No horrors in history are so overwhelmingly evidenced as the German
atrocities. The nature, the number, and the extent of their crimes have
been documented more thoroughly than the scalpings of settlers by Sioux
Indians, the horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, or the cruelties
of the Spanish Inquisition. No American to-day can cross the threshold
of Belgium or Northern France, Poland or Serbia, without recalling the
words that Dante saw above the gate of Hell: "Abandon hope, all ye who
enter here." Not since Judas and his fellow conspirators crucified
Jesus has there been a ruler, a War Staff or an army, that has
deliberately revived the cross, as an instrument of torture, to further
the ends of military efficiency. The Germans have literally fulfilled
the Kaiser's charge in 1899, and reproduced in 1914, upon various
cards for the Kaiser's soldiers: "You will take no prisoners; you will
show no mercy; you will give no quarter; you will make yourselves as
terrible as the Huns under Attila." All scholars know that the Kaiser
was referring to Attila's well-known motto, "Where my feet fall, let
grass not grow for a hundred years."