"Let us go to this Armenian village, or that, and kill the people. We German officers will take the large houses of the rich merchants and move into them, and your Turkish soldiers can kill the old men, use the Armenian girls for the harem, and fling the little children's bodies into pits dug in the garden behind the house. We will enter the village in the morning as soldiers; when the night comes, as Germans and Turks, we will be the only people living in the Armenian village, and we will move into their stores and take possession of their houses and their looms."
"You cannot hang an entire nation," said Edmund Burke. "You must arrest the leaders and hang them." Burke was right as to the punishment of criminals, but he was wrong when it comes to murdering industrious and honest Armenians. You can murder an entire nation, for the Germans and the Turks have practically done it. Ambassador Morgenthau has just said that the Kaiser and the Sultan through their forces have murdered nearly a million Armenians. But, soon or late, remorse and conscience will take hold upon these two unspeakable butchers with hands that drip with blood—the butcher Kaiser, the butcher Sultan, that represent earth's two murderous twins.
3. Pershing's Charges versus the Kaiser
Nothing measures a man so accurately as the names he gives to his favourite son. Most significant, therefore, is the fact that the Kaiser named his second son Eitel, or Attila. Who was this Attila who has captured the imagination of the Kaiser? He was a Hun who devastated Italy fifteen hundred years ago. The motto of this black-hearted murderer Attila the Hun was: "Where my feet fall, let grass not grow for a hundred years." When the Kaiser read Attila's story he exclaimed: "That is the man for me!" First, he named his favourite son for Attila the Hun. Second, in sending his German soldiers out to China, and later in 1914 to Belgium, he gave them this charge: "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." Plainly the Kaiser knew his men. He knew that they were capable of outdoing even that monster Attila the Hun. So he sent them forth to bayonet babes, violate old women, murder old men, crucify officers, violate nuns, sink Lusitanias, and turn solemn treaties into scraps of paper.
Now over against the Kaiser's charge, black as hell, and big with death, witness Pershing's charge, reported loosely by a French boy, with his imperfect knowledge of English, translated out of the French newspapers on July 18, 1917. Pershing's brief address comes to this:
"Young soldiers of America, you are here in France to help expel an invading enemy; but you are also here to lift a shield above the poor and weak; you will safeguard all property; you will lift a shield above the aged and oppressed; you will be most courteous to women, gentle and kind to little children; guard against temptation of every kind; fear God, fight bravely, defend Liberty, honour your native land. God have you in His keeping." "Pershing."
The difference between yonder lowest hell in its uttermost abyss and yonder highest heaven, where standeth the throne of a just God, is not greater than the chasm that separates that unspeakable butcher, the Kaiser, from General Pershing and the American soldier boys, who have never betrayed in France, the noblest ideals of service cherished by the people of the American Republic.
4. Who Taught the Kaiser That a Treaty Is a Scrap of Paper?
Each month of this war clears away some clouds and reveals Germany as wholly given over to crime and treachery. At the beginning of the invasion of Belgium, the Kaiser spoke of his treaty safeguarding the neutrality of that little land as a "scrap of paper." At the moment no one seems to have realized whence the Kaiser had that cynical expression. Now the whole damnable story has been made clear. Twenty-five years ago the Kaiser, in one of his addresses, used these words:
"From my childhood I have been under the influence of five men—Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Theodoric II, Napoleon and Frederick the Great. These five men dreamed their dream of a world empire; they failed. I am dreaming my dream of a world empire, but I shall succeed."