When I think back on those first stages--and in some respects the most
tragic stages--of the great war, I do not see it as a thing of pomp and
glory, of splendid panorama, pitched on a more impressive scale than any
movement ever was in all the history of mankind. I do not, in
retrospect, see the sunlight glinting on the long, unending, weaving
lanes of bayonets; or the troops pouring in grey streams, like molten
quicksilver, along all those dusty highroads of Northern Europe; or the
big guns belching; or the artillery horses going galloping into
action; or the trenches; or the camps; or the hospitals; or the
battlefields. I see it as it is reflected in certain little, detached
pictures--small-focused, and incidental to the great horror of which
they were an unconsidered part--but which, to me, typify, most fitly of
all, what war means when waged by the rote and rule of Prussian
militarism upon the civilian populace of an invaded country.
I see again the little red-bearded priest of Louvain who met us on the
day we first entered that town; who took us out of the panic of the
street where the inhabitants fluttered about in aimless terror, like
frightened fowl in a barnyard; and who led the way for us through a
little wooden gateway, set in the face of a high brick wall. It was as
though we were in another world then, instead of the little world of
panic and distress we had just quit. About a neglected tennis court grew
a row of pear trees, and under a laden grape arbour at the back sat four
more priests, all in rusty black gowns. They got up from where they sat
and came and spoke to us, and took us into a little cellar room, where
they gave us a bottle of their homemade wine to drink and handfuls of
their ripened pears to eat, and tried to point out to us, on a map,
where they thought the oncoming Germans might be, none of us knowing
that already uhlan scouts were entering the next street but one. As we
were leaving, the eldest priest took me by the coat lapels and, with his
kind, faded old eyes brimming and his gentle old face quivering, he
said to me in broken English:
"My son, it is not right that war should come to Belgium. We had no part
in the quarrel of these, our great neighbours. My son, we are not a bad
people here--do not believe them should they tell you so. For I tell you
we are a good people. We are a very good people. All the week my people
work very hard, and on Sunday they go to church; and then perhaps they
go for a walk in the fields. And that, to them, is all they know of
life.
"My son," he said, "you come from a great country--you come from the
greatest of all the countries. Surely your country, which is so great
and so strong, will not let my little country perish from off the face
of the earth?"
Because we had no answer for him we went away. And when, six weeks
later, I returned to ruined and devastated Louvain, I picked my way
through the hideous wreckage of the streets to the little monastery
again. Behold! the brick wall was a broken heap of wrecked, charred
masonwork; and the pear trees were naked stumps, which stood up out of
a clay waste; and the little cellar room, where we ate our pears and
drank our wine, was a hole in the ground now, full of ill-smelling
rubbish and fouled water, with the rotted and bloated corpse of a dead
horse floating in the water, poisoning the air with the promise of
pestilence. And the priests who once had lived there were gone; and none
in all that town knew where they had gone.
Always, too, when thinking of the war, I think of the refugees I saw,
but mostly of those I saw after Antwerp had fallen in the early days of
October and I was skirting Holland on my way back out of Germany to the
English Channel. I had seen enough refugees before then, God knows!--men
and women and children, old men and old women and little children and
babies in arms, fleeing by the lights of their own burning houses over
rainy, wind-swept, muddy roads; vast caravans of homeless misery, whose
members marched on and on until they dropped from exhaustion. And when
they had rested a while at the miry roadside, with no beds beneath them
but the earth and no shelters above them but the black umbrellas to
which they clung, they got up and went on again, with no destination in
view and no goal ahead; but only knowing, I suppose, that what might lie
in front of them could not be worse than what they left behind them. But
never--until after Antwerp--did there seem to be so many of them, and
never did their plight seem so pitiable. Over every road that ran up out
of Belgium into Holland--and that in this populous corner of Europe
meant a road every little while--they poured all day in thick, jostling,
unending, unbroken streams. I marked how the sides of every wayside
building along the Dutch frontier was scrawled over with the names of
hundreds of refugees, who already had passed that way; and, along with
their names, the names of their own people, from whom they were
separated in the haste and terror of flight, and who--by one chance in a
thousand--might come that way and read what was there written, and
follow on.
This was the larger picture. Now for a small corner of the canvas: I
remember a squalid little cowshed in a little Dutch town on the border,
just before dusk of a wet, raw autumnal night. Under the dripping eaves
of that cowshed stood an old man--a very old man. He must have been all
of eighty. His garments were sopping wet, and all that he owned now of
this world's goods rested at his feet, tied up in the rags of an old red
tablecloth. In one withered, trembling old hand he held a box of
matches, and in the other a piece of chalk. With one hand he scratched
match after match; and with the other, on the wall of that little
cowshed, he wrote, over and over and over again, his name; and beneath
it the name of the old wife from whom he was separated--doubtlessly
forever.
Possibly these things might have come to pass in any war, whether or not
Germans were concerned in making that war; probably they should be
included among the inevitable by-products of the institution called
warfare. That, however, did not make them the less sorrowful.
V
The point I am trying to make is this: That, seeing such sights, and a
thousand more like them, I could picture the same things--and a thousand
worse things--happening in my own country. With better reason, I to-day
can picture them as happening in my own country; and in all fairness I
go further than that and say that I can conceive them as being all the
more likely to happen should the invading forces come at us under that
design of a black vulture which is known as the Imperial Prussian Eagle.
Given similar conditions and similar opportunities, and I can see
Holyoke, Massachusetts, or Charleston, South Carolina, razed in smoking
ruins, as Louvain or as Dinant was. I can see the mayor of Baltimore
being put to death by drum-head court-martial because some inflamed
civilian of his town fired from a cottage window at a Pomeranian
grenadier. I can see in Pennsylvania congressmen and judges and
clergymen and G. A. R. veterans held as hostages and as potential
victims of the firing squad, in case some son or some grandson of old
John Burns, of Gettysburg, not regularly enrolled, takes up his shotgun
in defence of his homestead. I can see a price put on the head of some
modern Molly Pitcher, and a military prison waiting for some latter-day
Barbara Frietchie. For we must remember that what we Americans call
patriots the anointed War Lord calls _franc-tireurs_, meaning
bushwhackers.
I do not believe I personally can be charged with an evinced bias
against the German Army, as based on what I saw of its operations in the
opening months of the war. Because I had an admiration for the courage
and the fortitude of the German common soldier, and because I expressed
that admiration, I was charged with being pro-German by persons who
seemingly did not understand or want to understand that a spectator may
admire the individual without in the least sympathising with the causes
which sent him into the field. And at a time when this country was
filled with stories of barbarities committed upon Belgian civilians by
German soldiers--stories of the mutilating of babies, of the raping of
women, of the torturing of old men--I was one of five experienced
newspapermen who, all of our own free will and not under duress or
coercion, signed a statement in which we severally and jointly stated
that, in our experiences when travelling with or immediately behind the
German columns through upward of a hundred miles of Belgian territory,
we had been unable to discover good evidence of a single one of these
alleged atrocities. Nor did we.
What I tried to point out at the time--in the fall of 1914--and what I
would point out again in justice to those who now are our enemies, is
that identically the same accounts of atrocities which were told in
England and in America as having been perpetrated by Germans upon
Belgians and Frenchmen, were simultaneously repeated in Germany as
having been perpetrated by Belgians and Frenchmen upon German nuns and
German wounded; and were just as firmly believed in Germany as in
America and Britain, and had, as I veritably believe, just as little
foundation of fact in one quarter as in the other quarters.
Indeed, I am willing to go still further and say, because of the
rigorous discipline by which the German common soldier is bound, that in
the German occupation of hostile territory opportunities for the
individual brute or the individual degenerate to commit excesses against
the individual victim were greatly reduced. Of course there must have
been sporadic instances of hideous acts--there always have been where
men went to war; but I have never been able to bring myself to believe
that such acts could have been a part of a systematic or organised
campaign of frightfulness. There was plenty of the frightfulness without
these added horrors.
But I was an eyewitness to crimes which, measured by the standards of
humanity and civilisation, impressed me as worse than any individual
excess, any individual outrage, could ever have been or can ever be;
because these crimes indubitably were instigated on a wholesale basis by
order of officers of rank, and must have been carried out under their
personal supervision, direction and approval. Briefly, what I saw was
this: I saw wide areas of Belgium and France in which not a penny's
worth of wanton destruction had been permitted to occur, in which the
ripe pears hung untouched upon the garden walls; and I saw other wide
areas where scarcely one stone had been left to stand upon another;
where the fields were ravaged; where the male villagers had been shot in
squads; where the miserable survivors had been left to den in holes,
like wild beasts.
Taking the physical evidence offered before our own eyes, and
buttressing it with the statements made to us, not only by natives but
by German soldiers and German officers, we could reach but one
conclusion, which was that here, in such-and-such a place, those in
command had said to the troops: "Spare this town and these people!" And
there they had said: "Waste this town and shoot these people!" And
here the troops had discriminately spared, and there they had
indiscriminately wasted, in exact accordance with the word of their
superiors.