Ay', boy--you may well ask.
And the world asks also, and in due time will exact an answer to the
last drop of innocent blood.
What have you done?
You have fallen into the hands of the most scientifically organized
barbarism the world has ever seen, or, please God, ever will see--to
whom, of deliberate choice, such words as truth, honour, mercy, justice,
have become dead letters, by reason of the pernicious doctrines on which
the race has been nourished--by which its very soul has been poisoned.
Dead letters?--worn-out rags, the very virtues they once represented,
even in Germany, long since flung to the dust-heaps of the past in the
soulless scramble for power and a place in the sun which no one denied
her.
Deliberately, and of malice prepense, the military caste of Prussia has
taught, and the unhappy common-folk have accepted, that as a nation they
are past all that kind of thing. There is only one right in the
world--the might of the strongest. The weak to the wall! Make way for
the Hun, whose god is power, and his high-priests the Kaiser and the
Krupps.
And so, every nation, even the smallest, on whom the eye of the Minotaur
has settled in baleful desire, has said, "Better to die fighting than
fall into the hands of the devil!" And they have fought--valiantly, and
saved their souls alive, though their bodies may have been crushed out
of existence by overwhelming odds. As nations, however, they shall rise
again, and with honour, when their treacherous torturers have been
crushed in their turn.
And, wherever the evil tide has welled over a land, indemnities,
incredible and unreasonable, have been exacted, and hostages for their
payment, and for good behaviour under the yoke meanwhile, have been
taken.
Woe unto such! In many cases they have simply been shot in cold
blood--murdered as brazenly as by any Jack-the-Ripper. Murder, too, of
the most despicable--murder for gain--the gain that should accrue
through the brutal terrorism of the act and its effect on the rest.
And, if deemed advisable to gloss the crime with some thin veneer of
imitation justice for the--unsuccessful--hoodwinking of a shocked and
astounded world, what easier than an unseen shot in some obscure corner
from a German rifle? Then--"Death to the hostages!--destruction to the
village!--a fine of L100,000 on the town!"
Those provocative shots from German rifles have surely been the most
profitably engineered basenesses in the whole war. They have
justified--but in German eyes only--every committable crime, and they
cost nothing--except the souls of their perpetrators.
"It's your money we want--and your land--and your property--and, if
necessary, your lives! You are weak--we are strong--and so----!" That is
the simple Credo of the Hun.
But for all these things there shall come a day of reckoning and the
account will be a heavy one.
May it be exacted to the full--from the rightful debtors!
"What have you done?" You have at all events put the rope round the
necks of your murderers, and the whole world's hands are at the other
end of it.