The madness which descended upon our enemies when they started this war would appear to have taken a turn where it commonly manifests itself in acts of stark degeneracy. Every day I am hearing tales which prove the truth of this. If there was only one such story coming to light now and then we might figure the terrible thing as proof of the nastiness of an individual pervert manifesting itself; but where the evidence piles up in a constantly accumulating mass it makes out a case so complete one is bound to conclude that a demoniacal rottenness is running through their ranks, affecting officer and men alike. For the sake of the good name of mankind in general one strives not to accept all these tales but the bulk of them must be true.
A young tank-officer of ours whom I knew before the war in New York, where he was a rising lawyer, and whom I knew to be truthful, tells me that an honest appearing British non-com in turn, told him that a week or two ago the Britishers having cleaned up a nest of enemy machine guns, sent a detail out to bury the dead. The squad had buried two Germans, then they came upon the body of one of their own men who had fallen in the fighting two days earlier when the Britishers made their first attack upon the Germans only to be forced back and then to come again with better success. The sergeant who stood sponsor for the narrative declared that as he bent over the dead Englishman to unfasten the identification tag from the wrist, he saw that something was fastened to the dead man's arm and that this something was partly hidden beneath the body. Becoming instantly suspicious, he warned the other men to stand back and then kneeling down and feeling about cautiously, he found a bomb so devised that a slight jar would set it off. Before they fell back, the surviving Germans had attached this devilish thing to a corpse with the benevolent intent of blowing to bits the first man among the victors who should undertake to move the poor clay with intent to give it decent burial.
Our men have been warned against gathering up German helmets and German rifles in places from which the enemy has retired, because such souvenirs have a way of blowing up in the finders' hands by reason of the explosive grenades that have been attached to them and hidden beneath them with the cap so arranged that a tug at the wired-on connection will set off the charge; but this crowning atrocity shows they are making improvements in their system. From sawing down fruit trees, from shoveling filth in the drinking wells, from wantonly destroying the villages which for years have sheltered them, from laying waste the lands which they are being forced now to surrender back into the hands of their rightful proprietors, the ingenious Hun has progressed in his military education to where he makes dead men serve his purposes. Personally, I have heard of but one act to match this one. An American trooper entered a half-wrecked hamlet which the retreating Germans had just evacuated, and on going into a villager's house, saw a china doll lying upon a cupboard shelf, and saw that, hitched to the doll, was one of these touchy hand-bombs. Now, it is only reasonable to assume the German who planned this surprise went upon the assumption that the doll would be the prized possession of some French child and that when the family who owned the house found their way back to it, the child would run first of all to recover her treasured dollie and picking it up would be killed or mangled, thereby scoring one more triumph, if a small one, for Vaterland and Kaiser.
To a dressing station behind our front lines up beyond St. Mihiel—so I am reliably informed—our stretcher-bearers brought two wounded prisoners and laid them down. One of the pair was a Prussian captain with a hole in his breast; the other a weedy boy-private with a shattered leg. There were two surgeons at work here—a Frenchman and an American.
As the Frenchman bent over the captain, in the joy of service forgetting for the moment that the man lying before him was his enemy and filled only with a desire to save life and relieve human agony, the Prussian who seemingly had been unconscious, opened his eyes in recognition. Thereupon the surgeon, making ready to strip away the first-aid dressings from the punctured chest, spoke to his patient in French saying he trusted the captain did not suffer great pain. The reply Was Prussianesque. The wounded man cleared his throat and spat full in the Frenchman's face.
I hope I am not blood-thirsty, but I am happy to be able to relate a satisfactory sequel. The Frenchman, who must have been a gentleman as well as a soldier, stood true to the creed of an honourable and merciful calling. He merely put up his hand and without a word wiped the spittle from his face which had grown white as death under the strain of enduring the insult. But an American stretcher-bearer who had witnessed the act, snatched up a rifle from a heap of captured accoutrements near the door of the dugout and brought the butt of it down, full force, across the hateful, gloating mouth of the Prussian.
For contrast, mark the behaviour of the boy-soldier who also had just been borne in. It was the American surgeon who took the private's case in hand. Now this American surgeon was of pure German descent and bore a German name and he spoke well the tongue of his ancestors. So naturally he addressed the groaning lad in German.
Between gasps of pain, the lad told his interrogator that he was a Saxon, that his age was eighteen and that he had been in service at the Front for nearly a year. Even in the midst of his suffering he showed pleasure at finding among his captors a man who knew and could use the only language which he himself knew. Noting this, the surgeon continued to address the youngster as he made ready to do to the mangled limb what was needful to be done.
As his skilled fingers touched the wound, some sub-conscious instinct quickened perhaps by the fact that he had just employed the mother-speech of his parents set him to whistling between his teeth a song he had known as a child. And that song was Die Wackt am Rhein.