The Log of a Noncombatant Part 7

"We must have peace," the doctor finished, "and we must have it soon. I do not say this because I have lost a son, and I do not say it alone.

There are thousands who feel it just as much, but they are afraid to speak what is in their mind. You are a traveler from the great city [Berlin], and you do not know what war means. All you have heard is the talk of fight and victory and glory, and that is all you see if you do not look close. You must live in the smaller cities, must see the villages and farms without men, and you must come with me and see the homes without husband or son." For the third time he interrupted himself to ask:--"You are Amerikaner--yes? And why do you come?"

"To see the war and find out what the German people think."

"Then go home and tell your country what I think and say, and many others like me."

It was not easy to forget his tears and final words as he came up on the platform at Hanover, and, looking around to see that no one overheard, whispered hoa.r.s.ely: "Fangen sie ihre Propagande an, junger Mann, und Gott starke ihre Bemuhungen"--"Start your peace propaganda, young man, and Heaven help the undertaking."

The southern part of this trip was not without its crop of stories, some humorous, and some atrocious. It was impossible to verify the statement of the Bavarian travelers who boasted of the treatment of English prisoners en route to the detention camp. On one occasion sixty were captured, they said, and only five brought home alive. The Bavarian soldiers guarding them said with a laugh, "But they were tired, so we had to shoot the rest"; and the officer answered with a wink, "What happens to English prisoners need never be reported." One never needed more one's sense of the probabilities.

And there was the good-natured cavalry lieutenant who said the Germans had found a way to keep their prisoners in training. "You see," he explained, "we lock twenty of the 'red-trousers' [Frenchmen] and twenty Englishmen in the same room at night and shut the windows. You know a Frenchman can't stand air, and a Kitchener will die without it. So we stand outside to watch the fun. First a window goes up, and then it goes down, and pretty soon there are growls, grumbles, and oaths. In ten minutes a terrible fight ensues; in half an hour the Frenchmen are badly beaten,--they always are,--and twenty battered English heads come sticking out the window for a breath of air."

And finally there was the Landwehr captain's letter, a thing in keeping with the tales which come across the Polish border. Westward, in Belgium and in France, the fight was modern and of the day. Move eastward from Berlin and you got the mediaeval note. It was not to be found at the English prisoners' camp at Doeberitz, where the Germans stare with infinite contempt and satisfaction at Tommy Atkins behind his triple row of wire gratings. But wander among the thousands of captured Cossacks building their own prisons at the camp at Zossen, hear them muttering "Nichevo"--"this is fate"--"I do not care," and, listening to the stories of their captors, you felt the atmosphere of centuries gone by. One such was called to my attention in the form of a Prussian captain's letter, which was, I believe, published in Berlin. Here is his letter of the war in Poland, not long ago received by relatives. So much as is not private is given as he wrote it:--

"The inhabitants go out of our way like frightened dogs, with childish fear. When they wish to ask a question, they kneel down and kiss the border of our coats, as in the days of the serf system. We are stationed here in Poland, about eight kilometers from the so-called road, in a so-called village far from all civilization. The village consists of a number of tumble-down cottages, with rooms which we should not consider fit for stables for our horses. The rain is streaming down unceasingly, as if Heaven wished to wash away all the sins of the world.

Our horses sink into the mud up to their knees.

"We took up our quarters in this village after fifty-four hours'

marching, and came just in time to witness the end of a strange and tragic romance. When I was about to open the door of a farm, it was opened from the inside, and a subaltern came out, with a face beaming with satisfaction. He reported that a little while ago he, with a few of his men, partly captured and partly shot down half a company of Russians.

"'We were concealed' he told me. 'We let them come quite near, and then we started firing.'

"We entered a low-ceilinged room, or pen, spa.r.s.ely lighted by wax candles. The first object which caught my attention was a youthful Russian soldier, almost a child, lying on a straw mattress, smiling as if asleep. I approached; I put my hand on his forehead ... ice-cold-- dead. Some of the men approached to take off the clothing; others stood around in a half-circle, silently looking on. Suddenly there was a murmur... They seemed awe-stricken, these brave fellows, who are not daunted even by overwhelming odds. They hesitated, and one of them, advancing a few paces to me, reports: 'This Russian soldier is a girl.'

"This happened in the year 1914.

"We found out that the girl was the betrothed of a Russian officer, and fought side by side with him throughout the campaign, until killed by a shot in the breast. The officer was taken prisoner. I buried her myself that same day..."

In order to make clear what happened when I crossed the German border for the last time, I should explain that I now had with me several trophies which I had obtained with great difficulty and was correspondingly anxious to bring home. Among them was a German private's helmet and an original Iron Cross of the second degree. The marking on the temple band of the helmet said, "48th Regiment, 4th Army Corps, Company 7, No. 57, 1909-1914,"--meaning that the owner started service in 1909 and the helmet was issued to him in 1914. It is believed it belonged to a soldier who was either wounded or killed outside of Antwerp. The Iron Cross has on it: "1870" (when the order was started), and the letter "F" (Friedrich), and the date of its issuance. I should add that I did not rob a dead or dying soldier of these trophies, but I was asked not to show them in either Belgium or England, nor to state how I came by them. And I have kept my promise.

I had also a fragment of shrapnel casing from a 32 cm. sh.e.l.l--the only bomb which hit the Antwerp Cathedral during the German attack. It was given to me by Mr. Edward Eyre Hunt, who picked it up on the morning of the German entry. There were also some Belgian bullet clips and a bit of shrapnel picked up near the spot where I was knocked down by the concussion of a bursting sh.e.l.l on that same morning.

When I reached Bentheim we were put through the usual search by the border patrol and military officials of the Zollamt. I had pinned the Iron Cross to my undershirt, but the helmet was a bit bulky for such treatment.

"Take it out!" roared the officer who discovered the headgear wrapped in a sweater in my rucksack. "Da.s.s ist str-r-reng ver-r-rboten!"

When I explained that I had come by it honestly, and wanted to take it home, he burst into a pa.s.sion. The fact that I showed a letter from Von Bernstorff and explained that I was known in the Foreign Office in Berlin made no impression whatsoever. The officer said that if the owner was dead, the helmet could not even go to his family. It was government property and should return, therefore, to the commissary department. At all events, it must not leave the Empire.

I missed my train and was kept in Bentheim overnight. In the morning I again tried persuasion, but without success. As it was now a question of myself or the helmet, I decided to get myself home. I went back once more, and as a final chance put up this proposition to my officer. I showed my credentials and explained that I was going to The Hague.

Would he in the mean time put my name on the helmet, and if within forty-eight hours he received a wire both from the Foreign Office in Berlin and The Hague Legation, would he send the helmet after me? He glared at me for a moment. Yes, he said, he would.

At The Hague I immediately visited the German Legation and told them of the customs officer's promise.

From bitter experience I realized that in war-time out of sight is lost, so far as baggage is concerned. Consequently I had given up all hope of my trophy. A week later, when I happened to be in Dr. van d.y.k.e's study, I noticed a conical-shaped object resting on one of the secretary's desks. There, on top of a pile of letters, with "Herr Horace Green"

scribbled in German script on a piece of paper pinned to the green-gray service covering, lay my dented, battered, and long-lost German private's helmet!

Simply because the fiery customs officer had given his word, the German Legation at The Hague had telegraphed to Bentheim and also, I take it, to Excellency von Mumm at Berlin; and the customs officials had shipped the helmet to the Dutch capital, where the German Legation, obedient to promise, had turned it over to the American Legation for delivery to me.

The whole proceeding seemed typical of the overbearing gruffness, the systematic attention to detail, and at the same time the thoroughgoing honesty of the German character.

So I tucked the helmet under my arm, and, saying good-bye to Dr. van d.y.k.e and Mr. Langhome, who had made my stay at The Hague so pleasant, I crossed the mine-strewn English Channel for Piccadilly Circus.

Two weeks later I was aboard the Red Star liner Lapland, driven one hundred miles out of her course through fear of German war craft, yet pounding along through a thick fog and hopefully headed in the general direction of the good old Statue of Liberty.

Appendix: Atrocities

I gained the impressions given below and compiled many of the instances on the now threadbare subject of atrocities during the time that I was in the war zone. The opinions will not meet with favor in this country, particularly at present, when we seem on the point of breaking diplomatic relations with Germany.

Nevertheless, I think these notes present a point of view which ought to be known, if only for the purpose of showing the other side of the shield--and of checking, to some extent, the nursery tales in regard to personal atrocities, which become more fanciful the farther they are told from the scene of reported occurrence. After the horrible Lusitania crime and other evidences of German Schrecklichkeit for which there can be no justification, it is hard for Americans to reason fairly in questions involving Teutonic methods of warfare. I am therefore appending the notes in spite of a rather careful study of the Bryce Report on German atrocities in Belgium. They are, of course, to be taken into consideration merely as the evidence of what one man happened to see or as was often more the case, not to see.

In order that there may be no misunderstanding, it is well to define the meaning of the word "atrocity."

I suppose all will agree with me that the term does not include what may be called the necessary horrors of war--such as hunger and poverty resulting from the destruction of homes and loss of livelihood, the suffering of refugees driven by necessity from captured towns, starvation through no fault of the invader, the accidental wounding of noncombatant peasants, farmers, etc. For the present purpose the word is intended to include all cases of unnecessary, unprovoked personal cruelty, as well as, of course, the outraging of women. Such acts, for example, as the reported gouging-out of the eyes of prisoners, cutting off the wrists of children, the alleged stabbing of old women, cutting off the wrists and ears of nurses, and the more refined cruelties of which I have heard reports, are, it goes without saying, atrocities.

Let us examine one or two of these.

Near Osnabruck, Germany, an American visitor, pacing up and down a railroad siding early one morning, chewing a mouthful of stale sausage meat between thick crusts of rye bread, heard a particular cruelty story which may be used here as an example. It was told by an army surgeon with whom he was having his peripatetic breakfast. On the track alongside stood a so-called Red Cross train, consisting of a combination of well-equipped hospital coaches with their triple rows of berths slung one above the other as in a sleeper; attached in the rear were a few coal carriages and freight trucks. This train was waiting for the outbound traffic to pa.s.s by. You see, the outbound traffic consisted of fresh troops, being rushed to the front in one of those quick transcontinental shifts which have played so important a part in German strategy. But the eastbound train carried only wounded and dying on their way back home. So, of course, the hospital cars must wait as long as necessary, since they had no right or standing in the ruthless game called war.

In the cheerless interior of one of these freight cars (much the same kind of car as that in which we were confined during the trip from Brussels to Aix--apparently used as a horse-stall on the previous trip, and with no bedding beyond a damp pile of straw in one corner) the American noticed a young German private. This particular fellow was not wounded. He wore no bandages; he was the only occupant of the horse-stall; and he paced up and down the boards, muttering, muttering, continually muttering to himself. Now and then he s.n.a.t.c.hed up a musket, went through the form of fixing a bayonet, and again and again lunged savagely at the wall of the car.

The Red Cross surgeon to whom the American went for information dismissed the matter casually by merely tapping his forehead with his index finger.

"Just one of those insane cases," he said.

Later in the day on better acquaintance the surgeon explained the matter in this fashion:--

"The fellow was quartered in a village near Lille, doing sentry duty on a house occupied by German officers. There was an uprising of citizens.

From across the way native franc-tireurs fired shots into the house, killing one officer and wounding a second. Tracing the firing across the street, the remaining officers entered a bakery-shop where they found several men and a woman, all armed. They ordered the men to be shot. The woman had in her hand a revolver with one of the cartridge chambers empty. The German lieutenant saw that she was about to become a mother. He then explained the gravity of her offense, told her that she was practically guilty of murder, and took away her weapon. But under the circ.u.mstances he ordered her released instead of being shot.

He turned his back and walked away about five paces. Suddenly the woman s.n.a.t.c.hed another revolver from behind the counter and fired point-blank.

As he fell, the officer called out to his orderly, 'Bayonet the woman.'

"The sentry did what he was ordered, but, you see, it has affected the poor fellow's mind."

This story, along with a few others, I have picked out from hundreds of atrocity tales which I heard during four months spent in England, Belgium, Germany, and Holland. It will serve as an example, not only because it has the earmarks of truth,--having been told in an offhand way merely as an explanation of the private's insanity,--but because it is typical of the kind of incident which in the telling is, nine times out of ten, twisted into atrocious and wholly unrecognizable form.

Under the law of military reprisal was there justification for the death of this woman? Was the dying officer guilty of barbarian conduct? And did the private, ordered against his will to perform an act whose memory drove him insane, commit an atrocity? Without answering the question, let us consider for a moment how that particular anecdote would be told by a Belgian partisan. In my wanderings through Termonde, Liege, and Louvain, I heard tales--unspeakable and on their face utterly unbelievable--of which this kind of thing must have been the foundation.

When the body of this woman was found, let us say, by French peasants returning to their ruined homes, think how the horrible fact would be seized, without whatsoever there was of justification! How the British and French papers would describe that mutilated form! Think of the effect of a two-column word-picture of the wanton sack and ruin of the town, the shooting of its helpless citizens, and the description of that mangled body sacrified to the Huns! Think how the fact would be clutched by fear-crazed inhabitants, would be bandied from mouth to mouth, distorted and dressed up to suit a partisan press, and "twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools"!

One of the first atrocity accounts which I heard in Belgium, as well as one of the most persistent, had to do with scores of children whose wrists had been cut by the Kaiser's troops. Hundreds of them were reported to be in Belgium and Dutch hospitals or in the care of relief committees. The gossip was so prevalent and in some instances so specific that I had high hopes of tracking down and seeing, with my own eyes, an instance. In each case which I heard abroad, my informant's husband or brother or best friend had seen the children; but somehow or other it was never arranged that I could see one of them myself. This type of cruelty was so widely talked about that in plenty of cases the German soldiers believed that some of their men had committed these crimes. One of them told me that he understood that near Tirlemont the wrists of several young children had been cut. He said that thirty or forty children and peasants had fired on and killed German troops marching through a neighboring village. A squad was sent to round up the offenders, all of whom were found armed. Instead of killing the snipers, whose age was between ten and seventeen, the surgeons were ordered to slice the tendons of the wrist so that the noncombatants should be prevented from holding a gun or using a knife.

Soon after my ship, the Lapland, docked in America, I heard a case of whose verity, owing to the source from which it came, I had no doubt.

The refugee in question, according to my informant, was an English nurse, and lay with both wrists cut off at a well-known New York hospital on Madison Avenue. She had been in Brussels at the time of the German entry, and, being willing to work for the sake of humanity wheresoever there were sick to care for, she had nursed wounded German officers. Eventually, with a handful of English nurses still remaining in Brussels, she had been deported to Holland, because it was feared that German secrets were leaking out in letters sent by these English nurses. This latter part coincided so precisely with the facts which during my stay in Brussels I had found to be true, that I had no doubt of the whole business. On recovery the nurse was to exhibit herself and lecture for Red Cross funds. I was told this in strict confidence and I was to see and talk to the handless lady on condition that the "story"

should not reach the press. I agreed. But to my bitter disappointment the ----- Hospital had never heard of the woman. My informant then confessed that his informant had made a mistake in the name of the hospital. I offered four persons ten dollars each to trace the matter to its source, the final result being a telephone call from my informant saying that an English lawyer now in New York stated that to the best of his belief there was "some such person in a hospital somewhere in New Jersey."