GERMAN OUTRAGES IN BELGIUM.
TOWARDS the end of last year the Prime Minister appointed a Committee to inquire into the outrages committed by German troops during the present war, and the Report of the Committee was issued on Wednesday. The Committee consisted of Lord Bryce (Chairman), Sir Frederick Pollock, Sir Edward Clarke, Sir Alfred Hopkinson, Professor H. A. L. Fisher, and Mr. Harold Cox. Subsequently Sir Kenelm Digby was added. From time to time complaints have been made in the Press that the Report of the Committee should have been so long delayed, but the delay, so far as it was caused by
the necessity for careful investigation, has been amply justified. Nor, from the point of view of the effect of the Report on the public mind, is there any reason to regret the delay. Indeed, it is possible that if this Report, with its damning evidence of the hideous atrocities committed by German troops, had been published before the sinking of the Lusitania,' many readers might have been inclined to dismiss the statements made as unfounded or exag- gerated. The sinking of the Lusitania ' has informed the mind of the whole world of the true morality of the German people, and thus has enabled everybody to under- stand how it is possible that German troops committed in Belgium and in the North of France outrages which to most of us would otherwise have appeared quite incredible. The Committee themselves, as they relate, began their investigations with the belief that the stories told by Belgian refugees and by wounded British soldiers must be in many cases the result either of hysteria or of a fertile imagination. They add :—
"But the further we went and the more evidence we examined so much the more was our scepticism reduced. There might be some exaggeration in certain witnesses, possibly delusions in another, inaccuracies in a third. When, however, we found that things which at first seemed improbable were testified to by many witnesses coming from different places, having had no communi- cation with one another, and knowing nothing of one another's stat °ciente, points in which they all agreed became more and more evidently true."
The Report adds that the experienced lawyers who took the depositions of the various witnesses "passed from the same stage of doubt into the same stage of conviction." Further confirmatory evidence of the general truth of the horrible statements reproduced in this Report and the Appendix which accompanies it is furnished by the diaries found upon dead German soldiers and by the Proclamations issued by German officers. These diaries themselves confess --sometimes with a note of regret, sometimes with a note of boasting—to the worst horrors imputed to German troops, while the Proclamations posted up in towns occupied by the Germans openly announce that the innocent run the risk of being slaughtered with the guilty. The general scheme of the story told in this Report is chronological and geographical. In addition, there are brief extra chapters dealing more specifically with special subjects such as the treatment of women and children and the destruction of property. One of the most illuminating facts brought out is that the atrocities began at the very moment that the German troops crossed the frontier ; for this fact disposes at once of the defence put forward by the Germane that they only retaliated upon Belgian civilians who fired at them. Here is what happened on August 4th at Herve, a village not far from the frontier. Near the station a witness saw five Minns ; they were the first German troops he had seen. They were followed by an officer and some soldiers in a motor-car. The men in the car called out to a couple of young fellows who were standing about thirty yards, away. The young men, being afraid, ran off, and then the Germans fired and killed one of them. "The murder of this innocent fugitive civilian was a prelude to the burning and pillaging of Herve and of other villages in the neigh- bourhood, to the indiscriminate shooting of civilians of both sexes, and the organized military execution of batches of selected males." From this date onwards the advance of the German troops was accompanied in countless villages by acts of murder, pillage, and rape. At Liege, for example, several streets were systematically fired and many inhabitants were burned alive in their houses, their efforts to escape being prevented by rifle fire. Thirty-two civilians were killed on August 21st in the Place de rUniversite alone, and some fifteen or twenty women were openly raped on tables in the square itself. And so the story proceeds. Some of the outrages related are not merely cruel, but so utterly disgusting that we refrain from quoting them. They indicate a degradation of human nature which even savages would repudiate. Not only did the Germans in Belgium burn houses and shoot civilians, but they made a regular practice of herding large numbers of civilian prisoners into churches or other places of detention and keeping them there hour after hour and day after day without any adequate arrangements for feeding and without the least provision for the wants of nature. In some eases these prisoners were subsequently taken into Germany; one large batch was packed into cattle-trucks already foul with cattle-dung and sent to Cologne, and afterwards brought back again to Belgium ; the journey occupied altogether eight days. For two and a half days these wretched people—man, women, and children—were without food ; then they received a loaf of bread among ten persons and some water. Prisoners were not allowed to leave the train even to obey the calls of nature. One man who quitted the truck for this purpose was bayoneted. Many of these persons came from Louvain, and the story of Louvain in broad outline m already familiar throughout the world ; in this Report it is told in greater detail. It is sufficient to say that the vast majority of human beings will find it impossible to understand how any people claimiug to be civilized can have been guilty of such deliberate cruelties as those here detailed.
The verdict of Lord Bryce's Committee on the conduct of the Germans in the Louvain district is as follows
"ave are driven to the conclusion that the harrying of the villages in this district, the burning of a large part of Louvain, the massacres there, the marching out of the prisoners and the transport to Cologne, were due to a calculated policy carried out scientifically and deliberately, not merely with the sanction of, but under the direction of, higher military authorities, and were not due to any provocation or resistance of the civilian population."
As the Committee indicate, the inference to be drawn is that the German military authorities made up their minds that it was desirable to terrorize the Belgian people in order to overcome Belgium's resistance to the German Army, and in order to maintain the German communica- tions without having to devote too large a force to protect them. In other words, the military interests of Germany were held to justify any kind of cruelty that might con- ceivably contribute to the success of German arms. There is, as the Committee point out, abundant German evidence that this view of the nature of war and the means of warfare is held by German military authorities :—
" The spirit of war is deified; obedience to the State and its war lord loaves no room for any other duty or feeling ; cruelty becomes legitimate when it promises victory. . . . If this explanation be the true one the mystery is solved, and that which seemed scarcely credible becomes more intelligible though not loss pernicious. This is not the only case that history records in which a false theory disguising itself as loyalty to FL State or to a Church has perverted the conception of duty and become a source of danger to the world."
The seriousness of view thus expressed by a Com- mittee composed of men not one of whom, judging by their previous record, is likely to be led away by sensational statements, will be appreciated by public opinion here, and also, it is to be hoped, in the United States and other neutral countries. Such a considered judgment is far more serious than any mere enumera- tion of acts of atrocity which might conceivably be due to individual soldiers fired with drink or lust. Acts of this character occur in almost every war, and this Report shows that, apart from the outrages organized and ordered by the German -military authorities, there were also out- rages due to the drunkenness or the lust of individual German soldiers. But, while drawing this distinction, it is important to bear in mind that the German Army cannot escape responsibility even for these individual crimes, for of all armies in the world the German is subject to the most rigid discipline, and if the German military authorities had wished to hold their troops in check they certainly could have done so. Indeed, in some places German troops behaved as well as any troops could possibly behave, and therefore the inference is irresistible that where they behaved badly they were either ordered or permitted so to do. The whole story as told in this Report in carefully weighed language constitutes one of the most terrible reflections upon European civilization. We seem to have gone back in the standard of civilization for several centuries at least. In the words of the Com- mittee: "Murder, lust, and pillage prevailed over many parts of Belgium on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilized nations during the last throe centuries."
The Committee end their Report with the expression of a hope which all our readers would be inclined to share, but which at the moment seems too remote from the
realities of the present international situation. The Committee hope that these disclosures will "touch and rouse the conecience of mankind," and that when the war is over "the nations of the world in council will consider
what means can be provided and sanctions devised to prevent the recurrence of such horrors." The pity of the matter is that most of the nations of Europe other than those actually-engaged in fighting appear to ho terrorized by the very horrors which they ought to be engaged in checking. Instead of acting together as one unit to defend the civilization of the world, the neutral Powers, with few exceptions, seem to be considering only their own interests, and to be wondering whether it would be more profitable to them to remain outside as spectators or to rush into the fray in the hope of extracting some advan- tage for themselves.
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