Doubtlessly you read the published extracts from diaries taken off the
bodies of killed or captured German soldiers in the first year of the
war. Didn't you often read where this soldier or that, setting down his
own private thoughts, had lamented at having been required to put his
hand to the task of killing and destroying? But, from this same source,
did you ever get evidence that any soldier had actually revolted against
this campaign of cruelty, and had refused to burn the homes of helpless
civilians or to slay unresisting noncombatants? You did not, and for a
very good reason: Because that rebellious soldier would never have lived
long enough to write down the record of his humanity--he would have been
shot dead by the revolver of his own captain or his own lieutenant.
I saw German soldiers marching through a wrecked and ravished
countryside, singing their German songs about the home place, and the
Christmas tree, and the Rhine maiden--creatures so full of sentiment
that they had no room in their souls for sympathy. And, by the same
token, I saw German soldiers dividing their rations with hungry
Belgians. They divided their rations with these famished ones because it
was not _verboten_--because there was no order to the contrary. Had
there been an order to the contrary, those poor women and those scrawny
children might have starved, and no German soldier, whatever his private
feelings, would have dared offer to them a crust of bread or a bone of
beef. Of that I am very sure.
And it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, a most dangerous thing
for all the peoples of the earth, and a most evil thing, that into the
world should come a scheme of military government so hellishly contrived
and so exactly directed that, by the flirt of a colonel's thumb, a
thousand men may, at will, be transformed from kindly, courageous, manly
soldiers into relentless, ruthless executioners and incendiaries; and,
by another flirt of that supreme and arrogant thumb, be converted back
again into decent men.