Again a dispatch from Paris to Rome: "The Germans had been driven back
behind the Moselle and were begging for an armistice; the French had
passed Namur and were pressing forward in forced marches, while 500,000
English were falling upon the German flank."
Still another official report from Paris: "Liége is becoming the grave
of the 150,000 Germans who are breaking their heads against its walls;
the Belgians had taken 3,000 prisoners, who were in a terrible
condition; but for their good fortune of falling into captivity they
would have starved to death."
In contrast to all this let us take the unvarnished truth as in the
reported simple words of the German Quartermaster General:
We are now able to report upon Liége Without doing any harm.... We
had only a weak force at Liége four days ago, for it is not
possible to prepare for such a bold undertaking by collecting large
masses of men. That we attained the desired end in spite of this is
due to the excellent preparation, the valor of our troops, their
energetic leadership, and the help of God. The courage of the enemy
was broken, and his troops fought badly. The difficulties against
us lay in the exceedingly unfavorable topography of the
surroundings, which consisted of hills and woods, and in the
treacherous participation of the entire population in the fighting,
not even excluding women. The people fired upon our troops from
ambush, from villages and forests--fired upon our physicians who
were treating the wounded, and upon the wounded themselves. Hard
and bitter fighting occurred; whole villages had to be destroyed in
order to break the resistance, before our brave troops penetrated
the girdle of forts and took possession of the city. It is true
that a part of the forts still held out, but they no longer fired.
The Kaiser did not want to waste a drop of blood in storming the
forts, which no longer hindered the carrying out of our plans. We
were able to await the arrival of heavy artillery to level the
forts one after the other at our leisure, and without the sacrifice
of a single life--in case their garrisons should not surrender
sooner.... So far as can be judged at present the Belgians had more
men for the defense of the city than we had for storming it. Every
expert can measure from this fact the greatness of our achievement;
it is without a parallel....
(Signed) VON STEIN,
Quartermaster General.
It is not the German people alone that will have cause to remember
Liége; the whole world will do well to learn from the case of Liége that
an organized manufactory of lies is trying to deceive the public opinion
of all the nations. Glorious victories are converted into "defeats with
heavy losses," and the strong moral discipline of the German troops is
slanderously described in the reports of the imaginative, phrase-loving
French as cruelty--just as in 1870 the Prussian Uhlans were described as
thrusting through with their lances all the French babies and pinning
them fast to the walls.
How far the "grande nation" has already degenerated, and how far the
Belgian population, akin to the French both in blood and in sentiments,
imitate the French in their Balkan brutality, is illustrated by two
examples. One of these, in the form of a German official warning, says:
"The reports at hand about the fighting around Liége show that the
population of the country took part in the battle. Our troops were fired
upon from ambush. Physicians were shot at while following their
profession. Cruelties were practiced by the population on wounded
soldiers. There is also news at hand showing that German patrols in the
vicinity of Metz were fired at from ambush from the French side. It may
be that these occurrences are due to the composition of the population
in those industrial regions, but it may also be that France and Belgium
are preparing for a guerrilla warfare upon our troops. If the latter
alternative should prove true, and this proof be strengthened through
repetitions of these occurrences, then our opponents will have
themselves to thank if this war be carried on with unrelenting severity
even against the guilty population. The German troops, who are
accustomed to preserve discipline and to wage war only against the armed
forces of the hostile State, cannot be blamed if, in just self-defense,
they give no quarter. The hope of influencing the result of the war by
turning loose the passions of the populace will be frustrated by the
unshaken energy of our leaders and our troops. Before neutral foreign
countries, however, it must be demonstrated, even at the beginning of
this war, that it was not the German troops who caused the war to take
on such forms."
The details of the cruelties, here only hinted at, on the Belgian and
French side, are supplied and proved by an eye-witness, a German
physician, who reports:
We have experienced from the Belgian population, from men, women,
and half-grown boys, such things as we had hitherto seen only in
wars with negroes. The Belgian civilian population shoots in blind
hatred from every house, from every thick bush, at everything that
is German. We had on the very first day many dead and wounded,
caused by the civilian population. Women take part as well as men.
One German had his throat cut at night while in bed. Five wounded
Germans were put into a house bearing the flag of the Red Cross; by
the next morning they had all been stabbed to death. In a village
near Verviers we found the body of one of our soldiers with his
hands bound behind his back and his eyes punched out. An automobile
column which set out from Liége halted in a village; a young woman
came up, suddenly drew a revolver, and shot a chauffeur dead. At
Emmenich, an hour by foot from Aachen, a sanitary automobile column
was attacked by the populace on a large scale and fired at from the
houses. The red cross on our sleeves and on our automobiles gives
us physicians no protection at all.
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