THE CRIMES OF GERMANY.
T NETHER a whole nation can go mad is an interesting subject of speculation, and not a new one. It may well be that not all Germans are mad ; but if we give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume—as both reason and experience exhort us to do—that there are many thoughtful and decent Germans who are revolted by the barbarities committed in their name, the distressing fact remains that we have never beaTd of any organized protest by them. Much is no doubt hidden from
them. But even those who have never visited Belgium during the German occupation may easily have seen the forced labour which the German Government relentlessly exact from their prisoners, contrary to the law of nations. Such sermons as we referred to last week would not have been preached if the con- gregations had not been in sympathy with the preachers. It must be that at all events the majority of the people have so inflamed themselves with grandiose thoughts of Germany's mission that they consent to devastation and massacre, not only as a means of arriving at their goal, but as an exemplary punish- ment for evildoers which has been entrusted to the divinely supported German soldiery. If this is not madness, it is very near indeed to it. Mr. Kipling has said that he never expected to see " a whole nation in a frenzy," but that he has now seen it. It is not as though there had been no opportunities for the clergy or the people to express their feelings. The German Government have told them of the offer of the British Admiralty to submit the Baralong ' case (in which a British crew are charged with killing German seamen who were in their power and helpless) to an impartial inquiry together with the British charges against German submarines. If they had felt any scruples, they would naturally have expressed a desire for such an inquiry, instead of denouncing the proposal as an infamous impertinence. The German Government have allowed the people to know, again, of the request of the Belgian Bishops for an impartial inquiry into the charges against Belgians of having provoked the ma.seacres. But we have never heard that any sort of articulate demand has been expressed for the establishment of a tribunal that would be able to inculpate the Belgians if they were guilty and exculpate the German assassins if they were not guilty. Surely if one powerful voice had been raised we should have beard of it ; some echo of it would have reverberated outside Germany.
The stories of Louvain, Dinant, Termonde, and other places seem like old history now. There is the possibility that neutral observers will dismiss them as things not likely to happen again. But lesser, or at least rarer, crimes—lesser, so far as we can judge, only because the opportunities are less—are still being committed. Criminal submarine warfare goes on. Whatever concessions may have been made in form to America, with whom it is very inconvenient for Germany to quarrel, there has been no withdrawal of the German declaration that the British seas are a war zone in which Germany may do what she pleases to merchantmen. By some extraordinarily confused piece of logic, Germany tells herself that she has the " right " to sink merchantmen because her own coasts are blockaded. She talks as though international law were necessarily a case of " Heads I win, tails you lose " for Germany. " Oh," say the Germans, " but if the British Navy is supreme, that means that we shall lose the war, and that can never have been intended. Obviously the law no longer applies." They are incapable of grasping the fact that laws, treaties, and conventions do not necessarily assume the victory of Germany. The gentlemen who spent laborious days round the table at the Hague were not so silly as to suppose that one particular country would always be the winner ; they created humane regulations within the compass of which rivals were to fight out their quarrel and the better side was to win. Germans answer : " That is all rubbish. Directly a law tells against us, it is dead." We should despise the Germans less if they declared themselves outside all law, but they keep up a contemptible appearance of respecting the law for the sake of making an impression on neutral countries. Having signed away part of their licence in the use of sub- marines, they pretend that the latest atrocity was committed by a Turkish submarine. We suspect that there is a huge fleet of Bulgarian submarines in waiting. And submarine warfare is only one proof that the spirit of Louvain is still at work. Take the terms which were offered to unhappy Monte- negro. There has been much conflict of evidence about them, but it is probable that their essential brutality has not been overstated. Austria—the voice is the voice of Austria, but the hands are the hands of Germany—wished to round up and to corral like cattle the half-starved, ragged mountaineers whose very appearance, if not their history of unbroken freedom, is an appeal to pity and generosity. Even their women were to be segregated. A scaffold has been set up in front of the palace at Cettigne. That will burn itself on the vision of the mountain race even if the terms of surrender are forgotten.
There is evidence that the merciless treatment of prisoners goes on in many parts of Germany, though not in all. It is
stated that Russian prisoners are being put to forced labour in Belgium under the unceasing menace of the rifle and the whip. Similarly Belgians are believed to have been transported to Russian Poland, there to fulfil tasks of servile labour under conditions which their taskmasters think more favourable for suppressing outbreaks. Think of the misery of these men— Russians who cannot talk a word of Flemish or French, Belgians who cannot talk a word of Russian or Polish. They cannot converse with the people among whom they are placed ; they are indeed captives fast bound in misery and iron ; they are worse off than the Jews when they were bodily removed into exile ; they are not only prisoners, but slaves carrying out the most dreadful form of slave-work. If Germany had not laid a hand upon Louvain or any other place, if not a single house had been burnt, if not a single hostage had been shot, if not a single woman had been violated or a single child done to death, Germans would be for ever infamous in history for having enslaved their prisoners.
The latest number of the Field contains a striking supplement full of evidence in writing and by photograph of German brutality—brutality which, as the editor says, is continuing. Here is an account of what Russian doctors found at Schneide- mail :-
" The Germans have made wide use of the compulsory and unpaid labour of their prisoners of war. The hardest and dirtiest work was given to the Russian and the English prisoners. Tho French were treated more considerately. The prisoners were set in parties of a hundred at a time, to dig canals, hew down timber, carry logs and dig trenches. The hardest work was that of draining swamps and tilling and harrowing the fields. From 6 o'clock in the morning till 8 o'clock at night prisoners had to work, standing barefooted in water up to the knees, in digging canals for the drainage of marshy soiL . . . In ti ling the fields they were harnessed in batches to ploughs and harrows, thus taking the place of cattle, and being treated like cattle. If they sat down to rest they were driven back by a whip or the butt end of a German soldier's rifle. Any prisoner who refused to work was beaten senseless. Jacob Kalichkin, 27th regiment Siberian riflemen, was a spectator of the way in which a whole party of Russian prisoners were beaten, and ten of them beaten to death, for refusing to dig trenches in front of Kalisch. In addition to the beatings very frequently inflicted with the whips with which the German sergeants, subalterns, and soldiers holding sway in the camps were abundantly furnished, there were a number of cruel and humiliating disciplinary punishments.' Prisoners were kept on bread and water, they were made to stand with uplifted arms, they were made to kneel with bare knees on broken bricks, to drag heavy loads round the barracks until they were thoroughly exhausted and so forth. For the most part the forms of punishment favoured by the Germans remind one of the tortures of the middle ages. Offenders were tied up high with ropes or wire to posts, so that their feet barely touched the ground, and in this position they were left for three or four hours. In 20-25 minutes the blood began to rise to the head, copious hemorrhage took place from the nose, mouth and ears, the unfortunate man gradually grew weak, lost consciousness and was only prevented from falling down by the ropes or wires which held him to the post. According to the evidence of prisoners who underwent that kind of torture, it was frightfuL The rope and wire cut into the body, causing unbearable suffering and for a long time after being liberated the victim was unable to come to himself.' All the body ached and a general weakness rendered any movement impossible. Not infrequently prisoners were stretched over a barrel and beaten with sticks and whips with thongs of gut until they completely lost consciousness. There is another form of punishment, invented by cultured Germans, which does not, at first sight, appear to be very dreadful, but which those who had the misfortune to experience it declare is in the highest degree painful. The men to be punished were led out on to an open space, placed back to back, and in this position they were tightly bound together, the rope enveloping the body from head to foot. The men thus lashed together were left standing until one of them fainted away and pulled down the other. These disciplinary punish- ments were inflicted at the discretion of German sergeant-majors, under-officers, and even private soldiers, who were apparently given uncontrolled power over the honour, health and lives of the prisoners."
One is reminded of the Roman shackles which explorers have found with bones still fastened in them in the Roman mines. There the prisoners had worked, and fallen and died where they worked, without perhaps ever seeing the daylight during their captivity. The bodies had rotted away, and pieces of bone remained in the shackles. According to their lights, were the Romans much worse than the new Caesars of to-day ?
The brutalities of Germany make the relations of European nations after the war seem too difficult for one to care to think about them. It would be a relief, a partial solution, if only one could say that the Germans broke loose from their officers and their habits in a lust of blood and violence. But the terrible fact is that throughout the war we have heard no word of any German regiment being out of hand, or doing otherwise than their officers or the highest authorities desired. They have been a perfectly disciplined Army—disciplined to spaced
red ruin, to oppress, and to bully with a mechanical-docility. The policy behind all is horrible in its calculation. The Germans say that Russian soldiers have committed atrocities. Even if that be true, is there any evidence that Russian policy in the war has been cruel and criminal ? There is none that we ever heard of even in the German newspapers. Only Eng- land's " moat " divides us from the horrors. Birds that land on the English coast flew over the slave-prisoners at their work but an hour or so before. Crime and brutality, probably worse than any yet committed, are held in reserve for the men, women, and children of this country if ever the Germans succeed in bursting upon us. It is worth while for every one to perpend the meaning of this possibility. Murder, rape, and arson would be the German raiders' holy work. They would hack the protesting English civilian to pieces " before the Lord." We know their mission. Yet workers, jealous for a Trade Union rule, resist the " dilution " of labour, or some other technical innovation, as though Germans, if ever they obtained the upper hand, would allow Trade Unions to have any rules at all !
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