Our Part in the Great War

It is only in victorious conquest that the German is unendurable. When he was trounced at the Battle of the Marne, he ceased his wholesale burnings and massacres throughout that district, and continued his campaign of frightfulness only in those sections of Belgium around Antwerp where he was still conquering new territory. His dream of world conquest will die in a day, when the day comes that sends him home. In defeat, he is simple, kindly, surprised at humane treatment. He ceases to be a superman at the touch of failure. All his blown-up grandeur collapses, and he shrinks to his true stature.

This return to wholesomeness is dependent on two things: a thorough defeat in this war, so that the German people will see that a machine fails when it seeks to crush the human spirit, and an internal revolution in the conception of individual duty to the state, so that they will regain the virtues of common humanity. The water-tight compartments, which they have built up between the inner voice of conscience in the individual life and the outer compulsion of the state, must be broken through.

IV
THE BOOMERANG

One of the best jokes of the war has been put over on the Germans by themselves. Here I quote from a German diary of which I have seen the original. It is written by a sub-officer of the Landwehr, of the 46th Reserve Regiment, the 9th Company, recruited from the province of Posen. He and his men are on the march, and the date is August 21. He writes:

"We are informed of things to make us shudder concerning the wickedness of the French, as, for instance, that our wounded, lying on the ground, have their eyes put out, their ears and noses cut. We are told that we ought to behave without any limits. I have the impression that all this is told us for the sole purpose that no one shall stay behind or take the French side; our men also are of the same opinion."

On August 23 he writes:

"I learn from different quarters that the French maltreat our prisoners; a woman has put out the eyes of an Uhlan."

By August 24 all this begins to have its effect on the imperfectly developed natures of his comrades, and he writes:

"I find among our troops a great excitability against the French."

There we can see the machinery of hate in full operation. The officers state the lies to the soldiers. They travel fast by rumor. The primitive, emotional men respond with ever-increasing excitement till they readily carry out murder.

Let us see how all this is working back home in the Fatherland. I have seen the photographic reproduction of a letter written by a German woman to her husband (from whose body it was taken), in which she tells him not to spare the French dogs ("Hunden"), neither the soldiers nor the women. She goes on to give her reason. The French, she says, men and women, are cruel to German prisoners. The story had reached her.

The German Chancellor in September, 1914, stated in an interview for the United States:

"Your fellow countrymen are told that German troops have burned Belgian villages and towns, but you are not told that young Belgian girls have put out the eyes of the defenseless wounded on the field of battle. Belgian women have cut the throats of our soldiers as they slept, men to whom they had given hospitality."

The final consecration of the rumor was given by the Kaiser himself. On September 8, 1914, he sent a cable to President Wilson, in which he repeated these allegations against the Belgian people and clergy. Of course, he knew better, just as his Chancellor and General Staff and his officers knew better. It was all part of the play to charge the enemy with things akin to what the Germans themselves were doing. That makes it an open question, with "much to be said on both sides." That creates neutrality on the part of non-investigating nations, like the United States.

But what he and his military clique failed to see was that they had discharged a boomerang. The comeback was swift. The German Protestants began to "agitate" against the German Roman Catholics. The old religious hates revived; a new religious war was on. Now, this was the last thing desired by the military power. An internal strife would weaken war-making power abroad. Here was Germany filled with lies told by the military clique. Those lies were creating internal dissension. So the same military clique had to go to work and deny the very lies they had manufactured. They did not deny them out of any large love for the Belgian and French people. They denied them because of the anti-Catholic feeling inside Germany which the lies had stirred up. German official inquiries have established the falsity of the atrocity charges leveled against the Belgians.

A German priest, R. P. Bernhard Duhr, S. J., published a pamphlet-book, "Der Lügengeist im Völkekrieg. Kriegsmärchen gesammelt von Bernhard Duhr, S. J.," (München-Regensburg, Verlagsanstat, Vorm. G. J. Manz, Buch und Kunstdruckei, 1915). Its title means "The spirit of falsehood in a people's war. Legends that spring up in war-time." His book was written as a defense of Roman Catholic interests and for the sake of the internal peace of his own country. This book I have seen. It is a small pamphlet of 72 pages, with a red cover. The widest circulation through the German Empire was given to this proof of the falsity of the charges laid to the Allies. Powerful newspapers published the denials and ceased to publish the slanders. Generals issued orders that persons propagating the calumnies, whether orally, by picture or in writing, would be followed up without pity. So died the legend of atrocities by Belgians. The mighty power of the Roman Catholic Church had stretched out its arm and touched the Kaiser and his war lords to silence.

The charges are treachery, incitement to murder and battle, traitorous attacks, the hiding of machine guns in church towers, the murder, poisoning and mutilation of the wounded. The story ran that the civil population, incited by the clergy, entered actively into hostilities, attacking troops, signaling to the Allies the positions occupied by the Germans. The favorite and most popular allegation was that women, old people and children committed atrocities on wounded Germans, putting out their eyes, cutting off their fingers, ears and noses; and that priests urged them on to do these things and played an active part in perpetrating the crimes. Putting out the eyes became the prize story of all the collection.

The German priest, Duhr, runs down each lie to its source, and then prints the official denial. Thus, a soldier of the Landwehr sends the story to Oberhausen (in the Rhine provinces):

"At Libramont the Catholic priest and the burgomaster, after a sermon, have distributed bullets to the civil population, with which the inhabitants fire on German soldiers. A boy of thirteen years has put out the eyes of a wounded officer, and women, forty to fifty years old, have mutilated our wounded soldiers. The women, the priest and the burgomaster have been all together executed at Trèves. The boy has been condemned to a long term in the home of correction."

The German commander of the garrison at Trèves writes:

"Five Belgian francs-tireurs who had been condemned to death by the court martial were shot at Trèves. A sixth Belgian, still rather young, has been condemned to imprisonment for many years. Among the condemned there were neither women, nor priests nor burgomaster."

This communication is signed by Colonel Weyrach.

Postcards representing Belgian francs-tireurs were placed on sale at Cassel. The commander of the district writes:

"The commanding general of the XI Army Corps at Cassel has confiscated the cards."

Wagner Bauer, of the Prussian Ministry of War, writes of another tale:

"The story of the priest and the boy spreads as a rumor among troops on the march."

The Herner Zeitung, an official organ, in its issue of September 9, printed the following: "Among the French prisoners was a Belgian priest who had collected his parishioners in the church to fire from hiding on the German soldiers. Shame that German soil should be defiled by such trash! And to think that a nation which shields rascals of that sort dares to invoke the law of humanity!"

Frhr. von Bissing, commanding general of the VII Army Corps, writes:

"The story of a Belgian priest, reported by the Herner Zeitung does not answer at any point to the truth, as it has since been established. The facts have been communicated to the Herner Zeitung concerning their article."

The Hessische Zeitung prints the following under title of "Letters from the Front by a Hessian Instructor":

"The door of the church opens suddenly and the priest rushes out at the head of a gang of rascals armed with revolvers."

The Prussian Ministry of War replies:

"The inquiry does not furnish proof in support of the alleged acts."

The Berliner Tageblatt, for September 10, has a lively story:

"It was the curé who had organized the resistance of the people, who had them enter the church, and who had planned the conspiracy against our troops."

The Prussian Minister of War makes answer: "The curé did not organize the resistance of inhabitants; he did not have them enter the church, and he had not planned the conspiracy against our troops."

The dashing German war correspondent, Paul Schweder, writes in Landesbote an article, "Under the Shrapnel in Front of Verdun." He says that he saw:

"A convoy of francs-tireurs, at their head a priest with his hands bound."

The German investigator pauses to wonder why every prisoner and every suspect is a franc-tireur, and then he goes on with his inquiry, which results in a statement from the Prussian War Minister:

"Deiber (the priest) had nothing charged against him, was set at liberty, and, at his own request, has been authorized to live at Oberhaslach."

The Frankfurter Zeitung, September 8, has a spirited account of a combat with francs-tireurs in Andenne, written by Dr. Alex Berg, of Frankfort:

"The curé went through the village with a bell, to give the signal for the fight. The battle began immediately after, very hotly."

The military authority of Andenne, Lieutenant Colonel v. Eulwege:

"My own investigation, very carefully made, shows no proof that the curé excited the people to a street fight. Every one at Andenne gives a different account from that, to the effect that most of the people have seen hardly anything of the battle, so-called, because they had hidden themselves from fear in the cellars."

Finally, the War Ministry and the press wearied of individual denials, and one great blanket denial was issued. Der Völkerkrieg, which is a comprehensive chronicle of review of the war, states:

"It is impossible to present any solid proof of the allegation, made by so many letters from the front, to the effect that the Belgian priests took part in the war of francs-tireurs. Letters of that kind which we have heretofore reproduced in our record – for example, the recital of events at Louvain and Andenne – are left out of the new editions."

Der Fels, Organ der Central-Auskunftstelle der katholischen Presse, states:

"The serious accusations which I have listed are not only inaccurate in parts and grossly exaggerated, but they are invented in every detail, and are at every point false."

And, again, it says:

"All the instances, known up to the present and capable of being cleared up, dealing with the alleged cruelties of Catholic priests in the war, have been found without exception false or fabrications through and through."

Turning to the "mutilations," we have the Nach Feierabend publishing a "letter from the front" which tells of a house of German wounded being burned by the French inhabitants. Asked for the name of the place and the specific facts, the editor replied that "you are not the forum where it is my duty to justify myself. Your proceeding in the midst of war of representing the German soldiers who fight and die as liars, in order to save your own skin, I rebuke in the most emphatic way."

But the Minister of War got further with the picturesque editor, and writes:

"The editorial department of the Nach Feierabend states that it hasn't any longer in its possession the letter in question."

Now we come to the most famous of all the stories.

"At a military hospital at Aix-la-Chapelle an entire ward was filled with wounded, who had had their eyes put out in Belgium."

Dr. Kaufmann, an ecclesiastic of Aix-la-Chapelle, writes:

"I send you the testimony of the head doctor of a military hospital here, a celebrated oculist whom I consulted just because he is an oculist. He writes me:

"'In no hospital of Aix-la-Chapelle is there any ward of wounded with their eyes put out. To my knowledge absolutely nothing of the sort has been verified at Aix-la-Chapelle.'"

The Kölnische Volkzeitung, October 28, gives the testimony of Dr. Vülles, of the hospital in Stephanstrasse, Aix-la-Chapelle, in reference to the "Ward of Dead Men," where "twenty-eight soldiers lay with eyes put out." The men laughed heartily when they were asked if they had had their eyes put out.

"If you wish to publish what you have seen," said Dr. Vüller, "you will be able to say that my colleague, Dr. Thier, as well as myself, have never treated a single soldier who had his eyes put out."

Professor Kuhnt, of the clinic for diseases of the eye at Bonn, writes:

"I have seen many who have lost their sight because of rifle bullets or shell fire. The story is a fable."

The Weser-Zeitung has a moving story of a hospital at Potsdam for soldiers wounded by the francs-tireurs, where lie officers with their eyes put out. "Young Belgian girls, of from fourteen to fifteen years of age, at the incitement of Catholic priests, have committed the crimes."

The commander at Potsdam writes:

"There is no special hospital here for soldiers wounded by the francs-tireurs. There are no officers here with eyes put out. The commander has taken measures to correct the article under dispute, and also in other publications."

So perish the lies used against Belgium. Lies manufactured by the General Staff and taught to their officers, to be used among the soldiers, in order to whip them to hate, because in that hate they would carry out the cold cruelty of those officers and of that General Staff. Lies put out in order to blind the eyes of neutrals, like the government at Washington, to the pillage, the burning and the murder which the German army was perpetrating as it marched through Belgium and Lorraine. Lies that later had to be officially denied by the same military power that had manufactured them, because those lies were stirring up civil strife at home, and because the Roman Catholic Germans investigated the sources and silenced the liars.

The Kaiser cabled to our country:

"The cruelties committed in this guerilla warfare by women, children and priests on wounded soldiers, members of the medical staff and ambulance workers have been such that my generals have at last been obliged to resort to the most rigorous measures. My heart bleeds to see that such measures have been made necessary and to think of the countless innocents who have lost their life and property because of the barbarous conduct of those criminals."

Now that he knows that those stories are lies he must feel sorrier yet that his army killed those countless innocents and burned those peasant homes.

SECTION IV
THE PEASANTS

I
THE LOST VILLAGES

I was standing in what was once the pleasant village of Sommeilles. It has been burned house by house, and only the crumbled rock was left in piles along the roadside. I looked at the church tower. On a September morning, at fourteen minutes of nine o'clock, an incendiary shell had cut through the steeple of the church, disemboweled the great clock, and set the roof blazing. There, facing the cross-roads, the hands of the clock once so busy with their time-keeping, are frozen. For twenty-three months, they have registered the instant of their own stoppage. On the minute hand, which holds a line parallel with that of the earth, a linnet has built its nest of straw. The hour-hand, outpaced by its companion at the moment of arrest, was marking time at a slant too perilous for the home of little birds. Together, the hands had traveled steadily through the hours which make the years for almost a century. High over the village street, they had sent the plowman to his field, and the girl to her milking. Children, late from their play, had scrambled home to supper, frightened by that lofty record of their guilt. And how many lovers, straying back from the deep, protecting meadows, have quickened their step, when the revealing moon lighted that face. Now it marks only cessation. It tells of the time when a village ceased to live. Something came down out of the distance, and destroyed the activities of generations – something that made an end of play and love. Only the life of the linnet goes on as if the world was still untroubled. Northern France is held in that cessation. Suddenly death came, and touched seven hundred villages. Nor can there ever be a renewal of the old charm. The art of the builders is gone, and the old sense of security in a quiet, continuing world.

I have been spending the recent days with these peasants in the ruins of their shattered world. Little wooden baraquements are springing up, as neat and bare as the bungalows of summer visitors on the shore of a Maine lake. Brisk brick houses and stores lift out of crumpled rock with the rawness of a mining camp. It is all very brave and spirited. But it reminded me of the new wooden legs, with shining leather supports, and bright metal joints, which maimed soldiers are wearing. Everything is there which a mechanism can give, but the life-giving currents no longer flow. A spiritual mutilation has been wrought on these peasant people in destroying the familiar setting of their life. They had reached out filaments of habit and love to the deep-set hearth and ancient rafters. The curve of the village street was familiar to their eye, and the profile of the staunch time-resisting houses.

From a new wooden structure, with one fair-sized, very neat room in it, a girl came out to talk with us. She was about twenty years old, with a settled sadness in her face. Her old home had stood on what was now a vegetable garden. A fragment of wall was still jutting up out of the potatoes. Everything that was dear to her had been carefully burned by the Germans.

"All the same, it is my own home," she said, pointing to the new shack, "it does very well. But my mother could not stand it that everything was gone. We ran away for the few days that the Germans were here. My mother died eight days after we came back."

The 51st Regiment of German Infantry entered the village, and burned it by squirting petrol on piles of straw in the houses. The machine they used was like a bicycle pump – a huge syringe. Of the Town Hall simply the front is standing, carrying its date of 1836. Seventeen steps go up its exterior, leading to nothing but a pit of rubbish.

"For three days I lay hidden without bread to eat," said a passer-by.

An old peasant talked with us. He told us that the Germans had come down in the night, and burned the village between four and six in the morning. A little later, they fired on the church. With petrol on hay they had burned his own home.

"Tout brûlé," he kept repeating, as he sent his gaze around the wrecked village. He gestured with his stout wooden stick, swinging it around in a circle to show the completeness of the destruction. Five small boys had joined our group. The old man swung his cane high enough to clear the heads of the youngsters. One of them ran off to switch a wandering cow into the home path.

"Doucement," said the old man. ("Gently.")

We went to his home, his new home, a brick house, built by the English Quakers, who have helped in much of this reconstruction work. He and his wife live looking out on the ruin of their old home.

"Here was my bed," he said, "and here the chimney plate."

He showed the location and the size of each familiar thing by gestures and measurements of his hands. Nine of the neighbors had lain out in the field, while the Germans burned the village. He took me down into the cave, where he had later hidden; the stout vaulted cellar under the ruined house.

"It is fine and dry," I suggested.

"Not dry," he answered, pointing to the roof. I felt it. It was wet and cold.

"I slept here," he said, "away from the entrance where I could be seen."

His wife was made easier by talking with us.

"How many milliards will bring us back our happiness?" she asked. "War is hard on civilians. My husband is seventy-eight years old."

The cupboard in her new home stood gaping, because it had no doors.

"I have asked the carpenter in Revigny to come and make those doors," she explained, "but he is always too busy with coffins; twenty-five and thirty coffins a day."

These are for the dead of Verdun.

When the Germans left Sommeilles, French officers found in one of the cellars seven bodies: those of Monsieur and Madame Alcide Adnot, a woman, thirty-five years old, and her four children, eleven years, five, four, and a year and a half old. The man had been shot, the young mother with the right forearm cut off, and the body violated, the little girl violated, one of the children with his head cut off. All were lying in a pool of blood, with the splatter reaching a distance of ninety centimeters. The Germans had burned the house, thinking that the fire would destroy the evidence of their severity, but the flames had not penetrated to the cellar.

Sommeilles is in one of the loveliest sections of Europe, where the fields lie fertile under a temperate sun, and the little rivers glide under green willow trees. Villages of peasants have clustered here through centuries. One or two of the hundreds of builders that lifted Rheims and Chartres would wander from the larger work to the village church and give their skill to the portal, adding a choiceness of stone carving and some bit of grotesquerie. Scattered through the valleys of the Marne, and Meuse, and Moselle, you come on these snatches of the great accent, all the lovelier for their quiet setting and unfulfilled renown.

The peasant knew he was part of a natural process, a slow, long-continuing growth, whose beginnings were not yesterday, and whose purpose would not end with his little life. And the aspect of the visible world which reinforced this inner sense was the look of his Town Hall and his church, his own home and the homes of his neighbors – the work of no hasty builders. In the stout stone house, with its gray slabs of solidity, he and his father had lived, and his grandfather, and on back through the generations. There his son would grow up, and one day inherit the house and its goods, the gay garden and the unfailing fields.

Things are dear to them, for time has touched them with affectionate association. The baker's wife at Florent in the Argonne is a strapping ruddy woman of thirty years of age, instinct with fun and pluck, and contemptuous of German bombs. But the entrance to her cellar is protected by sand-bags and enormous logs.

"You are often shelled?" asked my friend.

"A little, nearly every day," she answered. "But it's all right in the cellar. For instance, I have removed my lovely furniture down there. It is safe in the shelter."

"Oh, then, you care more for your furniture than you do for your own safety?"

"Why," she answered, "you can't get another set of furniture so easily as all that." And she spoke of a clock and other wedding-presents as precious to her.

A family group in Vassincourt welcomed us in the room they had built out of tile and beams in what was once the shed. The man was blue-eyed and fair of hair, the woman with a burning brown eye, the daughter with loosely hanging hair and a touch of wildness. The family had gone to the hill at the south and watched their village and their home burn. They had returned to find the pigs ripped open. The destruction of live stock was something more to them than lost property, than dead meat. There is an intimate sense of kinship between a peasant and his live stock – the horse that carries him to market, his cows and pigs, the ducks that bathe in the pool of his barnyard and the hens that bathe in the roadside dust. No other property is so personal. They had lost their two sons in the war. The woman in speaking of the French soldiers called them "Ces Messieurs," "these gentlemen."

In this village is a bran-new wooden shed, "Café des Amis," with the motto, "A la Renaissance," "To the Rebirth."

In Sermaize, nearly five hundred men marched away to fight. When the Germans fell on the town, 2,200 were living there. Of these 1,700 have returned. There are 150 wooden sheds for them, and a score of new brick dwellings, and twenty-four brick houses are now being built. Six hundred are living in the big hotel, once used in connection with the mineral springs for which the place was famous: its full name is Sermaize-les-Bains. Eight hundred of the 840 houses were shelled and burned – one-third by bombardment, two-thirds by a house to house burning.

The Hotel des Voyageurs is a clean new wooden shed, with a small dining-room. This is built on the ruins of the old hotel. The woman proprietor said to me:

"We had a grand hotel, with twelve great bedrooms and two dining-rooms. It was a fine large place."

The Café des Alliés is a small wooden shed, looking like the store-room of a logging camp. We talked with the proprietor and his wife. They used to be manufacturers of springs, but their business was burned, their son is dead in the war, and they are too old to get together money and resume the old work. So they are running a counter of soft drinks, beer and post cards. The burning of their store has ended their life for them.

We talked with the acting Mayor of Sermaize, Paul François Grosbois-Constant. He is a merchant, fifty-four years old. The Germans burned his six houses, which represented his lifetime of savings.

"The Germans used pastilles in burning our houses," he said, "little round lozenges, the size of a twenty-five-centime piece (this is the same size as an American quarter of a dollar). These hop about and spurt out fire. They took fifty of our inhabitants and put them under arrest, some for one day, others for three days. Five or six of our people were made to dress in soldiers' coats and casques, and were then forced to mount guard at the bridges. The pillage was widespread. The wife and the daughter of Auguste Brocard were so frightened by the Germans that they jumped into the river, the river Saulx. Brocard tried to save them, but was held back by the Germans. Later, when he took out the dead bodies from the river, he found a bullet hole in the head of each."

As we drove away from Sermaize, I saw in the village square that a fountain was feebly playing, lifting a thin jet of water a few inches above the basin.