In the hope, therefore, of keeping respect for man many scholars transferred all responsibility unto devils. They called in Satan and made him to be the father of hate and cruelty. They could not believe that Nero, Judas or Torquemada could conceive such wickedness. They therefore made the devil with his cloven feet and his long tail to whisper these cunning suggestions in the ear of the traitor. Thus the responsibility for unwonted cruelty was divided between the murderer and the devil who counselled the black crime.
Perhaps the most damnable thing that was ever suggested by the devil in two thousand years is this little object called the German soldier's token. Never did an object so small send forth cruelties so large and manifold.
The little disc is stamped out on thick paper for German privates and upon aluminum for the officers. At the top of this cardboard is the portrait of that awful being called by the Kaiser "our good old German God."
Look at his white hair, the long beard and the great sword in the right hand, with the suggestion that since God uses the sword the German soldier must cut men to pieces also.
Beneath you see flames gushing up, suggesting to the German soldier that he is quite right in burning the houses of France and Belgium after he has looted them, and for flinging the dead bodies into the blazing rafters. Now read the words written beneath the face of the being the Germans call God.
"Strike them all dead. The Day of Judgment shall ask you no questions."
Strike dead old men and women! Dash the children's brains out against the stone wall! Violate young girls! Mutilate their fair bodies so that they will be unseemly when they are found by the husband or father. Burn, steal, kill—but remember that your Kaiser and the War Staff have promised to stand between you and God Almighty and the Day of Judgment! Even if Jesus did say, "Woe unto them that offend against my little ones," you must remember that your Kaiser and officers have promised you immunity on the Day of Judgment.
That is what is meant by the sentence on page thirty-one in the German handbook of "War on Land": "That which is permissible to the German soldier is anything whatsoever that will help him gain his goal quickly."
Nothing better illustrates the total collapse of manhood in the Germans than this soldier's token.
A coward by nature, the German is afraid to kill and steal, and so he invented a screen behind which he could hide and named it "the soldier's token."