This fearful and disgraceful record of a Nation’s shame and of an
Emperor’s complicity in atrocious crimes against God and man is no work
of fiction, but a plain unvarnished statement of the grim and terrible
work of the Kaiser’s Huns of Attila which I have considered it a duty to
lay before the British public.
Modern Germany, frothing with military Nietzschism, seems to have
returned to a primitive barbarism. Belgium, a peaceful modern nation,
has been swept by fire and sword, and its honest, pious inhabitants
tortured and massacred, not because the German soldiery desired to wreak
such vengeance upon a people with whom they could have no quarrel, but
because they had been encouraged “to act with unrelenting severity, to
create examples which by their frightfulness would be a warning to the
whole country.”
The wild orgies of blood and debauchery, the atrocious outrages,
murders, and mutilations, the ruthless violation and killing of
defenceless women, girls, and children of tender age, have been, it is
now admitted by the Germans themselves, carried out with their full
knowledge, and even as part of the actual plan of campaign of their
War-Lords.
Germany, though boasting of her culture, her refinement, her honest
home-life, and the peaceful efforts of her Emperor, has for ever lost
her place among civilized nations. It now stands revealed that when her
diplomatic methods of base chicanery and lying fail then she does not
hesitate to resort to acts so dastardly and inhuman as to have no
parallel. Not only has she broken her most solemn treaties and moral
engagements, but all the rules of civilized warfare to which she was a
signatory at The Hague she has also violated, merely regarding them as
“a scrap of paper.”
Not content with resorting to every act of savagery and every refinement
of cruelty which degenerated minds, filled with the blood-lust of war,
could conceive, her troops, by order of her generals, have made a
practice all along the line of placing before them innocent women and
children to act as a living screen, in the hope that the Allies would
not, from motives of humanity, fire upon them.
One cannot read a single page of this awful record--the German Black
Book--without being thrilled with horror at unspeakable acts of
civilized troops, who, at the behest of their Kaiser, and the exposed
yet still ruling _camarilla_ at Berlin, have become simply as the Huns
of Attila.
The contents of this book are no hearsay stories, but hard facts
officially recorded in _dossiers_ in the French and Belgian Ministries
of War, most of them, indeed, sworn statements taken before
burgomasters, mayors, prefects, and magistrates. Even our brave fellows
wounded in the Kaiser’s savage attack upon Europe have brought back from
the front similar narratives of the most appalling crimes. Evidence of
German trickery and savagery we have, too, in our midst, for trains,
sentries, and policemen have been shot at under cover of darkness by men
who mean to emulate the methods of their compatriots.
The frightful deeds which have been done over the face of Belgium and in
France are, no doubt, intended to be repeated in Great Britain, and, if
it were possible, the Red Hand of Destruction would certainly be laid
very heavy upon us--more heavily, perhaps, because we, by our honesty of
purpose, have incurred the hatred of Kaiserdom.
I would bid all sufferers in Belgium and France to remember that when
Attila of old came to Chalons, full of ostentation as the great
War-Lord, he came to his own undoing, and his dominion at once
disappeared to the winds. There is One with Whom vengeance lies for
wrongs, and most assuredly will He mete out the same dread Fate of death
and obscurity to the unblushing War-Lord of Germany, who, daily, with
his blasphemous impiety, lifts his bloodstained hands and thanks his
Maker for his shameful “successes.”