Ruined Homes and Hopes
At the officers' headquarters, one night after returning from the front, several officers were recounting to us their dramatic experiences. Many harrowing tales were told. During the winter of 1915, in the trenches at the foot of Vimy Ridge, several English officers and a French captain were down in a safety cellar having their pipes together and recounting the events of the day. Rain was falling and they delayed their stay. Finally the moment came to return to their trenches above. At that moment an English sentinel exclaimed: "One week from to-day and I will be home in England with my wife and baby. One more week! The next seven days seem to me like seven eternities." The English captain congratulated the boy, saying, "In two months my permission will come and I will have eight days home with my family." Then the English officer noticed the French officer's agitation. Turning to him, the English captain exclaimed, "And when do you go, Captain?" "When do I go home," exclaimed the Frenchman bitterly, "when do I go home? You Englishmen do not understand! Your land has never been invaded. Go home! To what could I go? The Germans have been in my land for a year. My little town is gone, quite gone. My little house is gone, and gone my little shop! My wife is still a young woman! My little girl,—she is just a little, little girl! Why, I never thought of her as a woman! And now our priest writes me that my young wife and my little girl will have babes in two months by these brutes!" And then the storm broke. The Frenchman beat his head upon the rude table, while the two Englishmen fled into the rain and night, knowing that the rain was nothing against those tears of pain, for that man's hopes were dead forever. That lieutenant's only task was to recover France and then transfer all his ambitions to God in Heaven.
Such devastations of the soul are why there must be no inconclusive peace. Unconditional surrender is the only word. Whether this war goes on one year or five years it must go on until the Hun repents and makes restitution—so far as possible. Alas, a myriad of these German outrages are irremediable! Thoughtful men doubt whether the German will ever learn the wickedness of his own atrocities and the crimes of militarism until his own land is laid waste, until he sees the horrors of war with his own eyes, and hears the groans of his own people with his own ears, sees his own land laid desolate, finds his own heart crushed under anguish. Yet retribution in kind would be unthinkable for the Allies!
The Foul Crime Against Women
Many Americans have looked with horror upon the photograph of the mutilated bodies of women. Sacred forever the bosom of his mother, and not less sacred the body of every woman. Not content with mutilating the bodies of Allied officers, of Belgian boys, they lifted the knife upon the loveliness of woman. The explanation was first given by the Germans themselves. When the Hun joins the army, he must pass his medical examination. A few drops of blood are taken from the left arm, and the Wassermann blood culture is developed. If free from disease, the soldier receives a card giving him access to the camp women, who are kept in the rear for the convenience of the German soldier. If, however, the Wassermann test shows that the German has syphilis, the soldier bids him report to the commanding officer. The captain tells him plainly that he must stay away from the camp women upon peril of his life, and that if he uses one of their girls he will be shot like a dog. Having syphilis himself, the German will hand it on to the camp girl, and she in turn will contaminate all the other soldiers, and that means that the Kaiser would soon have no army. Therefore, the soldier that has this foul disease must stay away from the camp women on peril of his life. Under this restriction the syphilitic soldier has but one chance, namely, to capture a Belgian or French girl; but using this girl means contaminating her, and she in turn will contaminate the next German using her. To save his own life, therefore, when the syphilitic German has used a French or Belgian girl, he cuts off her breast as a warning to the next German soldier. The girl's life weighs less than nothing against lust or the possibility of losing his life by being charged with the contamination of his brother German.
Insane Through Pain and Grief
One pathetic and dramatic story ran up and down the trenches upon a line twenty miles in length. Told by different soldiers, that tragic story never varies in the essential facts. When the Germans ruined a village near Ham, they carried away some fifty-four girls and women between the ages of fourteen and forty. These girls were held behind the lines among the camp women, kept for the Huns. One chilly morning last April a French boy, lying on a board on the bottom of his trench, heard the wild shrieks of a girl. Standing on tiptoe he peeped over the top to find the French soldiers in the one trench and the Boches in the other had forgotten the peril of the sniper's bullet, and were staring at a young girl out in No Man's Land. One week of cruelty had driven the girl insane. The German soldiers had lifted her out of their trench, and with their bayonets had pushed her in the direction of the French lines, and were shouting to her to go over to her friends among the French.
What the French soldiers saw was a young woman, clothed in a dark blue skirt, her waist torn, her bosom exposed, her hair loose upon her shoulders. She was standing bewildered in No Man's Land. Now she poured forth the pealing laughter of a maniac, and now she seemed to be talking to herself. Suddenly her eye caught sight of a human body, wearing the garb of a French soldier. The girl did not know that it was a French boy who in the darkness had been cutting the barbed wire, and in the midst of the German flare had been caught by a bullet. Mistaking the dead boy for that of her young husband, the girl ran forward, fell upon her knees, and lifted the body that was already cold into her arms. From time to time she would take an arm grown stiff and try to put it around her neck and then gaze upon it, not understanding why the cold hands did not clasp her around in the dear accustomed way. Suddenly her eyes saw his coat, lying near by; but she did not know that the boy in his death struggles had torn that coat from his body. She thought that garment, already stiff with blood, was her own little babe. Picking up the coat, she dropped upon her knees, lifted it to her breast, and began to sway to and fro, and soon the French soldiers heard a lullaby, familiar and dear to every Frenchman whose mother with that song charmed the fear out of the eyes and the terror from the heart. So terrible was the scene that for the moment the Frenchman and German alike forgot all warfare! Finally, a German lifted his rifle to the shoulder, and as the girl, rising to her feet, flung the bloody coat away, and screamed, "The Boche! the Boche!" his rifle cracked, and the young woman sank slowly down. A moment later, all helmets, German and French alike, disappeared behind the trenches. Silence rested on No Man's Land, and events went on as before. But for France the world will never be the same again. German crimes have lighted a flame of sacred anger that will never burn out until German cruelty has been utterly consumed. That is why the fire sparkles in the eyes of the Allied soldiers whenever you suggest peace by negotiation, or a peace without victory.
A Wounded German Colonel