When, years hence, some historian looks back upon the present war,
and from the confusion of its battles tries to frame before his mind a
picture of the whole, one grim conclusion will be forced upon his
mind. He will note, perhaps, vast alterations in the map of Europe; he
will lament a loss of life such as only the hand of Heaven has dealt
before; he will point to the folly of the wealth destroyed. But beneath
all these he will hear one insistent note from which he cannot escape,
the deep keynote of the whole, the note on which the war was based,
the secret of its ghastly chords, and the foundation of its dark
conclusion. And he will write that in the year 1914 one of the great
nations of civilized Europe relapsed into barbarism.
In the large sense a nation becomes civilized as its members
recognize the advantages of sinking their personal desires and gain
in the general good of the State. The fact that an individual can read
and write and play the piano has nothing at all to do with the degree
of his civilization, an elementary axiom of which some of our rulers
seem strangely ignorant. To be of use to the State, and to train others
to be of use to the State (and not only of use to themselves), should
be, and indeed is, the aim of every truly civilized man. Unless it be so,
his civilization is a mere veneer, ready to wear off at the first rub, and
he himself a parasite upon the civilized world.
As time has gone on, the State has laid down certain rules by means
of which the men who formed it could serve it better, and these are
our laws which we obey not for our own good directly, but for the
good of the State. From the point of view of the plain man in the
street, it is all utterly illogical, for it would be logical to go and take
from your neighbour whatever you wished, so long as you were
strong enough to hold it. But, let us thank Heaven, no sane man is
logical, and only a Professor would dare to make the claim. It is one
of the prerogatives of his office, and should be treated with tolerance.
And as our views of life are small and limited by our surroundings,
when States grew large they took from the shoulders of the individual
his responsibilities in the great State which the world has now
become; and the States of which the world was composed agreed
together on certain rules which should control their relations to one
another, not for the good of each, but for the good of the greater State
of which they were members. They are not so accurately laid down as
the laws of our separate States, but they are broad, general principles
for the use of statesmen and not of legalists. They are the Charter of
Civilization among the nations of the world, and the nation which
disregards them does so at her peril, and has handed in the
abnegation of her position as a civilized State. Like the laws of each
State, they are utterly illogical--at least, to those who have made up
their minds that they are strong enough to hold what they can take
from their neighbours.
I am often told, in half-defence of what they have done, that the
Germans are conducting the war in a strictly logical manner. At first, I
must admit, I was rather taken with the idea, and, indeed, one felt
almost sorry for a noble nation sacrificing its feelings on the
uncompromising altar of Logic. For the object of war is obviously to
defeat your enemy, and it may be argued that anything which will
accelerate that result is not only justifiable, but almost humane, for it
will shorten the unavoidable horrors of war. I should like to mention a
few of the features of logical warfare, all of which have at one time or
another been adopted by our opponents, and I shall then describe as
far as I can an example which I myself saw.
When an army wishes to pass through a country, the civil population
is in the way. To get rid of them, the best plan, and the quickest, is to
annihilate the first town of a suitable size to which the army comes. If
the town is wiped out, and men, women, and children slaughtered
indiscriminately, it will make such an impression in the rest of the
country that the whole population will clear out and there will be no
further trouble. The country will then be free for the passage of
troops, and there will be no troublesome civil population to feed or
govern. The conduct of the war will be greatly facilitated. Of course, it
will be necessary at intervals to repeat the process, but this presents
the further advantage that it advertises to other nations what they may
expect if war enters their borders. This, one of the most elementary
rules of logical warfare, has been strictly observed by Germany. The
sack of Louvain and the slaughter of its inhabitants met with an
immediate success. Wherever the German army arrived, they entered
with few exceptions empty towns. Termonde, Malines, Antwerp, had
everything swept and garnished for their reception. It would, of
course, be absurdly illogical to confine one's attack to persons
capable of defence. To kill a hundred women and children makes far
more impression than to kill a thousand men, and it is far safer,
unless, of course, it is preferred to use them as a screen to protect
your own advancing troops from the enemy's fire.
It is a mistake to burden your transport with the enemy's wounded, or,
indeed--low be it spoken--with your own. The former should
always be killed, and the latter so far as the degree of culture of your
country will allow. It is one of the regrettable points, logically, of
Germany's warfare that she appears to pay some attention to her
wounded, but our information on this point is deficient, and it is
possible that she limits it to those who may again be useful.
To kill the Medical Staff of the enemy is obviously most desirable.
Without them a large number of the wounded would die. If, therefore,
it is possible to kill both the doctors and the wounded together, it is a
great advantage, and of all possible objectives for artillery a hospital
is the most valuable. So complete was our confidence in the German
observance of this rule that when we heard that they were likely to
bombard Antwerp, we were strongly advised to remove our Red
Cross from the sight of prying aeroplanes, and we took the advice.
Several other hospitals were hit, but we escaped.
There are many other rules of logical warfare, such as ignoring
treaties, engagements, and, indeed, the truth in any form. But these
are those with which I myself came in contact, and which therefore
interested me the most. There is only one unfortunate objection to
logical warfare, and that is that it is the duty of the whole civilized
world, as it values its eternal salvation, to blot out from the face of the
earth they have defiled the nation which practises it.
I do not wish to be unfair to those with whom we are fighting, or to
arouse against them an unjust resentment. I am merely attempting to
express succinctly the doctrines which have been proclaimed
throughout Germany for years, of which this war is the logical
outcome, and in the light of which alone its incidents can be
understood. She is the home of logic, the temple where material
progress is worshipped as a god. For her there is no meaning in
those dim yearnings of the human mind, in which logic has no part,
since their foundations are hidden in depths beneath our ken, but
which alone separate us from the beasts that perish. And, above all
things, I would not be thought to include in such a sweeping
statement all those who call themselves German. There are many in
Germany who are not of this Germany, and in the end it may be for
them as much as for ourselves that we shall have fought this war.
It is only when viewed in this setting that a scene such as that we saw
at Lierre can be understood. By itself it would stand naked,
meaningless, and merely horrible. Clothed in these thoughts, it is
pregnant with meaning, and forms a real epitome of the whole
German conception of war; for horror is their dearest ally, and that
scene has left on my mind a feeling of horror which I do not think that
time will ever eradicate.
Lierre is an old-world town on the River Nethe, nine miles south of
Antwerp, prosperous, and thoroughly Flemish. Its 20,000 inhabitants
weave silk and brew beer, as they did when London was a village.
Without the physical advantages of Antwerp, and without the
turbulence of Ghent, Lierre has escaped their strange vicissitudes,
and for hundreds of years has enjoyed the prosperity of a quiet and
industrious town. Its church of St. Gommarius is renowned for its
magnificent proportions, its superb window tracery, and its wonderful
rood-loft--features in which it has eclipsed in glory even the great
cathedrals of Belgium, and which place it alone as a unique
achievement of the art of the fifteenth century. It is in no sense a
military town, and has no defences, though there is a fort of the same
name at no great distance from it.
Into this town, without warning of any kind, the Germans one morning
dropped two of their largest shells. One fell near the church, but
fortunately did no harm. One fell in the Hospital of St. Elizabeth. We
heard in Antwerp that several people had been wounded, and in the
afternoon two of us went out in one of our cars to see if we could be
of any service. We found the town in the greatest excitement, and the
streets crowded with families preparing to leave, for they rightly
regarded these shells as the prelude of others. In the square was
drawn up a large body of recruits just called up--rather late in the
day, it seemed to us. We slowly made our way through the crowds,
and, turning to the right along the Malines road, we drew up in front of
the hospital on our right-hand side. The shell had fallen almost
vertically on to a large wing, and as we walked across the garden we
could see that all the windows had been broken, and that most of the
roof had been blown off. The nuns met us, and took us down into the
cellars to see the patients. It was an infirmary, and crowded together
in those cellars lay a strange medley of people. There were bedridden
old women huddled up on mattresses, almost dead with terror.
Wounded soldiers lay propped up against the walls; and women and
little children, wounded in the fighting around, lay on straw and
sacking. Apparently it is not enough to wound women and children; it
is even necessary to destroy the harbour of refuge into which they
have crept. The nuns were doing for them everything that was
possible, under conditions of indescribable difficulty. They may not be
trained nurses, but in the records of this war the names of the nuns of
Belgium ought to be written in gold. Utterly careless of their own lives,
absolutely without fear, they have cared for the sick, the wounded,
and the dying, and they have faced any hardship and any danger
rather than abandon those who turned to them for help.
The nuns led us upstairs to the wards where the shell had burst. The
dead had been removed, but the scene that morning must have been
horrible beyond description. In the upper ward six wounded soldiers
had been killed, and in the lower two old women. As we stood in the
upper ward, it was difficult to believe that so much damage could
have been caused by a single shell. It had struck almost vertically on
the tiled roof, and, exploding in the attic, had blown in the ceiling into
the upper ward. I had not realized before the explosion of a large
shell is not absolutely instantaneous, but, in consequence of the
speed of the shell, is spread over a certain distance. Here the shell
had continued to explode as it passed down through the building,
blowing the floor of the upper ward down into the ward below. A great
oak beam, a foot square, was cut clean in two, the walls of both wards
were pitted and pierced by fragments, and the tiled floor of the lower
ward was broken up. The beds lay as they were when the dead were
taken from them, the mattresses riddled with fragments and soaked
with blood. Obviously no living thing could have survived in that awful
hail. When the shell came the soldiers were eating walnuts, and on
the bed of one lay a walnut half opened and the little penknife he was
using, and both were stained. We turned away sickened at the sight,
and retraced the passage with the nuns. As we walked along, they
pointed out to us marks we had not noticed before--red finger-marks
and splashes of blood on the pale blue distemper of the wall. All down
the passage and the staircase we could trace them, and even in the
hall below. Four men had been standing in the doorway of the upper
ward. Two were killed; the others, bleeding and blinded by the
explosion, had groped their way along that wall and down the stair. I
have seen many terrible sights, but for utter and concentrated horror I
have never seen anything to equal those finger-marks, the very sign-
manual of Death. When I think of them, I see, in the dim light of the
early autumn morning, the four men talking; I hear the wild shriek of
the shell and the deafening crash of its explosion; and then silence,
and two bleeding men groping in darkness and terror for the air.