AUTOCRACY
German Government is founded on the principle that the State is superior
to the individual. Being superior, it is not subject to that code of
honor, that respect for decency, which binds men of different races,
religions and countries and distinguishes man from the brute.
The Reichstag of Germany is supposed to be the popular assembly. In
reality, it is the bulwark of wealth. Under this system, man belongs to
property, not property to man. Voters, who have paid one-third of the
total income tax, elect one-third of the electors, who choose one-third
of the Reichstag. Voters who pay the next third do likewise, and the
same system applies to the last third. In 1908, 293,000 voters chose the
first third; 1,065,240 selected the second third, and 6,324,079 elected
the last third. Thus, 4 per cent of the voters elected the first third,
14 per cent the second, and the last third, 82 per cent—all the poor
people were thrown together and controlled by the other two-thirds, or
18 per cent.
In free countries, the State exists for the benefit of the individual.
In Germany, the individual lives exclusively for the State. He has no
right to free speech, free thought, the pursuit of happiness, nor even
to existence itself, unless the Kaiser sees it to his advantage to
grant, or permit, those luxuries.
In case a popular measure slipped through the Reichstag, it would have
to be voted upon by the Bundesrath—a secret upper house appointed by the
princes—not the people, of each separate State of the German Empire.
Each State votes as a unit. No amendment can pass the Bundesrath if
fourteen out of the sixty-one votes are cast against it. The Kaiser,
representing Prussia, holds seventeen votes, and three for
Alsace-Lorraine. So, the individual German voter’s work is carefully
nullified by this system, over which he has no control. He is outvoted
by wealth in the Reichstag. The Reichstag is outvoted by the aristocracy
of the Bundesrath. This, in turn, is outvoted by the Autocracy of the
Kaiser.
Autocracy, aristocracy and wealth compose the Board of Strategy and
officer the army. The army is superior to the Reichstag. It is outside
of and above the law, within the country but not responsible to it. It
is not an army of the people, it is the Kaiser’s army.
So the Bundesrath, the Reichstag, the Board of Strategy, the controlled
newspapers and political professors, extending down from the throneroom
to the kindergarten, are meshes in the net that entangles man whose
rights they have usurped. Through that system, the child is caught in
infancy, given Kultur with mother’s milk, then taught to spy upon family
and neighbors; he listens to political professors at school, political
parsons at church. The more he informs the further he advances, till he
reaches the army, where docility and obedience and respect for authority
are instilled into him till he can have neither original ideas nor
independent thought.
He is told he is under no obligation to observe elementary decency, that
there is no honor among men or nations. He is taught to hate, not to
love, to depend on might, not right, and to work for war instead of
peace. The French, the British, the Americans are only human, but the
good Kaiser is divine, and the German is a super-man, chosen by God to
rule the world. The “good Kaiser” was chosen by God to dominate the
German race, who are to conquer the world, and the German super-man,
under the Kaiser, is to obtain that domination through war.
A woman who has compassion in her soul for the unfortunate has no right
to live. Pity is not German. Miss Cavel had pity in her heart, even for
German wounded, for homeless Belgians. So she was executed.
The wounded in hospital ships were torpedoed without warning, murdered
by unseen hands reaching out from the darkness, and the perpetrators
were promoted for gallantry.
After robbing and burning the towns of northern France and Belgium they
turned around and demanded an indemnity, having picked the victim’s
pocket, they asked for his money. They robbed the priceless libraries to
preserve the books. They drove, the vanquished victims into slavery to
protect them from laziness, and raped woman to save her virginity. The
French, English or American who rapes a woman, desecrates a church, or
murders innocent women and children, knows he commits a crime—the German
lacks such consciousness.
So, unchecked, uncontrolled, responsible to no one, they are wild beasts
at large. Backed by an army of 11,000,000 men, they tried to overwhelm
peace-loving Europe. They overran Luxemburg. They turned the garden of
France into a desert. They could see in Belgium only the nearest road to
France. Subject to no restraint, responsible to no one, their passion
for power, for money, for lust, recognized no authority, contract, nor
law.
Their ungovernable tempers became inflamed at the slightest opposition
and they do not scruple to commit the most odious crimes upon the
unfortunate people in their power. Repression, terrorism, theft, rape
and murder are elevated into virtues and rewarded with honors. By brute
force they override decency, freedom, arbitration and liberty. Murderers
at bay, they fight to keep from being executed.
And, as the German people were compelled to work for them in time of
peace, now they must die for them in time of war.
Such is the German Government.
At The Hague Convention, 1907, the following were agreed to and signed
by Germany.
ARTICLE 24. “It is forbidden to kill or wound an enemy who has dropped
his arms or has no means of defense, and who surrenders at discretion.”
ARTICLE 46. “The honor and the rights of the people, the lives of the
family, the private property must be respected.”
“August 23, 1914, at Gomery, Belgium, a German patrol entered the
ambulance, fired upon the wounded, killed the doctor and shot the
stretcher bearers.” Part of a deposition of Dr. Simon, in Red Cross
Service, 10th Region.
“The night of the 22d (August, 1914), I found in the woods at 150 yards
to the north of the crossroads, formed by the meeting of the large
trench of Colonne with the road of Vaux de Palaneix to St. Remy, the
bodies of French prisoners shot by the Germans. I saw thirty soldiers
who had been gathered together in a little space, for the most part
lying down, a few on their knees, and all mutilated the same way by
being shot in the eye.” Affidavit of a captain of the 288th Infantry.
“We saw there an execution squad. Before it lay, on the slope of the
side of the road, fifty bodies of French prisoners who had just been
shot. We approached and saw one hapless Red Cross man who had not been
spared. A non-commissioned officer was finishing off with revolver shots
any who still moved. He gave us, in German, the order to point out to
him those of our men who still breathed.” Report of Dr. Chou, who was
captured and repatriated. He related the above to a Danish physician,
Dr. De Christmas.
“I saw a British prisoner killed by a sentry at point blank range,
because he did not stop at the command. Another British soldier was shot
by a sentry with whom he had a discussion. The shot broke his jaw; he
died next day.” Report of Sergt. Major Le Bihran, narrating conditions
at Gottingen.
The French Government has the note book of a German soldier, Albert
Delfosse of the 111th Infantry of the 14th Reserve Corps. “In the forest
near St. Remy, on the 4th or 5th of September, I encountered a very fine
cow and calf, dead, and again, the bodies of French men, fearfully
mutilated.”
Order of the Day, issued by General Stenger near Thiaville, Meurthe and
Moselle, August 26, 1914:
“After today we will not make any prisoners; all the prisoners are to be
killed; the wounded, with arms or without arms, to be killed; the
prisoners already gathered in crowds are to be killed; behind us there
must not remain any living enemy.”
Signed,
The Lieutenant commanding the Company,
STOV.
The Colonel commanding the Regiment,
NEUBAUER.
The General commanding the Brigade,
STENGER.
General Stenger was in charge of the 58th Brigade, composed of the 112th
and 142d Bavarian Infantry. Thirty soldiers of these regiments, now
prisoners, have made affidavits to this, signed with their own names,
which are in the possession of the French Government.
The attack of September 25, 1915, brought the French within two
kilometers of Somme-py. Lying in the trenches under the furious
bombardment, we considered the diary which was found on the German
soldier, Hassemer, of the 8th Army Corps, when they captured the town in
1914: “Horrible carnage; the villages totally burned; the French thrown
into the burning houses; the civilians burned with all the others.”
I have many times been at St. Maurice, Meurthe and Moselle, where I saw
and pondered over, fire-blackened houses and somber-faced, solitary
women. The tall chimney of a demolished manufacturing plant stands guard
over desolation. From the diary of a Bavarian soldier of the German
army, evidence written by the perpetrators, the following is quoted:
“The village of St. Maurice was encircled, the soldiers advanced at one
yard apart, through which line nobody could get. Afterward the Uhlans
started the fire, house by house. Neither man, nor woman, nor child
could get away. They were permitted to take out the cattle because that
was a drawing out method. Those that risked to run away were killed by
rifle shot. All those that were found in the village were burned with
it.”
In the first lot of exchanged English prisoners returned from Germany
was a Gloucester man shot in his jaws, his teeth blackened and broken.
Pointing to where his chin had been, he told me: “That is what they did
to me—what they did after I was taken prisoner and was wounded in four
places and unable to move. A Boche came along, put his rifle to my face
and pulled the trigger. But that wasn’t anything to what they did to my
comrade. He was lying in his blanket seriously wounded, and a Boche ran
a bayonet into him sixteen times before he died.”
In the clearing house hospital at Lyons I saw two old comrades meet, one
wounded, from the front, the other from a German prison camp. “Yes,”
said the latter, with a peculiar, vacant expression in his eye. “Yes, I
was crucified. I was hung from a beam in the middle of the camp for two
hours, hands tied together over my head, in the form of a cross, body
hanging down till my feet were eighteen inches above the ground.”
“Is that true?” I demanded.
“True, look at these arms. Ask those comrades over there. I swear it, I
will write it down for you.”
He wrote the above statement and signed his name, Gandit, Pierre, 19th
Infantry.
August 28, 1914. “The French soldiers who were captured were led away.
Those seriously wounded, in the head or lungs, etc., who could not get
up, were put out of their misery, according to orders, by another shot.”
An extract from the diary of a German soldier, Fahlenstein, 34th
Fusiliers II Army. The original is in the hands of the French
Government.
At Ethe, finding twenty wounded men stretched out in a shed, unable to
move, they burned the shed and roasted them alive.
At Gomery a temporary, first aid hospital was captured. A Boche sergeant
and a group of soldiers rushed in, assaulted the doctor in charge and
burned the building. The wounded men, some of whom had had amputations
that same morning, maddened by the flames, jumped out of the windows
into the garden, where they were bayonetted by the waiting fiends. Dr.
De Charette, Lieutenant Jeanin and about one hundred and twenty wounded
French officers and men were butchered. This hospital was under command
of Dr. Sedillat.
“The Russians were treated like beasts, but among those emaciated,
ragged creatures, the most miserable of all, the most cruelly used of
all are the British. They were always the last and the worst served. If
ill, they were always the worst cared for. When they had no more
clothing to sell to buy food, they came to the hospital utterly
exhausted, stark naked, and died of hunger. It was a sight to pierce the
heart.” Report of Dr. Monsaingeon, of the French Medical Service, on
conditions at Gustrout in 1914 and 1915. Confirmation furnished the
French Foreign Officers and printed in “Treatment of French Prisoners in
Germany.”
The following letter, written by Officer Klent, 1st Company, 154th
German Infantry Regiment, was published in the “Jauersches Tageblatt,”
Harmonville, September 24, 1914: “We reached a little hollow in the
ground, where many red breeches, killed and wounded, were lying. We
bayonetted some of the wounded and smashed in the skulls of others.
Nearby I heard a singular crushing sound. It was caused by the blows one
of our 154th men was raining on the bald skull of a Frenchman. Our
adversaries had fought bravely, but, whether slightly or severely
wounded, our brave Fusiliers spared our country the expense of having to
nurse so many enemies.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
FRENCH FURLOUGH
This furlough, in spite of its “sans prolongation,” has been
]