Last winter, a German colonel was shot through the spinal cord. His
lower limbs were completely paralyzed, and the paralysis began to
extend to his hands. The wounded man developed the theory that if he
could only be carried back to Germany recovery was possible. Lifted
into an ambulance, he was carried twelve miles to the northeast,
towards the Rhine. Unable to endure the agony of the rough road, he
commanded the ambulance driver to stop in front of the priest's house,
near ----. Two aged French women cared for the wounded man during
January, February and March. Little by little the wings of the angel of
death fanned away the mist before the eyes of the German officer. For
two and a half years he had carried an aluminum token with a portrait
of the German Kaiser's conception of God, and the words, "Strike them
all dead. The Day of Judgment will not ask you for reasons." But at
last a moment had come when he lost confidence in the pledge of the
Kaiser and the War Staff to stand between him and an outraged God.
One morning a little French boy waited after mass to tell the priest
that the German officer wanted him to come at once. The important
message proved to be a warning that the von Hindenburg line was nearly
completed, that the orders for retreat had gone out, that every church,
bank, factory, house, was to be looted and then burned, and the whole
region turned into a desolation. "These two aged women and you yourself
have been very kind to me, and this pass will take you through the
German lines to a place of safety." And then the dying officer advised
the priest to take the two women and go away at once. The news utterly
crushed the kindly man of God. Touched by the grief of the white-haired
priest, and perhaps terrified by memory and remorse, words of righteous
wrath and repentance fell from the lips of the officer. These were
his last words, as that old priest transcribed them from the lips of
this dying German. "Curses upon our army! Curses upon our Kaiser, and
our War Staff! Ten thousand curses upon the Fatherland! Either God is
dead or Germany is doomed!" Going out of the door, the last words the
aged priest heard were the dying curses of an officer, whose soul had
been debauched by his Kaiser and his War Staff, and who upon the brink
of the Day of Judgment realized that for every crime he must give an
account unto God. "Woe unto him who offends one of my little ones; it
were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and
that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."
That conscience-smitten dying German packed the genius of the moral
universe into the curse he pronounced upon the Kaiser, the War Staff
and the Fatherland. When the veil was taken away from his eyes he saw
that the stars in their courses were fighting against the Kaiser. In
the awful hour of death he learned at last that God is not dead, but
that because of her atrocities, Germany is doomed.