Truly, a remarkable example of the argumentum ab silentio! Perhaps the unfortunate priest remembered what happened to Faithful when he contradicted Chief Justice Hategood.
All the evidence adduced, where it is not that of the German soldiers, is of this character. It is all hearsay, the Belgian witnesses quoted are invariably anonymous, and there are only five of them at that (D 30, 34, 37, 38, 42). At Bueken “the clergymen” are accused of having incited the population to attack the German troops. The proof adduced is that the priest “left the church” when the firing began!
What is the true explanation?
One thing emerges quite clearly from these disorderly depositions and that is a great confusion of mind. The evidence from Belgian sources, very carefully sifted by a Committee[38] (presided over by Sir Mackenzie Chalmers) of the Belgian Commission and, independently, by the Bryce Committee,[39] is to the effect that two detachments of German troops fired on one another and then threw the blame on the innocent inhabitants. This explanation certainly receives some countenance from the German depositions, which, as I have said, exhibit a kind of turbulent confusion. The N.C.O.‘s of two battalions which entered the town at 9 p.m. say “the noise and confusion was very great,” and “to what extent our fire was returned I cannot say”; “we shot the street lamps to pieces”; “our opponents were not to be seen since it was already dark,” and “we only saw the flash of the discharges and supposed that they came from the houses” (D 36, 37); and here again, as in the case of the company of Landsturm previously referred to, only “five men” were known to be hit. During the greater part of the day (August 25th) there was only[40] one company of Landsturm and sixty men of a railway detachment in the town (D 8). It is surely rather remarkable that “a well-prepared and elaborately designed attack on the part of the civil population” (D 41) should have halted all day and then begun either at or a short time before (the German evidence is, as we have seen, very conflicting) German reinforcements were entering the town, and then tarried again until the whole or the greater part of a German Army Corps had arrived: the only thing that the German evidence proves is the sinister fact that the arrival of each detachment of German forces coincided with renewed massacres of the civilian population. Such is the ugly story that emerges from these ill-nourished and contradictory testimonies.
Such is the German White Book. I think it is not too much to say that it bears the stamp of the forger’s hand upon it, the same hand that forged the Ems telegram and garbled the Belgian documents captured in Brussels. It was conceived in iniquity and brought forth in falsehood. It confesses, but does not avoid.
III
GERMAN CREDIBILITY—A REVIEW OF THE EVIDENCE
The German Diaries.
I have allowed the German White Book to speak for itself. It is a well-known rule of law that a party is “estopped” from denying his own admissions, and the incriminating character of these admissions is, as we have seen, conclusive against the German Government. Had I desired, I could have reinforced it by other evidence, also emanating from German sources, in the shape of Proclamations and diaries (of which I have seen some hundreds at the Ministry of War in Paris), which amply corroborate the conclusions already arrived at. The German pretence of a judicial inquiry into the guilt or innocence of the victims of their sanguinary fury is refuted by the simple fact that their own Proclamations frankly intimate that the principle of decimation and of vicarious punishment will be adopted, in the case of infractions, whether real or assumed, of what they choose to call their commands. A hostage may fail to turn up as a substitute, an inhabitant may be found with a litre of benzol unaccounted for, another may dig potatoes in the field, yet another may fail to salute or to hold his hands up with sufficient promptitude—and the penalty decreed is invariably the same: he, or a substitute, will be shot—“the innocent will suffer with the guilty.”[41] Not only so, but as a rule no attempt was made to discover whether any offence had been committed or not. In the diary of a German officer which came into my possession an entry recording the undiscriminating butchery of some two hundred civilians concluded with the otiose remark: “In future there ought to be an inquiry into their guilt instead of shooting them.” An unpublished Proclamation in my possession, which was handed to me by the maire of a town now in our occupation, declared that the civils, “ou peutêtre les militaires en civil,” had fired on the troops; the parenthesis damns its authors beyond redemption. And when all other tests fail, when every international convention has been repudiated, there still remains the elementary rule, which not only jurists but soldiers have always emphasized, that in reprisals and retribution there should always be some proportion between the offence and its punishment. What then is to be thought of the admission of a German soldier that sixty villagers, including women in travail, were shot “because,” he adds laconically, “they had telephoned to the enemy”? The critic who carefully collates the diaries, published and unpublished, will find overwhelming evidence of indiscriminate and lawless butchery—“Befehl ergangen sämtliche männliche Personen zu erschiessen.... Ein schrecklicher Sonntag” (Order passed to shoot all the male inhabitants.... A frightful Sunday); “Ein schreckliches Blutbad” (A frightful blood-bath); “Sämtliche Rechtsnormen sind aufgelöst” (All the rules of law are cast to the winds). And nothing is more instructive than to observe how each lays the blame for the worst outrages upon the other, while incidentally admitting those of his own unit. One says, “It’s the infantry who are to blame”; another says, “The pioneers are the worst and those brigands of artillerymen”; a third writes, “It’s all the fault of the transport.” The cumulative effect of these recriminations is to inculpate the whole.[42]
German Credibility.
Quite apart from this inductive evidence there is the fact that the German Government is so tainted with the infamy of indisputable mendacity that no sober and impartial man can credit a single word of what it says. It has deliberately forged Belgian documents which have come into its possession in order to make out a case against the Belgian Government;[43] it has repeatedly broken faith with the British Government and the Vatican;[44] it has abused the Geneva Convention in order to make use of a hospital ship as an instrument of war.[45] Berlin itself is one great factory of lies, and its official Press service, to quote the words of our Ambassador, “a vast system of international blackmail.”[46] As is the Government, so are the people. Its merchants forge manifests and falsify bills of lading in order to secure the immunity of their property from capture at sea.[47] A journal under German control[48] has admitted that the stories of mutilation so industriously circulated by the German Government and its agents are entirely the product of hysterical “suggestion.” Often its pretexts are a shameless afterthought. In co-operation with the French authorities I was instrumental in tracking down a now notorious order issued by a German Brigadier-General to butcher all the wounded who fell into German hands. At first its authenticity was denied by the German Government, but, when it was established beyond doubt, they published a statement that a similar order had been issued by one of our own Generals some twelve months ago. The excuse was as belated as it was mendacious, and to this day not the slightest proof has been adduced in support of it.