battalion of Light Infantry Reserves, which he was writing at the moment he was fatally wounded.

"Ich bin verwundet. Behüte dich Gott. Küsse das Kind. Es soll fromm sein." And then the pencil stops forever. The writing on that final page of all is regular and firm up to the "Ich bin verwundet." Those last four sentences are each just a line long, as if each was a cry. He wrote the word "Küsse" and could hardly rally himself. His pencil slips into three marks without meaning, then he writes "das Kind." I trust my German readers will not deny me the use of this diary. It is the only one of which I have not seen the original. The photographic reproduction is my only evidence of this flash of tenderness among a thousand acts of infamy.

The diaries are little black-covered pocket copybooks: the sort that women in our country use for the family accounts. They contain about 100 pages. They average five inches in length and three in width. A few of the diaries, and those mostly belonging to officers, are written in ink. But most of them are in pencil, occasionally in black, but the large majority in purple.

Many of the diaries are curt records of daily marches and military operations. The man is too tired to write anything but distances, names of places, engagements. That was what the Great German General Staff had in mind in ordering the practice. They could not foresee what would slip through into the record, because in all their calculations they have always forgotten the human spirit. Once again we are indebted to German thoroughness. The causes, the objects, the methods of this war, will not be in doubt, as in other wars of the past. History will be clear in dealing its judgments. Like the surgeon's ray on a fester, German light has played on the sore spots. So the soldiers have gone on making their naked records of crimes committed and their naïve mental reactions on what they did, till all too late the German machine forbade further exposure of the national soul. But the faithful peasant fingers had written what all eternity cannot annul.

"These booklets, stained, bruised, sometimes perforated by bayonet or torn by splinters of shell, the pencilings in haste, day by day, in spite of fatigue, in spite even of wounds"—they are the most human documents of the war.

This privilege of working with the originals themselves was extended by the Ministry of War. The General Staff issued a Laissez-Passer, and gave me an introduction to the fine white-haired old Lieutenant, who is a Russian and German scholar. Together we went word by word over the booklets. I was impressed by the fair-minded attitude of my co-worker. "An honest man," he said, when we came to Harlak's record. "Un brave soldat," he declared of the old reservist, who protested against murder. He was not trying to make a case. He had no need to make a case. The pity of it is that the case has been so thoroughly made by German hands. These diaries have not been doctored in the smallest detail. There they are, as they were taken from the body of the dead man and the pocket of the prisoners. The room where we worked is stuffed with the booklets of German soldiers. Shelves are lined with the black-bound diaries and the little red books of identification carried by each soldier. They overflow upon tables. In this room and a suite adjoining sit the official translators of the French General Staff. I have purposely selected certain of my examples from the official reports of the French Government. I wanted to verify for American "neutrals" that no slightest word had been altered, that no insertions had been made.