Part 3

But the ruin of his cathedrals, his galleries, his schoolhouses, his libraries, his farmhouses, his vineyards and orchards, is the least of sorrows of the Frenchman. In a little village near Ham dwelt a man who had saved a fortune for his old age, 100,000 francs. When the invading army, like a black wave, was approaching, he buried his treasure beneath the large, flat stones that made the walk from the road up to the front step of his house. Then, with the other villagers, the old man fled. Many months passed by, while the Germans bombarded the village. At last the German wave retreated, and once more the old man drew near to his little village. There was nothing, nothing left. After a long time, he located the street, which was on the very edge of the town, but could not find the cellar of his own house. Great shells had fallen. Exploding in the cellar, they had blown the bricks away. Then other shells had fallen hard by and blown dirt that filled up what once had been a cellar. The very trees in front of his house had been blown away and replaced by shell pits. In one of his reports Ambassador Sharp states that the aged man had up to that time failed to locate his house, much less his buried treasure. But what trifles light as air are houses in contrast with other forms of desolation!

RUINED HOMES AND HOPES

At the officers' headquarters, one night after returning from the front, several officers were recounting to us their dramatic experiences. Many harrowing tales were told. During the winter of 1915, in the trenches at the foot of Vimy Ridge, several English officers and a French captain were down in a safety cellar having their pipes together and recounting the events of the day. Rain was falling and they delayed their stay. Finally the moment came to return to their trenches above. At that moment an English sentinel exclaimed: "One week from to-day and I will be home in England with my wife and baby. One more week! The next seven days seem to me like seven eternities." The English captain congratulated the boy, saying, "In two months my permission will come and I will have eight days home with my family." Then the English officer noticed the French officer's agitation. Turning to him, the English captain exclaimed, "And when do you go, Captain?" "When do I go home," exclaimed the Frenchman bitterly, "when do I go home? You Englishmen do not understand! Your land has never been invaded. Go home! To what could I go? The Germans have been in my land for a year. My little town is gone, quite gone. My little house is gone, and gone my little shop! My wife is still a young woman! My little girl,--she is just a little, little girl! Why, I never thought of her as a woman! And now our priest writes me that my young wife and my little girl will have babes in two months by these brutes!" And then the storm broke. The Frenchman beat his head upon the rude table, while the two Englishmen fled into the rain and night, knowing that the rain was nothing against those tears of pain, for that man's hopes were dead forever. That lieutenant's only task was to recover France and then transfer all his ambitions to God in Heaven.

Such devastations of the soul are why there must be no inconclusive peace. Unconditional surrender is the only word. Whether this war goes on one year or five years it must go on until the Hun repents and makes restitution--so far as possible. Alas, a myriad of these German outrages are irremediable! Thoughtful men doubt whether the German will ever learn the wickedness of his own atrocities and the crimes of militarism until his own land is laid waste, until he sees the horrors of war with his own eyes, and hears the groans of his own people with his own ears, sees his own land laid desolate, finds his own heart crushed under anguish. Yet retribution in kind would be unthinkable for the Allies!

THE FOUL CRIME AGAINST WOMEN

Many Americans have looked with horror upon the photograph of the mutilated bodies of women. Sacred forever the bosom of his mother, and not less sacred the body of every woman. Not content with mutilating the bodies of Allied officers, of Belgian boys, they lifted the knife upon the loveliness of woman. The explanation was first given by the Germans themselves. When the Hun joins the army, he must pass his medical examination. A few drops of blood are taken from the left arm, and the Wassermann blood culture is developed. If free from disease, the soldier receives a card giving him access to the camp women, who are kept in the rear for the convenience of the German soldier. If, however, the Wassermann test shows that the German has syphilis, the soldier bids him report to the commanding officer. The captain tells him plainly that he must stay away from the camp women upon peril of his life, and that if he uses one of their girls he will be shot like a dog. Having syphilis himself, the German will hand it on to the camp girl, and she in turn will contaminate all the other soldiers, and that means that the Kaiser would soon have no army. Therefore, the soldier that has this foul disease must stay away from the camp women on peril of his life. Under this restriction the syphilitic soldier has but one chance, namely, to capture a Belgian or French girl; but using this girl means contaminating her, and she in turn will contaminate the next German using her. To save his own life, therefore, when the syphilitic German has used a French or Belgian girl, he cuts off her breast as a warning to the next German soldier. The girl's life weighs less than nothing against lust or the possibility of losing his life by being charged with the contamination of his brother German.

INSANE THROUGH PAIN AND GRIEF

One pathetic and dramatic story ran up and down the trenches upon a line twenty miles in length. Told by different soldiers, that tragic story never varies in the essential facts. When the Germans ruined a village near Ham, they carried away some fifty-four girls and women between the ages of fourteen and forty. These girls were held behind the lines among the camp women, kept for the Huns. One chilly morning last April a French boy, lying on a board on the bottom of his trench, heard the wild shrieks of a girl. Standing on tiptoe he peeped over the top to find the French soldiers in the one trench and the Boches in the other had forgotten the peril of the sniper's bullet, and were staring at a young girl out in No Man's Land. One week of cruelty had driven the girl insane. The German soldiers had lifted her out of their trench, and with their bayonets had pushed her in the direction of the French lines, and were shouting to her to go over to her friends among the French.

What the French soldiers saw was a young woman, clothed in a dark blue skirt, her waist torn, her bosom exposed, her hair loose upon her shoulders. She was standing bewildered in No Man's Land. Now she poured forth the pealing laughter of a maniac, and now she seemed to be talking to herself. Suddenly her eye caught sight of a human body, wearing the garb of a French soldier. The girl did not know that it was a French boy who in the darkness had been cutting the barbed wire, and in the midst of the German flare had been caught by a bullet. Mistaking the dead boy for that of her young husband, the girl ran forward, fell upon her knees, and lifted the body that was already cold into her arms. From time to time she would take an arm grown stiff and try to put it around her neck and then gaze upon it, not understanding why the cold hands did not clasp her around in the dear accustomed way. Suddenly her eyes saw his coat, lying near by; but she did not know that the boy in his death struggles had torn that coat from his body. She thought that garment, already stiff with blood, was her own little babe. Picking up the coat, she dropped upon her knees, lifted it to her breast, and began to sway to and fro, and soon the French soldiers heard a lullaby, familiar and dear to every Frenchman whose mother with that song charmed the fear out of the eyes and the terror from the heart. So terrible was the scene that for the moment the Frenchman and German alike forgot all warfare! Finally, a German lifted his rifle to the shoulder, and as the girl, rising to her feet, flung the bloody coat away, and screamed, "The Boche! the Boche!" his rifle cracked, and the young woman sank slowly down. A moment later, all helmets, German and French alike, disappeared behind the trenches. Silence rested on No Man's Land, and events went on as before. But for France the world will never be the same again. German crimes have lighted a flame of sacred anger that will never burn out until German cruelty has been utterly consumed. That is why the fire sparkles in the eyes of the Allied soldiers whenever you suggest peace by negotiation, or a peace without victory.

A WOUNDED GERMAN COLONEL

Last winter, a German colonel was shot through the spinal cord. His lower limbs were completely paralyzed, and the paralysis began to extend to his hands. The wounded man developed the theory that if he could only be carried back to Germany recovery was possible. Lifted into an ambulance, he was carried twelve miles to the northeast, towards the Rhine. Unable to endure the agony of the rough road, he commanded the ambulance driver to stop in front of the priest's house, near ----. Two aged French women cared for the wounded man during January, February and March. Little by little the wings of the angel of death fanned away the mist before the eyes of the German officer. For two and a half years he had carried an aluminum token with a portrait of the German Kaiser's conception of God, and the words, "Strike them all dead. The Day of Judgment will not ask you for reasons." But at last a moment had come when he lost confidence in the pledge of the Kaiser and the War Staff to stand between him and an outraged God. One morning a little French boy waited after mass to tell the priest that the German officer wanted him to come at once. The important message proved to be a warning that the von Hindenburg line was nearly completed, that the orders for retreat had gone out, that every church, bank, factory, house, was to be looted and then burned, and the whole region turned into a desolation. "These two aged women and you yourself have been very kind to me, and this pass will take you through the German lines to a place of safety." And then the dying officer advised the priest to take the two women and go away at once. The news utterly crushed the kindly man of God. Touched by the grief of the white-haired priest, and perhaps terrified by memory and remorse, words of righteous wrath and repentance fell from the lips of the officer. These were his last words, as that old priest transcribed them from the lips of this dying German. "Curses upon our army! Curses upon our Kaiser, and our War Staff! Ten thousand curses upon the Fatherland! Either God is dead or Germany is doomed!" Going out of the door, the last words the aged priest heard were the dying curses of an officer, whose soul had been debauched by his Kaiser and his War Staff, and who upon the brink of the Day of Judgment realized that for every crime he must give an account unto God. "Woe unto him who offends one of my little ones; it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."

That conscience-smitten dying German packed the genius of the moral universe into the curse he pronounced upon the Kaiser, the War Staff and the Fatherland. When the veil was taken away from his eyes he saw that the stars in their courses were fighting against the Kaiser. In the awful hour of death he learned at last that God is not dead, but that because of her atrocities, Germany is doomed.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "In this village, from which the Germans had just retreated, I saw a proclamation by the German officer, saying that every Frenchman who refused to work should receive twenty blows of the whip; the women, fifteen blows, and the boys and girls under fifteen years of age, ten blows."--_Extract from letter of the American violinist, Albert Spalding, now a lieutenant serving in France._

[2] During last September and October, at the author's suggestion, the American etcher--Louis Orr--for eighteen days was in Rheims Cathedral while under bombardment. Mr. Orr is one of the most distinguished etchers now living. He has sent to Dr. Hillis 2,400 copies of his three etchings to be sold for the Red Cross work under official direction.

II

The Pan-German Empire Scheme, For Which Germany Lost Her Soul

"Our motto is 'from Hamburg to the Persian gulf.'"--PROFESSOR TANNEMANN.

"In this Pan-German Empire, Germans alone will govern; they alone will exercise political rights; they alone will serve in the army and navy; they alone will have the right to hold land; and they will thus be made to feel that they are a people of rulers, as they were in the Middle Ages. They will, however, allow inferior tasks to be carried out by the foreign subjects under their domination."--"_Gross Deutschland und Mitteleuropa um das Jahr 1950_," p. 48.

"Why should we make paltry excuses? Yes, we brought on this war, and we are glad of it. We provoked it, because we were sure of winning." MAXIMILIAN HARDIN, In _Zukunft_, Aug. 20, 1914.

"After this war is over, I will stand no nonsense from the United States."--_The Kaiser's threat to Ambassador Gerard._

II

The Pan-German Empire Scheme, For Which Germany Lost Her Soul

German apostasy began with German military success. What the Kaiser offered to Germany in exchange for her soul was the Pan-German empire. The originator of the world empire scheme was the Kaiser; Nietzsche was its philosopher; Treitsche its historian; Bernhardi its advocate; and von Hindenburg its executive. The first conference regarding the Pan-German empire seems to have been called in 1895, and was held in the Potsdam Palace. During the next two or three years, a world organization was brought together by the "Potsdam gang," with the Kaiser at the center, an inner circle of officers, and politicians, a larger circle of bankers, manufacturers, and ship owners. Finally there was a far-flung web of diplomats, spies, commercial travellers, Pan-German League agents, organizing in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, in Buenos Ayres and Rio de Janeiro, in Buda Pesth and Vienna, in Constantinople and Cairo, German Veteran Leagues, German Commercial Associations, all looking towards the day when the Kaiser would be the world emperor, and all countries would become provinces paying tribute to the world capital, Berlin. "What about international law?" asked an American diplomat of Bernhardi. "There will be no international law," was the answer. "Berlin will decide what laws are best for the rest of the world."

The Pan-German empire pamphlets, maps, books, magazine articles, published during the next ten years, were legion, but Professor Tannemann, a personal friend of the Kaiser, in 1911 restated the Kaiser's scheme. The essence of Pan-German plan was condensed into a few sentences: "From Hamburg and the North Sea to the Persian Gulf; the immediate goal, by 1915, the conquest of 250,000,000 of people; the ultimate goal, the Germanization of all the nations of the world." One of the Kaiser's speeches contains the explanation of his dream of becoming a world conqueror: "From my childhood I have been under the influence of five men,--Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Theodoric II, Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Each of these men dreamed a dream of a world empire; they failed. I am dreaming a dream of a German world empire--and my mailed fist shall succeed." The Kaiser printed a map headed, "The Roman Empire; Cæsar Augustus, world emperor." That map shows the once great states, Athens, Ephesus, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Carthage, reduced to county seat towns, paying tribute to the world capital, while their captive kings had walked as slaves in the triumphal processions along the Appian Way, towards the palace of the world ruler, Cæsar Augustus. One of the Pan-German empire pamphlets, and many of the German newspapers contain a revised map of Europe, showing "Germania" stamped across the continent, with St. Petersburg, Paris and London become county seat towns, paying tribute to the world capital, Berlin. Many German newspapers, during this war, have published maps showing Canada as a German province, with the name "Germania" stamped across South America, Mexico and Central America. These many pamphlets and Pan-German empire books explain Admiral Dewey's report to President McKinley. That report seems to have been written in the cabin of the flag-ship _Olympia_, in Manila Bay. Dewey states that the German admiral told him plainly to make a note of this prophecy that within fifteen years (1899, report of Admiral Dewey), Germany would crush France and Belgium, seize Holland and Denmark, utterly destroy England, and take Canada as a German province. Admiral Dewey added that the German admiral told him that while the Kaiser intended to seize New York and Washington and hold them for an indemnity, he did not intend to permanently hold in subjection the United States, but he did intend to retain Mexico and South America, and then "dispose of the Monroe Doctrine as he thinks best." This may explain the Kaiser's word to Mr. Gerard: "After this war I will stand no nonsense from the United States." So astounding were these claims that the statesmen and rulers of the world laughed at these threats, deeming it incredible that Germany was plotting a world war. Two or three men of remarkable prescience and vision, General Roberts in London, Chéradame in Paris, and Ex-President Roosevelt, understood and therefore never ceased warning the nation to prepare and make ready for a conflict that seemed to them inevitable.

When the Kaiser first announced his Pan-German empire scheme he bribed his people by appeals to avarice, ambition, and jealousy of England and Russia. The arguments used by the Potsdam gang were very simple: Agriculture pays six per cent., trade eight per cent., finance ten per cent., shipping twelve per cent., but war is an industry that pays fifty per cent. dividend upon the investment. Germany's war upon little Denmark, a people without army or navy, paid an enormous dividend upon the investment, in that it gave Germany one of her richest provinces, made possible the Kiel Canal, and left Denmark permanently crippled and exposed. "Denmark and Holland, also, are apples," says a German author, "that are slowly ripening, and we will pick the fruit at the proper time." Germany's war of 1864 upon Austria was the attack of a brigand upon a traveller rich with gold, and the cities and provinces that Germany wrested away from the ruler of Vienna paid a hundred per cent. upon the investment. In his Memoirs Bismarck tells the world plainly that he deliberately fomented a war with France, that he might seize the iron ore provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, in order to obtain the hematite iron that would make it possible for Germany to pass from the agricultural people into an industrial and manufacturing state as the competitor of England for the world's trade. For more than forty years the chief argument presented in the Reichstag for increased appropriations for the army and the navy was the money dividends paid by war.

In 1911 the Kaiser spread out before his people bribes most alluring. Just as the Devil led Jesus up into a mountain and showed Him the whole earth, so the Kaiser and the Potsdam gang led the Germans into a mount of temptation and showed them how easy it was to make the Kaiser a world emperor. The argument was very simple; after twenty-five years of preparation, Germany has nine million soldiers, has cannons, liquid fire, poisoned gases, battle-ships, aeroplanes, with every wagon and automobile ready to have the pleasure body removed, and a military body substituted. "We are ready to the last buckle on the horses' harness." To the east was Russia, broken by war with Japan; Russia with her gold mines, her wheat granaries, her vast coal and iron deposits and forests all undeveloped. To the southeast was Rumania, with her oil wells, with Constantinople and the silk fields, and the Tigris, the gateway to the Indian Ocean, and the treasures of the Bagdad railway country. To the west was unarmed Belgium, rich with twenty billions of treasure; France, half armed, with her newly discovered iron mines and coal measures; England, one vast jewel box, a kind of Aladdin's cave,--"Wait until Germany lifts her mailed fists upon the English treasure box, there will be enough for everybody in Berlin," is the gist of Zimmermann's speech of November, 1914. "The people of the United States call us Huns," writes the editor of the _Localanzeiger_, "but New York had better remember that the young Huns from the German forests took only two weeks to cross the Alps and loot the city of Rome." Other German members of the Reichstag have likened the United States unto a Croesus, the richest man in the world, living in a golden house, surrounded with bags, bursting with gems and wedges of gold and silver, but a Croesus that had no lock on his door and no weapon in his hand.

THE TREASURE BOXES OF EUROPE

"Belgium is a lamb, France and England are flocks of sheep, feeding and fattening in the pasture, ready for our shears." All these statements were sent out through Germany. The other nations are so many treasure boxes, ready for our military key to unlock them. Boys, farmers' sons, discussed the coming looting expedition in the hayfields. College boys talked about the treasures of England and France, Belgium and Holland, as boys once talked about emptying the newly discovered gold mines of California. Officers drank to "The Day." Editors added fuel to the flames of avarice. The statesmen cried, "It is our duty to rule these countries, and besides, by war we get great gain."

The influence of these incitements to avarice and ambition is found in the letters taken from the dead bodies of German soldiers. In one letter, found near Vitrimont, the German lover tells his sweetheart that he expects soon to be in Paris, and will bring her a handful of diamond rings, and a pocket full of bracelets and a few Paris gowns. Another German boy writes his young wife about a little valley in France with rich pastures and meadows, and beautiful farmhouses, and how Heinrich, Hans and Diedrich had decided to pick out the four best farms on which they would live as soon as they had cleaned up Paris. He adds, however, that Hans thinks it would be much better for them to wait until England is smashed, and when Canada is a colony, they can pick farms there two or three miles square, and make their children great landowners. For this war was to pay Germany a thousand per cent. dividend on her investment.

And who, even already, can deny that in large part Germany has made good the bribes offered to German boys? When one thinks how Germany has looted the states of Europe of her gold and silver, her bonds and stocks, their pictures, books, furniture, laces, silks, wheat, corn, wine, it is easy to understand the Kaiser's statement that "war should be Germany's chief national industry." With the Kaiser crime has prospered.