Our Part in the Great War

Lord Bryce replied:

"When the early accounts of the atrocious conduct of the German Government in Belgium were laid before the Committee over which I presided they seemed hardly credible. But when we sifted them, going carefully through every case, and rejecting all those that seemed doubtful, we found such a mass of concurrent testimony coming from different sources, and carefully tested by the lawyers who examined the witnesses, that we could not doubt that the facts which remained were beyond question. You ask how German officers came to give such orders. The Committee tried to answer that question in a passage of their report. They point out that for the German officer caste morality and right stop when war begins. The German Chancellor admitted that they had done wrong in invading Belgium, but they would go on and hack their way through. The German military class had brooded so long on war that their minds had become morbid. To Prussian officers war has become, when the interests of the State require it, a sort of sacred mission: everything may be done by and for the omnipotent State. Pity and morality vanish, and are superseded by the new standard justifying every means that conduces to success. 'This,' said the Committee, 'is a specifically military doctrine, the outcome of a theory held by a ruling caste who have brooded and thought, written and talked and dreamed about war until they have fallen under its obsession and been hypnotized by its spirit.' You will find these doctrines set forth in 'Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege,' the German Official Monograph on the usages of war on land, issued under the direction of the German Staff. What military needs suggest becomes lawful. You will find in that book a justification for everything the German Army has done, for seizing hostages, i. e., innocent inhabitants of an invaded area, and shooting them if necessary. You will find what amounts to a justification even of assassination. The German soldiers' diaries captured on prisoners offer the proof that the German officers acted upon this principle. 'This is not the only case that history records in which a false theory, disguising itself as loyalty to a State or a Church, has perverted the conception of Duty, and become a source of danger to the world.' This doctrine spread outside military circles. I do not venture to say that it has infected anything like the whole people. I hope that it did not. But national pride and national vanity were enlisted, and it became a widespread doctrine accepted by the military and even by many civilians. The Prussians are far more penetrated by the military spirit than the Americans or English or French, and such a doctrine ministered to the greatness of the power of Prussia. It was part of Prussian military theory and sometimes of practice a century ago. But in the rest of Germany it is a new thing. There was nothing of the kind in southern Germany when I knew it fifty years ago.

"In an army there will be individual cases of horrible brutality – plunder, rape, ill-treatment of civilians. There will always be men of criminal instinct whose passion is loosed by the immunities of war conditions. Drunkenness, moreover, may turn a decent soldier into a wild beast. But most of the crimes committed in Belgium were not committed by drunken troops. The German peasant, the 'Hans' whom we know, is a good, simple, kindly sort of fellow, as are the rural folk in every country. But remember in the German army there is a habit of implicit obedience. The officers are extremely severe in military discipline. They will shoot readily for a minor infraction. It is the officers more than the private soldiers that were to blame. And some of the officers were shocked by what they were forced to do. 'I am merely executing orders and I should be punished if I did not execute them,' said more than one officer whose words were recorded. How can an officer in war time disobey the orders of the supreme military command? He would be shot, and if he were to say he could not remain in an army where he was expected to commit crimes, to retire in war time, if he were permitted to retire, would mean disgrace to his name. It is the spirit of the Higher German Army Command that is to blame. The authority that issued the orders is guilty. The German people as a whole are not cruel, but many of them have been infected by this war spirit.

"And we little realize how strict is the German censorship. The German people have been fed with falsehoods. So far are they from believing in the record of their own army's cruelties, that they have been made to believe in cruelties alleged to have been committed by French and English troops. They have been fed on stories of soldiers with their eyes put out by Belgians. The Chancellor of the German Empire in a press communication said:

"Belgian girls gouged out the eyes of the German wounded. Officials of Belgian cities have invited our officers to dinner and shot and killed them across the table. Contrary to all international law, the whole civilian population of Belgium was called out, and after having at first shown friendliness, carried on in the rear of our troops terrible warfare with concealed weapons. Belgian women cut the throats of soldiers whom they had quartered in their homes while they were sleeping.

"There was no truth at all in these stories."

The next question was submitted as follows:

"Has the German Government made any effort to prove their general charges and to disprove the detailed charges of your report and the report made by the French Government?"

Lord Bryce writes in reply:

"The diaries of German soldiers referred to have been published throughout the world, and no question has been raised of their authenticity. They contain testimony to outrages committed in Belgium and France that is overwhelming. No answer is possible. The German Government have never made a reply to the Report of the British Committee. They attempted to answer some of the reports made by the Belgian Government. But their answer was really an admission to the facts, for it consisted in allegations that Belgian civilians had given provocation. They endeavored to prove that Belgian civilians had shot at them. It would not have been strange if some civilians had shot at those who suddenly burst into their country, but no proof has ever been given of more than a few of such cases, nor of the stories of outrages committed by Belgian priests, women and children on German soldiers. Even if such occasional shooting by civilians had taken place, as very likely it did, that did not justify the wholesale slaughter of innocent persons and the burning of whole villages. In the burning of the 26 houses at Melle, which you tell me you witnessed, no allegations were made of shooting by civilians. The little girl murdered at Alost, to whom you refer, had not shot at the Germans. The woman, eighty years old, had not shot at them. These severities were committed as a method to achieve an end. That end was to terrorize the civilian population, and destroy the spiritual resources of the nation."

The final question was this:

"As the result of this war, what hope have we of reconstruction and an altered policy in Germany?"

Viscount Bryce answered:

"It is to be hoped and expected that the Allies will so completely defeat Germany as to discredit the whole military system and the ideas out of which the horrors of German war practice have developed. It is essential to inflict a defeat sufficiently decisive in the eyes of the German people that they will have done with their military caste and its nefarious doctrine, and it is essential to discredit the methods themselves – discredit them by their failure – in so thorough a manner that no nation will ever use them again. The way, then, of ending what is called 'frightfulness' is by a complete victory over it. It is our task to show that shocking military practices and total disregard of right do not succeed. We must bring to pass the judgment of facts to the effect that such methods do not avail. In this determination our British people are unanimous as they have never been before. The invasion of Belgium, the atrocities committed there, and the sinking of the Lusitania– these three series of acts united the whole British people in its firm resolve to prosecute the war to a complete victory. Now on the top of these things and of isolated crimes of the German Government, like the shooting of Miss Cavell and Captain Fryatt, come these abominable deportations of Belgians into a sort of slavery."

In all communication with Lord Bryce, one feels the accurate fair-minded scholar. He is without heat and partisanship. He added in a note:

"We know that our British soldiers fight hard, but they fight fair, and they have no personal hatred to their enemies. I have been at the British front and have seen their spirit. I was told that our men when they take a prisoner often clap him on the back and give him a cigarette. There is no personal hatred among our officers or men. Efforts are properly made here at home to keep bitterness against the German people as a whole from the minds of our people, but it is right that they should detest and do their utmost to overthrow the system that has produced this war and has made it so horrible."

II

SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES

I have seen the original diaries of the German soldiers in the army which devastated Belgium and Northern France. Things tumble out just as they happened, hideous acts, unedited thoughts. Phillips Brooke once spoke of the sensation there would be if the contents of our minds were dumped on Boston Common for people to see. Here is the soul of the German people spilled out into writing. This is what Germany was in the year 1914. This record left by dead men and by captured men is a very living thing to me, because I saw these German soldiers at their work of burning and torture. Here they have themselves told of doing the very thing I saw them do. We must not miss the point of their proof, written and signed by the perpetrators themselves. It is the proof of systematic massacre, systematic pillage, systematic arson.

These diaries found on the field of battle were brought to the French General Staff along with the arms and equipments of the dead and the prisoners. They are written by the soldiers because of Article 75 of the German Instruction for Campaign Service (Felddienst-Ordnung), which states that "these journals of war serve for information on the general operations, and, by bringing together the various reports of active fighting, they are the basis for the later definitive histories of the campaigns. They should be kept daily." No words could be more exactly prophetic. Those diaries will be the basis of all future histories of the war. The keeping of them is obligatory for the officers, and seems to be voluntary on the part of the men, but with a measure of implied requirement. So stern did some of the soldiers feel the military requirement to be that they kept on with their record up to the point of death. Here is the diary of a soldier of the Fourth Company of the Tenth Battalion of Light Infantry Reserves, which he was writing at the moment he was fatally wounded.

"Ich bin verwundet. Behüte dich Gott. Küsse das Kind. Es soll fromm sein." And then the pencil stops forever. The writing on that final page of all is regular and firm up to the "Ich bin verwundet." Those last four sentences are each just a line long, as if each was a cry. He wrote the word "Küsse" and could hardly rally himself. His pencil slips into three marks without meaning, then he writes "das Kind." I trust my German readers will not deny me the use of this diary. It is the only one of which I have not seen the original. The photographic reproduction is my only evidence of this flash of tenderness among a thousand acts of infamy.

The diaries are little black-covered pocket copybooks: the sort that women in our country use for the family accounts. They contain about 100 pages. They average five inches in length and three in width. A few of the diaries, and those mostly belonging to officers, are written in ink. But most of them are in pencil, occasionally in black, but the large majority in purple.

Many of the diaries are curt records of daily marches and military operations. The man is too tired to write anything but distances, names of places, engagements. That was what the Great German General Staff had in mind in ordering the practice. They could not foresee what would slip through into the record, because in all their calculations they have always forgotten the human spirit. Once again we are indebted to German thoroughness. The causes, the objects, the methods of this war, will not be in doubt, as in other wars of the past. History will be clear in dealing its judgments. Like the surgeon's ray on a fester, German light has played on the sore spots. So the soldiers have gone on making their naked records of crimes committed and their naïve mental reactions on what they did, till all too late the German machine forbade further exposure of the national soul. But the faithful peasant fingers had written what all eternity cannot annul.

"These booklets, stained, bruised, sometimes perforated by bayonet or torn by splinters of shell, the pencilings in haste, day by day, in spite of fatigue, in spite even of wounds" – they are the most human documents of the war.

This privilege of working with the originals themselves was extended by the Ministry of War. The General Staff issued a Laissez-Passer, and gave me an introduction to the fine white-haired old Lieutenant, who is a Russian and German scholar. Together we went word by word over the booklets. I was impressed by the fair-minded attitude of my co-worker. "An honest man," he said, when we came to Harlak's record. "Un brave soldat," he declared of the old reservist, who protested against murder. He was not trying to make a case. He had no need to make a case. The pity of it is that the case has been so thoroughly made by German hands. These diaries have not been doctored in the smallest detail. There they are, as they were taken from the body of the dead man and the pocket of the prisoners. The room where we worked is stuffed with the booklets of German soldiers. Shelves are lined with the black-bound diaries and the little red books of identification carried by each soldier. They overflow upon tables. In this room and a suite adjoining sit the official translators of the French General Staff. I have purposely selected certain of my examples from the official reports of the French Government. I wanted to verify for American "neutrals" that no slightest word had been altered, that no insertions had been made.

My first diary was that of a Saxon officer of the Eighth Company, of the 178th Regiment, of the XII Army Corps. He makes his entry for 26 August, 1914.

"The lovely village of Gué-d'Hossus, apparently entirely innocent, has been given to the flames. A cyclist is said to have fallen from his machine, and in so doing his rifle was discharged, so they fired at him. Accordingly the male inhabitants were cast into the flames. Such atrocities are not to happen again, one hopes."

The German phrases carry the writer's sense of outrage: "Das wunderschöne Dorf Gué-d'Hossus soll ganz unschuldig in Flammen gegangen sein. … Man hat männliche Einwohner einfach in die Flammen geworfen. Solche Scheusslichkeiten Kommen hoffentlich nich wieder vor."

He adds: "At Läffe, about 200 men have been shot. There it was an example for the place; it was inevitable for the innocent to suffer. Even so there ought to be a verification of mere suspicions of guilt before aiming a fusillade at everybody."

In the village of Bouvignes on August 23, 1914, he and his men entered a private home.

"There on the floor was the body of the owner. In the interior our men had destroyed everything exactly like vandals… The sight of the inhabitants of the village who had been shot beggars any descriptions. The volley had nearly decapitated certain of them. Every house to the last corner had been searched and so the inhabitants brought out from their hiding-places. The men were shot. The women and children put in the convent. From this convent shooting has come, so the convent will be burned. Only through the giving up of the guilty and the paying of 15,000 francs can it save itself."

The German phrases of frightfulness have a sound that matches their meaning:

"Hatten unsere Leute bereits wie die Vandalen gehaust." "Männer erschossen."

I opened the diary of Private Hassemer of the VIII Corps, and in the entry at Sommepy (in the district of the Marne) for September 3, 1914, I read:

"3/9 1914. Ein schreckliches Blutbad, Dorf abgebrannt, die Franzosen in die brennenden Häuser geworfen, Zivilpersonen alles mitverbrandt."

("A hideous bloodbath (massacre), the village totally burned, the French hurled into the burning houses, civilians, everybody, burned together.")

An unsuspected brutality is here revealed. To these men a peasant of another race is not a father and husband and man. He is as a dog. He is "Ausländer," beyond the pale – a thing to be chased with bayonets and burned with fire, to the rollicking amusement of brave soldiers. Back of the slaughter lies the basic idea of a biological superiority in the German people, a belief that their duty calls them to a sacred war to dominate other races, and create a greater Germany. They think they are a higher order of beings, who can kill creatures of a lesser breed, as one slays the lower order of animals in the march of progress. Other races have had dreams of grandeur, but never so mad a dream, so colossal in its designs on world dominion, so cruel in its methods of achieving that supremacy.

Soldat Wilhelm Schellenberg, of 106 Reserve Infantry of the XII Reserve Army Corps, gives his home as Groitzsch bei Leipzig, "am Bahnhof," first floor, number 8. "Frau Martha Schellenberg" is to be notified. His diary is innocent.

I held in my hands the diary of Erich Harlak of the II Company, 38 Fusilier Regiment of the Sixth Army Corps. There is a cut through the cover and pages of the pamphlet – probably the stab of a bayonet. Harlak is a Silesian. On the first page he writes in German "Bitte dieses Buch gütigst meinen Eltern zusenden zu wollen." Then in French "Je prie aussi Les Français de rendre, s'il vous plait, cet livre à mes parents. Addresse Lehrer Harlak." "Meinen lieben Eltern gewidmet in Grune bei Lisser in Posen."

He writes, "I noticed how our cavalry had plundered here." He gives an instance of how the men broke to pieces what they could not carry away. "La Guerre est la Guerre." He writes that in French. He runs his table of values.

He has a vocabulary of French words in his own handwriting. His record is one of honest distress at the pillage done by his comrades.

When the French soldiers say "C'est la Guerre" – "that's the way it is with war" – they refer to the monotony of it, or the long duration, or some curious ironic contrast between a peaceful farmyard scene and a Taube dropping bombs. The Germans say it again and again in their diaries, sometimes in the French phrase, sometimes "Das ist der Krieg," and almost always they use it in speaking of a village they have burned or peasants they have shot. To them that phrase is an absolution for any abomination. It is the blood-brother of "military necessity."

Carl Zimmer, Lieutenant of the 57th Infantry of the VII Corps, has a diary that runs from August 2 to October 17, 1914. On August 29 he tells of marching through a village of Belgium.

"Very many houses burned whose inhabitants had shot at our soldiers. 25 °Civilians shot."

At the head of his diary he writes: "Mit Gott für König und Vaterland." His record is in ink. Bielefeld in Westphalia is his home town.

Prussia has Prussianized Germany. These diaries cover the Empire. The writers are Rhenish Pomeranian and Brandenburgian, Saxon and Bavarian. And the very people, such as the Bavarians and Saxons, whom we had hoped were of a merciful tradition, have bettered the instruction of the military hierarchy at Berlin. What Prussia preached they have practiced with the zeal of a recent convert eager to please his master.

Fahlenstein, a reservist of the 34 Fusiliers, II Army Corps, writes on August 28th:

"They (the French troops) lay heaped up 8 to 10 in a heap, wounded and dead, always one on top of the other. Those who could still walk were made prisoners and brought with us. The severely wounded, with a shot in the head or lungs and so forth, who could not make further effort, received one more bullet, which ended their life. That is indeed what we were ordered to do."

("Die schwer verwundeten … bekamen dennoch eine Kugel zu, dass ihr Leben ein Ende hatte. Das ist uns ja auch befohlen worden.")

His unwillingness to do the wicked thing must be subordinated to the will of the officer.