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[Illustration: _Photo. Excelsior._
THE PLAY-BOYS OF THE WESTERN FRONT.
The famous French Fusiliers Marins. These sailors from Brittany are
called "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge," because of their youth and the
gay red tassel on their cap.]
GOLDEN LADS
BY
ARTHUR GLEASON
AND
HELEN HAYES GLEASON
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
_"Golden Lads and Girls all must,
As chimney sweepers, come to dust."_
[Illustration]
TORONTO
McCLELLAND, GOODCHILD & STEWART, LIMITED
1916
Copyright, 1916, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Copyright, 1915, by the
CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY.
Copyright, 1916, by the
BUTTERICK PUBLISHING COMPANY.
Copyright, 1915 and 1916, by the
TRIBUNE ASSOCIATION.
_Published, April, 1916_
(_Printed in the U. S. A._)
TO THE
SAILORS OF BRITTANY
THE BOY SOLDIERS OF THE FRENCH FUSILIERS MARINS
WHOSE WOUNDED IT WAS OUR PRIVILEGE TO CARRY IN FROM THE
FIELD OF HONOR AT MELLE, DIXMUDE,
AND NIEUPORT
Profits from the sale of this book will go to "The American Committee
for Training in Suitable Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France."
CONCERNING THIS BOOK
It would be futile to publish one more war-book, unless the writer had
been an eye-witness of unusual things. I am an American who saw
atrocities which are recorded in the Bryce Report. This book grows out
of months of day-by-day living in the war zone. I have been a member of
the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps, which was permitted to work at the
front because the Prime Minister of Belgium placed his son in military
command of us. That young man, being brave and adventurous, led us along
the first line of trenches, and into villages under shell fire, so that
we saw the armies in action.
We started at Ghent in September, 1914, came to Furnes, worked in
Dixmude, Pervyse, Nieuport and Ypres, during moments of pressure on
those strategic points. In the summer of 1915, we were attached to the
French Fusiliers Marins. My wife's experience covers a period of twelve
months in Belgium. My own time at the front was five months.
Observers at long-distance that are neutral sometimes fail to see
fundamentals in the present conflict, and talk of "negotiations" between
right and wrong. It is easy for people who have not suffered to be
tolerant toward wrongdoing. This war is a long war because of German
methods of frightfulness. These practices have bred an enduring will to
conquer in Frenchman and Briton and Belgian which will not pause till
victory is thorough. Because the German military power has sinned
against women and children, it will be fought with till it is
overthrown. I wish to make clear this determination of the Allies. They
hate the army of Aerschot and Lorraine as a mother hates the defiler of
her child.
There are two wars on the Western Front. One is the war of aggression.
It was led up to by years of treachery. It was consummated in
frightfulness. It is warfare by machine. Of that war, as carried on by
the "Conquerors," the first half of this book tells. On points that
have been in dispute since the outbreak, I am able to say "I saw." When
the Army of Invasion fell on the little people, I witnessed the signs of
its passage as it wrote them by flame and bayonet on peasant homes and
peasant bodies.
In the second half of the book, I have tried to tell of a people's
uprising--the fight of the living spirit against the war-machine. A
righteous defensive war, such as Belgium and France are waging, does not
brutalize the nation. It reveals a beauty of sacrifice which makes
common men into "golden lads."
Was this struggle forced on an unwilling Germany, or was she the
aggressor?
I believe we have the answer of history in such evidences as I have seen
of her patient ancient spy system that honeycombed Belgium.
Is she waging a "holy war," ringed around by jealous foes?
I believe we have the final answer in such atrocities as I witnessed. A
hideous officially ordered method is proof of unrighteousness in the
cause itself.
Are you indicting a nation?
No, only a military system that ordered the slow sapping of friendly
neighboring powers.
Only the host of "tourists," clerks, waiters, gentlemanly officers, that
betrayed the hospitality of people of good will.
Only an army that practised mutilation and murder on children, and
mothers, and old people,--and that carried it through coldly,
systematically, with admirable discipline.
I believe there are multitudes of common soldiers who are sorry that
they have outraged the helpless.
An army of half a million men will return to the home-land with very
bitter memories. Many a simple German of this generation will be unable
to look into the face of his own child without remembering some tiny
peasant face of pain--the child whom he bayoneted, or whom he saw his
comrade bayonet, having failed to put his body between the little one
and death.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE CONQUERORS
PAGE
THE SPY 3
THE ATROCITY 26
BALLAD OF THE GERMANS 45
THE STEAM ROLLER 48
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER 66
GOLDEN LADS
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY 79
"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES" 95
WAS IT REAL? 113
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!" 127
FLIES: A FANTASY 152
WOMEN UNDER FIRE 168
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN 192
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE 234
REMAKING FRANCE 253
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Play-boys of the Western Front _Frontispiece_
Peasants' cottages burned by Germans 8
The home of a German spy near Coxyde Bains, Belgium 13
The green pass, used only by soldiers and officers of the
Belgian Army 33
Church in Termonde which the writer saw 42
One of the dangerous Belgian franc-tireurs 51
Fifteenth century Gothic church in Nieuport 69
Sailors lifting a wounded comrade into the motor-ambulance 87
Door chalked by the Germans 105
Street fighting in Alost 123
Belgian officer on the last strip of his country 134
A Belgian boy soldier in the uniform of the first army
which served at Liège and Namur 139
Belgians in their new Khaki uniform, in praise of which
they wrote a song 145
Breton sailors ready for their noon meal in a village under
daily shell fire 187
Sleeping quarters for Belgian soldiers 206
Belgian soldiers telephoning to an anti-aircraft gun the
approach of a German taube 215
Postcards sketched and blocked by a Belgian workman,
A. Van Doorne 229
INTRODUCTION
By Theodore Roosevelt
On August 4, 1914, the issue of this war for the conscience of the world
was Belgium. Now, in the spring of 1916, the issue remains Belgium. For
eighteen months, our people were bidden by their representative at
Washington to feel no resentment against a hideous wrong. They were
taught to tame their human feelings by polished phrases of neutrality.
Because they lacked the proper outlet of expression, they grew
indifferent to a supreme injustice. They temporarily lost the capacity
to react powerfully against wrongdoing.
But today they are at last becoming alive to the iniquity of the
crushing of Belgium. Belgium is the battleground of the war on the
western front. But Belgium is also the battleground of the struggle in
our country between the forces of good and of evil. In the ranks of evil
are ranged all the pacifist sentimentalists, the cowards who possess the
gift of clothing their cowardice in soothing and attractive words, the
materialists whose souls have been rotted by exclusive devotion to the
things of the body, the sincere persons who are cursed with a deficient
sense of reality, and all who lack foresight or who are uninformed.
Against them stand the great mass of loyal Americans, who, when they see
the right, and receive moral leadership, show that they have in their
souls as much of the valor of righteousness as the men of 1860 and of
1776. The literary bureau at Washington has acted as a soporific on the
mind and conscience of the American people. Fine words, designed to work
confusion between right and wrong, have put them to sleep. But they now
stir in their sleep.
The proceeds from the sale of this book are to be used for a charity in
which every intelligent American feels a personal interest. The training
of maimed soldiers in suitable trades is making possible the
reconstruction of an entire nation. It is work carried on by citizens of
the neutral nations. The cause itself is so admirable that it deserves
wide support. It gives an outlet for the ethical feelings of our people,
feelings that have been unnaturally dammed for nearly two years by the
cold and timid policy of our Government.
The testimony of the book is the first-hand witness of an American
citizen who was present when the Army of Invasion blotted out a little
nation. This is an eye-witness report on the disputed points of this
war. The author saw the wrongs perpetrated on helpless non-combatants by
direct military orders. He shows that the frightfulness practiced on
peasant women and children was the carrying out of a Government policy,
planned in advance, ordered from above. It was not the product of
irresponsible individual drunken soldiers. His testimony is clear on
this point. He goes still further, and shows that individual soldiers
resented their orders, and most unwillingly carried through the cruelty
that was forced on them from Berlin. In his testimony he is kindlier to
the German race, to the hosts of peasants, clerks and simple soldiers,
than the defenders of Belgium's obliteration have been. They seek to
excuse acts of infamy. But the author shows that the average German is
sorry for those acts.
It is fair to remember in reading Mr. Gleason's testimony concerning
these deeds of the German Army that he has never received a dollar of
money for anything he has spoken or written on the subject. He gave
without payment the articles on the Spy, the Atrocity, and the Steam
Roller to the New York _Tribune_. The profits from the lectures he has
delivered on the same subject have been used for well-known public
charities. The book itself is a gift to a war fund.
Of Mr. Gleason's testimony on atrocities I have already written (see
page 38).
What he saw was reported to the Bryce Committee by the young British
subject who accompanied him, and these atrocities, which Mr. Gleason
witnessed, appear in the Bryce Report under the heading of Alost. It is
of value to know that an American witnessed atrocities recorded in the
Bryce Report, as it disposes of the German rejoinders that the Report is
ex-parte and of second-hand rumor.
His chapter on the Spy System answers the charge that it was Belgium who
violated her own neutrality, and forced an unwilling Germany, threatened
by a ring of foes, to defend herself.
The chapter on the Steam Roller shows that the same policy of injustice
that was responsible for the original atrocities is today operating to
flatten out what is left of a free nation.
The entire book is a protest against the craven attitude of our
Government.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
_March 28, 1916._
THE CONQUERORS
THE SPY
Germany uses three methods in turning a free nation into a vassal state.
By a spy system, operated through years, she saps the national strength.
By sudden invasion, accompanied by atrocity, she conquers the territory,
already prepared. By continuing occupation, she flattens out what is
left of a once independent people. In England and North America, she has
used her first method. France has experienced both the spy and the
atrocity. It has been reserved for Belgium to be submitted to the
threefold process. I shall tell what I have seen of the spy system, the
use of frightfulness, and the enforced occupation.
It is a mistake for us to think that the worst thing Germany has done is
to torture and kill many thousands of women and children. She
undermines a country with her secret agents before she lays it waste. In
time of peace, with her spy system, she works like a mole through a wide
area till the ground is ready to cave in. She plays on the good will and
trustfulness of other peoples till she has tapped the available
information. That betrayal of hospitality, that taking advantage of
human feeling, is a baser thing than her unique savagery in war time.
During my months in Belgium I have been surrounded by evidences of this
spy system, the long, slow preparedness which Germany makes in another
country ahead of her deadly pounce. It is a silent, peaceful invasion,
as destructive as the house-to-house burning and the killing of babies
and mothers to which it later leads.
The German military power, which is the modern Germany, is able to
obtain agents to carry out this policy, and make its will prevail, by
disseminating a new ethic, a philosophy of life, which came to
expression with Bismarck and has gone on extending its influence since
the victories of 1870-'71. The German people believe they serve a higher
God than the rest of us. We serve (very imperfectly and only part of
the time) such ideals as mercy, pity, and loyalty to the giver of the
bread we eat. The Germans serve (efficiently and all the time) the
State, a supreme deity, who sends them to spy out a land in peace time,
to build gun foundations in innocent-looking houses, buy up
poverty-stricken peasants, measure distances, win friendship, and worm
out secrets. With that information digested and those preparations
completed, the State (an entity beyond good and evil) calls on its
citizens to make war, and, in making it, to practise frightfulness. It
orders its servants to lay aside pity and burn peasants in their homes,
to bayonet women and children, to shoot old men. Of course, there are
exceptions to this. There are Germans of the vintage of '48, and later,
many of them honest and peaceable dwellers in the country which shelters
them. But the imperial system has little use for them. They do not serve
its purpose.
The issue of the war, as Belgium and France see it, is this: Are they to
live or die? Are they to be charted out once again through years till
their hidden weakness is accurately located, and then is an army to be
let loose on them that will visit a universal outrage on their children
and wives? Peace will be intolerable till this menace is removed. The
restoration of territory in Belgium and Northern France and the return
to the _status quo_ before the war, are not sufficient guarantees for
the future. The _status quo_ before the war means another insidious
invasion, carried on unremittingly month by month by business agents,
commercial travelers, genial tourists, and studious gentlemen in villas.
A crippled, broken Teutonic military power is the only guarantee that a
new army of spies will not take the road to Brussels and Paris on the
day that peace is signed. No simple solution like, "Call it all off,
we'll start in fresh; bygones are bygones," meets the real situation.
The Allied nations have been infested with a cloud of witnesses for many
years. Are they to submit once again to that secret process of the
Germans?
[Illustration: PEASANTS' COTTAGES BURNED BY GERMANS.
The separate flame in each cottage is clearly visible, proving that each
house was separately set on fire. Radclyffe Dugmore took this photograph
at Melle, where he and the writer were made prisoners.]
The French, for instance, want to clear their country of a cloud which
has been thick and black for forty-three years. They always said the
Germans would come again with the looting and the torture and the
foulness. This time they will their fight to a finish. They are sick of
hate, so they are fighting to end war. But it is not an empty peace that
they want--peace, with a new drive when the Krupp howitzers are big
enough, and the spies in Paris thick enough, to make the death of France
a six weeks' picnic. They want a lasting peace, that will take fear from
the wife's heart, and make it a happiness to have a child, not a horror.
They want to blow the ashes off of Lorraine. Peace, as preached by our
Woman's Peace Party and by our pacifist clergy and by the signers of the
plea for an embargo on the ammunitions that are freeing France from her
invaders, is a German peace. If successfully consummated, it will grant
Germany just time enough to rest and breed and lay the traps, and then
release another universal massacre. How can the Allies state their terms
of peace in other than a militant way? There is nothing here to be
arbitrated. Pleasant sentiments of brotherhood evade the point at issue.
The way of just peace is by "converting" Germany. There is only one cure
for long-continued treachery, and that is to demonstrate its failure.
To pause short of a thorough victory over the deep, inset habits and
methods of Germany is to destroy the spirit of France. It will not be
well for a premier race of the world to go down in defeat. We need her
thrifty Lorraine peasants and Brittany sailors, her unfailing gift to
the light of the world, more than we need a thorough German spy system
and a soldiery obedient to commands of vileness.
Very much more slowly England, too, is learning what the fight is about.
It is German violation of the fundamental decencies that makes it
difficult to find common ground to build on for the future. It is at
this point that the spy system of slow-seeping treachery and the
atrocity program of dramatic frightfulness overlap. It is in part out of
the habit of betraying hospitality that the atrocities have emerged. It
isn't as if they were extemporized--a sudden flare, with no background.
They are the logical result of doing secretly for years that which
humanity has agreed not to do.
Some of the members of our Red Cross unit--the Hector Munro Ambulance
Corps--worked for a full year with the French Fusiliers Marins, perhaps
the most famous 6000 fighting men in the western line. They were sailor
boys. They covered the retreat of the Belgian army. They consolidated
the Yser position by holding Dixmude for three weeks against a German
force that outnumbered them. Then for a year, up to a few months ago,
they helped to hold the Nieuport section, the last northern point of the
Allied line. When they entered the fight at Melle in October, 1914, our
corps worked with one of their doctors, and came to know him. Later he
took charge of a dressing station near St. George. Here one day the
Germans made a sudden sortie, drove back the Fusiliers for a few
minutes, and killed the Red Cross roomful, bayoneting the wounded men.
The Fusiliers shortly won back their position, found their favorite
doctor dead, and in a fury wiped out the Germans who had murdered him
and his patients, saving one man alive. They sent him back to the
enemy's lines to say:
"Tell your men how we fight when you bayonet our wounded."
That sudden act of German falseness was the product of slow, careful
undermining of moral values.
One of the best known women in Belgium, whose name I dare not give, told
me of her friends, the G----'s, at L---- (she gave me name and
address). When the first German rush came down on Belgium the household
was asked to shelter German officers, one of whom the lady had known
socially in peace days. The next morning soldiers went through the
house, destroying paintings with the bayonet and wrecking furniture. The
lady appealed to the officer.
"I know you," she said. "We have met as equals and friends. How can you
let this be done?"
"This is war," he replied.
No call of chivalry, of the loyalties of guest and host, is to be
listened to. And for the perpetrating of this cold program years of
silent spy treachery were a perfect preparation. It was no sudden
unrelated horror to which Germans had to force themselves. It was an
astonishing thing to simple Belgian gentlemen and gentlewomen to see the
old friendly German faces of tourists and social guests show up, on
horseback, riding into the cities as conquerors where they had so often
been entertained as friends. Let me give you the testimony of a Belgian
lady whom we know. She is now inside the German lines, so I cannot give
her name.
[Illustration: THE HOME OF A GERMAN SPY NEAR COXYDE BAINS, BELGIUM.
He had a deep gun foundation, concealed by tiling, motors, hydraulic
apparatus--a complete fortification inside his villa.
[This photograph would have been better if it had not been developed in
the ambulance of one of the American Field Service, but it shows the
solid construction of the hidden flooring, the supporting pillars, one
of the motors and one of the gas pipes.]]
"When the German troops entered Brussels," she states, "we suddenly
discovered that our good friends had been secret agents and were now
officers in charge of the invasion. As the army came in, with their
trumpets and flags and goose-stepping, we picked out our friends
entertained by us in our salons--dinner guests for years. They had
originally come with every recommendation possible--letters from
friends, themselves men of good birth. They had worked their way into
the social-political life of Brussels. They had won their place in our
friendly feeling. And here they had returned to us at the head of troops
to conquer us, after having served as secret agents through the years of
friendly social intercourse."
After becoming proficient in that kind of betrayal the officers found it
only a slight wrench to pass on to the wholesale murder of the people
whose bread they had eaten and whom they had tricked. The treachery
explains the atrocity. It is worth while to repeat and emphasize this
point. Many persons have asked me, "How do you account for these
terrible acts of mutilation?" The answer is, what the Germans did
suddenly by flame and bayonet is only a continuation of what they have
done for years by poison.
Here follows the testimony of a man whom I know, Doctor George Sarton,
of the University of Ghent:
"Each year more Germans came to Belgian summer resorts; Blankenberghe,
for instance, was full of them. They were all very well received and had
plenty of friends in Belgian families, from the court down. When the war
broke out, it immediately became evident that many of these welcomed
guests had been spying, measuring distances, preparing foundations for
heavy guns in their villas located at strategical points, and so on. It
is noteworthy that this spying was not simply done by poor devils who
had not been able to make money in a cleaner way--but by very successful
German business men, sometimes men of great wealth and whose wealth had
been almost entirely built up in Belgium. These men were extremely
courteous and serviceable, they spent much money upon social functions
and in the promotion of charities, German schools, churches and the
like; they had numerous friends, in some cases they had married Belgian
girls and their boys were members of the special corps of our 'National
Guard.' ... Yet at the same time, they were prying into everything,
spying everywhere.
"When the Germans entered into Belgium, they were guided wherever they
went by some one of their officers or men who knew all about each place.
Directors of factories were startled to recognize some of their work
people transformed into Uhlans. A man who had been a professor at the
University of Brussels had the impudence to call upon his former
'friends' in the uniform of a German officer.
"When the war is over, when Belgium is free again, it will not be many
years before the Germans come back, at least their peaceful and
'friendly' vanguard. How will they be received this time? It is certain
that it will be extremely difficult for them to make friends again. As
to myself, when I meet them again in my country--I shall ask myself: 'Is
he a friend, or is he a spy?' And the business men will think: 'Are they
coming as faithful partners, or simply to steal and rob?' That will be
their well deserved reward."
One mile from where we were billeted on the Belgian coast stood a villa
owned by a German. It lay between St. Idesbald and Coxyde Bains, on a
sand dune, commanding the Channel. After the war broke out the Belgians
examined it and found it was a fortification. Its walls were of six-foot
thickness, of heavy blocks of stone and concrete. Its massive flooring
was cleverly disguised by a layer of fancy tiling. Its interior was
fitted with little compartments for hydraulic apparatus for raising
weights, and there was a tangle of wires and pipes. Dynamite cleared
away the upper stories. Workmen hacked away the lower story, piece by
piece, during several weeks of our stay. Two members of our corps
inspected the interior. It lay just off the excellent road that runs
from St. Idesbald to Coxyde Bains, up which ammunition could be fed to
it for its coast defense work. The Germans expected an easy march down
the coast, with these safety stations ready for them at points of
need.[A]
A Belgian soldier rode into a Belgian village one evening at twilight
during the early days of the war. An old peasant woman, deceived
because of the darkness, and thinking him to be a German Uhlan, rushed
up to him and said, "Look out--the Belgians are here." It was the work
of these spies to give information to the marauding Uhlans as to whether
any hostile garrison was stationed in the town. If no troops were there
to resist, a band of a dozen Uhlans could easily take an entire village.
But if the village had a protecting garrison the Germans must be
forewarned.
Three days after arriving in Belgium, in the early fall of 1914, a
friend and I met a German outpost, one of the Hussars. We fell into
conversation with him and became quite friendly. He had no cigarettes
and we shared ours with him. He could speak good English, and he let us
walk beside him as he rode slowly along on his way to the main body of
his troops. The Germans had won the day and there seemed to be nothing
at stake, or perhaps he did not expect our little group would be
long-lived, nor should we have been if the German plans had gone
through. It was their custom to use civilian prisoners as a protective
screen for their advancing troops. Whatever his motive, after we had
walked along beside his horse for a little distance, he pointed out to
us the house of the spy whom the Germans had in that village of Melle.
This man was a "half-breed" Englishman, who came out of his house and
walked over to the Hussar and said:
"You want to keep up your English, for you'll soon be in London."
In a loud voice, for the benefit of his Belgian neighbors, he shouted
out:
"Look out! Those fellows shoot! The Germans are devils!"
He brought out wine for the troops. We followed him into his house,
where he, supposing us to be friends of the Germans, asked us to partake
of his hospitality. That man was a resident of the village, a friend of
the people, but "fixed" for just this job of supplying information to
the invaders when the time came.
During my five weeks in Ghent I used to eat frequently at the Café
Gambrinus, where the proprietor assured us that he was a Swiss and in
deep sympathy with Belgians and Allies. He had a large custom. When the
Germans captured Ghent he altered into a simon pure German and friend
of the invaders. His place now is the nightly resort of German officers.
In the hotel where I stayed in Ghent the proprietor, after a couple of
days, believing me to be one more neutral American, told me he was a
German. He went on to say what a mistake the Belgians made to oppose the
Germans, who were irresistible. That was his return to the city and
country that had given him his livelihood. A few hours later a gendarme
friend of mine told me to move out quickly, as we were in the house of a
spy.
Three members of our corps in Pervyse had evidence many nights of a spy
within our lines. It was part of the routine for a convoy of motor
trucks to bring ammunition forward to the trenches. The enemy during the
day would get the range of the road over which this train had to pass.
Of course, each night the time of ammunition moving was changed in an
attempt to foil the German fire. But this was of no avail, for when the
train of trucks moved along the road to the trenches a bright flash of
light would go up somewhere within our lines, telling the enemy that it
was time to fire upon the convoy.
Such evidences kept reaching us of German gold at work on the very
country we were occupying. Sometimes the money itself.
My wife, when stationed by the Belgian trenches at Pervyse, asked the
orderly to purchase potatoes, giving him a five-franc piece. He brought
back the potatoes and a handful of change that included a French franc,
a French copper, a Dutch small coin, a Belgian ten-centime bit, and a
German two-mark piece with its imperial eagle. This meant that some one
in the ranks or among the refugees was peddling information to the
enemy.
In early October my wife and I were captured by the Uhlans at Zele. Our
Flemish driver, a Ghent man, began expressing his friendliness for them
in fluent German. After weeks of that sort of thing we became suspicious
of almost every one, so thorough and widespread had been the bribery of
certain of the poorer element. The Germans had sowed their seed for
years against the day when they would release their troops and have
need of traitors scattered through the invaded country.
The thoroughness of this bribery differed at different villages. In one
burned town of 1500 houses we found approximately 100 houses standing
intact, with German script in chalk on their doors; the order of the
officer not to burn. This meant the dwellers had been friendly to the
enemy in certain instances, and in other instances that they were spies
for the Germans. We have the photographs of those chalked houses in
safe-keeping, against such time as there is a direct challenge on the
facts of German methods. But there has come no challenge of facts--we
that have seen have given names, dates and places--only a blanket denial
and counter charges of _franc-tireur_ warfare, as carried on by babies
in arms, white-haired grandmothers and sick women.
In October, 1914, two miles outside Ostend, I was arrested as a spy by
the Belgians and marched through the streets in front of a gun in the
hands of a very young and very nervous soldier. The Etat Major told me
that German officers had been using American passports to enter the
Allied lines and learn the numbers and disposition of troops. They had
to arrest Americans on sight and find out if they were masqueraders. A
little later one of our American ambassadors verified this by saying to
me that American passports had been flagrantly abused for German
purposes.
All this devious inside work, misusing the hospitality of friendly,
trustful nations, this buying up of weak individuals, this laying the
traps on neutral ground--all this treachery in peace times--deserves a
second Bryce report. The atrocities are the product of the treachery.
This patient, insidious spy system, eating away at the vitality of the
Allied powers, results in such horrors as I have witnessed.
THE ATROCITY
When the very terrible accounts of frightfulness visited on peasants by
the invading German army crossed the Channel to London, I believed that
we had one more "formula" story. I was fortified against unproved
allegations by thirteen years of newspaper and magazine investigation
and by professional experience in social work. A few months previously I
had investigated the "poison needle" stories of how a girl, rendered
insensible by a drug, was borne away in a taxicab to a house of ill
fame. The cases proved to be victims of hysteria. At another time, I had
looked up certain incidents of "white slavery," where young and innocent
victims were suddenly and dramatically ruined. I had found the cases to
be more complex than the picturesque statements of fiction writers
implied. Again, by the courtesy of the United States Government,
Department of Justice, I had studied investigations into the relation
of a low wage to the life of immorality. These had shown me that many
factors in the home, in the training, in the mental condition, often
contributed to the result. I had grown sceptical of the "plain"
statement of a complex matter, and peculiarly hesitant in accepting
accounts of outrage and cruelty. It was in this spirit that I crossed to
Belgium. To this extent, I had a pro-German leaning.
On September 7, 1914, with two companions, I was present at the skirmish
between Germans and Belgians at Melle, a couple of miles east of Ghent.
We walked to the German line, where a blue-eyed young Hussar officer,
Rhinebeck, of Stramm, Holstein, led us into a trap by permitting us to
walk along after him and his men as they rode back to camp beyond Melle.
We walked for a quarter mile. At our right a barn was burning brightly.
On our left the homes of the peasants of Melle were burning, twenty-six
little yellow brick houses, each with a separate fire. It was not a
conflagration, by one house burning and gradually lighting the next. The
fires were well started and at equal intensity in each house. The walls
between the houses were still intact. The twenty-six fires burned slowly
and thoroughly through the night.
These three thousand German soldiers and their officers were neither
drunk nor riotous. The discipline was excellent. The burning was a
clean-cut, cold-blooded piece of work. It was a piece of punishment.
Belgian soldiers had resisted the German army. If Belgian soldiers
resist, peasant non-combatants must be killed. That inspires terror.
That teaches the lesson: "Do not oppose Germany. It is death to oppose
her--death to your wife and child."
We were surrounded by soldiers and four sentries put over us. Peasants
who walked too close to the camp were brought in and added to our group
of prisoners, till, all told, we numbered thirty. A peasant lying next
to me watched his own house burn to pieces.
Another of the peasants was an old man, of weak mind. He kept babbling
to himself. It would have been obvious to a child that he was foolish.
The German sentry ordered silence. The old fellow muttered on in
unconsciousness of his surroundings. The sentry drew back his bayonet
to run him through. A couple of the peasants pulled the old man flat to
the ground and stifled his talking.
At five o'clock in the morning German stretcher bearers marched behind
the burned houses. Out of the house of the peasant lying next to me
three bodies were carried. He broke into a long, slow sobbing.
At six o'clock a monoplane sailed overhead, bringing orders to our
detachment. The troops intended for Ghent were turned toward Brussels.
The field artillery, which had been rolled toward the west, was swung
about to the east. An officer headed us toward Ghent and let us go. If
the Germans had marched into Ghent we would have been of value as a
cover for the troops. But for the return to Brussels we were only a
nuisance. We hurried away toward Ghent. As we walked through a farmyard
we saw a farmer lying at full length dead in his dooryard. We passed the
convent school of Melle, where Catholic sisters live. The front yard was
strewed with furniture, with bedding, with the contents of the rooms.
The yard was about four hundred feet long and two hundred feet deep. It
was dotted with this intimate household stuff for the full area. I made
inquiry and found that no sister had been violated or bayoneted. The
soldiers had merely ransacked the place.
One of my companions in this Melle experience was A. Radclyffe Dugmore,
formerly of the Players Club, New York, a well-known naturalist, author
of books on big game in Africa, the beaver, and the caribou. For many
years he was connected with Doubleday, Page & Co. His present address is
Crete Hill, South Nutfield, Surrey.
At other times and places, German troops have not rested content with
the mere terrorization and humiliation of religious sisters. On February
12, 1916, the German Wireless from Berlin states that Cardinal Mercier
was urged to investigate the allegation of German soldiers attacking
Belgian nuns, and that he declined. As long as the German Government has
seen fit to revive the record of their own brutality, I present what
follows.
A New York physician whom I know sends me this statement:
"I was dining in London in the middle of last April with a friend, a
medical man, and I expressed doubt as to the truth of the stories of
atrocity. I said I had combatted such stories often in America. In
reply, he asked me to visit a house which had been made over into an
obstetrical hospital for Belgian nuns. I went with him to the hospital.
Here over a hundred nuns had been and were being cared for."
On a later Sunday in September I visited the Municipal Hospital of
Ghent. In Salle (Hall) 17, I met and talked with Martha Tas, a peasant
girl of St. Gilles (near Termonde). As she was escaping by train from
the district, and when she was between Alost and Audeghem, she told me
that German soldiers aimed rifle fire at the train of peasants. She was
wounded by a bullet in the thigh. My companion on this visit was William
R. Renton, at one time a resident of Andover, Massachusetts. His present
address is the Coventry Ordnance Works, Coventry.
A friend of mine has been lieutenant in a battery of 75's stationed near
Pervyse. His summer home is a little distance out from Liège. His wife,
sister-in-law, and his three children were in the house when the Germans
came. Peasants, driven from their village, hid in the cellar. His sister
took one child and hid in a closet. His wife took the two-year-old baby
and the older child and hid in another closet. The troops entered the
house, looted it and set it on fire. As they left they fired into the
cellar. The mother rushed from her hiding place, went to her desk and
found that her money and the family jewels, one a gift from the
husband's family and handed down generation by generation, had been
stolen. With the sister, the baby in arms, the two other children and
the peasants, she ran out of the garden. They were fired on. They hid in
a wood. Then, for two days, they walked. The raw potatoes which they
gathered by the way were unfit for the little one. Without money, and
ill and weakened, they reached Holland. This lady is in a safe place
now, and her testimony in person is available.
[Illustration: THE GREEN PASS, USED ONLY BY SOLDIERS AND OFFICERS OF THE
BELGIAN ARMY.
It gives passage to the trenches at any hour. The writer, by holding
this, and working under the Prime Minister's son, became
stretcher-bearer in the Belgian Army.]
The apologists of the widespread reign of frightfulness say that war is
always "like that," that individual drunken soldiers have always broken
loose and committed terrible acts. This defense does not meet the
facts. It meets neither the official orders, nor the cold method, nor
the immense number of proved murders. The German policy was ordered from
the top. It was carried out by officers and men systematically, under
discipline. The German War Book, issued by the General Staff, and used
by officers, cleverly justifies these acts. They are recorded by the
German soldiers themselves in their diaries, of which photographic
reproductions are obtainable in any large library. The diaries were
found on the persons of dead and wounded Germans. The name of the man
and his company are given.
On Sunday, September 27, I was present at the battle of Alost, where
peasants came running into our lines from the German side of the canal.
In spite of shell, shrapnel, rifle, and machine fire, these peasants
crossed to us. The reason they had for running into fire was that the
Germans were torturing their neighbors with the bayonet. One peasant, on
the other side of the canal, hurried toward us under the fire, with a
little girl on his right shoulder.
On Tuesday, September 29, I visited Wetteren Hospital. I went in
company with the Prince L. de Croy, the Due D'Ursel, a senator; the
Count de Briey, Intendant de la Liste Civile du Roy, and the Count Retz
la Barre (all of the Garde du General de Wette, Divisions de Cavalerie).
One at least of these gentlemen is as well and as favorably known in
this country as in his own. I took a young linguist, who was kind enough
to act as secretary for me. In the hospital I found eleven peasants with
bayonet wounds upon them--men, women and a child--who had been marched
in front of the Germans at Alost as a cover for the troops, and cut with
bayonets when they tried to dodge the firing. A priest was ministering
to them, bed by bed. Sisters were in attendance. The priest led us to
the cot of one of the men. On Sunday morning, September 27, the peasant,
Leopold de Man, of No. 90, Hovenier-Straat, Alost, was hiding in the
house with his sister, in the cellar. The Germans made a fire of the
table and chairs in the upper room. Then, catching sight of Leopold,
they struck him with the butts of their guns and forced him to pass
through the fire. Then, taking him outside, they struck him to the
ground and gave him a blow over the head with a gunstock and a cut of
the bayonet, which pierced his thigh all the way through.
"In spite of my wound," said he, "they made me pass between their lines,
giving me still more blows of the gun-butt in the back in order to make
me march. There were seventeen or eighteen persons with me. They placed
us in front of their lines and menaced us with their revolvers, crying
out that they will make us pay for the losses they have suffered at
Alost. So we march in front of the troops.
"When the battle began we threw ourselves on our faces to the ground,
but they forced us to rise again. At a certain moment, when the Germans
were obliged to retire, we succeeded in escaping down side streets."
The priest led the way to the cot of a peasant whose cheeks had the spot
of fever. He was Frans Meulebroeck, of No. 62, Drie Sleutelstraat,
Alost. Sometimes in loud bursts of terror, and then falling back into a
monotone, he talked with us.
"They broke open the door of my home," he said, "they seized me and
knocked me down. In front of my door the corpse of a German lay
stretched out. The Germans said to me: 'You are going to pay for that to
us.' A few moments later they gave me a bayonet cut in my leg. They
sprinkled naphtha in my house and set it afire. My son was struck down
in the street and I was marched in front of the German troops. I do not
know even yet the fate of my son."
Gradually as the peasant talked the time of his suffering came on him.
His eyes began to see it again in front of him. They became fixed and
wild, the white of them visible. His voice was shrill and broken with
sobs.
"My boy," he said, "I haven't seen him." His body shook with sobbing.
At my request the young man with me took down the statements of these
two peasants, turning them into French from the Flemish, with the aid of
the priest. In the presence of the priest and one of the sisters the two
peasants signed, each man, his statement, making his mark.
Our group passed into the next room, where the wounded women were
gathered. A sister led us to the bedside of a very old woman, perhaps
eighty years old. She had thin white hair, that straggled across the
pillow. There was no motion to the body, except for faint breathing. She
was cut through the thigh with a bayonet.
I went across the room and found a little girl, twelve years old. She
was propped up in bed and half bent over, as if she had been broken at
the breast bone. Her body whistled with each breath. One of our
ambulance corps went out next day to the hospital--Dr. Donald Renton. He
writes me:
"I went out with Davidson, the American sculptor, and Yates, the cinema
man, and there had been brought into the hospital the previous day the
little girl you speak of. She had a gaping wound on, I think, the right
side of her back, and died the next day."
Dr. Renton's address is 110 Hill Street, Garnet Hill, Glasgow.
The young man who took down the record is named E. de Niemira, a British
subject. He made the report of what we had seen to the Bryce Committee.
These cases which I witnessed appear in the Bryce Report under the
heading of "Alost."[B] Of such is the Bryce Report made: first-hand
witness by men like myself, who know what they know, who are ready for
any test to be applied, who made careful notes, who had witnesses.
"Why do the Germans do these things? It is not war. It is cruel and
wrong," that is a remark I heard from noblemen and common soldiers
alike. Such acts are beyond the understanding of the Belgian people.
Their soldiers are kindly, good-humored, fearless. Alien women and
children would be safe in their hands. They do not see why the Germans
bring suffering to the innocent.
A few understand. They know it is a scientific panic which the German
army was seeking to cultivate. They see that these acts are not done in
the wilful abandon of a few drunken soldiers, beyond discipline, but
that they belong to a cool, careful method by means of which the German
staff hoped to reduce a population to servitude. The Germans regard
these mutilations as pieces of necessary surgery. The young blond
barmaid of the Quatrecht Inn told us on October 4 that a German captain
came and cried like a baby in the taproom on the evening of September 7,
after he had laid waste Quatrecht and Melle. To her fanciful, untrained
mind he was thinking of his own wife and children. So, at least, she
thought as she watched him, after serving him in his thirst.
One of the sentries patted the shoulder of the peasant at Melle when he
learned that the man had had the three members of his family done to
death. Personally, he was sorry for the man, but orders were orders.
[Illustration: CHURCH IN TERMONDE WHICH THE WRITER SAW.
The Germans burned this church and four others, a hospital, an
orphanage, and 1,100 homes, house by house. Priests, nuns and churches
irritated the German Army. This photograph was taken by Radclyffe
Dugmore, who accompanied the writer, to witness the methodical
destruction.]
I spent September 13 and September 23 in Termonde. Ten days before my
first visit Termonde was a pretty town of 11,000 inhabitants. On their
first visit the Germans burned eleven hundred of the fifteen hundred
houses. They burned the Church of St. Benedict, the Church of St.
Rocus, three other churches, a hospital, and an orphanage. They burned
that town not by accident of shell fire and general conflagration, but
methodically, house by house. In the midst of charred ruins I came on
single houses standing, many of them, and on their doors was German
writing in chalk--"Nicht Verbrennen. Gute Leute wohnen hier." Sometimes
it would be simply "Nicht Verbrennen," sometimes only "Gute Leute," but
always that piece of German script was enough to save that house, though
to the right and left of it were ruins. On several of the saved houses
the name of the German officer was scribbled who gave the order to
spare. About one hundred houses were chalked in the way I have
described. All these were unscathed by the fire, though they stood in
streets otherwise devastated. The remaining three hundred houses had the
good luck to stand at the outskirts and on streets unvisited by the
house-to-house incendiaries.
Four days after my first visit the Germans burned again the already
wrecked town, turning their attention to the neglected three hundred
houses. I went in as soon as I could safely enter the town, and that was
on the Wednesday after.
As companions in Termonde I had Tennyson Jesse, Radclyffe Dugmore, and
William R. Renton. Mr. Dugmore took photographs of the chalked houses.
"Build a fence around Termonde," suggested a Ghent manufacturer, "leave
the ruins untouched. Let the place stand there, with its burned houses,
churches, orphanage, hospital, factories, to show the world what German
culture is. It will be a monument to their methods of conducting war.
There will be no need of saying anything. That is all the proof we need.
Then throw open the place to visitors from all the world, as soon as
this war is over. Let them draw their own conclusions."
BALLAD OF THE GERMANS
In Wetteren Hospital, Flanders, the writer saw a little peasant girl
dying from the bayonet wounds in her back which the German soldiers had
given her.
Cain slew only a brother,
A lad who was fair and strong,
His murder was careless and honest,
A heated and sudden wrong.
And Judas was kindly and pleasant,
For he snared an invincible man.
But you--you have spitted the children,
As they toddled and stumbled and ran.