Nor were these atrocities committed in moods of drunkenness, hours
of anger, nor by the occasional degenerate, like Jack the Ripper of
Whitechapel Road. Allen White and Arnold Toynbee are doubtless right
in asserting that _most_ of the attacks upon little girls and young
women were made by German officers, nevertheless, all must confess that
the German soldiers were not less culpable, as they pillaged the land,
guided by the deliberate, cold, precise, scientific, ordered policy of
German frightfulness.
The story of German occupancy of Belgium and France is a long, black
story of unspeakable crimes. These brigands broke into banks, looted
factories, pillaged houses, burned the farmers' machinery, chopped down
orchards and vineyards. In the face of their newly-signed treaties
with the Allied nations, pledging the safeguarding of all buildings
dedicated to education and religion, with the lives and property of
non-combatants, the Germans made their treaties mere scraps of paper,
sneered at the most solemn obligations given by men to men, burned
cathedrals, colleges and libraries, mutilated old men and women,
violated little children, nailed a child to a farmer's barn door upon
which they found a calf skin drying in the sun, and beneath wrote the
word "zwei." They crucified Canadian officers and Roman Catholic nuns.
They bombed hospitals and Red Cross buildings. They thrust women and
little children between themselves and the Belgian and French soldiers
defending their native land. The affidavits, photographs, and mutilated
bodies are witnesses that destroy forever the last shred of doubt and
incredulity. For men who are open to testimony, the German atrocities
are more surely established than any of the hideous cruelties recorded
in history. Now, for the first time, wildest savagery has been reduced
to a science, and damned into existence under the name of German
efficiency.