The wonder is not that women went mad, but that there are left any
sane civilians of the ravished districts of Belgium after all those
infamies perpetrated under orders by the German troops after the first
infuriating check of Liége and before the final turning of the German
line at the battle of the Marne. We have supped full of horrors since,
and by an insensible process grown something callous. But we never came
near to realising the Belgian agony, and Raemaekers does us service
by helping to make us see it mirrored in the eyes of this poor raving
girl. This indeed is a later incident, but will serve for reminder of
the earlier worse.
It is really _not_ well to forget. These were not the inevitable
horrors of war, but a deliberately calculated effect. There seems no
hope of the future of European civilisation till the men responsible
for such things are brought to realise that, to put it crudely and at
its lowest, they don’t pay.
What the attitude of Germany now is may be guessed from the blank
refusal even of her bishops to sanction the investigation which
Cardinal Mercier asks for. It is still the gentle wolf’s theory that
the truculent lamb was entirely to blame.