The International Committee of the Red Cross at Geneva early in 1918
issued an appeal against the use of poisonous gases. The Rev. Dr. Balan,
President of the Consistory for the Prussian Province of Posen and head
of the Protestant Church in that province, refused, "after
conscientiously examining it before God," to indorse or circulate the
appeal, and wrote as follows to the President of the International
Committee:
The first question that occurred to me on reading your appeal
was, Is it really a more inhumane method of waging war when
Germany, in defending herself against an immensely superior
force of enemies in a fight for existence forced upon her, makes
use also of poisonous gas, than when her enemies pour over our
armies, so much weaker in numbers, devastating and
disintegrating showers of iron, lasting days and weeks, and to
which we cannot reply in such volume because we have not so many
human hands at our disposal for the manufacture of munitions as
our enemies have? I say, No. I ask further, Is it more humane to
set the whole world in motion in order by starving it to prevent
a great nation that, with its noble, chivalrous Kaiser at its
head, has manifested clearly enough its unbounded love of peace,
from taking the place to which it is entitled by the side of
other nations than when this nation uses every means of defense
that its enlightened scientists have discovered? I say again,
No.
Dr. Balan maintains in the further course of his letter that the enemies
of Germany cannot expect to be treated humanely in any special manner,
for all war is inhumane, because they have from the outset persistently
and constantly utterly disregarded the laws of nations and the "sacred
sign of the Red Cross." In conclusion this Prussian church dignitary
informs the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross
that if he and his friends really wish to render the whole suffering
population of Europe a truly great service, they should do their utmost
to bring home to the French people, who are so deeply to be pitied, the
fact that the phantom which, deluded by the lies of their and England's
rulers, they still pursue is dragging them every day to deeper and more
hopeless misery. At the very moment that France realizes this, Dr. Balan
asserts, there will be peace. He explains that the phantom pursued by
the French is "the recovery of two provinces that have been German from
time immemorial, and of which we were once robbed against all right and
justice."