Read Ebook: Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights by Miller Kelly

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TREATY OBLIGATIONS.

Categorically, the violation and disregard of every phase of the Hague treaty is described. In spite of the strict provision that undefended cities, villages and dwellings are not to be bombarded, and where bombardment is necessary the commanding officer of the attacking party must warn the authorities that such bombardment is to take place, German aeroplanes and dirigibles bombarded relentlessly from the beginning. In Antwerp a Zeppelin threw explosive bombs at the Royal Palace, but the missiles went astray, demolishing private residences, killing eight persons and injuring many. Servants were killed in their beds in one private house when the bombs tore away the top of the building.

"In the Place du Poids Public a bomb fell on the pavement. Fragments scattered all over the place. Not a house facing the square was untouched. A policeman was cut to pieces, all that was found of him being a leg covered with a few rags of his uniform. Five other persons who opened their windows were blown to atoms. The bed-rooms of two houses facing one another were visited. In the first there were three corpses. Blood was scattered all over the place. The floor was covered with fragments of windows and with blood-soaked underwear. On the ceiling and walls, parts of intestines and brains were visible. In the other house two old persons had been killed while looking down upon the street. Later Antwerp was bombarded, as was Heyst-op-den-Berg and the city of Malines, which was undefended, and where there was not a Belgian soldier. At Malines the batteries fired shell after shell in the direction of the Cathedral of Saint Rombault, a beautiful edifice, which was hit many times and badly damaged, though there was no military reason for the assault as the town was practically abandoned."

The commission turned over to President Wilson explosive bullets used by the Germans at Werchter, and submitted briefs from physicians who treated wounds made by the explosive bullets.

DETAILED ATROCITIES OUTLINED.

A few details of the atrocities are outlined as follows:

"German cavalry, occupying the village of Linsmeau, were attacked by some Belgian infantry and two Gendarmes. A German officer was killed by our troops during the fight, and subsequently buried at the request of the Belgian officer in command. None of the civilian population took part in the fight. Nevertheless, the village was invaded at dusk on August 10 by a strong force of German cavalry, artillery and machine guns. In spite of the assurance given by the Burgomaster that none of the peasants had taken part in the previous fighting two farms and six outlying houses were destroyed by gunfire and burned. All the male population were compelled to come forward and hand over what they possessed. No recently discharged firearms were found, but the invaders divided the peasants into three groups. Those in one group were bound and eleven of them placed in a ditch, whither they were afterward found dead, their skulls fractured by the butts of German rifles.

"During the night of August 10, German cavalry entered Velm in great numbers; the inhabitants were asleep. The Germans, without provocation, fired upon Mr. Deglimme-Gever's house, broke into it, destroyed furniture, looted money, burned barns, hay, corn stacks, farm implements, six oxen, and the contents of the farmyard. They carried off Mme. Deglimme half-naked, to a place two miles away. She was then let go and was fired upon as she fled, without being hit. Her husband was carried away in another direction."

Farmer Jeff Dierckx, of Neerhespen, bears witness to the following acts of cruelty committed by German cavalry at Orsmael Neerhespen, on August 10, 11 and 12:

SHOCKING BARBARITIES.

"An old man of the latter village had his arm sliced in three longitudinal cuts; he was then hanged head downward and burned alive. Young girls have been raped and little children outraged at Orsmael, where several inhabitants suffered mutilations too horrible to describe. A Belgian soldier belonging to a battalion of cyclist carbineers who had been wounded and made prisoner was hanged, while another who was tending his comrade was bound to a telegraph pole and shot."

The sacking of Louvain, which was one of the vile acts of the Germans during the early days of the war, is described briefly in the report of the commission as follows:

"The Germans entered Louvain on Wednesday, August 19, after having set fire to the towns through which they passed.

"From the moment of their having entered the city of Louvain, the Germans requisitioned lodgings and victuals for their troops. They entered every private bank of the city and took over the bank funds. German soldiers broke the doors of houses abandoned by their inhabitants, pillaged them and indulged in orgies.

"The German authorities took hostages; the mayor of the city, Senator Vander Kelen, the Vice Rector of the Catholic University, the Dean of the City; magistrates and aldermen were also detained. All arms down to fencing foils had been handed over to the town administration and deposited by the said authorities in the Church of St. Peter.

"In the neighboring village, Corbeck-Loo, a young matron, 22 years old, whose husband was in the army, was surprised on Wednesday, August 19, with several of her relatives, by a band of German soldiers. The persons who accompanied her were locked in an abandoned house, while she was taken into another house, where she was successively violated by five soldiers.

LUSTFUL CRUELTY OF THE GERMANS.

"In the same village, on Thursday, August 20, German soldiers were searching a house where a young girl of 16 lived with her parents. They carried her into an abandoned house and, while some of them kept the father and mother off, others went into the house, the cellar of which was open, and forced the young woman to drink. Afterwards they carried her out on the lawn in front of the house and violated her successively. She continued to resist and they pierced her breast with bayonets. Having been abandoned by the soldiers after their abominable attacks, the girl was carried off by her parents, and the following day, owing to the gravity of her condition, she was administered the last rites of the church by the priest of the parish and carried to the hospital at Louvain."

Upon entering villages occupied by the Germans after they were driven back to Louvain, the report says the Belgian soldiers found that the German soldiers had sacked, ravaged and set fire to the villages everywhere, taking with them and driving before them all the male inhabitants. "Upon entering Hofstade, the Belgian soldiers found the corpse of an old woman who had been killed by bayonet thrusts; she still held in her hand the needle with which she was sewing when attacked; one mother and her son, aged about 15 years, lay there pierced with bayonet wounds; one man was found hung.

"In Sempst, a neighboring village, were found corpses of two men partially burned. One of them was found with legs cut off to the knees; the other was minus his arms and legs. A workman had been pierced with bayonets, afterward while he was still living the Germans soaked him with petroleum and locked him in a house which they set on fire. An old man and his son had been killed by sabre cuts; a cyclist had been killed by bullets; a woman coming out of her house had been stricken down in the same manner."

A LAME EXCUSE OFFERED.

"The houses which had not taken fire were entered by German soldiers, who were throwing fire grenades, some of which seem to have been provided for the occasion. The largest part of the city of Louvain, especially the quarters of 'Ville Haute,' comprising the modern houses, the Cathedral of St. Peter, the University Halls, with the whole library of the University with its manuscripts, its collections, the largest part of the scientific institutions and the town theatre were at the moment being consumed by flames.

"The commission deems it necessary, in the midst of these horrors, to insist on the crime of lese-humanity which the deliberate annihilation of an academic library--a library which was one of the treasures of our time--constitutes.

"Numerous corpses of civilians covered the streets and squares. On the routes from Louvain to Tirlemont alone one witness testifies to having seen more than fifty of them. On the threshold of houses were found burnt corpses of people, who, surprised in their cellars by the fire, had tried to escape and fell into the heap of live embers. The suburbs of Louvain were given up to the same fate. It can be said that the whole region between Malines and Louvain and most of the suburbs of Louvain have been devastated and destroyed.

BASE INDIGNITIES TO CLERGYMEN.

"A group of 75 persons, among whom were several notables of the city, such as Father Coloboet and a Spanish priest, and also an American priest, were conducted, during the morning of Wednesday, August 26, to the square in front of the station. The men were brutally separated from their wives and children, after having received the most abominable treatment after repeated threats of being shot, and were driven in front of the German troops as far as the village of Campenhout. They were locked, during the night, in the church. The following day, at 4 o'clock, a German officer came to tell them that they might all confess themselves and that they would be shot half an hour later. When, finally, they were released, the report continues, they were recaptured by another German brigade and compelled to march to Malines, where they were finally liberated.

"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, shivering 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 asserting 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.

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 ships 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 lust 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 attitude.

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 mass 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 shell 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.

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