Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights Part 13

"An eye witness testified that he met nothing except burned villages, crazed peasants, lifting to each comer their arms, as mark of submission. From each house was hanging a white flag, even from those that had been set on fire, and rags of them were found hanging from the ruins. The fire began a little above the American College, and the city is entirely destroyed, with the exception of the town hall and the depot. Today the fire continues and the Germans, instead of trying to stop it--seem rather to maintain it by throwing straw into the flames, as I have myself seen behind the Hotel de Ville. The Cathedral and the theatre have been destroyed and fallen in, and also the library. The town resembles an old city in ruins, in the midst of which drunken soldiers are circulating, carrying around bottles of wine and liquor; the officers themselves being installed in arm chairs, sitting around tables and drinking like their own men.

"In the streets dead horses are decaying, horses which are completely inflated, and the smell of the fire and the decaying animals is such that it has followed me for a long time."

And the policy which developed such outrageous conduct on the part of the Kaiser's soldiers in the early days of the war, against which Belgium protested to the world, inspired brutal acts, ruthlessness and cruelty at every stage and during every period of the war. Nowhere is there written a single line which tells of the humanitarian acts of the German soldiers. Those who fight against them acknowledge their stoical bravery, the efficiency of the army, the navy and the people as a whole, but there is no reflection of refined instincts in any of the acts of Germany or the Germans.

THE AMERICAN MINISTER'S REPORT.

Of those conditions which existed in Belgium when the German soldiers overran the country, America's own minister to the devastated country, Brand Whitlock, sent a report to the State Department in the beginning of 1917, when President Wilson was protesting against the treatment accorded the helpless people of Belgium by the Germans.

Mr. Whitlock tells how the Germans determined to put the Belgians thrown out of employment to work for them. "In August," says the report, dealing with the treatment of the helpless Belgians, "Von Hindenburg was appointed supreme commander. He is said to have criticised Von Bissing's policy as too mild, and there was a quarrel; Von Bissing went to Berlin to protest, threatened to resign, but did not. He returned, and a German official said that Belgium would now be subjected to a more terrible regime, would learn what war was. The prophecy has been vindicated.

"The deportations began in October in the Etape, at Ghent and at Bruges. The policy spread; the rich industrial districts at Hainaut, the mines and steel works about Charleroi were next attacked, and they seized men in Brabant, even in Brussels, despite some indications and even predictions of the civil authorities that the policy was about to be abandoned.

"As by one of the ironies of life the winter has been more excessively cold than Belgium has ever known it and while many of those who presented themselves were adequately protected against the cold, many of them were without overcoats. The men, s.h.i.+vering from cold and fear, the parting from weeping wives and children, the barrels of brutal Uhlans, all this made the scene a pitiable and distressing one.

RAGE, TERROR AND DESPAIR.

"The rage, the terror and despair excited by this measure all over Belgium were beyond anything we had witnessed since the day the Germans poured into Brussels. The delegates of the commission for relief in Belgium, returning to Brussels, told the most distressing stories of the scenes of cruelty and sorrow attending the seizures. And daily, hourly almost, since that time, appalling stories have been related by Belgians coming to the legation. It is impossible for us to verify them, first because it is necessary for us to exercise all possible tact in dealing with the subject at all, and secondly because there is no means of communication between the Occupations Gebiet and the Etappey Gebiet.

"I am constantly in receipt of reports from all over Belgium that tend to bear the stories one constantly hears of brutality and cruelty. A number of men sent back to Mons are said to be in a dying condition, many of them tubercular. At Molines and at Antwerp returned men have died, their friends a.s.serting that they have been victims of neglect and cruelty, of cold, of exposure, of hunger.

"I have had requests from the burgomasters of ten communes asking that permission be obtained to send to the deported men in Germany packages of food similar to those that are being sent to prisoners of war. Thus far the German authorities have refused to permit this except in special instances, and returning Belgians claim that even when such packages are received they are used by the camp authorities only as another means of coercing them to sign the agreements to work.

A MORTAL BLOW TO BELGIANS.

"By the deportation of Belgians to work in Germany," says Mr. Whitlock's report, "they have dealt a mortal blow to any prospect they may ever have had of being tolerated by the population of Flanders; in tearing away from nearly every humble home in the land a husband and a father or a son and brother; they have lighted a fire of hatred that will never go out; they have brought home to every heart in the land, in a way that will impress its horror indelibly on the memory of three generations, a realization of what German methods mean, not as with the early atrocities in the heat of pa.s.sion and the first l.u.s.t of war, but by one of those deeds that make one despair of the future of the human race, a deed coldly planned, studiously matured, and deliberately and systematically executed, a deed so cruel that German soldiers are said to have wept in its execution, and so monstrous that even German officers are now said to be ashamed."

And if these acts were not sufficient to convince the world that Germany "is without the pale" so far as civilized warfare is concerned her conduct in wantonly destroying property in Flanders while in retreat could permit of no other conclusion.

After the violation of Belgium and the destruction of the Lusitania and the adoption of the policy of sinking neutral s.h.i.+ps on sight for military advantage, or "necessity," why shouldn't the soldiers pollute wells, kill trees, carry off the girls, smash the household furniture not worth taking away and smear the pictures on the wall, just for revenge or in the sheer l.u.s.t of destruction?

It makes no difference, so far as the principles of humanity are concerned, whether the German army is in victory or suffering defeat, advancing or retreating. The treatment accorded the evacuated cities of the Somme district was foretold by the treatment of the cities occupied early in the war. Here is the wording of an order posted during the victorious invasion of Belgium:

"Order--To the people of Liege. The population of Andenne, after making a display of peaceful intentions toward our troops, attacked them in the most treacherous manner. With my authority the general commanding these troops has reduced the town to ashes and has had 110 persons shot. I bring this fact to the knowledge of the people of Liege in order that they may know what fate to expect should they adopt a similar att.i.tude.

GENERAL VON BULOW.

Liege, Aug. 22, 1914."

CRUEL EXTREME OF PUNISHMENT.

And yet this order showed only a cruel extreme of punishment where some punishment was to be expected. It was left for the retreating Germans of 1917 to destroy, without provocation and without purpose, motived by revenge and obsessed by the Nietschean doctrine of "spare not."

Before Bapaume was evacuated it was deliberately converted into a ma.s.s of muck. There is no Bapaume now. It is perfectly understandable that the retreating soldiers should destroy their trenches and put up the question, "Tommy, how do you like your new trenches?" But why smear filth over the photograph of three little girls, a family treasure? All around Bapaume the villages were looted and the night the deliverers entered the destroyers made the sky lurid with the fires of towns and hamlets. Some 300 in the evacuated region were burned.

At Nesle, Roye and Ham there was not time enough to destroy everything.

The house of a doctor at Nesle, a specially attractive home, was not blown down for strategic purposes, but some soldiers did find time to drive axes through the mahogany panels of the beds and smash the clocks and mirrors. They were angry at being compelled to leave the house.

Villages like Cressy, near Nesle, where a sh.e.l.l never fell in the course of the war, have been completely destroyed.

PERONNE A HOPELESS RUIN.

There is not a habitable house left in Peronne. The sixteenth century church of St. Jean is but a relic. W. Beach Thomas wrote after the retreat that nothing was left that was valuable enough to be worth collection by a penny tinker or a rag-and-bone merchant. Foul what you cannot have, was the motto.

The famous ruins of the Feudal Castle of Coucy, one of the finest relics of architecture of its period, was wantonly blown up by the Germans on retreat. It was built in the thirteenth century by Enguerrand III and pa.s.sed to the French crown in 1498, and was one of the great historic landmarks of Northern France.

Coucy was one of the n.o.blest relics of the Middle Ages, respected by the most barbarous wars of the past, whose donjon (greatest in all Europe) dates almost from Charlemagne, harmless, time-wrecked, ill.u.s.trious Coucy!

To give an idea of Coucy's importance, the French, in their first astonishment and sorrow, proposed to make reprisals on Hindenburg, should it take ten years. Of course, they will not; it is not their way.

Coucy is a mountain of blasted stones. Shoun Kelly, American, owned one of the outer towers of the great castle and the story of its owners.h.i.+p is the American ant.i.thesis of German ravage. Americans were always faithful tourists to Coucy; but among them, one loved more than all the glorious old ruin and its story which began with Enguerrand, the Sire of Coucy, in the year 1210. This was the late Edmund Kelly, of New York and Paris, international lawyer and for many years counsel of the American Emba.s.sy in Paris. He meditated on the motto of old Enguerrand: "I am not king, nor prince, nor duke, nor even count: I am the Sire of Coucy!" In fact, the Sire made a record for standing off local kings.

"He was a good American ahead of his time," said Lawyer Kelly; and he took to reading up the ancient chronicles, how Enguerrand's descendants stood off royalty for some 200 years, until finally bought out by the wealthy Louis of Orleans, and all the later glories of the place.

Mazarin dismantled Coucy, but left it standing in its beauty; and Lawyer Kelly discovered it to be a State museum, impossible to be purchased, in these latter days, even by a millionaire. Not being one, he preferred it so, loving Coucy more than ever, the cultured American did the next best thing.

A LITTLE TOWN REDUCED.

The little town, once so rich, had dwindled since Mazarin. On the castle side stood two ma.s.sive towers of the inner defense, belonging to the town. Mr. Kelly asked Mayor and department legislature to make a price on the nearest. As soon as he had bought his tower, he used loving care restoring it. He pierced windows through walls 16 feet thick. He built rooms in three stories, furnis.h.i.+ng them in ma.s.sive antique style. The tower roof was his shady terrace, covered with a little grove of century-old trees! From it he dominated Coucy. All its soul of beauty lay beneath his view.

All was systematically blown up, the town, the towers, the castle, by retreating Germans in their rage. Just ma.s.ses of crumbled stones. The German papers boast that it took 28 tons of high explosives, and any one can see, this hour, the plain of Coucy covered with a white layer of powdered limestone, for miles around.

What for? To clear a battlefield, they say. It is not true. Nothing is cleared. The ma.s.ses of crumbled stone remained, when they fled their "battlefield."

The donjon was very high. It stood on a kind of bluff or elevation, overlooking the country, and before the days of aeroplanes it might have been used for observation. The donjon walls were 16 yards thick, not feet, but yards! No other tower in Europe had those dimensions. They tell a story about Mazarin. He deemed so strong a place, so near to Paris, might be dangerous to the Crown; so he dismantled Coucy militarily, without destroying its architectural beauty. The donjon worried him in those days when artillery could make no impression on its ma.s.sive thickness. So Mazarin put 16 barrels of powder inside the tower, and set them off. The tower just converted itself into gun barrel! The powder blew out all the stories and the roof--shot them up like a gun pointed at the sky! But the tower stood, exactly as before.

OF Ma.s.sIVE ARCHITECTURE.

The masonry was admittedly the heaviest achieved by the Middle Ages.

From the donjon extended three great vaulted halls. Ma.s.sive buildings continued. There was a Gothic chapel, a Tribunal Hall, the Hall of the Nine Peers (whose statues remained), the Hall of the Nine Countesses (whose medallion-portraits were carved on the monumental chimney). There was a Romanesque chapel (relic from Charlemagne, like the original donjon), the separate Fortified Chateau of the Chatelain (the Sire's First Officer), and so on, and so on.

The retreating Germans have not only blown up Coucy, but that other priceless relic, the Tower of the Grand Constable and the entire historic Chateau of Ham, and equally the Castle of Peronne, a jewel of beauty--all in one corner of the Vallois! On the smoking wreck of Peronne, they left a humorous placard:

"Nicht aergen! Tur wundern! Don't be angry, just wonder!" Noyon and Peronne are sacked and ruined. At Chauny 1800 houses out of 2500 were deliberately burned, and at a distance they bombarded the remainder, full of old folks and children whom they had parked there. All the public buildings, churches, hospitals and poorhouse were blown up. Three hundred towns and villages were burning at one time in this small section of the Cradle of France. Hindenburg was at Roisel when they rounded up the populations, went through their pockets for their money (giving "receipts"), took their clothes off their backs (so that all the American relief agencies in Paris were overwhelmed with telegrams of appeal) and burgled all the safes in banks and business houses before setting fire to the town and blowing up the main street!

ACCORDING TO THE PRINCIPLE OF WAR.

The German official communique said that it was "all done uniquely according to the technical principles of modern war." At Berlin they caused an American correspondent to cable these words to his papers: "The enemy will find great difficulty to take shelter on a battlefield where everything has been completely razed. We regret the destruction of a beautiful region of France, but it was necessary to transform it into a clear field of battle before we quit it."

They blew up the precious Romanesque Church of Tracy-le-Val (which dates before the Gothic). The church was situated in the midst of the great forest of Laigue; they blew up the church--and left the forest standing!

No battlefield was cleared, but they hacked the bark to kill great n.o.ble trees by thousands. They made no effort to clear the forest; but weeping old French peasants told how half a German regiment was occupied three days in barking trees to prevent the sap from mounting. The crushed pearl of architecture lies in a dying forest.

At Le Novion, torch in hand, they burned 223 houses; but all the gutted walls are standing.