Logan Marshall

“ In many campaigns of the past, disease has slain its thousands where bullets and shells have killed hundreds, and even the twentieth century with its marvelous science of sanitation has not defeated the direful common enemies of allies and foes. Why disease should attack masses of men in the prime of life, living in the open air, and on the whole well fed and clothed, at first sight seems strange, but when we remember that modern fighting begets an intolerable thirst, which the soldier is naturally tempted to slake as best he can and when he can, at least one reason is not hard to find. ”

“ Even at this hour of hysterical and relentless warfare there lies deep in the heart of the democracy of Europe a consuming hatred of militarism.
Drops of water (or blood) do not more naturally flow into each than did the English hatred of Cæsarism blend with the high French hatred of the evil thing; and when the palaces have done fighting, the cottages of Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Black Sea to the Hebrides, will proclaim its destruction. ”

“ Whoever or whatever country is to blame for this war, Belgium is innocent. Her hands are free from stain. She has kept the faith. She saw it with the eyes of duty and honor. Her government is carried on in another land. Her king is in the trenches. Her army is decimated, but the last decimals fight on.
Her people wander in foreign lands, the highest and lowest looking for work and bread; they cannot look for homes. Those left behind huddle near the ruins of their shattered villages or take refuge in towns which cannot feed their own citizens. ”

“ Their sufferings are majestic in simple heroism and uncomplaining endurance. So majestic in proportion ought the relief to be. The Belgian people are wards of the world. In the circumstances the Belgian people are special wards of the one great country that is secure in its peace and that by its natural instincts of human sympathy and love of freedom is best suited to do the work that should be done for Belgium. ”

“ To destroy an enemy ship, an unarmed merchant vessel of great value and power, is an act of war; to sink her in such a manner as to send hundreds of her passengers, among them many neutrals, to their death, is morally murder, and no technical military plea will avail to procure any other verdict at the bar of civilized public opinion.”
Boston Post: “The sinking of the British liner Lusitania by the torpedo of a German submarine with terrible loss of life, is the worst crime against civilization and humanity that the modern world has ever known. ”

“ But to have Louvain’s atrocities justified, to have the destruction of towns systematically brought about in a spirit of fiendish reprisal or as part of a propaganda of military terrorism, this is what revolts the world. It is this demoniacal barbarism, raised to the ultimate power for evil by modern mechanism, that staggers civilization. ”

“ In the minds of Prussian officers war seems to have become a sort of sacred mission, one of the highest functions of the omnipotent state, which is itself as much an army as a state. Ordinary morality and the ordinary sentiment of pity vanish in its presence, superseded by a new standard which justifies to the soldier every means that can conduce to success, however shocking to a natural sense of justice and humanity, however revolting to his own feelings. ”

“ Would you hesitate to act if a man slapped you in the face? I do not say what should be demanded. That is for the government to decide. But an explanation should be demanded of Germany at once. The German submarine violated a law that even savages would recognize. I would hold Germany to account by proclaiming her an outlaw among the nations of the world. If the German government pleads that it was justified in this crime—which it will—it is then the duty of the United States to join [71] with other neutral nations and cut her off from the rest of the world. ”

“ It is indeed a war against civilization. The personnel of the armies makes it so. Every battle is the sacrifice of human assets that cannot be replaced. That is the real tragedy of this stupendous conflict.
Perhaps it is better that the inevitable has come so soon. The burden of preparation was beginning to stagger Europe. There may emerge from the whirlpool new dynasties, new methods, new purposes. This may be the furnace necessary to purge humanity of its brutal perspective. The French Revolution gave an impulse to democracy which it has never lost. ”

“ To all human beings of normal mentality it must have seemed that the destruction of the Lusitania marked the apex of horror. There is, indeed, nothing in modern history—nothing, at least, since the Black Hole of Calcutta and some of the indescribable atrocities of Kurdish fanatics—to supply the mind with a vantage ground from which to measure the causeless and profitless savagery of this black deed of murder. ”

“ Towns like Dendermonde, that were of 10,000 people, have now 4,000, and in Dendermonde 1,200 houses have fallen under the iron and fire of war. Into that vast graveyard and camp of the desolate only the United States enters with an adequate and responsible organization upon the mission of humanity.
No such opportunity was ever given to a people, no such test ever came to a Christian people in all the records of time. Will the American nation rise to the chance given to it to prove that its civilization is a real thing and that its acts measure up with its inherent and professed Christianity? ”

“ THE WORLD-WIDE INDICTMENT OF GERMANY FOR THE LUSITANIA ATROCITY VIEWS OF COLONEL ROOSEVELT, UNITED STATES SENATORS AND OTHER PROMINENT MEN—OPINIONS OF THE NEWSPAPERS OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA — VIEWS OF PROMINENT CANADIANS.
Not even the invasion of peaceful Belgium, nor any of the other atrocities charged to the belligerent nations in the great war, stirred such universal and emphatic condemnation as the destruction of the Lusitania and over half its human freight of human lives. From all quarters of the globe the cry of amazement, indignation and outrage arose. ”

“ A whole nation of 18,000,000 people, including 2,000,000 Jews, are carrying the burden of the war in the east on their backs, and their backs are breaking under the load. The great majority of the whole Polish people, about 11,000,000 men, women and children, peasants and workmen, have been driven into the open, their homes taken from them or burned, and they flee, terror-stricken, hungry and in confusion, whither they know not. In ruins, in woods or in hollows they are hiding, feeding on roots and the bark of trees. It is Christian humanity that calls for help for succumbing Poland. ”

“ All great achievement in the world has been a matter of great faith.
The hope of humanitarianism and civilization rests on the very enormity of the present calamity. The horrors and atrocities of the war are so great, its waste and devastation so enormous, its scars so deep, that [320] [1] no one who is touched by it can want war again. The disaster is so overwhelming that peace when it comes must be lasting. ”

“ It is civilization that is being shot down by machine guns in Europe. That great German host is not made up of mercenaries, nor of the type of men that at one time composed armies. There are Ehrlichs serving as privates in the ranks and in the French corps are Rostands. A bullet does not kill a man; it destroys a generation of learning, annihilates the mentality which was about to be humanity’s instrument in unearthing another of nature’s secrets. The very vehicles of progress are the victims. ”

“ She cannot plead ignorance of a vessel’s identity, or attack it unless it refuses to stop when signaled. The burden of proof is upon the submarine, and to torpedo a vessel on suspicion merely would be unredeemed piracy and murder.
“This is distinctly a case in which the convenient doctrine of ‘military necessity’ is not to be invoked. Nor would an occasional misuse of a neutral flag by belligerent vessels, as a ruse of war, justify a mistaken act of destruction. If every British merchantman approaching England flew the American colors, that would not excuse the torpedoing of one American ship. ”

“ All that made life humanly fair is hidden in the fetid clouds of war where savages (in terror and hysteria) grope for each other’s throats.
The glory of war—rot! The heroism of war—rot! The scarlet and beneficent energies of war—rot! When you look at it close what you see are hulking masses of brutes with fear behind them prodding them on, or wild and splendid savages, hysterical with hate, battling to save their hearth fires and women from the oncoming horde. Reversal to barbarism. ”

“ The saddest, most heartrending thing I have ever seen has been the patience of every Belgian, whatever his state, I have met. Among the thousands of [117] refugees I have seen in Holland, in the long stream that crossed the frontier at Maastricht and besieged the doors of the Belgian Consul while I was there, no man, no woman railed or declaimed against the horror of their situation. The pathos of lonely, staring, apathetic endurance is tragic beyond words. So grateful, so simply grateful, are they, every one, for whatever is done for them. ”

“ Will not the conscience of the whole world rise against those nameless barbarians who shelled Red Cross flags floating over that twice-sacred pile, who have committed this supreme sacrifice against the spirit of man in seven hundred years? Those gray cliffs of chiseled stone had risen above the furious tides of innumerable invasions unhurt, spared by the most savage onsets. Battered, by every storm of heaven and earth, the noblest sculpture of the West remained until German culture came. ”

“ In truth it can be stated that never has a war carried on between civilized nations assumed the savage and ferocious character of the one which at this moment is being waged on our soil by an implacable adversary. Pillage, rape, arson, and murder are the common practice of our enemies; and the facts which have been revealed to us day by day at once constitute definite crimes against common rights, punished by the codes of every country with the most severe and the most dishonoring penalties, and which prove an astonishing degeneration in German habits of thought since 1870. ”

“ What I would emphasize is that in the natural state of barbarism induced by the war the woman falls back to her antique state of she animal. In thousands of years she has been made into a thing of exquisite and mysterious femininity; in a day she is thrown back to kinship with the she dog. Slashed with sabres, pricked with lances, she is a mere thing of prey.
Surely not the dear Countess and Baroness? Of course not. War is made in the palaces, but it does not attack the palaces. The worth of every nation dwells in the cottage; and it is upon the cottage that war works its worst infamy. ”

“ So overwhelming has been the thought of human suffering in Europe, so anxious has the world been to relieve it, that little thought has been bestowed on the dumb sufferers. Various war photographs have shown us the novel sight of the dogs of Belgium impressed into service for dragging the smaller guns; but all contestants use horses, and when we reflect that the average life of a cavalry horse at the front is not more than a week, if that, we gain some idea of the sacrifice of animals which modern warfare demands. ”

“ In a day, in an hour, a cycle of civilization is canceled. What you saw in the morning was suave and ordered life; and the sun sets on howling savagery. In the morning black-coated men lifted their hats to women. Ere nightfall they are slashing them with sabres and burning the houses over their heads. And the grave old professors who were droning platitudes of peace and progress and humanitarianism are screaming, ere today is done, shrill senile clamors for blood and ravage and rapine.
A reversal to barbarism. ”

“ The inner shrine of the inalienable sense of human brotherhood is profaned. One cannot reconcile with any program for the lasting accomplishment of good and the victory of the truth, this fever of murder on a grand scale, this insensate madness of pillage and slaughter that goes from alarum and counter-alarum to overt acts of fiendish and sickening brutality, palliated because they are done by anonymous thousands instead of by one man who can be named. ”

“ The law of nations and the law of God have been alike trampled upon. The German government must be given to understand that no plea of military necessity will now avail it before the tribunal on which sits as judge the humane conscience of the world. As was declared by Germany’s own representative at The Hague Congress, the late Marschall von Bieberstein, there are some atrocities which international law does not need to legislate against, since they fall under the instant and universal condemnation of mankind. ”

“ Seen from a distance, this apparently confused mass of passages, crossing and recrossing one another, resembles an irregular gridiron.
“The life led by the infantry on both sides at close quarters is a strange, cramped existence, with death always near, either by means of some missile from above or some mine explosion from beneath—a life which has one dull, monotonous background of mud and water. Even when there is but little fighting the troops are kept hard at work strengthening the existing defenses, constructing others, and improvising the shelter imperative in such weather.” ”