The catalogue of German atrocities, now documented, in legal reports,
with the accompanying photographs, preserved in the Department of
Justice of the various nations, makes up the blackest page in human
history. Long days and nights spent over the reports in the various
capitals, and in courts of justice, journeys to and fro amid the ruined
villages along a battle front six hundred miles in length, leave the
head sick and the heart faint. The traveller would become utterly
hopeless and broken-hearted, and give himself up to black despair,
were it not that everything that German savagery has done to destroy
one's faith in the divine origin of the human soul has been more than
recovered by the gentleness, the self-sacrifice, the fortitude, the
sympathy, the heroism of the British, the Belgians, and the French.
The Germans have at last compelled all unprejudiced minds to recognize
the atrocity as the German notion of scientific efficiency. It is not
by chance that the first atrocities were begun on practically the same
day, August 17th, of 1914, and ended about September 19th, and along a
line extending from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier, just
as the murders and mutilations, the rapes and the pillaging began and
ended at the same time in Poland, Rumania and Serbia, and are now being
repeated in more malignant forms in Northeastern Italy.