Chapter 3

But the boast is an idle and empty boast. It is true that no army of the Allies has crossed the German frontier to permanently hold a city. But let no man think that Germany has succeeded because of the richness of her loot. There is a success that is failure. There is a victory that is defeat.

Macbeth killed Duncan and went to live in the palace of the dead king, but did Macbeth succeed? Was not his palace a brief halting place in his journey towards remorse, insanity and the day when Duncan's friends in turn slew Macbeth?

The rich judges of Athens succeeded and Socrates failed. They went home to drink wine and feast, while Socrates went to the jail to drink a cup of poison. But who succeeded? The judges whose names are written low down and bespattered with dirt--or Socrates, whose name fills the sky and who has become the thinker for the world?

What if the Kaiser does boast of his successes to-day? So boasted Nero--sending Paul to his rags, crusts and the dungeon preparatory to the headman's axe. But it is Nero that lost out, and it is Paul who reigns a crowned king.

The chief priests celebrated their victory; at the close of the day, after they had succeeded in crucifying Jesus; but after nineteen centuries the murderers are unknown and almost forgotten, while that young carpenter rules over His Empire of Love.

To-day the Kaiser claims to have won the victory of "a superman." In that he has carried murder, arson, lying, rapine, lust up to the _nth_ power, let us concede his claim. Not otherwise two hundred years ago the Indian, with his scalping knife, his war-whoop and his tomahawk, was "a superman" in terms of savagery. Not otherwise the Spaniards under Bloody Alva were "supermen" in terms of rack, thumbscrew and instruments of torture.

But what savages once did in the little, the Kaiser and his men now do in the large. But because the Kaiser can publish a long list of wealth gained--by breaking his treaties, by murder, arson and lust--let no man think that he is successful.

The two Biddle brothers looted the Bank of England, but they became outcasts upon the face of the earth, and always the dungeon yawned for them, just as the Kaiser and von Hindenburg never sleep at night without a vision of an oak tree, a long bough and a hemp rope dangling at the end, for the hemp is now twisted that will one day choke to death the murderous Kaiser and his War Staff.

Let no patriot, whether he lives in Spain, Russia or the United States, forget that ours is a world ruled by men who were defeated.

To-day on the thrones of the world are the heroes, like Paul and Demosthenes; the martyrs who were burned with Savonarola in Florence or poisoned with Socrates in Athens.

To-day, the soldiers of Marathon and Marston Moor, Gettysburg and the Marne now rule the world.

The treasure of the burglar and the brigand dissolves like snowflakes in a river.

Long ago the Hebrew poet said: "I have seen the wicked flourish like a green bay tree, and then I lifted up my eyes, and, behold! he was not." And when a little time has passed all lovers of liberty and humanity will exclaim: "During four years I have seen the Kaiser and von Hindenburg flourish as the green bay tree, and I lifted up mine eyes, and, behold! they were not. For the breath of His nostrils had slain them."

6. Germans Who Hide Behind the Screen

Two thousand years are a long time in terms of history.

Many damnable tools have been invented during these twenty centuries. The rack, the thumbscrew, the tomahawk, the fagot belong among these devilish instruments.

Cruelties so terrible have been devised that old scholars often felt unwilling to believe that men were so low in the scale as to have been the authors of these methods of fiendishness.

In the hope, therefore, of keeping respect for man many scholars transferred all responsibility unto devils. They called in Satan and made him to be the father of hate and cruelty. They could not believe that Nero, Judas or Torquemada could conceive such wickedness. They therefore made the devil with his cloven feet and his long tail to whisper these cunning suggestions in the ear of the traitor. Thus the responsibility for unwonted cruelty was divided between the murderer and the devil who counselled the black crime.

Perhaps the most damnable thing that was ever suggested by the devil in two thousand years is this little object called the German soldier's token. Never did an object so small send forth cruelties so large and manifold.

The little disc is stamped out on thick paper for German privates and upon aluminum for the officers. At the top of this cardboard is the portrait of that awful being called by the Kaiser "our good old German God."

Look at his white hair, the long beard and the great sword in the right hand, with the suggestion that since God uses the sword the German soldier must cut men to pieces also.

Beneath you see flames gushing up, suggesting to the German soldier that he is quite right in burning the houses of France and Belgium after he has looted them, and for flinging the dead bodies into the blazing rafters. Now read the words written beneath the face of the being the Germans call God.

"Strike them all dead. The Day of Judgment shall ask you no questions."

Strike dead old men and women! Dash the children's brains out against the stone wall! Violate young girls! Mutilate their fair bodies so that they will be unseemly when they are found by the husband or father. Burn, steal, kill--but remember that your Kaiser and the War Staff have promised to stand between you and God Almighty and the Day of Judgment! Even if Jesus did say, "Woe unto them that offend against my little ones," you must remember that your Kaiser and officers have promised you immunity on the Day of Judgment.

That is what is meant by the sentence on page thirty-one in the German handbook of "War on Land": "That which is permissible to the German soldier is anything whatsoever that will help him gain his goal quickly."

Nothing better illustrates the total collapse of manhood in the Germans than this soldier's token.

A coward by nature, the German is afraid to kill and steal, and so he invented a screen behind which he could hide and named it "the soldier's token."

Going into a French village the Germans collect the women and children, order them to march in advance, shoot a few to terrorize the rest, and then, hiding behind this living screen, the Germans march forward. In this way they protect themselves.

The whole history of the human race contains no chapter of atrocity like the atrocity of the Germans. The history of the world contains no story of cowardice so black and damnable as the cowardice of the Germans. Out of cowardice the soldier's token was born.

And so the Kaiser and the War Staff invented this round piece of cardboard, with the representation of God as going forth with His sword to kill men and with His flames to burn them and with the motto: "Strike them all dead, for the Day of Judgment will ask you no questions."

Therefore among the instruments of cruelty, called the rack, the fagot, the thumbscrew and the tomahawk, let us give the first place to the German soldier's token, the most damnable weapon that has come out of hell during the last two thousand years.

7. Must German Men Be Exterminated?

A singular revulsion of sentiment as to what must be done with the German army after the war, is now sweeping over the civilized world. Men who once were pacifists, men of chivalry and kindness, men whose life has been devoted to philanthropy and reform, scholars and statesmen, whose very atmosphere is compassion and magnanimity towards the poor and weak, are now uttering sentiments that four years ago would have been astounding beyond compare. These men feel that there is no longer any room in the world for the German. Society has organized itself against the rattlesnake and the yellow fever. Shepherds have entered into a conspiracy to exterminate the wolves. The Boards of Health are planning to wipe out typhoid, cholera and the Black Plague. Not otherwise, lovers of their fellow man have finally become perfectly hopeless with reference to the German people. They have no more relations to the civilization of 1918 than an orang-outang, a gorilla, a Judas, a hyena, a thumbscrew, a scalping knife in the hands of a savage. These brutes must be cast out of society.

Some of us, hoping against hope, after the reluctant confession of the truth of the German atrocities, have appealed to education. We knew that Tacitus said, nearly two thousand years ago, that "the German treats women with cruelty, tortures his enemies, and associates kindness with weakness." But nineteen centuries of education have not changed the German one whit. The mere catalogue of the crimes committed by German officers and soldiers and set forth in more than twenty volumes of proofs destroys the last vestige of hope for their future. Think of the catalogue! Babies nailed like rats to the doors of houses! Children skewered on a bayonet midst the cheers of marching Germans--as if the child were a quail, skewered on a fork! Matrons, old men and priests slaughtered; young Italian officers with throats cut and hanging on hooks in butchers' shops; the bombing of Red Cross hospitals and nurses and the white flag; everything achieved by civilized man defiled and destroyed--reverence for childhood and age, the sanctity of womanhood, the standards of honour, fidelity to treaties and all destroyed, not in a mood of drunkenness or a fit of rage, but on a deliberate, cold, calculated policy of German frightfulness.

The sense of hopelessness as to civilizing the German and keeping him as an element in the new society grew out of the breakdown of education and science in changing the German of the time of Tacitus. Plainly the time has come to make full confession of the fact that education can change the size but not the sort. The German in the time of Tacitus was ignorant when he took the children of his enemy and dashed their brains out against the wall; the German of 1914 and 1918 still butchers children, the only difference being that the butchery is now more efficient and better calculated, through scientific cruelty, to stir horror and spread frightfulness. The leopard has not changed its spots. The rattlesnake is larger and has more poison in the sac; the German wolf has increased in size, and where once he tore the throat of two sheep, now he can rend ten lambs in half the time. In utter despair, therefore, statesmen, generals, diplomats, editors are now talking about the duty of simply exterminating the German people. There will shortly be held a meeting of surgeons in this country. A copy of the preliminary call lies before me. The plan to be discussed is based upon the Indiana State law. That law authorizes a State Board of Surgeons to use upon the person of confirmed criminals and hopeless idiots the new painless method of sterilizing the men. These surgeons are preparing to advocate the calling of a world conference to consider the sterilization of the ten million German soldiers, and the segregation of their women, that when this generation of German goes, civilized cities, states and races may be rid of this awful cancer that must be cut clean out of the body of society.

THE BLACK SOUL OF THE HUN

III

1. German Barbarism Not Barbarism to the German

Strictly speaking, the only man who thoroughly understands the cruelty of the Germans is the German himself. No American or Englishman, no Belgian or Frenchman has the gift of telepathy that enables him to know what is going on in the German mind that guides the German's hand in committing his horrible atrocities. Now and then, in a moment when he is off guard, an occasional German reveals the explanation, and we look in, just as John Bunyan's pilgrim saw the door into Hades opened by a little crack, through which he looked upon the flames. Not otherwise was it with that German in Baltimore, who recently exposed the German mind, and from the German view-point explained the Germans in their hour of brutality.

During a most intimate and personal conversation with a banker, this German, the other day, explained his people's atrocities by saying that what is barbarism and atrocities to England, France or the United States is not barbarism at all to the Germans. In proof of this astounding statement the German gave this personal incident of his boyhood. He said that in his gymnasium there was another boy who had something that he wanted. When the opportunity came, being the stronger, he jumped upon the other boy, beat him up terribly and made him a cripple for life. On reaching his home he showed his parents what he had stolen, and he was patted on the back, praised for his might with his fists, and told that that was the method he was to follow in after life.

He insisted that this sort of thing was drilled into every German boy, and for that reason it never once even occurred to him that he had done wrong. "After I became a man I settled in America, and as I came to understand the spirit of American civilization it grew upon me that I had committed a crime, and now for twenty-two years, as some atonement for my sin, I have been supporting that crippled man and his widowed mother."

The modern banker has become a sort of confessor, and to the banker many sins are revealed as once to the priest. Nothing is more significant than this German confession and his philosophy of the German atrocity. In his own written letter concerning that crime of his boyhood this German adds: "Had I remained in Germany no one would ever have thought of suggesting to me that I had done wrong, and it would never have entered into my head that I was under any obligation to the man I had maimed. In the light of American civilization I understand the difference, and I am seeking to atone for my sin, but all Germans have been taught, as I was taught. The Germans, therefore, in their campaign of frightfulness, are committing deeds which from the view-point of American civilization are barbarous, but from the view-point of Germans are not crimes at all."

The significance of this frank confession of a German, his story of how America had redeemed his soul out of the spirit of force and cruelty into the spirit of kindness, humanity and justice, reveals more of the real nature of the German beast and the Potsdam gang than a thousand volumes on the philosophy of German atrocities. The simple fact is that the crimes of the Germans are abominable atrocities to us, but that intellectually and morally the German officer and soldier simply do not know what we mean by our horror and the wave of moral indignation that has swept over the earth. Jesse Pomeroy used to pull canary birds apart, and tortured children to death. But the boy was deficient in the nerve of humanity. He simply stared with blank eyes when the judge and the jury condemned him. He was incapable of knowing what the excitement over the dead body was about. On the side of compassion and humanity the German is, as it were, colour blind, is without musical sense, and the nerves of kindness and humanity are atrophied. The ordinary German prisoner when shown the bodies left behind after the flight of the German army simply looks blankly at the mutilated corpse and exclaims: "Well, what of it? Why not? Why shouldn't we?" and shrugs his shoulders, taking it as a matter of course. That is another reason why a great number of American business men, bankers, merchants, manufacturers, scholars, statesmen, have reluctantly been forced to the conviction that the ten millions of German soldiers should be painlessly sterilized, that the German people (saving only the remnant who accept Jesus' idea of compassion and kindness towards God's poor and weak) should be allowed to die out of the world. Re-read, therefore, what this German has said about the teaching of his German parents and the German people in praise of cruelty, and how for twenty years now, redeemed by life in the United States, he has tried to make atonement by supporting the man whom he had crippled, and also his mother. Who shall explain to us the reason why German barbarism is not barbarism to the Germans? Why, this German shall explain it, through his personal experience as a criminal. But the day will come when the Potsdam gang and ten million German soldiers will stand before the judgment seat of God. And what shall be the verdict then pronounced? You will find it in the New Testament: "'Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee,' thou wicked and cruel German!"

2. The German "Science of Lying"

For the first time in history a nation has organized lying into a science and taught deceit as an art.

At the very time when the diplomats of the world have refused any form of secrecy and insist upon publishing all international treaties and doing everything in the open, Germany has organized lying into a national science. Even Maximilian Harden, editor of _Zukunft_, openly acknowledges this in one of his editorials reproduced in the papers of Denmark and Holland.

Harden comes right out in the open. He tells the German people that at the beginning of the war it was necessary to say to the world that Germany was fighting a defensive war, that her back was against the wall, that those wicked enemies named England and France, Russia and Belgium were leaping upon her like wolves.

Of course, says Harden, at first that was good diplomacy, but now that we are successful, "Why say this any longer? Let the Kaiser and his Chancellor tell the world plainly that we decided upon this war twenty-five years ago; that during all of these years we were preparing cannons and shells; that we drilled ten million men against 'Der Tag'; that we wanted this war, that we planned this war, that we forced this war and that we are proud of it."

With one stroke Harden has torn off the mask. He exhibits the Kaiser as the prince of liars. If his words mean anything, they mean that what has long been surmised is absolutely true, namely, that Germany wished some one would kill the Austrian Prince and Princess so as to start the war, for which Berlin had prepared everything, down to the last buckle on the harness of the horses.

General von Bissing is not less open. Dying men are not apt to tell lies. When he saw that the end was coming the Governor-General of Belgium prepared what he called his "last will and testament."

As a close and intimate friend of the Kaiser, he left a letter with his will asking the German Government carefully to consider his wishes. He says plainly that all of the statements that Berlin never intended to annex Belgium were pure camouflage. He urges the Berlin office to flatly declare its purpose never to give up a foot of the Belgian coast nor an acre of the conquered territory of north France and Belgium.

"It is of no consequence," he says, "that we have given a solemn pledge not to annex Belgium. Why not tell the world that we will have failed in the one thing for which we set out if we evacuate Belgium? We need Belgium's coast line for our shipping."

He adds that Germany has used twenty-three million tons of Belgian coal and has taken as much more iron ore out of France's basin in Briey. "We cannot live and compete with France and England if we give up the coal and iron mines that we have conquered and the harbours that we have won."

Having affirmed, therefore, that the German Government lied at the beginning in claiming that they entered Belgium fighting a defensive warfare, General von Bissing cast about for some one behind whom he can hide as a screen and who can be used as an authority for lying. He finds his guide and leader in "The Prince," written by Machiavelli. That book has often been called the treatise on the art of lying. Never was such cunning exhibited. Never was the father of lies invoked with such skill as by the German leaders. In their sight truth is contemptible, kindness is weakness, honour is a figment.

But the individual, the city, or the empire that builds its life on lies builds its house on sand. Soon the rains will descend and the floods come, the winds will blow, and the house will fall, and great will be the fall of it.

The German is like a thirsty man who tries to quench his thirst by drinking scalding water. He is like a hungry man who tries to satisfy his appetite by eating red-hot coals.

3. The Malignity of the German Spies

Disturbed by many events in their city, the Secret Service men guard very carefully the speakers for the Liberty Loan, the Red Cross or the Y. M. C. A. hut work. Fearing lest some German agent might injure the good name of their town, the Secret Service men of a certain community recently told the following incident, merely as a warning to all public speakers who might, by their words, arouse the enmity of half-balanced German fanatics. Because it was intended to put us all upon our guard, and because no interest could possibly be injured, but many persons be benefited, the incident is here set forth in detail. The speaker was a young lawyer, of position, influence and fine education, who was serving his country during the period of the war.

"One morning I received my assignment through a sealed envelope. Experience told me that I was to take up the work of some other Secret Service man and complete the task. Of course, one Secret Service man does not know who else is in the service. Since the war began we go by numbers, rather than by our names. When I opened my envelope I found these directions: 'Go to No. ---- ----. Wait until there is no customer in the tobacco store. Then put down on the counter two ten-cent pieces, and say to the woman, "I want that package of green leaf tobacco." When you have left the store, open the package, and you will find full directions therein.' I followed the instructions strictly, and out on the street I opened the package, and found a large key and a small one, with these words written: 'Go to No. so-and-so (mentioning a third-class little apartment house in one of the worst districts in the city). The large key will open room No. 14. The small key will open a little writing table in the room. In the drawer of that table you will find full directions.'

"I soon found the apartment house, climbed to the second floor, found my large key turning in the lock, and the small key opened the drawer in the desk. In that drawer I found these words: 'The man we want is in the adjoining room. He will come in about seven o'clock, but he may not come until eleven or twelve. It is important that we have his testimony. Don't wound him seriously or kill him. You will find a hole bored through the door between your room and his. That hole is filled with putty, but underneath the putty is wax. Warm the wire in the drawer in the gas jet and melt the wax.'