Well may the Russian Government say in their covering communication that “the forms of punishment”—if we can speak of punishment when no offence had been committed—“remind one of the tortures of the Middle Ages.” Other documents in my possession recite how the prisoners were harnessed to ploughs and carts, like cattle, and lashed with long leather whips; how a man who fainted from exhaustion was immediately bayoneted, while another who fell out of the ranks to pick up a rotten turnip shared a like fate; how wounded men were forced to stand naked for hours in the frost until gangrene set in, tied up for hours to posts with their toes just touching the ground until, the blood rising to the head, copious hæmorrhage took place from the nose, mouth, and ears; how yet others who, exhausted with hunger and fatigue, could not keep up on the march were bayoneted or clubbed where they lay. As for the conduct of the German populace let the following speak for itself:
“The peaceful inhabitants along the routes traversed in Germany showed the greatest hostility towards the prisoners, whom they reviled as ‘Russian swine and dogs.’ Women and even children threw stones and sand at them, and spat right in their faces.... Even the wounded men were not spared by these demented Germans who struck them, pulled their moustaches, and spat in their faces.”
The German Ideal—Europe in Chains.
The conception of the educated classes of Germany as to the future of Europe we have on record: it is to be a tributary Europe, vast satrapies of subject populations more rightless than the mediæval villein, their language proscribed, their liberties disfranchised, their commerce prohibited, their lands expropriated, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the conqueror. The ill-disguised slavery under which Belgium[56] and the occupied French Departments[57] groan to-day is to be perpetuated. The small nations of Europe are to exchange the protection of Europe for the suzerainty of Germany and to live under the German “shield.” Their territories are to be to Germany what the provinces were to Rome at her worst—great praedial estates, the peasantry of which are either to be “cleared” or to remain as the menials of the conqueror. The German dream is the dream of the Latin historian who sighed for more provinces to conquer in order that liberty might be “banished from the sight”[58] of those already under his heel. What Germany cannot annex she will ruin, so that borne down by heavy indemnities France shall never be able to lift her head again. Such are the “terms of peace” proclaimed by the German Professors, a body of men who, it should be remembered, in Germany hold their chairs at the pleasure of the State and are, in fact, a branch of the Civil Service. They therefore speak as men having authority.[59]
A Moral Distemper.
I have been told that there are still some individuals in England who cherish the idea that this vast orgy of blood, lust, rapine, hate, and pride is in some peculiar way merely the Bacchanalia of troops unused to the heady bouquet of the wines of Champagne or, stranger still, that it is the mental aberration of a people seduced by idle tales into these courses by its rulers. It is no part of my task to find explanations. But if the reader is astonished, as well he may be, at the disgusting repetition of stories of rape and sodomy let him study the statistics of crime in Germany during the first decade of this century, issued by the Imperial Government; he will find in them much to confirm the impression that the whole people is infected with some kind of moral distemper.[60] The seduction of a people by its rulers is impossible; such hypnotic susceptibility to the influences of “suggestion” would, of itself, be a symptom of mental degeneration in the people itself. It is impossible to believe that the most highly educated nation in Europe is either so ignorant or so credulous as such an explanation would suggest. It is not in their ignorance but in their turpitude that the clue to these barbarities is to be found. This is a sombre fact which has to be faced or these appalling records will have been sifted and published in vain. The problem of explanation is ultimately one for the anthropologist rather than the lawyer, and there may be force in the contention of those who believe that the Prussian is not a member of the Teutonic family at all, but a “throw-back” to some Tartar stock. Certain it is that he exhibits an insensibility to the feelings of others which is only equalled by his extreme sensitiveness as to his own.[61] This morbid insensibility is, of course, the secret of German “Terrorism,” and of the immense influence which it has exerted on the theory and practice of war among the German nation. It explains their singular ingenuity in finding means to an end, and between the German trooper who dips a baby’s head into scalding water in order to get more coffee from its mother[62] to the commandant who at the point of the bayonet thrusts a living screen of priests, old men, and women with babes at the breast[63] between his own troops and those of the enemy there is a difference of degree rather than of kind. Similarly the dark passage in the German War Book which hints that there may be occasions on which it will be profitable to massacre prisoners of war reveals the same quality of mind as the order to shoot helpless sailors who are struggling for their lives in the sea.[64] All things are lawful which are expedient, and if your enemy has ties of affection, the better he lends himself to your belligerent exploitation. Mentem mortalia tangunt—human things touch the heart—acquires for the German Staff a new and sinister significance. Every tender feeling that their enemy has becomes a hostage for his tractability, because it can be violated if he is contumacious. His churches can be profaned, his priests murdered, his boys driven into exile, his women-folk handed over to the lust of a licentious soldiery, and his home destroyed. If his troops defeat one in the field, the civilian population can be made to pay for it with their lives,[65] so that eventually he may be disarmed not by defeat but by horror. His own humanity will be his undoing. Not fear but anguish will bring him to his knees.
This is the German doctrine, secreted in the pages of many a German manual,[66] and now published to the world in the German Proclamations and the evil deeds which they both excuse and provoke. This it is which has made the German nation, in the words of Lord Rosebery, “the enemy of the human race,” and has caused the very name of this bestial and servile people to stink in the nostrils of mankind.
IV
THE FUTURE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND THE QUESTION OF RETRIBUTION
The Dissolution of Europe.
Many years ago the most distinguished of the modern school of French historians wrote a remarkable essay on the subject of “Diplomacy and Progress.”[67] He knew Europe as few had known it; he had spent his life in its chancelleries and its archives, and his wisdom was only equalled by his knowledge, for he had studied not only books but men. In that essay he speculated as to the effect of the progress of mechanical invention in the arts of war upon the prospects of European peace, and he confessed to a mournful depression. But the source of his apprehension was not Europe but Asia. He foresaw the possibility of some potent Oriental nation awaking from its secular meditations and applying itself in a single generation to an apprenticeship in those mechanical arts which are no longer the peculiar mystery and the prerogative of the Western world. A nation thus acquiring the destructive resources of the West, while retaining the peculiar morality of the East—its ruthlessness, its contempt for human life, its sombre fatalism, its indifference to personal liberty, its chicanery, its love of espionage—might, he apprehended, fall upon Europe in a catastrophic assault as unforeseen as it would be unprovoked, and threaten her with destruction.