All Americans who have journeyed through Belgium and France this year have returned home permanently saddened men. German cruelty has cut a bloody gash in the heart, and while there are Dakin solutions that heal wounds in the arms and legs, there is no medicine that can heal the wounds in the heart. Some German-Americans still insist that the alleged German atrocities represent English lies, Belgian hypocrisies and French delusions, but all possibility of evasion or denial has been destroyed. Modern courts are satisfied with two forms of testimony, but the German atrocities are evidenced by five kinds of indubitable proof. There is the testimony of men and women telling what their own eyes have seen, and their own ears have heard,—that is a high form of evidence. There is the testimony of little children, children too innocent to invent what they are old enough to describe. Legal authorities tell us that because children are unprejudiced their testimony is the highest form of proof known to modern courts. Third, there is the testimony of the photograph,—photographs taken often before the massacred bodies had grown cold, and immediately after the German retreat from the town they had pillaged. The sunbeams move in straight lines; they tell no lies; they cannot be bribed; they have no prejudice for or against the Germans. No one can look at the hundreds of photographs of mutilated bodies without confessing that the sunlight, like a recording angel, has given a damning testimony that cannot be gainsaid by the monsters who not only killed men who defended the honour of their wives, but hacked these young husbands into shreds, mutilating the body in ways that can only be mentioned by men to men and in whispered tones.
The Germans Convict Themselves
Another form of proof is found in the journals and diaries of the German soldiers. The German has climbed into the witness stand, and given conclusive testimony against himself. Had his statements been made by Belgians, French or English, we would have denied or questioned the words, but when diaries have been taken from the dead bodies of German soldiers, and when these different journals contain substantially the same statements as to the atrocities committed at a given day in a given town, it becomes impossible for an American student to deny the daily records of German soldiers, with the confession of deeds committed sometimes by their fellows, sometimes by themselves. There is also the testimony of mutilated bodies that have been preserved in certain morgues against the day of judgment when arbitrators will behold the proof, hear the witnesses, and weigh the guilt of the Germans. The Day of Judgment is coming when these witnesses will rise literally from the grave and indict the German Kaiser and his War Staff for atrocities that are the logical and inevitable result of the ceaseless drill of their officers and privates in the science of murder, as a method of breaking down the nervous resources of the armed soldiers of Belgium and France.
Overwhelming Evidence
No horrors in history are so overwhelmingly evidenced as the German atrocities. The nature, the number, and the extent of their crimes have been documented more thoroughly than the scalpings of settlers by Sioux Indians, the horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, or the cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition. No American to-day can cross the threshold of Belgium or Northern France, Poland or Serbia, without recalling the words that Dante saw above the gate of Hell: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." Not since Judas and his fellow conspirators crucified Jesus has there been a ruler, a War Staff or an army, that has deliberately revived the cross, as an instrument of torture, to further the ends of military efficiency. The Germans have literally fulfilled the Kaiser's charge in 1899, and reproduced in 1914, upon various cards for the Kaiser's soldiers: "You will take no prisoners; you will show no mercy; you will give no quarter; you will make yourselves as terrible as the Huns under Attila." All scholars know that the Kaiser was referring to Attila's well-known motto, "Where my feet fall, let grass not grow for a hundred years."
A Catalogue of Crimes
The catalogue of German atrocities, now documented, in legal reports, with the accompanying photographs, preserved in the Department of Justice of the various nations, makes up the blackest page in human history. Long days and nights spent over the reports in the various capitals, and in courts of justice, journeys to and fro amid the ruined villages along a battle front six hundred miles in length, leave the head sick and the heart faint. The traveller would become utterly hopeless and broken-hearted, and give himself up to black despair, were it not that everything that German savagery has done to destroy one's faith in the divine origin of the human soul has been more than recovered by the gentleness, the self-sacrifice, the fortitude, the sympathy, the heroism of the British, the Belgians, and the French. The Germans have at last compelled all unprejudiced minds to recognize the atrocity as the German notion of scientific efficiency. It is not by chance that the first atrocities were begun on practically the same day, August 17th, of 1914, and ended about September 19th, and along a line extending from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier, just as the murders and mutilations, the rapes and the pillaging began and ended at the same time in Poland, Rumania and Serbia, and are now being repeated in more malignant forms in Northeastern Italy.
These Horrors Do Not Represent Drunkenness