Nor were these atrocities committed in moods of drunkenness, hours of anger, nor by the occasional degenerate, like Jack the Ripper of Whitechapel Road. Allen White and Arnold Toynbee are doubtless right in asserting that most of the attacks upon little girls and young women were made by German officers, nevertheless, all must confess that the German soldiers were not less culpable, as they pillaged the land, guided by the deliberate, cold, precise, scientific, ordered policy of German frightfulness.
The story of German occupancy of Belgium and France is a long, black story of unspeakable crimes. These brigands broke into banks, looted factories, pillaged houses, burned the farmers' machinery, chopped down orchards and vineyards. In the face of their newly-signed treaties with the Allied nations, pledging the safeguarding of all buildings dedicated to education and religion, with the lives and property of non-combatants, the Germans made their treaties mere scraps of paper, sneered at the most solemn obligations given by men to men, burned cathedrals, colleges and libraries, mutilated old men and women, violated little children, nailed a child to a farmer's barn door upon which they found a calf skin drying in the sun, and beneath wrote the word "zwei." They crucified Canadian officers and Roman Catholic nuns. They bombed hospitals and Red Cross buildings. They thrust women and little children between themselves and the Belgian and French soldiers defending their native land. The affidavits, photographs, and mutilated bodies are witnesses that destroy forever the last shred of doubt and incredulity. For men who are open to testimony, the German atrocities are more surely established than any of the hideous cruelties recorded in history. Now, for the first time, wildest savagery has been reduced to a science, and damned into existence under the name of German efficiency.
The Philosophy of the German Atrocities
At the beginning of the war the American people questioned all these alleged horrors, saying that all war is hell, and abuses are common to all armies. Americans looked upon these alleged abominations as being intellectually absurd and morally monstrous, and therefore we doubted the evidence. But at last all alike perceive that the German war-deeds differ from the usual abuses of war, as a cunning fiend differs from a drunken man. Germany believes in militarism, in forty-two centimeter guns, in submarines, in liquid fire and poisoned gases. This republic and our Allies believe in the manufacture of souls of good quality. We believe in schools, colleges, libraries, churches, factories, banks, fruitful fields and a self-sufficing, intelligent and moral manhood. From the Allied view-point, the very thought of Germany's asking other nations to produce property while once in a generation, with her standing army, she goes forth to pillage and loot the wealth that industrious French or Belgians have created, is for us a monstrous thought. From the German view-point, however, atrocities represent military efficiency. Just as the German War Staff perfected in advance rifles and cannon as legitimate warfare, so they prepared in advance certain outrages from which they expected the greatest possible results, in terms of conquered territory.
The German Handbook of Military Tactics
That their officers and soldiers might understand in advance the use of the atrocity as a military instrument, the General Staff of the German army, in 1902, published a handbook of military tactics, entitled "The Laws of War on Land." This handbook sets forth a deliberate system of atrocity, and prepares the way for every species of villainy. In clear and unmistakable language, the War Staff presents principles that embody the ideas of savages. Witness the statements on page 35: "By steeping himself in military history an officer will be able to guard himself against excessive humanitarian notions. It will teach him that certain severities are indispensable to war. What is permissible includes every means without which the object of the war cannot be attained." Witness also the savagery outlined on page 52: "A war conducted with energy cannot be directed merely against the combatants of the enemy states and the positions they occupy, but it will and must in like manner seek to destroy the total intellectual and material resources of the latter. Humanitarian claims,—such as the protection of men's lives and their property, can be taken into consideration only in so far as the nature and object of the war will permit." Their Handbook of Military Tactics is, therefore, nothing other than the science of atrocity. With an army steeped in these vicious teachings, with private soldiers trained by this handbook that teaches crime as an art, and with the exhortation of their Kaiser to make themselves as terrible as the Huns under Attila, the rape of Belgium, the crucifixion of Poland, and the assassination of Northern France were logical and inevitable results.
The German Motive for Massacre an Overwhelming One
To-day, Germans find it difficult to forgive Bethmann-Hollweg for his confessions when, at the beginning of the war, he acknowledged they were committing a wrong against Belgium, that their designs made necessary, by "hacking the way through." We now know that the motive of the Kaiser and his War Staff for massacring Belgium was an overwhelming motive. They had staked everything upon a short war. "Brussels in one week, Paris in two weeks, London in two months,"—that was the programme. The stubborn opposition of the Belgian army, standing on a frontier whose sanctity the Kaiser, by the most solemn treaties, had just pledged himself to safeguard, stalled the German military machine, made impossible a crushing victory over France, and threatened their dreams of a series of hurricane victories over England.
Then the German War Staff put into operation the instructions to "frightfulness" against aged men and women, girls and little children. Should the average American return home at night to find that his wife and children had been massacred and mutilated during his absence, he would not go to the office on the following morning. The horror of "a great darkness" would fall upon him, the tool would drop from his hand, and weeks would pass before he could steel his hand to the accustomed task. Now the German War Staff fully realized the true value of the atrocity as a military instrument. Their soldiers ran no risk in killing aged men or raping young girls, but they hoped that when the news of their crimes reached the armed opponent, the atrocity committed upon his wife or child would break his nerve, and leave him helpless to fight. It took only three and a half weeks to spread the black wave of terror and frightfulness over Belgium, in order to break the nerve forces of the Belgian army.