J. H. Morgan

“ But in proportion as our conception is high and the German conception is low, it seems to me incumbent on us to place our hopes for the future in the strength of our right arm and in that alone. And if, in Burke’s noble phrase, we are to consider ourselves for the future “embodied with Europe” so that, sympathetic with the adversity or the happiness of mankind, we feel that nothing human is alien to us, then we must be prepared to support our treaty guarantees of the independence of the small nations with an adequate armed force ”

“ For their part, they expressly and solemnly protest against a population which has, with the most despicable means, waged a dishonourable war against the German soldiers, and still more against the Government which, in complete perversion of their duties, has given rein to the senseless passions of the population, and even now does not scruple to free itself from its own heavy guilt by mendacious libels against the German Army. ”

“ I have been told that there are still some individuals in England who cherish the idea that this vast orgy of blood, lust, rapine, hate, and pride is in some peculiar way merely the Bacchanalia of troops unused to the heady bouquet of the wines of Champagne or, stranger still, that it is the mental aberration of a people seduced by idle tales into these courses by its rulers. ”

“ The Germans have broken all laws, human and divine, and not even the ancient freemasonry of arms, whose honourable traditions are almost as old as war itself, has restrained them in their brutal and licentious fury. It is useless to attempt to discriminate between the people and their rulers ”

“ Till the outbreak of the present conflict men who sought for signs of the progress of mankind were cheered by the hope that war would hereafter be waged only between regular disciplined forces on each side; that these forces would abstain from needless cruelty, that women would be protected from lust, and that the lives of non-combatants would not be endangered. There was even a prospect that private property would not be destroyed except in so far as a definite military aim made its destruction unavoidable, as when a hostile force had to be shelled out of its shelter in a village. ”

“ The voice of America is a voice crying in the wilderness; both groups of belligerents deny the American contention that peace, and with it the commerce of neutrals, should govern the construction of the rules of war. How can it be otherwise in a struggle for existence? I very much doubt whether, for a long time to come, international lawyers can afford to assume, as they have been in the habit of doing, that peace, not war, is the normal conditions of nations. A nation which like Germany will not admit your major premises will certainly reject your conclusions when it suits her convenience. ”

“ Mentem mortalia tangunt—human things touch the heart—acquires for the German Staff a new and sinister significance. Every tender feeling that their enemy has becomes a hostage for his tractability, because it can be violated if he is contumacious. His churches can be profaned, his priests murdered, his boys driven into exile, his women-folk handed over to the lust of a licentious soldiery, and his home destroyed. If his troops defeat one in the field, the civilian population can be made to pay for it with their lives,65 so that eventually he may be disarmed not by defeat but by horror. ”

“ Quite apart from this inductive evidence there is the fact that the German Government is so tainted with the infamy of indisputable mendacity that no sober and impartial man can credit a single word of what it says. ”

“ The Germans appear in the case of the Russian, as in that of the British, Belgian, and French prisoners, to have taken a malignant and bestial delight in outraging their feelings of self-respect, and men were herded together day and night in cattle-trucks deep in manure, and forced to perform their natural functions where they stood, packed together so close that they could not sit and dared not lie down. ”

“ Civilians who fire upon invading troops without observing the requirements which the Hague Convention prescribes may, no doubt, be shot according to the customs of war; but there must be some proof that these particular civilians have done so. To put to death a quarter or more of the adult male inhabitants of a village because some shots have been fired, or are supposed by an excited soldiery to have been fired, out of its houses, is mere murder. All the paragraphs in the Manual of War issued by the German Staff cannot make it anything else. ”

“ Outrages upon women have been far more numerous than in any war between civilised nations during the last hundred years. One crime deserves special condemnation, because it is done deliberately and is justified by its perpetrators. This is the practice of seizing innocent non-combatants, usually the leading inhabitants of a town or village, calling them hostages and executing them in cold blood if the population of the town or village whom “the hostages” cannot control, fail to obey the commands of the invaders. ”

“ I doubt if we shall hear very much in future of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, or of the sanctity of the levée en masse as a medium of lawful transition from the one to the other; he who studies the German 52 White Book on hostilities in Belgium will see how easily a belligerent, if he be so minded, can dispose with a quibble of the obligations to respect an improvised force which has “no time” to organise. A belligerent contemplating a sudden attack and a belligerent having to meet it will entertain very different conceptions as to what is meant by “no time.” ”

“ The subtle danger of the presence of such a nation in the European comity is that it uses the language of that international society, and yet all the while means something different, and that with every appearance of solemn subscription to its forms and treaties it is making mental reservations and “economies” which strike at the very root of them.
The Casuistry of the Intellectual Savage.
In the hands of such a nation an international convention is not merely idle and impotent; the convention itself becomes positively dangerous, simply because it can be perverted. ”

“ Neither can we suppose that the declarations of professors, victims of a doctrine and a practice which compels them to approve every act of the State are more to be accepted as expressing what may be felt by the less vocal Germans. We must remember how severe is the German censorship, how accustomed the Germans are to believe what their Government tells them, how habitually mendacious the military authorities have been in the accounts they supply of the conduct of the Allied Powers and their troops. ”

“ War has, indeed, come to be, as von der Goltz prophesied it would be, a war not between armies but between peoples, and we are further than ever from the oft-quoted maxim of Rousseau that “War is not a relation of Man to Man but of States to States,” in which particular individuals are enemies only by the accident of a uniform. ”

“ International Law rests on a reciprocity of obligation; if one belligerent fails to observe it the other is, as a mere matter of self-preservation, released from its observance towards him, and is bound not by law but by morality, by his own conception of what he owes to his own self-respect. ”

“ The German Army is accustomed to make war only against hostile armies, and not against peaceful inhabitants. The incontrovertible fact that from the beginning a defensive struggle in the interests of self-protection was forced upon the German troops in Belgium by the population of the country cannot be done away with by the inquiry of any commission.
The narratives of fugitives which have been put together by the Belgian Commission, and which are characterised as the result of careful and impartial investigation, bear the stamp of untrustworthiness, if not of malicious invention. ”

“ A nation thus acquiring the destructive resources of the West, while retaining the peculiar morality of the East—its ruthlessness, its contempt for human life, its sombre fatalism, its indifference to personal liberty, its chicanery, its love of espionage—might, he apprehended, fall upon Europe in a catastrophic assault as unforeseen as it would be unprovoked, and threaten her with destruction. ”

“ She alone has taught, both by precept and example, that there are no limitations to what is justifiable by the exigencies of war. “C’est la guerre” is the common answer of German officers when implored by the victims to stop the lust and rapine of their men.72 It follows from all this that war as taught and practised by the Germans exceeds in savagery even the practices of the ancient world, in which it was thought the mark of barbarism to poison wells, desecrate temples and murder priests—practices which the Germans have not hesitated to pursue. ”

“ Reports of atrocities can serve no useful purpose unless they move men to reflect no less resolutely than deeply upon what is to be done to deliver Europe from the scourge of their repetition. It may well be that my own reflections will seem cynical to one, depressing to another, arbitrary to a third. They are not the idols of the theatre, and in academic circles they may not be fashionable. But the catastrophe that has disturbed the dreams of the idealogues must teach jurists and statesmen to beware of the opiate of words and sacramental phrases. ”

“ Where the life of the civilian is held so cheap, it is not surprising that the German soldier, himself the subject of a fearful discipline, is under a strong temptation to escape punishment for the consequences of his own careless or riotous or drunken behaviour by attributing those consequences to the civil population, for the latter is invariably suspected. ”

“ The whole of the Belgian People’s War must therefore be judged from the point of view of an unorganised armed resistance of the civil population. As such resistance is only allowed in unoccupied territory, it was for this reason alone, without any doubt, contrary to international law in all those places which were already in occupation of German troops, and particularly at Aerschot, Andenne, and Louvain. ”

“ Before I leave the subject of the treatment of private property by the German troops, I should like 88 to draw the attention of the reader to some unpleasant facts which throw a baneful light on the temper of German officers and men. If one thing is more clearly established than another by my inquiries among the officers of our Staff and divisional commands, it is that châteaux or private houses used as the head-quarters of German officers were frequently found to have been left in a state of bestial pollution, which can only be explained by gross drunkenness or filthy malice. ”

“ I confine myself to the practices which have come under my observation.88 Here it is clear that the treatment of civilians is regulated by no more rational or humane policy than that of intimidation or, even worse, of sullen vindictiveness. As the German troops passed through the 77 communes and towns of the arrondissements of Ypres, Hazebrouck, Bethune, and Lille, they shot indiscriminately at the innocent spectators of their march; the peasant tilling his fields, the refugee tramping the roads, and the workman returning to his home. ”

“ The general impression left in my mind by these subsequent inquiries at head-quarters as to the value of the statements made to me earlier by soldiers in hospital is that those statements were true. There is a tendency in some quarters to depreciate the value of the testimony of the British soldier, but the degree of its value depends a good deal on the capacity in which, and the person to whom, the soldier is addressing himself. In writing letters home or in talking to solicitous visitors the soldier is one person; in giving evidence in an official inquiry he is quite another. ”

“ Indeed there seems some reason to suppose that the German troops hold the civil inhabitants responsible even for the acts of lawful belligerents, and, as my inquiries at Merris and Messines go to show, a French patrol cannot operate in the vicinity of a French or Belgian village without exposing the inhabitants to sanguinary punishment or predatory fines. There is not the slightest evidence to show that French civilians have fired upon German troops, and in spite of the difficulty of proving a negative there is a good deal of reason to reject such a supposition. ”

“ The Belgian Government had, at the most, two days—two days in which to organise a whole nation for defence. The German ultimatum to Belgium was issued on August 2nd; the violation of Belgian territory took place on August 4th. How could a little nation with a small standing army organise its whole population on a military basis within two days against the most powerful and mobile army in Europe, equipped with all the modern engines of war? ”

“ The imprisoned officers had to sleep in dirty beds full of bugs, lice, and other vermin. Their meagre fare was served up on dirty tables, littered with straw, whilst alongside were other tables, covered with clean tablecloths and decently furnished even to the extent of glasses for beer, and on these tables dinner was served for the sentries, German subalterns, who looked on at the prisoners and their wretched accommodation in the most insolent manner.
All the imprisoned officers were formed into companies, commanded by rough and rude sergeant-majors, who treated them like common soldiers. ”