Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights

by Kelly Miller

Of those conditions which existed in Belgium when the German soldiers overran the country, America's own minister to the devastated country, Brand Whitlock, sent a report to the State Department in the beginning of 1917, when President Wilson was protesting against the treatment accorded the helpless people of Belgium by the Germans.

Mr. Whitlock tells how the Germans determined to put the Belgians thrown out of employment to work for them. "In August," says the report, dealing with the treatment of the helpless Belgians, "Von Hindenburg was appointed supreme commander. He is said to have criticised Von Bissing's policy as too mild, and there was a quarrel; Von Bissing went to Berlin to protest, threatened to resign, but did not. He returned, and a German official said that Belgium would now be subjected to a more terrible regime, would learn what war was. The prophecy has been vindicated.

"The deportations began in October in the Etape, at Ghent and at Bruges. The policy spread; the rich industrial districts at Hainaut, the mines and steel works about Charleroi were next attacked, and they seized men in Brabant, even in Brussels, despite some indications and even predictions of the civil authorities that the policy was about to be abandoned.

"As by one of the ironies of life the winter has been more excessively cold than Belgium has ever known it and while many of those who presented themselves were adequately protected against the cold, many of them were without overcoats. The men, shivering from cold and fear, the parting from weeping wives and children, the barrels of brutal Uhlans, all this made the scene a pitiable and distressing one.

RAGE, TERROR AND DESPAIR.

"The rage, the terror and despair excited by this measure all over Belgium were beyond anything we had witnessed since the day the Germans poured into Brussels. The delegates of the commission for relief in Belgium, returning to Brussels, told the most distressing stories of the scenes of cruelty and sorrow attending the seizures. And daily, hourly almost, since that time, appalling stories have been related by Belgians coming to the legation. It is impossible for us to verify them, first because it is necessary for us to exercise all possible tact in dealing with the subject at all, and secondly because there is no means of communication between the Occupations Gebiet and the Etappey Gebiet.

"I am constantly in receipt of reports from all over Belgium that tend to bear the stories one constantly hears of brutality and cruelty. A number of men sent back to Mons are said to be in a dying condition, many of them tubercular. At Molines and at Antwerp returned men have died, their friends asserting that they have been victims of neglect and cruelty, of cold, of exposure, of hunger.

"I have had requests from the burgomasters of ten communes asking that permission be obtained to send to the deported men in Germany packages of food similar to those that are being sent to prisoners of war. Thus far the German authorities have refused to permit this except in special instances, and returning Belgians claim that even when such packages are received they are used by the camp authorities only as another means of coercing them to sign the agreements to work.

A MORTAL BLOW TO BELGIANS.

"By the deportation of Belgians to work in Germany," says Mr. Whitlock's report, "they have dealt a mortal blow to any prospect they may ever have had of being tolerated by the population of Flanders; in tearing away from nearly every humble home in the land a husband and a father or a son and brother; they have lighted a fire of hatred that will never go out; they have brought home to every heart in the land, in a way that will impress its horror indelibly on the memory of three generations, a realization of what German methods mean, not as with the early atrocities in the heat of passion and the first lust of war, but by one of those deeds that make one despair of the future of the human race, a deed coldly planned, studiously matured, and deliberately and systematically executed, a deed so cruel that German soldiers are said to have wept in its execution, and so monstrous that even German officers are now said to be ashamed."