Golden Lads Part 1

Golden Lads.

by Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason.

CONCERNING THIS BOOK

It would be futile to publish one more war-book, unless the writer had been an eye-witness of unusual things. I am an American who saw atrocities which are recorded in the Bryce Report. This book grows out of months of day-by-day living in the war zone. I have been a member of the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps, which was permitted to work at the front because the Prime Minister of Belgium placed his son in military command of us. That young man, being brave and adventurous, led us along the first line of trenches, and into villages under sh.e.l.l fire, so that we saw the armies in action.

We started at Ghent in September, 1914, came to Furnes, worked in Dixmude, Pervyse, Nieuport and Ypres, during moments of pressure on those strategic points. In the summer of 1915, we were attached to the French Fusiliers Marins. My wife's experience covers a period of twelve months in Belgium. My own time at the front was five months.

Observers at long-distance that are neutral sometimes fail to see fundamentals in the present conflict, and talk of "negotiations" between right and wrong. It is easy for people who have not suffered to be tolerant toward wrongdoing. This war is a long war because of German methods of frightfulness. These practices have bred an enduring will to conquer in Frenchman and Briton and Belgian which will not pause till victory is thorough. Because the German military power has sinned against women and children, it will be fought with till it is overthrown. I wish to make clear this determination of the Allies. They hate the army of Aerschot and Lorraine as a mother hates the defiler of her child.

There are two wars on the Western Front. One is the war of aggression.

It was led up to by years of treachery. It was consummated in frightfulness. It is warfare by machine. Of that war, as carried on by the "Conquerors," the first half of this book tells. On points that have been in dispute since the outbreak, I am able to say "I saw." When the Army of Invasion fell on the little people, I witnessed the signs of its pa.s.sage as it wrote them by flame and bayonet on peasant homes and peasant bodies.

In the second half of the book, I have tried to tell of a people's uprising--the fight of the living spirit against the war-machine. A righteous defensive war, such as Belgium and France are waging, does not brutalize the nation. It reveals a beauty of sacrifice which makes common men into "golden lads."

Was this struggle forced on an unwilling Germany, or was she the aggressor?

I believe we have the answer of history in such evidences as I have seen of her patient ancient spy system that honeycombed Belgium.

Is she waging a "holy war," ringed around by jealous foes?

I believe we have the final answer in such atrocities as I witnessed. A hideous officially ordered method is proof of unrighteousness in the cause itself.

Are you indicting a nation?

No, only a military system that ordered the slow sapping of friendly neighboring powers.

Only the host of "tourists," clerks, waiters, gentlemanly officers, that betrayed the hospitality of people of good will.

Only an army that practised mutilation and murder on children, and mothers, and old people,--and that carried it through coldly, systematically, with admirable discipline.

I believe there are mult.i.tudes of common soldiers who are sorry that they have outraged the helpless.

An army of half a million men will return to the home-land with very bitter memories. Many a simple German of this generation will be unable to look into the face of his own child without remembering some tiny peasant face of pain--the child whom he bayoneted, or whom he saw his comrade bayonet, having failed to put his body between the little one and death.

INTRODUCTION

By Theodore Roosevelt

On August 4, 1914, the issue of this war for the conscience of the world was Belgium. Now, in the spring of 1916, the issue remains Belgium. For eighteen months, our people were bidden by their representative at Washington to feel no resentment against a hideous wrong. They were taught to tame their human feelings by polished phrases of neutrality.

Because they lacked the proper outlet of expression, they grew indifferent to a supreme injustice. They temporarily lost the capacity to react powerfully against wrongdoing.

But today they are at last becoming alive to the iniquity of the crushing of Belgium. Belgium is the battleground of the war on the western front. But Belgium is also the battleground of the struggle in our country between the forces of good and of evil. In the ranks of evil are ranged all the pacifist sentimentalists, the cowards who possess the gift of clothing their cowardice in soothing and attractive words, the materialists whose souls have been rotted by exclusive devotion to the things of the body, the sincere persons who are cursed with a deficient sense of reality, and all who lack foresight or who are uninformed.

Against them stand the great ma.s.s of loyal Americans, who, when they see the right, and receive moral leadership, show that they have in their souls as much of the valor of righteousness as the men of 1860 and of 1776. The literary bureau at Washington has acted as a soporific on the mind and conscience of the American people. Fine words, designed to work confusion between right and wrong, have put them to sleep. But they now stir in their sleep.

The proceeds from the sale of this book are to be used for a charity in which every intelligent American feels a personal interest. The training of maimed soldiers in suitable trades is making possible the reconstruction of an entire nation. It is work carried on by citizens of the neutral nations. The cause itself is so admirable that it deserves wide support. It gives an outlet for the ethical feelings of our people, feelings that have been unnaturally dammed for nearly two years by the cold and timid policy of our Government.

The testimony of the book is the first-hand witness of an American citizen who was present when the Army of Invasion blotted out a little nation. This is an eye-witness report on the disputed points of this war. The author saw the wrongs perpetrated on helpless non-combatants by direct military orders. He shows that the frightfulness practiced on peasant women and children was the carrying out of a Government policy, planned in advance, ordered from above. It was not the product of irresponsible individual drunken soldiers. His testimony is clear on this point. He goes still further, and shows that individual soldiers resented their orders, and most unwillingly carried through the cruelty that was forced on them from Berlin. In his testimony he is kindlier to the German race, to the hosts of peasants, clerks and simple soldiers, than the defenders of Belgium's obliteration have been. They seek to excuse acts of infamy. But the author shows that the average German is sorry for those acts.

It is fair to remember in reading Mr. Gleason's testimony concerning these deeds of the German Army that he has never received a dollar of money for anything he has spoken or written on the subject. He gave without payment the articles on the Spy, the Atrocity, and the Steam Roller to the New York _Tribune_. The profits from the lectures he has delivered on the same subject have been used for well-known public charities. The book itself is a gift to a war fund.

Of Mr. Gleason's testimony on atrocities I have already written (see page 38).

What he saw was reported to the Bryce Committee by the young British subject who accompanied him, and these atrocities, which Mr. Gleason witnessed, appear in the Bryce Report under the heading of Alost. It is of value to know that an American witnessed atrocities recorded in the Bryce Report, as it disposes of the German rejoinders that the Report is ex-parte and of second-hand rumor.

His chapter on the Spy System answers the charge that it was Belgium who violated her own neutrality, and forced an unwilling Germany, threatened by a ring of foes, to defend herself.

The chapter on the Steam Roller shows that the same policy of injustice that was responsible for the original atrocities is today operating to flatten out what is left of a free nation.

The entire book is a protest against the craven att.i.tude of our Government.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

_March 28, 1916._

THE CONQUERORS

THE SPY

Germany uses three methods in turning a free nation into a va.s.sal state.

By a spy system, operated through years, she saps the national strength.

By sudden invasion, accompanied by atrocity, she conquers the territory, already prepared. By continuing occupation, she flattens out what is left of a once independent people. In England and North America, she has used her first method. France has experienced both the spy and the atrocity. It has been reserved for Belgium to be submitted to the threefold process. I shall tell what I have seen of the spy system, the use of frightfulness, and the enforced occupation.

It is a mistake for us to think that the worst thing Germany has done is to torture and kill many thousands of women and children. She undermines a country with her secret agents before she lays it waste. In time of peace, with her spy system, she works like a mole through a wide area till the ground is ready to cave in. She plays on the good will and trustfulness of other peoples till she has tapped the available information. That betrayal of hospitality, that taking advantage of human feeling, is a baser thing than her unique savagery in war time.

During my months in Belgium I have been surrounded by evidences of this spy system, the long, slow preparedness which Germany makes in another country ahead of her deadly pounce. It is a silent, peaceful invasion, as destructive as the house-to-house burning and the killing of babies and mothers to which it later leads.

The German military power, which is the modern Germany, is able to obtain agents to carry out this policy, and make its will prevail, by disseminating a new ethic, a philosophy of life, which came to expression with Bismarck and has gone on extending its influence since the victories of 1870-'71. The German people believe they serve a higher G.o.d than the rest of us. We serve (very imperfectly and only part of the time) such ideals as mercy, pity, and loyalty to the giver of the bread we eat. The Germans serve (efficiently and all the time) the State, a supreme deity, who sends them to spy out a land in peace time, to build gun foundations in innocent-looking houses, buy up poverty-stricken peasants, measure distances, win friendship, and worm out secrets. With that information digested and those preparations completed, the State (an ent.i.ty beyond good and evil) calls on its citizens to make war, and, in making it, to practise frightfulness. It orders its servants to lay aside pity and burn peasants in their homes, to bayonet women and children, to shoot old men. Of course, there are exceptions to this. There are Germans of the vintage of '48, and later, many of them honest and peaceable dwellers in the country which shelters them. But the imperial system has little use for them. They do not serve its purpose.

The issue of the war, as Belgium and France see it, is this: Are they to live or die? Are they to be charted out once again through years till their hidden weakness is accurately located, and then is an army to be let loose on them that will visit a universal outrage on their children and wives? Peace will be intolerable till this menace is removed. The restoration of territory in Belgium and Northern France and the return to the _status quo_ before the war, are not sufficient guarantees for the future. The _status quo_ before the war means another insidious invasion, carried on unremittingly month by month by business agents, commercial travelers, genial tourists, and studious gentlemen in villas.

A crippled, broken Teutonic military power is the only guarantee that a new army of spies will not take the road to Brussels and Paris on the day that peace is signed. No simple solution like, "Call it all off, we'll start in fresh; bygones are bygones," meets the real situation.

The Allied nations have been infested with a cloud of witnesses for many years. Are they to submit once again to that secret process of the Germans?

[Ill.u.s.tration: PEASANTS' COTTAGES BURNED BY GERMANS.

The separate flame in each cottage is clearly visible, proving that each house was separately set on fire. Radclyffe Dugmore took this photograph at Melle, where he and the writer were made prisoners.]