gez. v. Fabeck
Für die Richtigkeit der Abschrift
Baessler
Oberlt. und Brig-Adjutant.
Baessler is the aide-de-camp.
Two violations of the rights of non-combatants are in that order. The requisitioning of inhabitants on military work where they are exposed to the fire of their own nation; pitiless severity applied to every non-combatant on the least suspicion of a hostile act.
Actually the state which the simple soldiers obey so utterly is an inner clique of landed proprietors, captains of industry, and officers of the army—men of ruthless purpose and vast ambitions. The sixty-five millions of docile peasants, clerks, artizans and petty officials are tools for this inner clique.
"The theories of the German philosophers and public men are of one piece with the collective acts of the German soldiers. The pages of the Pan-German writers are prophetic. They are not so much the precursors as the results, the echoes of a something impersonal that is vaster than their own voice. Here we have acted out the cult of force, creator of Right, practiced since its dim origins by Prussia, defended philosophically by Lasson, scientifically by Haeckel and Ostwald, politically by Treitschke, and in a military way by General von Bernhardi."
The modern Germany is the victim of an obsession. Under its sentimental domestic life, its placid beergarden recreation, its methodical activities, its reveries, its emotional laxity fed on music, it was generating destructive forces. Year by year it was thinking the thoughts, inculcated by its famous teachers, until those ideas, pushed deep down into the subconscious, became an overmastering desire, a dream of world-grandeur. For once an idea penetrates through to the subconsciousness, it becomes touched with emotional life, later to leap back into the light of day in uncontrolled action.
I can produce one of the original bills posted on the walls of Liège by General von Bulow. Here is the way it reads:
Ordre.
A la population Liègeoise.