German Atrocities: An Official Investigation

by J. H. Morgan

A REVIEW OF
GERMAN ATROCITIES
BY
THE RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
Published in The Westminster Gazette, London,
March 20, 1916

A FRESH EXAMINATION OF GERMAN WAR METHODS[99]

Professor Morgan, whose bright little book, called “Sketches From the Front,” has given to us some of the most fresh and vivid pictures of the actualities of warfare in France, presents in the present volume the evidence he has been busy in collecting regarding the behaviour of the German troops in the western theatre of war. Some of this has already been made known to the public by what he published in the Nineteenth Century and After in June, 1915, and also by the depositions which he obtained under the instructions of the Home Office and submitted to the British Committee on Alleged German Outrages. (Many of these were published in the Appendix to their Report last May.) Since that time he has spent four or five months in collecting further important data and still more months in collating the results of the facts he has collected, having been granted by the British Headquarters Staff in France those facilities for moving to and fro along the front and getting into touch with eye-witnesses which were essential for arriving directly at the facts. The evidence thus obtained is supplemented by several diaries of German soldiers never before published in England, and by some extracts from documents issued by the Russian Government describing cruelties committed by the Germans in the fighting on the Eastern front. As respects the data he has himself collected, Professor Morgan explains, in his introduction, the methods he has followed in taking evidence and testing its value, showing himself sensible, as a lawyer ought to be, of the need for care and caution in such a matter. The large experience which his months of work at the front have given him adds weight to his assurance that what he submits is worthy of all credence as well as to the conclusions at which he has arrived. But before adverting to these conclusions a preliminary question deserves to be considered.

It has been asked—and it is natural that it should he asked—“What is the use of multiplying tales of horror?” “Why do anything that can aggravate the bitterness of feeling, already lamentably acute, between the belligerent nations? All war is horrible; why add fresh items to the list of offences which are making us think worse of human nature than we supposed two years ago we ever could think?”

These questions need an answer. Such a painful record as the present book contains, such a record as can be found in the reports already officially published by the Belgian, French, and British Governments, might, perhaps, have been better left unpublished if it did not serve some definite tangible aim, looking to some permanent good for mankind.

Now such a definite, tangible, practical aim does exist, and seems to justify, and, indeed, to require, the publication of the facts contained in this book and also in the reports which have been published by the Belgian, French, and British Governments. It is an aim which can be stated quite shortly; and the need for pursuing it is shown by what has happened during the last twenty months.

In most parts of the ancient world, and among the semi-civilised peoples of Asia till very recent times, wars were waged against combatants and non-combatants alike. Even in the European Middle Ages indiscriminate slaughter of combatants and non-combatants alike sometimes occurred, especially where, as in the case of the Albigenses, religious passion intensified hatred. As late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were campaigns in which frightful license was allowed to soldiery, private property was pillaged or ruthlessly destroyed, and women were habitually outraged.

A reaction of sentiment caused by the horror of the Thirty Years’ War, coupled with a general softening of manners, brought about a change. During the last two centuries, though every war was marked by shocking incidents, there was a growing feeling that non-combatants should be protected, and a serious purpose to restrain the excesses of troops invading a hostile country. The wars of the eighteenth century were less cruel and destructive than those of the seventeenth, and the wars of the nineteenth showed some improvement on those of the eighteenth. The war of 1870-71, if those of us in Britain who remember it can trust our recollection, seemed better in both the above-named respects than had been the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars between 1793 and 1814. Till the outbreak of the present conflict men who sought for signs of the progress of mankind were cheered by the hope that war would hereafter be waged only between regular disciplined forces on each side; that these forces would abstain from needless cruelty, that women would be protected from lust, and that the lives of non-combatants would not be endangered. There was even a prospect that private property would not be destroyed except in so far as a definite military aim made its destruction unavoidable, as when a hostile force had to be shelled out of its shelter in a village. The Hague Convention had passed rules which ameliorated the practices of war as regards the combatant forces and had solemnly proclaimed the duty of respecting the lives and property of non-combatant civilians.

The present war has, however, brought a rude awakening. The proofs are now overwhelming that in Belgium and Northern France—as to other regions the evidence is not fully before us—non-combatants have been slaughtered without mercy by the orders of the German military authorities, while the mitigations of war usages as regards combatants have been openly and constantly disregarded. Private property has been constantly destroyed where no specific military reason existed, but only for the sake of terrorising the civil population, or perhaps out of sheer malice. A license has been practised by, and in many cases obviously permitted to, the soldiers which has led to acts of wanton cruelty. Outrages upon women have been far more numerous than in any war between civilised nations during the last hundred years. One crime deserves special condemnation, because it is done deliberately and is justified by its perpetrators. This is the practice of seizing innocent non-combatants, usually the leading inhabitants of a town or village, calling them hostages and executing them in cold blood if the population of the town or village whom “the hostages” cannot control, fail to obey the commands of the invaders. Civilians who fire upon invading troops without observing the requirements which the Hague Convention prescribes may, no doubt, be shot according to the customs of war; but there must be some proof that these particular civilians have done so. To put to death a quarter or more of the adult male inhabitants of a village because some shots have been fired, or are supposed by an excited soldiery to have been fired, out of its houses, is mere murder. All the paragraphs in the Manual of War issued by the German Staff cannot make it anything else.

Though we may hope, and indeed must hope, that the horror caused by this war may lead to measures which will diminish the risks of war in the future, he must be indeed a sanguine man who can think that war, the oldest of the curses that have afflicted mankind, is likely to be eradicated within this century. It is therefore an urgent duty to do all that can be done for a regulation of the methods of war and a mitigation of the sufferings that it causes.