The Log of a Noncombatant Part 8

Merely for what they may be worth, and not in any sense as conclusive, I mention the cases which came to my attention. During a month spent in that part of Belgium where the most savage of the atrocities were reported,--a month devoted to a diligent search for the truth,--I could run down only two instances where the facts were proved, and where taken all in all and looked at from both sides they const.i.tuted an atrocity.

I lived in an atmosphere of popular apprehension frequently amounting to terror. A friend of mine saw children throw up their hands in terror and fall down on their knees before a squad of German Uhlans who suddenly dashed into a village near Vilvorde. The incident does not prove that Uhlans are in the habit of acting atrociously; it does prove the popular fear of them. Near the same town I investigated the case of a peaceful villager, reported in the current conversation of the story to have had his ears cut off and to have been finished off with a half-dozen bayonet wounds. This I got at first hand from the man who had seen the body. I asked him how he knew the man had been bayoneted by Germans. My informant said that he himself was running from the village, where a skirmish was going on between a regiment of the enemy (Germans) and Belgian carabineers, that he was racing for his life through a rain of bullets, etc., etc., and that under fire of sharpshooters he stumbled across this body. He did not know the man was dead; but the case interested him. So later he went back (still under fire of the sharpshooters) and counted the number of holes in the man's shirt; there were six, he told me, and he was sure from the shape of the holes that they were the result of bayonets, not bullets.

At one time when driving from Ghent toward Brussels with Julius Van Hee, the acting Consul-General of the United States at Ghent, we pa.s.sed a little hillock of ground upon which was a small square slab of stone, topped by a pair of sticks--hardly more than sticks--in the shape of a cross. There was a yarn floating around the neighborhood, which had almost crystallized into legend, that this was the fresh grave of a child murdered by the Germans because it refused to salute. They said the feet had been cut off and the boy was left to bleed to death.

Conceivably the story was true. We did not stop, for we could not carry the investigation to the point of digging up a fresh grave.

On the evening previous Van Hee had gone over to his office to lock up preparatory to our early start for Brussels. A woman of Louvain stood on the doorstep. How on earth she had ever got back to Ghent, neither Van Hee nor Luther, who was in Van Hee's office and who told me the story, could make out from her incoherent words. She had been torn from her family, driven from house and home with a mob of wretched women, and shipped into Cologne, Germany. She was almost starved; several others went mad for lack of water. She now believed herself a widow. Between tears and hysterics she told how soldiers had entered her house, how two of them had held her husband against the wall at the point of a revolver, while "several" others in succession violated her before her husband's eyes!!

These stories are not pleasant. But in seeking the real facts one cannot work with kid gloves. Of the hundreds I have heard I have mentioned a few of those which show the kind of thing believed to have occurred in the ravaged country. Of all those which I heard, the last mentioned and the one at the head of this chapter--for which there was justification--appeared to have the greatest probability of truth.

During the first rush of war the German system of destruction, and the doctrine of "awfulness," as I saw it applied to physical objects, was barbaric, relentless, and totally unjustified. At Louvain, Aerschot, and Termonde it was at its height. On the other hand, in the mind of an impartial student of the facts there cannot be the slightest doubt that at Louvain there was an organized attack on the invaders by snipers and franc-tireurs armed with knives, guns, revolvers of every description.

A half-day spent en route from burning Antwerp with a Jesuit priest of Louvain and the testimony of several villagers would have convinced me of this, had I not already been convinced by the stories of other survivors.

The burning of villages is one matter, the outraging and torturing of women and children another. The truth of the former should not in any way convict a German officer, much less Private Johann Schmidt, of unprovoked personal cruelty.

There undoubtedly were, though I did not happen to see them, numerous cases of unprovoked cruelty and other evidences of barbarity that are bound to happen in any war of invasion. The fact that I, personally, did not happen to see them, and have found scarcely a non-partisan observer who did, is neither here nor there. I merely state the fact as one of the many bits of evidence which should be taken into consideration. I have no case for Prussian militarism in so far as applied to inanimate objects. The German system of destruction in the early part of the war was utterly without excuse or justification; the wreck and desolation, the hunger and suffering of the larger portion of Belgium are utterly beyond the comprehension of those who have not been there. Certainly words cannot convey the impression. The suffering, particularly during the weeks following the fall of Antwerp, was so awful and on so large a scale that the senses refused to grasp it. It has been said that in the Civil War Sheridan was commanded, in pushing up the Shenandoah Valley, to leave the countryside in such condition that a crow could not live on it. A sparrow could not have existed in many parts of Belgium.

At the same time it is true that because of the tortures endured by the Belgian people, because of the pain and horror of the war of invasion, much of it unavoidable, the American public, because its sentiment is so strongly anti-German, has been willing to believe anything of the race against whom runs its prejudice. Truly remarkable is the rapidity with which atrocity stories have been created and the relish with which they are swallowed by drawing-room gossips. Those who have seen the war do not find it necessary to talk about what does not exist. Mr. Arthur Ruhl, who has seen and carefully studied all sides of the war, applies the term "nursery tale" to the average atrocity story. Mr. Irvin Cobb, John T. McCutcheon, and others who have been on the ground also took them with a grain of salt. Curiously enough, the closer one got to the actual fight, the less bitter was the feeling between partic.i.p.ants, the greater their respect for one another, and the less credulous their belief in the enemy's barbarity.

An American who was recently discharged from seven months' service with the British army tells me that during this time the only knowledge he had of personal atrocities was through the British and French newspapers. And there are well-known stories of opposing trenches so closely situated that the soldiers taught each other their respective national airs, and the choruses of their camp tunes.

To return to another form of alleged outrage, we have the ancient argument on the case of Rheims.

An interesting contribution to the testimony has been given by Cyril Brown, now special correspondent of the New York Times in Berlin. Brown made his way to the German army lines before Rheims, where, among others, he interviewed First Lieutenant Wengler, of the Heavy Artillery, commander of a battery which sh.e.l.led the church spire, but known among his comrades as "the little friend of the Rheims Cathedral." According to Lieutenant Wengler two shots only struck the church spire (one from a fifteen centimeter howitzer, another from a twenty-one centimeter mortar) and this after French observers had used the tower for five days between September thirteenth and eighteenth. So sparing was this young "barbarian," in spite of provocative fire obviously directed from the French cathedral, that "the friend of the Rheims Cathedral" stuck to him as a nickname.

In America Brown's statement provoked a storm of retort. Allied correspondents claimed that a dozen shots at least crashed through the roof, set the scaffolding ablaze, and that, at a time when Red Cross flags were floating from the tower and red crosses were painted on the roof, sh.e.l.ls continued to devastate the beautiful interior, etc., etc.

There has been a quant.i.ty of discussion back and forth as to the number of shots fired. Now, so far as the question of atrocity is concerned, though every one will regret the ruin of this n.o.ble work of art, I hold that it is not of the slightest importance whether there were fired two sh.e.l.ls or seventeen or seventy-seven. The important and only question at issue is, whether the tower was used for observation purposes, or, in other words, was there military justification for its attempted destruction?

Military men, English as well as German, to whom I have talked, take it as a matter of course that the highest spot in any locality is used for observation. As an English officer in Antwerp put it, "If the French did not use the church tower they are d------fools."

By way of guide and for sake of likely comparison I can state what I know did happen in two other cities: Termonde and Antwerp. In Chapter II of this book I have told how we made our way across the broken bridge at Termonde on the day of its second bombardment, and how that night word came to us of the manner in which the Belgians took revenge on the conquerors. I told how staff officers, entering with a scouting party at the head of a German column, mounted the only remaining spire in the town. With a few well-directed shots from their concealed batteries west of the river, the Belgians destroyed the tower and killed the officers. The Belgians took no little pride in their marksmanship on that occasion, and boasted freely of it. In this case, the use, and therefore the destruction, of the observation-post was looked upon by the Belgians as a natural and necessary instance of the work of war. As evidence, it is rather valuable because given unconsciously and without motive.

Likewise at Antwerp. In all probability the fact has never been appreciated that during the bombardment of this city,--the most important, from a military point of view, in Belgium,--the spire of the Notre Dame Cathedral was used as an outlook-station by the Belgian defenders, if not by both Belgians and English. On the inadvertent testimony of English themselves I know this to be true. On the second night of the Antwerp bombardment the Americans who had not left the city were gathered in the almost deserted Queen's Hotel along the water front. Some time during the evening, I don't remember just when, but it was while the British retreat was going on, an English lad called Lucien Arthur Jones burst in upon us. At no little risk he had dodged through the deserted streets and falling sh.e.l.ls, much elated over the view of the enemy he had just got from the cathedral tower.

"I've had bully luck," he confided to me, after I had done him a n.o.ble service (i.e., lent him a safety razor). "Belgian signal officers took me up to the tower, where they can see everything the Germans are doing."

The following is taken from his account--an Englishman's account-- printed in the London Chronicle, and copied in the New York Times, Tribune, and other papers:--

"I now return to the events of Thursday. At 12.30 o'clock in the afternoon, when the bombardment had already lasted over twelve hours, through the courtesy of a Belgian officer, I was able to ascend to the roof of the cathedral, and from that point of vantage I looked down upon the scene in the city. I could just discern through my gla.s.ses dimly in the distance the instruments of culture of the attacking German forces ruthlessly pounding at the city and creeping nearer to it in the dark.

At that moment I should say the enemy's front line was within four miles of Antwerp.

"From my elevated position I had an excellent view also of the great oil tanks on the opposite side of the Scheldt. They had been set on fire by four bombs from a German Taube, and a huge, thick volume of black smoke was ascending two hundred feet into the air. The oil had been burning furiously for several hours, and the whole neighborhood was enveloped in a mist of smoke.

"After watching for some considerable time the panorama of destruction that lay unrolled all around me, I came down from my post of observation on the cathedral roof, and at the very moment I reached the street a 28- centimeter sh.e.l.l struck a confectioner's shop between the Place Verte and the Place de Meir. It was one of these high-explosive sh.e.l.ls, and the shop, a wooden structure, immediately burst into flames."

Recapitulation

The destruction of towns and villages, and the vengeance against inanimate objects shown in the German march through Belgium was barbaric. It was provoked by organized resistance on the part of Belgian franc-tireurs, and by shooting from behind shutters, etc., and other attacks by citizens of the invaded country. The Germans, though truthful in the statement of the causes, inflicted punishment out of all proportion to the crime.

The reports of unprovoked personal atrocities, it is nevertheless true, have been hideously exaggerated. Wherever one real atrocity has occurred, it has been multigraphed into a hundred cases. Each, with clever variation in detail, is reported as occurring to a relative or close friend of the teller. For campaign purposes, and particularly in England for the sake of stimulating recruiting, a partisan press has helped along the concoction of lies.

In every war of invasion there is bound to occur a certain amount of plunder and rapine. The German system of reprisal is relentless; but the German private as an individual is no more barbaric than his brother in the French, the British, or the Belgian trenches.

The End