"ARCHBISHOPRIC OF MALINES,
"_Malines, 10th November, 1916_.
"Mr. GOVERNOR GENERAL:
"I refrain from expressing to Your Excellency the sentiments which
have been evoked in me by your letter of reply to the letter which
I had the honor to address to you on October 19th, relative to the
deportation of the unemployed.
[Sidenote: German perfidy.]
"I have recalled with melancholy the words which Your Excellency,
dwelling upon each syllable, pronounced in my presence, after your
arrival at Brussels: 'I hope that our relations will be loyal * * * I
have received the mission of dressing the wounds of Belgium.'
"My letter of October 19th recalled to Your Excellency the engagement
taken by Baron von Huene, military governor of Antwerp, and ratified
a few days later by Baron von der Goltz, your predecessor as Governor
General at Brussels. The engagement was explicit, absolute, unlimited
as to time: 'The young men need not fear being taken to Germany,
either to be enrolled in the army _or to be employed at forced labor_.'
"This engagement is being violated every day--thousands of times in
the last fortnight.
"Baron von Huene and the late Baron von der Goltz did not say
conditionally, as your despatch of the 26th of October would seek to
imply: 'If the occupation does not last longer than two years men
fit for military duty shall not be taken into captivity;' they said
categorically: 'Young men, and with greater reason, men who have
reached an advanced age, shall not _at any moment of the occupation,
either be made prisoners or employed at forced labor_.' * * *
"The decrees, posters, and comments of the press, which were intended
to prepare public opinion for the measures now being taken, pleaded
especially two considerations: The unemployed, so they declared, are a
danger to public security; they are a charge upon governmental charity.
[Sidenote: The Belgians have got no charity from the Germans.]
"It is not true, I said in my letter of October 19th, that our
workmen have troubled, or even anywhere threatened the public peace.
Five million Belgians and hundreds of Americans are the astonished
witnesses of the dignity and the flawless patience of our working
class. It is not true that the workmen deprived of work are a charge
upon the occupying power for the charity which is dispensed by
their administration. The _Comité National_, in which the occupying
government has no active part, is the sole purveyor of subsistence to
the victims of enforced idleness. * * *
[Sidenote: The German plan makes Belgians war against their own
country.]
"Each Belgian workman will liberate a German workman who will add
one more soldier to the German army. There, in all its simplicity,
is the fact which dominates the situation. The author of the letter
himself feels this burning fact, for he writes: 'nor is the measure
one which affects the conduct of war _properly speaking_ (_proprement
dite_)'. It is, then, connected with the war _improperly speaking_
(_improprement dite_); which can only mean that the Belgian workman,
although he does not bear arms, will free the hands of a German
workman who will take up the arms. The Belgian workman is forced to
co-operate, in an indirect but evident manner, in the war against
his country. This is manifestly contrary to the spirit of the Hague
Conventions.
"Here is another statement: _unemployment is not caused either by the
Belgian workman or by England; it is brought about by the régime of
the German Occupation_.
[Sidenote: No disorder is caused by Belgians.]
"The occupying government has seized considerable supplies of raw
material intended for our national industry; it has seized and
shipped to Germany the machinery, tools, and metals of our factories
and our workshops. The possibility of national labor being thus
suppressed, there remained one alternative to the workman: to work
for the German Empire, either here or in Germany; or to remain
idle. Some thousands of workmen, under the pressure of fright or of
hunger, accepted, with regret for the most part, work for the enemy;
but four hundred thousand workmen and workwomen preferred to resign
themselves to unemployment, with its privations, rather than injure
the interests of the fatherland; they lived in poverty, with the aid
of a meager relief allowed them by the _Comité national de secours et
d' alimentation_, under the supervision of the protecting ministers
of Spain, America, and Holland. Calm, dignified, they bore without
a murmur their painful lot. In no part of the country was there a
revolt or even the semblance of one. Employers and employees awaited
with patience the end of our long martyrdom. Meanwhile, the communal
administrations and private initiative endeavored to alleviate the
undoubted inconveniences of unemployment. But the occupying power
paralyzed their efforts. The _Comité National_ attempted to organize
a professional school for the use of the unemployed. This practical
instruction, respectful of the dignity of our workmen, was meant to
keep up their skill, increase their capacity for work, and prepare for
the restoration of the country. Who opposed this noble movement, the
plan of which had been elaborated by our large manufacturers? Who? The
occupying government.
[Sidenote: Communes not allowed to furnish work for unemployed.]
"Notwithstanding all this, the communes made every effort to give
work to the unemployed upon undertakings of public utility; but the
governor general made these enterprises depend upon permission which,
as a general rule, he refused. There are numerous cases, I am assured,
where the General Government authorized undertakings of this kind upon
the express condition that they should not be undertaken by unemployed.
"They were seeking to create unemployment. They were recruiting the
army of the unemployed. * * *
"The letter of October 26th says that the first responsibility for the
unemployment of our workmen rests upon England, because she has not
allowed raw materials to enter Belgium.
[Sidenote: England not to blame.]
"England generously allows foodstuffs to enter Belgium for the
revictualling [of the country], under the control of neutral
States--Spain, the United States, and Holland. She would allow raw
materials necessary for industry to enter the country under the same
control if Germany were willing to agree to leave them to us, and not
to seize the finished products of our industrial work.
[Sidenote: Germany robs Belgians and inflicts privations.]
"But Germany, by various proceedings, notably by the organization of
its _Centrales_, over which neither the Belgians nor our protecting
ministers can exercise any efficacious control, absorbs a considerable
portion of the products of agriculture and of the industry of our
country. The result is a considerable increase in the cost of living,
which causes painful privations for those who have no savings. * * *
[Sidenote: Deportation is slavery.]
"Deportation is slavery, and the heaviest penalty of the penal code
after that of death. Has Belgium, who never did you any wrong,
deserved at your hands this treatment which cries to heaven for
vengeance?
"Mr. Governor General, in the beginning of my letter I recalled the
noble words of Your Excellency: 'I have come into Belgium with the
mission of dressing the wounds of your country.'
"If Your Excellency could penetrate into the homes of workingmen, as
we priests do, and hear the lamentations of wives and mothers whom
your orders cast into mourning and into dismay, you would realize far
better that the wound of the Belgian people is gaping.
[Sidenote: Cold calculation of Germans.]
"Two years ago, we hear people say, it was death, pillage, fires,
but it was war! To-day it is no longer war, it is cold calculation,
intentional destruction, the victory of force over right, the
debasement of human personality, a cry of defiance to humanity.
"It depends upon you, Excellency, to silence these cries of a revolted
conscience; may the good God, whom we call upon with all the ardor of
our soul for our oppressed people, inspire you with the pity of the
good Samaritan!
"Accept, Mr. Governor General, the homage of my highest consideration.
"D.J. CARD. MERCIER,
"_Arch. of Malines_."
In less moving phrases, but in deadly corroboration, the continuation
of the report of Minister Whitlock says:
REPORT OF MINISTER WHITLOCK (continued).
[Sidenote: Appalling stories of German behavior.]
"_The rage, the terror, and despair excited by this measure all over
Belgium were beyond anything we had witnessed since the day the
Germans poured into Brussels. The delegates of the Commission for
Relief in Belgium, returning to Brussels, told the most distressing
stories of the scenes of cruelty and sorrow attending the seizures.
And daily, hourly almost, since that time appalling stories have been
related by Belgians coming to the Legation. It is impossible for us
to verify them, first, because it is necessary for us to exercise all
possible tact in dealing with the subject at all, and secondly because
there is no means of communication between the Occupations-Gebiet and
the Etappen-Gebiet. Transportation everywhere in Belgium is difficult,
the vicinal railways scarcely operating any more because of the lack
of oil, while all the horses have been taken. The people who are
forced to go from one village to another must do so on foot or in
vans drawn by the few miserable horses that are left. The wagons of
the breweries, the one institution that the Germans have scrupulously
respected, are hauled by oxen._
[Sidenote: A foul deed.]
"_The well-known tendency of sensational reports to exaggerate
themselves, especially in time of war, and in a situation like that
existing here, with no newspapers to serve as a daily clearing house
for all the rumours that are as avidly believed as they are eagerly
repeated, should of course be considered; but even if a modicum of all
that is told is true there still remains enough to stamp this deed as
one of the foulest that history records._
"_I am constantly in receipt of reports from all over Belgium that
tend to bear out the stories one constantly hears of brutality and
cruelty. A number of men sent back to Mons are said to be in a dying
condition, many of them tubercular. At Malines and at Antwerp returned
men have died, their friends asserting that they have been victims of
neglect and cruelty, of cold, of exposure, of hunger._" (Continued on
page 74.)
A vivid sketch of the deportations from Mons, drawn by a participant,
may well be cited here:
[Sidenote: "The woes of slavery."]
"I will take the 18th of November of last year [1916]. A week or so
before that a placard was placed on the walls telling my capital
city of Mons that in seven days all the men of that city who were
not clergymen, who were not priests, who did not belong to the city
council, would be deported.
"At half past five, in the gray of the morning on the 18th of
November, they walked out, six thousand two hundred men at Mons,
myself and another leading them down the cobblestones of the street
and out where the rioting would be less than in the great city, with
the soldiers on each side, with bayonets fixed, with the women held
back.
"The degradation of it! The degradation of it as they walked into this
great market square, where the pens were erected, exactly as if they
were cattle--all the great men of that province--the lawyers, the
statesmen, the heads of the trades, the men that had made the capital
of Hainaut glorious during the last twenty years.
"There they were collected; no question of who they were, whether they
were busy or what they were doing, or what their position in life. 'Go
to the right! Go to the left! Go to the right!' So they were turned to
the one side or the other.
"Trains were standing there ready, steaming, to take them to Germany.
You saw on the one side the one brother taken, the other brother left.
A hasty embrace and they were separated and gone. You had here a man
on his knees before a German officer, pleading and begging to take his
old father's place; that was all. The father went and the son stayed.
They were packed in those trains that were waiting there.
"You saw the women in hundreds, with bundles in their hands beseeching
to be permitted to approach the trains, to give their men the last
that they had in life between themselves and starvation--a small
bundle of clothing to keep them warm on their way to Germany. You saw
women approach with a bundle that had been purchased by the sale of
the last of their household effects. Not one was allowed to approach
to give her man the warm pair of stockings or the warm jacket, so
there might be some chance of his reaching there. Off they went!" John
H. Gade, in _The National Geographic Magazine_, May, 1917.
The Belgian women sent a touching appeal to Minister Whitlock: