Our Part in the Great War

The Prussian Ministry of War replies:

"The inquiry does not furnish proof in support of the alleged acts."

The Berliner Tageblatt, for September 10, has a lively story:

"It was the curé who had organized the resistance of the people, who had them enter the church, and who had planned the conspiracy against our troops."

The Prussian Minister of War makes answer: "The curé did not organize the resistance of inhabitants; he did not have them enter the church, and he had not planned the conspiracy against our troops."

The dashing German war correspondent, Paul Schweder, writes in Landesbote an article, "Under the Shrapnel in Front of Verdun." He says that he saw:

"A convoy of francs-tireurs, at their head a priest with his hands bound."

The German investigator pauses to wonder why every prisoner and every suspect is a franc-tireur, and then he goes on with his inquiry, which results in a statement from the Prussian War Minister:

"Deiber (the priest) had nothing charged against him, was set at liberty, and, at his own request, has been authorized to live at Oberhaslach."

The Frankfurter Zeitung, September 8, has a spirited account of a combat with francs-tireurs in Andenne, written by Dr. Alex Berg, of Frankfort:

"The curé went through the village with a bell, to give the signal for the fight. The battle began immediately after, very hotly."

The military authority of Andenne, Lieutenant Colonel v. Eulwege:

"My own investigation, very carefully made, shows no proof that the curé excited the people to a street fight. Every one at Andenne gives a different account from that, to the effect that most of the people have seen hardly anything of the battle, so-called, because they had hidden themselves from fear in the cellars."

Finally, the War Ministry and the press wearied of individual denials, and one great blanket denial was issued. Der Völkerkrieg, which is a comprehensive chronicle of review of the war, states:

"It is impossible to present any solid proof of the allegation, made by so many letters from the front, to the effect that the Belgian priests took part in the war of francs-tireurs. Letters of that kind which we have heretofore reproduced in our record – for example, the recital of events at Louvain and Andenne – are left out of the new editions."

Der Fels, Organ der Central-Auskunftstelle der katholischen Presse, states:

"The serious accusations which I have listed are not only inaccurate in parts and grossly exaggerated, but they are invented in every detail, and are at every point false."

And, again, it says:

"All the instances, known up to the present and capable of being cleared up, dealing with the alleged cruelties of Catholic priests in the war, have been found without exception false or fabrications through and through."

Turning to the "mutilations," we have the Nach Feierabend publishing a "letter from the front" which tells of a house of German wounded being burned by the French inhabitants. Asked for the name of the place and the specific facts, the editor replied that "you are not the forum where it is my duty to justify myself. Your proceeding in the midst of war of representing the German soldiers who fight and die as liars, in order to save your own skin, I rebuke in the most emphatic way."

But the Minister of War got further with the picturesque editor, and writes:

"The editorial department of the Nach Feierabend states that it hasn't any longer in its possession the letter in question."

Now we come to the most famous of all the stories.

"At a military hospital at Aix-la-Chapelle an entire ward was filled with wounded, who had had their eyes put out in Belgium."

Dr. Kaufmann, an ecclesiastic of Aix-la-Chapelle, writes:

"I send you the testimony of the head doctor of a military hospital here, a celebrated oculist whom I consulted just because he is an oculist. He writes me:

"'In no hospital of Aix-la-Chapelle is there any ward of wounded with their eyes put out. To my knowledge absolutely nothing of the sort has been verified at Aix-la-Chapelle.'"

The Kölnische Volkzeitung, October 28, gives the testimony of Dr. Vülles, of the hospital in Stephanstrasse, Aix-la-Chapelle, in reference to the "Ward of Dead Men," where "twenty-eight soldiers lay with eyes put out." The men laughed heartily when they were asked if they had had their eyes put out.

"If you wish to publish what you have seen," said Dr. Vüller, "you will be able to say that my colleague, Dr. Thier, as well as myself, have never treated a single soldier who had his eyes put out."

Professor Kuhnt, of the clinic for diseases of the eye at Bonn, writes:

"I have seen many who have lost their sight because of rifle bullets or shell fire. The story is a fable."

The Weser-Zeitung has a moving story of a hospital at Potsdam for soldiers wounded by the francs-tireurs, where lie officers with their eyes put out. "Young Belgian girls, of from fourteen to fifteen years of age, at the incitement of Catholic priests, have committed the crimes."

The commander at Potsdam writes:

"There is no special hospital here for soldiers wounded by the francs-tireurs. There are no officers here with eyes put out. The commander has taken measures to correct the article under dispute, and also in other publications."

So perish the lies used against Belgium. Lies manufactured by the General Staff and taught to their officers, to be used among the soldiers, in order to whip them to hate, because in that hate they would carry out the cold cruelty of those officers and of that General Staff. Lies put out in order to blind the eyes of neutrals, like the government at Washington, to the pillage, the burning and the murder which the German army was perpetrating as it marched through Belgium and Lorraine. Lies that later had to be officially denied by the same military power that had manufactured them, because those lies were stirring up civil strife at home, and because the Roman Catholic Germans investigated the sources and silenced the liars.

The Kaiser cabled to our country:

"The cruelties committed in this guerilla warfare by women, children and priests on wounded soldiers, members of the medical staff and ambulance workers have been such that my generals have at last been obliged to resort to the most rigorous measures. My heart bleeds to see that such measures have been made necessary and to think of the countless innocents who have lost their life and property because of the barbarous conduct of those criminals."

Now that he knows that those stories are lies he must feel sorrier yet that his army killed those countless innocents and burned those peasant homes.

SECTION IV

THE PEASANTS

I

THE LOST VILLAGES

I was standing in what was once the pleasant village of Sommeilles. It has been burned house by house, and only the crumbled rock was left in piles along the roadside. I looked at the church tower. On a September morning, at fourteen minutes of nine o'clock, an incendiary shell had cut through the steeple of the church, disemboweled the great clock, and set the roof blazing. There, facing the cross-roads, the hands of the clock once so busy with their time-keeping, are frozen. For twenty-three months, they have registered the instant of their own stoppage. On the minute hand, which holds a line parallel with that of the earth, a linnet has built its nest of straw. The hour-hand, outpaced by its companion at the moment of arrest, was marking time at a slant too perilous for the home of little birds. Together, the hands had traveled steadily through the hours which make the years for almost a century. High over the village street, they had sent the plowman to his field, and the girl to her milking. Children, late from their play, had scrambled home to supper, frightened by that lofty record of their guilt. And how many lovers, straying back from the deep, protecting meadows, have quickened their step, when the revealing moon lighted that face. Now it marks only cessation. It tells of the time when a village ceased to live. Something came down out of the distance, and destroyed the activities of generations – something that made an end of play and love. Only the life of the linnet goes on as if the world was still untroubled. Northern France is held in that cessation. Suddenly death came, and touched seven hundred villages. Nor can there ever be a renewal of the old charm. The art of the builders is gone, and the old sense of security in a quiet, continuing world.

I have been spending the recent days with these peasants in the ruins of their shattered world. Little wooden baraquements are springing up, as neat and bare as the bungalows of summer visitors on the shore of a Maine lake. Brisk brick houses and stores lift out of crumpled rock with the rawness of a mining camp. It is all very brave and spirited. But it reminded me of the new wooden legs, with shining leather supports, and bright metal joints, which maimed soldiers are wearing. Everything is there which a mechanism can give, but the life-giving currents no longer flow. A spiritual mutilation has been wrought on these peasant people in destroying the familiar setting of their life. They had reached out filaments of habit and love to the deep-set hearth and ancient rafters. The curve of the village street was familiar to their eye, and the profile of the staunch time-resisting houses.

From a new wooden structure, with one fair-sized, very neat room in it, a girl came out to talk with us. She was about twenty years old, with a settled sadness in her face. Her old home had stood on what was now a vegetable garden. A fragment of wall was still jutting up out of the potatoes. Everything that was dear to her had been carefully burned by the Germans.

"All the same, it is my own home," she said, pointing to the new shack, "it does very well. But my mother could not stand it that everything was gone. We ran away for the few days that the Germans were here. My mother died eight days after we came back."

The 51st Regiment of German Infantry entered the village, and burned it by squirting petrol on piles of straw in the houses. The machine they used was like a bicycle pump – a huge syringe. Of the Town Hall simply the front is standing, carrying its date of 1836. Seventeen steps go up its exterior, leading to nothing but a pit of rubbish.

"For three days I lay hidden without bread to eat," said a passer-by.

An old peasant talked with us. He told us that the Germans had come down in the night, and burned the village between four and six in the morning. A little later, they fired on the church. With petrol on hay they had burned his own home.

"Tout brûlé," he kept repeating, as he sent his gaze around the wrecked village. He gestured with his stout wooden stick, swinging it around in a circle to show the completeness of the destruction. Five small boys had joined our group. The old man swung his cane high enough to clear the heads of the youngsters. One of them ran off to switch a wandering cow into the home path.