"As I walked out, General von Bernhardi came into the room, an expert artillery-man, a professor in one of their war colleges. I met him the next morning, and he asked me if I had read his book, Germany and the Next War.
"I said I had. He said, 'Do you know, my friends nearly ran me out of the country for that. They said, "You have let the cat out of the bag." I said, "No, I have not, because nobody will believe it." 'What did you think of it?'
"I said, 'General, I did not believe a word of it when I read it, but I now feel that you did not tell the whole truth;' and the old general looked actually pleased."
Speaking on August 29, 1914, at Münster, of the extreme measures which the Germans had felt obliged to take against the civil population of Belgium, Gen. von Bissing said:
Statement by von Bissing.
"The innocent must suffer with the guilty. * * * In the repression of infamy, human lives cannot be spared, and if isolated houses, flourishing villages, and even entire towns are annihilated, that is assuredly regrettable, but it must not excite ill-timed sentimentality. All this must not in our eyes weigh as much as the life of a single one of our brave soldiers—the rigorous accomplishment of duty is the emanation of a high Kultur, and in that, the population of the enemy countries can learn a lesson from our army."
Gen. von Bissing, after his appointment as governor general of Belgium, repeated in substance the above opinion to a Dutch journalist. The interview is published in the Düsseldorfer Anzeiger of December 8, 1914.
Irvin S. Cobb states his conclusions on the responsibility of the higher German command for the atrocities:
"But I was an eyewitness to crimes which, measured by the standards of humanity and civilization, impressed me as worse than any individual excess, any individual outrage, could ever have been or can ever be; because these crimes indubitably were instigated on a wholesale basis by order of officers of rank, and must have been carried out under their personal supervision, direction, and approval. Briefly, what I saw was this: I saw wide areas of Belgium and France in which not a penny's worth of wanton destruction had been permitted to occur, in which the ripe pears hung untouched upon the garden walls; and I saw other wide areas where scarcely one stone had been left to stand upon another; where the fields were ravaged; where the male villagers had been shot in squads; where the miserable survivors had been left to den in holes, like wild beasts.
"Taking the physical evidence offered before our own eyes, and buttressing it with the statements made to us, not only by natives but By German soldiers and German officers, we could reach but one conclusion, which was that here, in such and such a place, those in command had said to the troops: 'Spare this town and these people.' And there they had said: 'Waste this town and shoot these people.' And here the troops had discriminately spared, and there they had indiscriminately wasted, in exact accordance with the word of their superiors." Irvin S. Cobb, Speaking of Prussians, New York, 1917, pp. 32-34.
These ideas, then, were systematically impressed upon the military and official classes. It was necessary, however, to work upon the minds of the German people, so that they might lend themselves to the inhuman policies advocated by the military leaders. To do this was difficult, for, as has been shown above, many of the civilian leaders of public opinion, time and again, expressed their horror of the new spirit which was animating the military authorities. The Reichstag debates give ample evidence of this, and the task of the military leaders would have been still more difficult if the Reichstag had had any real power. (See War Information Series, No. 3, The Government of Germany; see also Gerard's My Four Years in Germany, Chap. II.)
The military authorities and those in sympathy with them have done all in their power to stimulate a hatred of other peoples in the minds of the Germans. A campaign of education before the war was carried on with the object of impressing upon the minds of the Germans the treacherous nature of the peoples against whom the military leaders were anxious Hatred against Belgians. to wage war. Not only were the Germans gradually led to believe that it was necessary to fight a defensive war against unscrupulous foes, but also that these foes would violate every precept of humanity, and consequently must be crushed without mercy as a measure of self-defense. The fruits of this campaign of suspicion and hatred became evident when almost at the outbreak of the war many Germans became possessed with the belief that the whole population of Belgium, the first country to be invaded, had violated every rule of honorable warfare, that the francs-tireurs (guerillas) were everywhere present doing their deadly work in secrecy or under the cover of darkness; that women and even children were mutilating and killing the wounded or helpless prisoners.
The effect of the fables upon the popular mind may be seen in the following extracts from German letters: