I
A scene in Schabatz, when the Austro-Hungarians attempted to flank Belgrade in early August, 1914, has seared itself into my memory. I was in the shambles of an overgrown village. The blood of both armies flowed in the streets and the wine from broken casks and bottles flowed in the cellars, soldiers walking in it up to their knees.
The street was deserted save for an Unteroffizier who was passing. An old woman, bent and shriveled, her white locks escaping the yellow sash around her head, tottered from a whitewashed mixture of mud and thatch, saw the enemy soldier, started back, thought better of it, and sank to her knees while she extended her bony arms for mercy. He drew his saber—still a relic of war. “A little despicable stage play and magnanimous pardon,” I thought. I was mistaken. The saber whistled and slashed the outstretched arms, the woman’s shriek cut me like saws and knives, and I turned away bewildered.
I came face to face with the man a few minutes later. He was not drunk. Nor did he look like a wild man from the hills. He was a Viennese, the kind of man I had seen on scores of occasions lolling in a café, mild and gentle as a kitten. He looked mild and gentle now.
“Why did you do it?” I had to ask.
“She was a pig-dog Serb, an enemy of my country. I did my duty.” And he said it in a manner which showed him satisfied in his conscience that he had done what was right.
I realize now that I had had my first war-time example of the German system of education. The code is that anything done in the name of the Fatherland is correct. A man can be educated in such a manner that he will wipe out “crawling verminous pests of his country” with as little compunction as a farmer would rid his field of potato bugs.
II
On Thanksgiving Day, 1914, I visited the American Hospital in Munich, a military hospital supported by contributions from the United States. While talking with three men in one room I was actually saying to myself that such as these could not be guilty of atrocities, when one of them told me a story which forced me to change my mind.
“I was a member of a relief company marching in the Vosges,” he said. “As we were about to halt for lunch, we came upon a French priest in a wood who was judged quickly to be a spy by our officers. These turned him over to us and we had great amusement after we had finished eating. I laugh still whenever I think of it. We tied a rope around his neck and threw it over a limb of a tree. Some comrades pulled and up went the priest while the rest of us stood around and jabbed him with our bayonets. ‘Higher, higher!’ we shouted. And then we had a jumping contest to see which could thrust his bayonet highest.”