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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon, by
+Newell Dwight Hillis
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon
+
+
+Author: Newell Dwight Hillis
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 1, 2007  [eBook #22821]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLOT ON THE KAISER'S
+'SCUTCHEON***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Stephen Blundell, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+THE BLOT ON THE KAISER'S 'SCUTCHEON
+
+by
+
+NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS
+
+
+        *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ Each 12mo, cloth, net, $1.20
+
+ STUDIES OF THE GREAT WAR
+ What Each Nation Has at Stake
+
+ LECTURES AND ORATIONS BY HENRY WARD BEECHER
+ Collected by Newell Dwight Hillis
+
+ THE MESSAGE OF DAVID SWING TO HIS GENERATION
+ Compiled, with Introductory Memorial Address
+ by Newell Dwight Hillis
+
+ ALL THE YEAR ROUND
+ Sermons for Church and Civic Celebrations
+
+ THE BATTLE OF PRINCIPLES
+ A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the
+ Anti-Slavery Conflict
+
+ THE CONTAGION OF CHARACTER
+ Studies in Culture and Success
+
+ THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC
+ Studies, National and Patriotic, upon the
+ America of To-day and To-morrow
+
+ GREAT BOOKS AS LIFE-TEACHERS
+ Studies of Character, Real and Ideal
+
+ THE INVESTMENT OF INFLUENCE
+ A Study of Social Sympathy and Service
+
+ A MAN'S VALUE TO SOCIETY
+ Studies in Self-Culture and Character
+
+        *       *       *       *       *
+
+ FAITH AND CHARACTER
+ 12mo, cloth, gilt top, net, 75 cents
+
+ FORETOKENS OF IMMORTALITY
+ 12mo, cloth, net, 60 cents
+
+ HOW THE INNER LIGHT FAILED
+ 18mo, boards, net, 25 cents
+
+ RIGHT LIVING AS A FINE ART
+ A Study of Channing's Symphony
+ 12mo, boards, net, 35 cents
+
+ THE MASTER OF THE SCIENCE OF RIGHT LIVING
+ 12mo, boards, net, 35 cents
+
+ ACROSS THE CONTINENT OF THE YEARS
+ 16mo, old English boards, net, 25 cents
+
+ THE SCHOOL IN THE HOME
+ Net, 60 cents
+
+
+        *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE BLOT ON THE KAISER'S 'SCUTCHEON
+
+by
+
+NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS, D. D.
+Author of "German Atrocities," etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Decoration]
+
+
+New York         Chicago
+Fleming  H.  Revell  Company
+London   and   Edinburgh
+
+Copyright, 1918, by
+Fleming H. Revell Company
+
+
+_Uniform with this Volume_
+
+German Atrocities
+By NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS
+Illus., Cloth, $1.00 net
+
+_A Million and a Half
+Extracts from this book
+have been issued by the
+Liberty Loan Committee!_
+
+
+New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
+Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
+London: 21 Paternoster Square
+Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+ I. THE ARCH-CRIMINAL                            11
+      1. The Kaiser's Hatred of the United
+         States.
+      2. The Kaiser's Character Revealed
+         in His Choosing the Sultan for His
+         friend.
+      3. Pershing's Charges versus the
+         Kaiser.
+      4. Who Taught the Kaiser That a
+         Treaty Is a Scrap of Paper?
+      5. The Plot of the Kaiser.
+
+ II. THE JUDAS AMONG NATIONS                     31
+      1. The Original Plot of the Members
+         of the Potsdam Gang.
+      2. The Berlin Schemers and Their
+         Plot.
+      3. German Superiority a Myth That
+         Has Exploded.
+      4. German Intrigues.
+      5. German Burglars Loaded with Loot
+         Are the More Easily Captured.
+      6. Germans Who Hide Behind the
+         Screen.
+      7. Must German Men Be Exterminated?
+
+ III. THE BLACK SOUL OF THE HUN                  60
+      1. German Barbarism Not Barbarism
+         to the German.
+      2. The German "Science of Lying."
+      3. The Malignity of the German Spies.
+      4. The Cancer in the Body-Politic of
+         Germany.
+      5. Polygamy and the Collapse of the
+         Family in Germany.
+      6. The Red-Hot Swords in Sister
+         Julie's Eyes.
+      7. The Hidden Dynamite: The
+         Hun's Destruction of Cathedrals.
+      8. The German Sniper Who Hid Behind
+         the Crucifix.
+      9. The Ruined Studio.
+     10. Was This Murder Justified?
+
+ IV. IN FRANCE THE IMMORTAL!                     98
+      1. The Glory of the French Soldier's
+         Heroism.
+      2. Why the Hun Cannot Defeat the
+         Frenchman.
+      3. "I Am Only His Wife."
+      4. A Soldier's Funeral in Paris.
+      5. The Old Book-Lover of Louvain.
+      6. A Vision of Judgment in Martyred
+         Gerbeviller.
+      7. The Return of the Refugees.
+      8. An American Knight in France.
+      9. An American Soldier's Grave in
+         France.
+     10. "These Flowers, Sir, I Will Lay
+         Them Upon My Son's Grave."
+     11. The Courage of Clemenceau.
+
+ V. OUR BRITISH ALLIES                          132
+      1. "Gott Strafe England"--"And
+         Scotland."
+      2. "England Must Not Starve."
+      3. German-Americans Who Vilify
+         England.
+      4. British vs. American Girls in
+         Munition Factories.
+      5. The Wolves' Den on Vimy Ridge.
+      6. "Why Did You Leave Us in
+         Hell for Two Years?"
+      7. "This War Will End Within
+         Forty Years."
+      8. "Why Are We Outmanned By
+         the Germans?"
+
+ VI. "OVER HERE"                                164
+      1. The Redemption of a Slacker.
+      2. Slackers versus Heroes.
+      3. German Stupidity in Avoiding the
+         Draft.
+      4. "I'm Working Now for Uncle
+         Sam."
+      5. The German Farmer's Debt to the
+         United States.
+      6. "Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth"
+         Is an Ungrateful Immigrant.
+      7. In Praise of Our Secret Service.
+
+
+
+
+Publisher's Explanatory Note
+
+
+These brief articles are sparks struck as it were from the anvil of
+events. They were written on trains, in hotels, in the intervals between
+public addresses. During the past year beginning October 1, 1917, Dr.
+Hillis, in addition to his work in Plymouth Church, and as President of
+The Plymouth Institute, has visited no less than one hundred and
+sixty-two cities, and made some four hundred addresses on "The National
+Crisis," "How Germany Lost Her Soul," "The Philosophy of the German
+Atrocities," and "The Pan-German Empire Plot," the substance of these
+lectures and addresses being given in the book, "German Atrocities,"
+heretofore published. These articles are illustrative of and
+supplementary to the principles stated in that volume.
+
+While consenting to publication, the author was not afforded opportunity
+for full revision of this second volume, being again called over-seas
+just as this book was being put into type. This will account for the
+form in which the material appears.
+
+
+
+
+THE ARCH-CRIMINAL
+
+I
+
+
+1. The Kaiser's Hatred of the United States
+
+It is a proverb that things done in secret soon or late are published
+from the housetops.
+
+Certainly everything that was hidden as to the plots of the Potsdam gang
+is, little by little, now being revealed.
+
+Nothing illustrates this fact better than that volume published in
+Leipsic in 1907, called "Reminiscences of Ten Years in the German
+Embassy in Washington, D. C."
+
+When that aged diplomat published the story of his diplomatic career he
+doubtless thought that the volume prepared for his children and
+grandchildren and friends was forever buried in the German language. It
+never even occurred to the Councillor of the Ambassador, von Holleben,
+that the book would ever fall into the hands of any American. The very
+fact that an American author found the volume in a second-hand
+bookstore of Vienna in 1914 and translated the three chapters on the
+Kaiser's representatives in the United States and the organization of
+the German-American League, must have roused the Foreign Department in
+Berlin to the highest point of anger.
+
+Children and diplomats oftentimes unconsciously betray the most
+important secrets. No volume ever published could possibly have revealed
+matters of greater moment to Germany than this volume of reminiscences
+that sets forth the propaganda carried on in the United States by
+Ambassador von Holleben and his legal councillor for the furthering of
+the Pan-German Empire scheme.
+
+No scholar can doubt the right of this old diplomat to speak. The Kaiser
+personally vouched for him by giving him this important duty. The
+honours bestowed at the end of his long diplomatic career tell their own
+story. Every page breathes sincerity and truthfulness. No one who reads
+this volume can doubt that this author gave the exact facts--facts well
+known to his German friends--in the recollections of his diplomatic
+career.
+
+This diplomat tells us plainly that von Holleben and himself were sent
+to the United States specially charged with the task of reuniting
+Germans who were naturalized in America with the German Empire.
+
+It was their duty to organize secret German-American societies in every
+great city like New York and Brooklyn, Chicago and Milwaukee, Cincinnati
+and St. Louis, and to present to these societies a German flag sent from
+the hands of the Kaiser himself.
+
+Their work, says the author, was based upon the fact that the Kaiser had
+passed a law restoring full citizenship in Germany to those Germans who
+had become naturalized citizens of the United States. When, therefore,
+these members of the German-American League formally accepted their
+restored citizenship their first duty was to the Fatherland and the
+Kaiser and their second duty to the United States and its Government.
+Indeed, this lawyer and author actually goes so far as to give extracts
+from von Holleben's speech before the German-American League in Chicago
+when he presented the society with a German flag and swore the members
+to the old-time allegiance.
+
+He says that in some way the editor of the Chicago _Tribune_ found out
+about this meeting and wrote a very severe editorial, after which, he
+adds, that von Holleben and himself had to be more careful.
+
+Concerning the Milwaukee meeting, he refers to a conversation which
+revealed his judgment that if ever there was trouble between Germany and
+the United States the war would partake of the nature of a civil war.
+The author not only gives an account of the conference held at the
+Waldorf-Astoria between Ambassador von Holleben, Professors Munsterberg
+of Harvard and Schoenfield of Columbia and himself, on the one side, and
+Herman Ridder on the other, but he gives the instructions from Berlin
+that Herr Ridder could only keep his subsidy from the German Government
+for the New Yorker _Staats Zeitung_ by placing his fealty to Germany
+first and subordinating his Americanism, and that otherwise Ambassador
+von Holleben would found a rival German paper that would have back of it
+"unlimited resources, to wit: the total resources of the German Empire."
+
+Here, then, is proof positive that the Kaiser began his efforts to
+establish a pro-German movement against the United States for several
+years before 1906 and that he methodically kept it up until the war
+began.
+
+Through it all he claimed to be our sincere friend; but he was then, as
+he is to-day, an implacable and relentless enemy, with a heart laden
+with hatred and bitterness.
+
+
+2. The Kaiser's Character Revealed in His Choosing the Sultan for His
+Friend
+
+Nothing tests manhood like the choice of a bosom-friend. Criminals
+choose bad associates.
+
+Every Black Hand leader goes naturally towards the saloon, the gambling
+house and the dens where thieves congregate. Dickens made Fagin surround
+himself with pickpockets, burglars and murderers.
+
+History tells us that Christianity has always kept good company. Its
+friends have been architects, artists, poets and statesmen. Christianity
+repeats itself through its friends in the Gothic Cathedral shaped in the
+form of the cross, in the Transfiguration of Raphael, the Duomo of
+Giotto, the Paradise Lost of Milton, the In Memoriam of Tennyson, the
+Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln. Christianity has never formed any
+close friendships with jails, gallows or slave ships. Men like Gladstone
+and Lincoln always kept good company; their friends have been scholars
+and heroes; but, in striking contrast, consider the friends selected by
+the Kaiser.
+
+To the Kaiser came a critical hour; at that moment he was at the parting
+of the ways. It became necessary for him to make a choice of friends.
+Like every man, his isolation was impossible and friendship became a
+necessity.
+
+The Kaiser had the whole world from which to choose. Yonder in London
+were King Edward and his son, the Prince of Wales. In France were
+certain statesmen and scientists like Curie. There was the old hero
+living in the capital of Japan and two ex-Presidents known the world
+around for their splendid manhood; and he could have made overtures of
+friendship to any one of these brave men; but in the silence of the
+night the Kaiser passed in review earth's great men, and finally
+selected for his close friend the lowest of the low--the butcher,
+unspeakable butcher--the Sultan of Turkey.
+
+At that time the Sultan had just completed the butchery of many
+Armenians. His garments were red with blood, his hands dripped with
+gore. His house was a harem; his hand held a dagger. The sea-wall behind
+his palace rose out of the blue waters of the Bosporus.
+
+When an American battle-ship was anchored there and a diver went down he
+pulled a rope and was brought up, shivering with terror, and saying that
+he found himself surrounded with corpses tied in sacks and held down by
+stones at the bottom of the sea.
+
+In that hour the Kaiser exclaimed: "Let the Sultan be my associate! I
+will go to Constantinople and sign a treaty with the unspeakable
+butcher."
+
+And so the Kaiser took his train, lived in the Sultan's palace, signed
+this treaty, and hired the Sultan's knife and club, just as the Chief
+Priest Annas chose Judas to be his representative upon whom he could
+load the responsibility for the murder of Jesus.
+
+Never was a friendship more damnable. Reared in a country that believed
+in the sanctity of the marriage relation and in monogamy, the Kaiser
+lined up with polygamy. The treaty that he made was thoroughgoing. He
+sent out word to all Mohammedans, whether they lived in India or Persia,
+in Arabia or Turkey, that they must remember that the Kaiser had entered
+into a treaty to become their protector and friend. Having become a
+Lutheran in Berlin, he became a Mohammedan in Constantinople on the
+principle that "When you are in Rome do as the Romans do, and when you
+are in hell act like the devil"--a simple principle which the Kaiser
+proceeded to obey as soon as he reached Constantinople.
+
+Every one knew that the Kaiser wanted to build a German railroad through
+to Bagdad and the Persian Gulf; this would give him an outlet for
+surplus goods to be sold in India. Serbia lay straight across the path,
+and he had to work out some scheme to attack Serbia. Then he needed the
+Sultan's friendship, and the end justified the means--and the end was
+the Bagdad Railroad.
+
+But the Turk tired of being the Kaiser's tool; he wanted more land; the
+Armenian was in his way; the Turk was lazy, shiftless and a spendthrift.
+The Armenian was industrious and hard-working. The Turk's method of
+living made him poor. The gifts of the Armenian tended towards wealth.
+Once in twenty years the Turk found himself a pauper and found the
+Armenian rich; the result was envy and covetousness on the part of the
+Sultan and his people. It became necessary to bribe the Turk to stand by
+the Kaiser and his Baghdad Railroad. The Kaiser's German officers,
+therefore, furnished the bribe.
+
+"Let us go to this Armenian village, or that, and kill the people. We
+German officers will take the large houses of the rich merchants and
+move into them, and your Turkish soldiers can kill the old men, use the
+Armenian girls for the harem, and fling the little children's bodies
+into pits dug in the garden behind the house. We will enter the village
+in the morning as soldiers; when the night comes, as Germans and Turks,
+we will be the only people living in the Armenian village, and we will
+move into their stores and take possession of their houses and their
+looms."
+
+"You cannot hang an entire nation," said Edmund Burke. "You must arrest
+the leaders and hang them." Burke was right as to the punishment of
+criminals, but he was wrong when it comes to murdering industrious and
+honest Armenians. You can murder an entire nation, for the Germans and
+the Turks have practically done it. Ambassador Morgenthau has just said
+that the Kaiser and the Sultan through their forces have murdered nearly
+a million Armenians. But, soon or late, remorse and conscience will take
+hold upon these two unspeakable butchers with hands that drip with
+blood--the butcher Kaiser, the butcher Sultan, that represent earth's
+two murderous twins.
+
+
+3. Pershing's Charges versus the Kaiser
+
+Nothing measures a man so accurately as the names he gives to his
+favourite son. Most significant, therefore, is the fact that the Kaiser
+named his second son Eitel, or Attila. Who was this Attila who has
+captured the imagination of the Kaiser? He was a Hun who devastated
+Italy fifteen hundred years ago. The motto of this black-hearted
+murderer Attila the Hun was: "Where my feet fall, let grass not grow for
+a hundred years." When the Kaiser read Attila's story he exclaimed:
+"That is the man for me!" First, he named his favourite son for Attila
+the Hun. Second, in sending his German soldiers out to China, and later
+in 1914 to Belgium, he gave them this charge: "You will take no
+prisoners; you will show no mercy; you will give no quarter; you will
+make yourselves as terrible as the Huns under Attila." Plainly the
+Kaiser knew his men. He knew that they were capable of outdoing even
+that monster Attila the Hun. So he sent them forth to bayonet babes,
+violate old women, murder old men, crucify officers, violate nuns, sink
+_Lusitanias_, and turn solemn treaties into scraps of paper.
+
+Now over against the Kaiser's charge, black as hell, and big with death,
+witness Pershing's charge, reported loosely by a French boy, with his
+imperfect knowledge of English, translated out of the French newspapers
+on July 18, 1917. Pershing's brief address comes to this:
+
+"Young soldiers of America, you are here in France to help expel an
+invading enemy; but you are also here to lift a shield above the poor
+and weak; you will safeguard all property; you will lift a shield above
+the aged and oppressed; you will be most courteous to women, gentle and
+kind to little children; guard against temptation of every kind; fear
+God, fight bravely, defend Liberty, honour your native land. God have
+you in His keeping." "Pershing."
+
+The difference between yonder lowest hell in its uttermost abyss and
+yonder highest heaven, where standeth the throne of a just God, is not
+greater than the chasm that separates that unspeakable butcher, the
+Kaiser, from General Pershing and the American soldier boys, who have
+never betrayed in France, the noblest ideals of service cherished by the
+people of the American Republic.
+
+
+4. Who Taught the Kaiser That a Treaty Is a Scrap of Paper?
+
+Each month of this war clears away some clouds and reveals Germany as
+wholly given over to crime and treachery. At the beginning of the
+invasion of Belgium, the Kaiser spoke of his treaty safeguarding the
+neutrality of that little land as a "scrap of paper." At the moment no
+one seems to have realized whence the Kaiser had that cynical
+expression. Now the whole damnable story has been made clear.
+Twenty-five years ago the Kaiser, in one of his addresses, used these
+words:
+
+"From my childhood I have been under the influence of five
+men--Alexander, Julius Caesar, Theodoric II, Napoleon and Frederick the
+Great. These five men dreamed their dream of a world empire; they
+failed. I am dreaming my dream of a world empire, but I shall succeed."
+
+Now why did the Kaiser over and over again proclaim his allegiance to
+Frederick the Great? How is it that he celebrates his ancestor,
+Frederick? This "scrap of paper" incident makes it all quite clear. The
+bitter waters gushing out of the Potsdam Palace go back to a bitter
+spring named Frederick the Great. The poisoned fruit that ripened in
+1914 hangs on a bough whose trunk was planted by Frederick in far-off
+days.
+
+Among many musty old German books recently published is a little book by
+that same Frederick. The Prussian king was writing certain notes for the
+guidance of his sons and successors, among whom is the present Kaiser.
+In his page of counsels Frederick talks very plainly about the breaking
+of treaties:
+
+"Consider a treaty as a scrap of paper under any one of the following
+emergencies: First, when necessity compels it. Second, when you lack
+means to continue the war. Third, when you cannot by any other means
+combat your ally or enemy."
+
+Then Frederick raises one question: "If the interests of your army or
+your people or yourself are at stake or you have to keep your word on
+one hand and your pledge word and treaty is on the other hand, which
+path will you take? Who can be stupid enough to hesitate in answering
+this question? In other words, treaties are to be kept when they promote
+your interest, and shamelessly broken when you gain thereby."
+
+The Kaiser, therefore, had from Frederick, his ancestor, this handbook
+on lying. In turn, the Kaiser gave this notion of the treaty as a scrap
+of paper to his Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, who engraved, as has been
+said, "on eternal brass the infamy of Germany": "We are now in a state
+of necessity, and necessity knows no law. We were compelled to override
+the the just protest of Luxembourg and Belgian Governments. The wrong--I
+speak openly--that we are committing we will endeavour to make good as
+soon as our military goal has been reached. Anybody who is threatened,
+as we are threatened, and who is fighting for his highest possessions,
+can have only one thought, how he is to hack his way through."
+
+Guizot mentions "honour and fidelity to the pledged word" as one of the
+distinguishing elements of what is called "a civilized State." But this
+puts Germany among the barbarous savages. Three indictments and
+convictions have blackened the name of Germany throughout all the world.
+First, her atrocious and dishonourable methods of warfare; second, the
+carrying off into slavery of non-combatants, the Belgians and French,
+and third, the breach of the pledged word and the solemn treaties with
+other nations.
+
+But at last we know that Frederick the Great, the ancestor of the
+Kaiser, was the author of the phrase, "the treaty is a scrap of paper."
+What was once in the gristle in the ancestor is now bred in the bone of
+the Kaiser and Crown Prince. That phrase, "a scrap of paper," holds the
+germ of a thousand wars. It spells the ruin of civilization. Not to
+resent it by war, is for the Allies to commit spiritual suicide.
+
+
+5. The Plot of the Kaiser
+
+All the pamphlets issued secretly to the members of the Pan-German
+League invariably used Rome as their illustration. We are not surprised,
+therefore, to find that the German leaders called attention to the fact
+that it took two wars at intervals of some years to make Rome a world
+empire.
+
+In like manner, therefore, the Kaiser and his Cabinet told the German
+people at home and abroad that the first war, beginning in 1914, would
+establish a Middle-Europe Empire extending from Hamburg on the North Sea
+to Bagdad on the Persian Gulf.
+
+One of the pamphlets issued many years ago fixed the countries to be
+conquered about 1915, and distinctly mentioned Denmark, Holland, Belgium
+and North France, Poland and Rumania, Hungary and Austria, Serbia and
+Bulgaria, and the wheat granaries of Russia, with Turkey and Armenia.
+
+The number of people to be conquered and included after the first war
+was fixed at 250,000,000.
+
+The argument states that it will take but a few years to compact this
+Middle-Europe Empire and that naturally Great Britain, Spain and Italy,
+to the west, with Norway and Sweden to the north, with Italy and
+Switzerland to the south, and of course Greece and Egypt would, from
+time to time, as crises came, fall inevitably into Germany's hand.
+Berlin, as the world capital, should by 1920 be the magnet, and the
+little particles of iron, named the Balkan States, would be drawn and
+held by this great German magnet in Berlin.
+
+The first step to be taken and the first goal to be reached concerned,
+of course, the English Channel, the Dutch cities on the mouth of the
+Rhine, and the iron mines of Northern France. We know to an absolute
+certainty all the details of this plan.
+
+For more than thirty years Germany had been organizing her army; she
+knew every road, inn, bridge, factory, shop, and wholesale store in
+Denmark and Holland, Belgium and France. In all of the larger ones she
+had German agents belonging to the Pan-German League toiling as workmen
+and every detail was planned out in advance.
+
+In 1910 General von Bissing, one of the Kaiser's closest friends, was
+sent to Brussels. For years he spent the summer months apparently at
+the watering places near The Hague in Holland and Ostend in Belgium,
+preparatory to the hour when Germany would seize Belgium and he assume
+his position as Governor-General, living in Brussels.
+
+Men nearing death tell the truth. In January of 1917 von Bissing
+prepared a memorandum for the direction of Belgian affairs in His
+Majesty's name and according to his wish. This document contains the
+meditations of a dying man. The statements he makes, he says, contain
+the views that inspired his every act in Belgium during his
+administration.
+
+In his last will and testament von Bissing, in the spring of 1917,
+advises the German Government in Berlin that the time has come to throw
+off all disguises. He says that at the beginning of the war it was
+probably good policy to deny that the Government ever intended to annex
+Belgium, but, he says, "now that we are victorious there is no reason
+why we should not publish to the world the fact that we never intend to
+give up one foot of the Belgian sea-coast, nor one ton of the Belgian
+coal, nor one acre of the French iron mines."
+
+He says plainly: "The annual Belgian production of 23,000,000 tons of
+coal has given us a monopoly on the continent which has helped to
+maintain our vitality. If we do not hold Belgium, administer Belgium in
+future for our interest and protect Belgium by force of arms, our trade
+and industry will lose the positions they have won in Belgium and
+perhaps will never recover them."
+
+And what about Dutch cities and seaports? On page eighteen of General
+von Bissing's last will and testament he adds:
+
+"Our frontier, in the interest of our sea power, must be pushed forward
+to the sea." This sentence makes it perfectly plain that a little later
+Germany intends to incorporate Rotterdam in her own customs union.
+"Belgium must be seized and held, as it now is, and as it is to-day it
+must be in the future. The conquest of Belgium has simply been forced
+upon us by the necessities of German expansion."
+
+Von Bissing, however, recognizes the difficulty of annexing Belgium and
+securing the consent of the members who shall arrange the treaty of
+peace at the conclusion of the war, and this is his decision:
+
+"Our best method, therefore, is to avoid, during the peace negotiations,
+all discussion about the form of the annexation and to apply nothing
+but the right of conquest. Plainly Belgium's King can never consent to
+abandon his sovereignty, but we can read in Machiavelli that he who
+desires to take possession of a country will be compelled to remove the
+King or regent, even by killing him."
+
+Von Bissing has torn off all masks. He himself states that he is
+speaking for the Kaiser, as his most trusted friend and counsellor.
+Germany intends, therefore, ultimately to kill King Albert of Belgium,
+and this carries with it that the Kaiser and his War Staff believe they
+have the right to kill any King or President who happens to stand in the
+pathway of their ambition. Every lover of mankind whose heart is knitted
+in with the poor and the weak will understand what that editor meant the
+other day when he said:
+
+"The one duty of the hour, therefore, for America, is to kill Germans,
+that we may keep the rest of the world from being killed."
+
+
+
+
+THE JUDAS AMONG NATIONS
+
+II
+
+
+1. The Original Plot of the Members of the Potsdam Gang
+
+Many historic meetings, big with social disaster, are recorded in
+history. Witness the meeting of the Athenian judges for the killing of
+Socrates. Witness the coming together of the priests and Judas for the
+piteous tragedy of the death of Jesus. Witness that midnight meeting of
+the conspirators in Florence for the burning of Savonarola. Terrible
+also the results of that meeting in the Potsdam Palace in 1896 that
+culminated in the Pan-German Empire scheme.
+
+What began as a spark that day has ended in a world conflagration.
+
+In retrospect the Kaiser and his associates had many events behind them
+to encourage the ambition to make Berlin a world capital, Kaiser Wilhelm
+the world emperor and all the other nations and races subject peoples.
+
+Beginning in 1860 with thirty-five millions of people and only fifteen
+billions of dollars, Germany had climbed to greatness upon iron steps,
+heated hot by war. Never did wars yield so large a return.
+
+The war with Denmark had given Germany the Kiel Harbour, the Kiel Canal
+and a sea-coast for her ships.
+
+The war with Austria had given Germany the rich coal provinces of
+Central Europe. The war with France had given Germany the iron mines of
+Alsace and Lorraine.
+
+And here for the next war were Denmark and Holland, Belgium and northern
+France--so many jewel boxes that could be looted. To the eastward were
+Poland with her coal mines, Rumania with her oil fields and Russia with
+her wheat granaries. And once Central Europe became a Middle-Europe
+German Empire there was no reason why later on Germany should not extend
+her conquests to Russia on the east and England on the west, and then to
+North and South America.
+
+It was a great scheme. Never was prize so rich. Never could obstacles be
+so easily swept away. To make Berlin a world-capital and Kaiser Wilhelm
+a world-emperor only two things were needed.
+
+Plainly the first thing to be done was to organize the Pan-German Empire
+League and educate the leading men of Germany--the ship owners, bankers,
+merchants and manufacturers, editors, ministers, priests and university
+professors.
+
+Local branch societies were organized in all the large German towns and
+cities. Weekly meetings were held, papers read and reports made. Slowly
+people of the middle class were included in the league. Documents marked
+"Secret and Confidential" were distributed, setting forth the details of
+the scheme.
+
+Full reports were made as to what Germany could make by seizing the
+fields of Denmark, the cities on the mouth of the Rhine in Belgium, the
+coal and iron mines of France, Poland and Russia, and also the
+undeveloped resources of the Valley of the Euphrates.
+
+Careful statements were prepared as to the difficulties that must be
+surmounted, but always this lure was held out--that the poorest German
+who then had nothing, would when Germany was victorious become a
+landowner, live in a mansion and drive his own automobile. Then he would
+have Russians and Frenchmen to wait upon him, since the German was a
+superman, intended for a patrician, while all other races were pigs,
+intended by nature to be bondsmen and plebeians.
+
+"The rest of the world is amassing wealth, and when the fruit is ripe
+then we Germans will pluck it"--this was their motto.
+
+Little by little the germ of world-ambition became a fever, burning in
+the soul of every German at home or abroad. It took twenty years to
+thoroughly inculcate every individual of the German race with this
+feverish ambition, but when 1914 came every German had gone over to the
+Pan-German scheme and was ready to die for it.
+
+
+2. The Berlin Schemers and Their Plot
+
+After all the Germans at home and abroad understood the Pan-German
+scheme of seditious intrigue in foreign countries and the vast web was
+spun and thrown out over all the cities and continents where the
+Kaiser's representatives were living, the second thing to be done was to
+make the plan clear by spreading it out like a great map. The method
+used, therefore, was pictorial.
+
+The Department of Publicity in Berlin became experts on geography. They
+began to issue illustrated maps so that the rudest German peasants and
+the German colonists living in Milwaukee or El Paso, in Rio Janeiro or
+Buenos Aires, in Brussels or St. Petersburg, in Melbourne or Calcutta,
+could easily understand the method and the goal.
+
+Out of twenty maps issued in Berlin and reproduced by Andre Cheredame,
+no one is more important than the one marked "The Old Roman Empire." The
+simplest German miner understood the map at a glance and realized its
+meaning for the members of the Pan-German League. Here is old Rome
+marked world capital. Here is Caesar Augustus called the first world
+emperor. Here is Carthage with its capital looted and Roman peasants
+remaining after the victory to move into rich men's houses and estates
+of North Africa. And here also were the maps of conquered Palestine,
+Ephesus, Athens and Corinth. To be sure the old Romans had to become
+soldiers, but, later, did not each Roman soldier live in the rich
+gardens around Thebes, Ephesus and Corinth?
+
+Instantly the imaginations of the German peasants and workmen kindled.
+The Kaiser was right. What had been in Rome must be in Berlin. The Elbe
+must succeed the Tiber. Berlin shall be the second world-capital. Our
+Wilhelm shall be the second world-emperor. Germania shall be written
+straight across Europe from Hamburg on the North Sea to Bagdad on the
+Persian Gulf. Germans alone shall be allowed to carry weapons, as once
+only the Roman was allowed to own a spear; only Germans shall be allowed
+to hold title deeds to lands, even as once only Romans could hold a
+field or a house in fee simple. Old Rome won by becoming a military
+State.
+
+Did not the people of Rome go forth as soldiers and return with
+triumphal processions, with treasures of loot that took days to pass
+along the Appian Way, while the Romans stood cheering and the women and
+children sang and threw flowers in the path? Why should not the German
+army, between the reaping of the wheat in July and the threshing of the
+wheat in October, return from Brussels and Paris laden with treasure,
+while a second triumphal procession marched down Wilhelmstrasse?
+
+The German peasants kindled at this dream. Why should the German have
+to live always on bologna sausage, drink beer, eat sauerkraut and live
+in ugly houses when the people of Paris and London drank champagne, ate
+roast fowl, wore French laces and the finest English wools? It was a
+wicked shame. Surely the German was intended for something better than
+sauerkraut and beer!
+
+"Two weeks and we will be in Brussels. Three weeks and we will have
+Paris. Two months and we will loot London."
+
+This was the plan. How significant that letter, taken from the dead body
+of a German boy found in No Man's Land, near Compiegne.
+
+"Within three days, Liebschen, we will be in Paris. I intend to bring
+you a pocketful of Paris rings and jewels, with Paris gowns and laces."
+
+From the body of a German boy found near Luneville was taken this letter
+saying that, with his three companions, he had picked out four French
+farms and left the houses standing, and that his friends and himself had
+picked out these farms as permanent homes. Later he added that Heinrich
+thought it would be much better for them to wait until they smashed
+England and made Canada a German colony. Then they could own, not small
+French farms, but vast Canadian farms with a hundred tenants working for
+him in the valleys around Toronto and the vineyards of Winnipeg and
+orchards of Hudson Bay.
+
+Most shrewd and cunning, the plotters of the Potsdam gang. They knew how
+to feed the fires of envy and avarice in the German people. Every few
+weeks they placed new material in the hands of every German at home and
+abroad. They reminded each poor peasant and foreign colonist that he was
+a superman, and that by day and by night he was to prepare for the time
+when he would become the head of all the people of the town or industry
+with which he was related. Poor Germans in foreign countries dreamed
+their dreams of the time when they would be appointed by the Kaiser and
+Foreign Minister to take charge of the village in Mexico, the mine in
+Chile, or when they would be the tax collector in some distant province.
+
+We know now, from letters that have been found, that the German soldiers
+in France carried in their pockets a description by the German historian
+Curtius of the triumphal procession along the Appian Way, when the
+Roman conquerors came home loaded with loot. These skillful German
+plotters printed at the bottom of Curtius's description the statement
+that each German soldier must look forward to a similar return from
+London, Paris and Brussels to march through the streets of Munich and
+Berlin.
+
+What a dream was this German dream! What treasures were to be brought
+into Berlin! What marbles and bronzes of Rodin stolen from Paris! At
+last Berlin was to own beautiful paintings, for the treasures of the
+Louvre were to be the Kaiser's.
+
+Never was there such a dream dreamed by peasants who soon were to become
+princes and kings and patricians. The German had exchanged the rye bread
+of 1913 for the "fog bank" of 1918; had given up German beer to grasp
+only empty, breaking bubbles. But it was a great dream while it lasted.
+In pursuance of his hope he sacrificed three million German boys, left
+dead in the fields of Flanders and France. He sent home four million
+German cripples. He filled the land with vast armies of widows and
+orphans.
+
+It could not have been otherwise. There has never been, and never will
+be, but one world city--Rome; and there has never been but one
+world-emperor--Caesar Augustus. There is to be one universal kingdom--and
+that is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of love, justice, peace and
+good-will. The German has been pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp.
+
+A world-kingdom will come, but no Kaiser will rule over that empire of
+love. In that world-parliament all the races shall be represented as
+equals; then the earth that has long been a battle-field shall become an
+Eden garden, where all are patriots towards the world-kingdom, and
+scholars towards the intellect, and self-sufficing towards the family,
+and obedient towards their God.
+
+
+3. German Superiority a Myth That Has Exploded
+
+Several years before the great war began a Dutch humorist wrote a play
+on German megalomania. He portrayed a German schoolroom in Prussia.
+Thirty or forty embryonic Prussians are at the desks and a Prussian
+schoolmaster is in the chair.
+
+"Children, what is the greatest country in the world?"
+
+All shouted vociferously, "Germany!"
+
+"What is the greatest city in the world?"
+
+"Berlin!"
+
+"Who is the greatest man in the world?"
+
+"The Kaiser!"
+
+"Should there ever be, children, a vacancy in the Trinity, who is best
+fitted to fill the position?"
+
+"The Crown Prince!"
+
+"Who are the chosen people of the good old German God?"
+
+"The German people!"
+
+Never was there a finer bit of sarcasm and yet the Germans were never
+able to understand the play. The Kaiser, the War Staff, the Cabinet,
+down to the last wretched creature working in the stables and the
+sewers, reading the play, exclaimed:
+
+"What is the man driving at? Why, of course the Germans are the greatest
+people in the world--we admit it!"
+
+Now, during the last few years the Germans have spent untold millions in
+propagating this myth of superiority, and yet the German intellect has
+never even had a second-rate position. Call the roll of all the tools
+that have redeemed men from drudgery and you will find that Germany's
+contributions are hopelessly inferior to the other nations.
+
+The new industrial era began with the locomotive and steamship; James
+Watt invented the one and Stevenson the other.
+
+The new era of physical comfort began with the loom; a Frenchman named
+Jacquard and an Englishman named Arkwright made men warm for their work
+in winter. Garments within the reach of the poor man in forest and
+factory, field and mine, means the cotton gin, and that gin is the gift
+of an American. The sewing machine changed woman's position, but the
+world owes that to our own Elias Howe.
+
+We owe the telegraph to an English inventor and, in part, to Morse. We
+owe the cable in part to Lord Kelvin and, in part, to Cyrus Field. We
+owe the telephone to Bell and the wireless to Marconi.
+
+Holland invented the submarine, Wright the airplane, McCormick the
+reaper and Edison the phonograph.
+
+An American invented the German submarine; an American invented the
+German torpedo; an American invented the German machine-gun; an American
+invented the Murphy button, the yellow fever antitoxin, the Dakin
+solution.
+
+An English physician discovered the circulation of the blood, Jenner
+gave us vaccination, Lister antiseptics, France the Pasteur serums and
+the Curie radio discoveries, while a Bulgarian, Dr. Metchnikoff,
+discovered the enemies of the blood.
+
+It was from France, England and the United States that Germany stole the
+typewriter, the steel building, the use of rubber, the aniline dyes,
+reenforced concrete bridges, air-brakes, the use of electricity.
+
+One of the most amazing volumes in the world is the "History of Tools
+and Machinery." We have all known for a long time that there is not one
+single German name among the eight great masters of painting that begins
+with Rembrandt and includes men like Velasquez and Giotto. We have long
+known that there is no German sculptor of the first class nor a German
+sculptor that is within ten thousand leagues of Rodin, Michael Angelo or
+Phidias. We have long known that Schubert and Schumann and Rubinstein
+and Haydn and Chopin were all Jews, and that three-fourths of the other
+so-called German musicians were Jews whose ancestors suffered such
+frightful political disabilities in Germany and were so regularly looted
+of all their property that they gave up their Hebrew names and took
+German, just as now thousands upon thousands of Germans in this
+country, ashamed of their names, are Americanizing their family title.
+
+The simple fact is that if a Jew will only write the creative music,
+like that of Beethoven, a German whose gift is detail will conduct the
+orchestra.
+
+The German can standardize a machine, providing an Englishman, a
+Frenchman or an American will first invent it. The German will gather up
+the remnants and scraps and odds and ends in a clothing factory--but,
+oh, think of an American gentleman having to wear the coat that was cut
+by a tailor in Berlin or Munich! Having during ten different summers
+looked at their garments, all one can say is that the German men and
+women are covered up but not clothed.
+
+For thirty years the Germans have paid their representatives to stand on
+the corner of the street and bawl out to every passer-by: "Great is the
+Kaiser! Great are we Germans! Let all people with cymbals, sackbut,
+shawms and psaltery cry aloud, saying 'Great is the Kaiser and all his
+people!'"
+
+And now suddenly the myth has burst like a bubble. The delusion is
+exploded. The Kaiser has found out that it is dangerous to blow too
+much hot air into a German bladder.
+
+Measured around the stomach in the Hofbraus in the presence of a barrel
+of beer, the Prussian and the Bavarian are great; but the hat band
+requires the least material of any made in four countries.
+
+For the time has come to confess this simple fact that for any one great
+tool, or art, or contribution to science created by a German there are
+four invented by either an American, an Englishman or a Frenchman.
+
+
+4. German Intrigues
+
+The spider's web stretched out over a flower bed with a great fat spider
+at the centre and the threads along which the spider runs to thrust its
+poisoned sting into the enmeshed butterfly is nature's most accurate
+symbol of the vast web of espionage lying over North and South America
+with secret threads that vibrated to the touch of the spider at the
+centre named Berlin.
+
+In that web thousands of German-Americans were enmeshed. The records of
+our Secret Service concerning these German enemies of the American
+Government read like a book of assassinations or like a history of the
+black arts. When the whole story comes to be told it will horrify the
+world.
+
+The quality of the German-Americans that Berlin bribed is set forth in
+the reminiscences of Witte when he says that the Kaiser and the Foreign
+Department paid Munsterberg of Harvard University $5,000 a year salary
+and that Munsterberg was the most successful and efficient spy that the
+German system had ever developed.
+
+In the long list of German agents are to be found the names of
+German-American bankers who received secret decorations and medals from
+the German Government; of German merchants who were partners in this
+country of firms in the Fatherland and were bribed by a ribbon and an
+invitation to the Potsdam Palace; of German newspaper men who were under
+German pay, and, most amazing of all, among the papers seized in the
+office of a German Consul was found a commission appointing this Consul
+in an American city to the office of Governor-General of one of the
+greatest States of Canada as soon as Canada became a German colony.
+
+Many of the threads from Berlin ran into the various cities of Mexico. A
+German head office was set up under the general direction of Zimmermann
+in Berlin and of von Bernstorff in Washington. Certain large
+institutions that did business in Mexico, working in the same field,
+were quietly elbowed out of Mexico, and an American company, ostensibly
+American, but controlled by Germans, took over the business of the other
+firms under special arrangement with Mexico. Pledges were given Mexico
+that as soon as Germany had reduced Canada and the United States to the
+position of German colonies, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and
+California should be handed back to the Mexicans.
+
+Millions were spent by the German Foreign Office as ordinary men spend
+dollars. The German spies, like Boy-Ed and von Papen, arranged to blow
+up American munition factories and held dinners waiting for a telephone
+message saying that the magazine had just exploded or the depot had
+taken fire or a scow had been sunk, after which they drank the health of
+the man who lighted the match.
+
+German agents burned up wheat elevators with hundreds of millions of
+dollars' worth of wheat; they fired warehouses, blew up bridges, wrecked
+munition plants, destroyed shiploads of food, dynamited the House of
+Parliament in Ottawa, sank the _Lusitania_ near Ireland, spread glanders
+among the horses in Sweden, poisoned the food in Rumania, sank the ships
+of Norway, plotted against the Argentine Republic. Their spies,
+dynamiters, secret agents, were in every capital and country because it
+was their purpose to make Berlin a world capital, Kaiser Wilhelm the
+world emperor and to Germanize the people of the whole earth.
+
+The web had as its centre the Potsdam Palace, but its black lines ran
+out into all the earth.
+
+
+5. German Burglars Loaded With Loot Are the More Easily Captured
+
+It seems that Germany has published, for the Spaniards, a list of
+treasures she has won. In the long calendar the reader finds that eight
+States--Belgium, France, Poland, Rumania, Russia, Serbia, Armenia,
+Italy--have all been looted.
+
+The Germans claim they have spoiled over three hundred first class
+cities, several thousand secondary cities and towns; they add that they
+have destroyed seventy-three cathedrals and looted them of their
+priceless treasures of statues, paintings, stained glass, vessels of
+silver and gold.
+
+With brazen audacity the German pamphlet tells the Spaniards that they
+have seized so many hundred thousand watches, so many hundred thousand
+rings, so much treasure of diamonds and jewels, so many paintings from
+rich men's houses, and the long boast ends with the statement that they
+"obtained nearly five billions of loot out of western Russia and have
+assessed two billions more upon the farmers, villages and cities of
+Ukraine."
+
+But the boast is an idle and empty boast. It is true that no army of the
+Allies has crossed the German frontier to permanently hold a city. But
+let no man think that Germany has succeeded because of the richness of
+her loot. There is a success that is failure. There is a victory that is
+defeat.
+
+Macbeth killed Duncan and went to live in the palace of the dead king,
+but did Macbeth succeed? Was not his palace a brief halting place in his
+journey towards remorse, insanity and the day when Duncan's friends in
+turn slew Macbeth?
+
+The rich judges of Athens succeeded and Socrates failed. They went home
+to drink wine and feast, while Socrates went to the jail to drink a cup
+of poison. But who succeeded? The judges whose names are written low
+down and bespattered with dirt--or Socrates, whose name fills the sky
+and who has become the thinker for the world?
+
+What if the Kaiser does boast of his successes to-day? So boasted
+Nero--sending Paul to his rags, crusts and the dungeon preparatory to
+the headman's axe. But it is Nero that lost out, and it is Paul who
+reigns a crowned king.
+
+The chief priests celebrated their victory; at the close of the day,
+after they had succeeded in crucifying Jesus; but after nineteen
+centuries the murderers are unknown and almost forgotten, while that
+young carpenter rules over His Empire of Love.
+
+To-day the Kaiser claims to have won the victory of "a superman." In
+that he has carried murder, arson, lying, rapine, lust up to the _nth_
+power, let us concede his claim. Not otherwise two hundred years ago
+the Indian, with his scalping knife, his war-whoop and his tomahawk,
+was "a superman" in terms of savagery. Not otherwise the Spaniards under
+Bloody Alva were "supermen" in terms of rack, thumbscrew and instruments
+of torture.
+
+But what savages once did in the little, the Kaiser and his men now do
+in the large. But because the Kaiser can publish a long list of wealth
+gained--by breaking his treaties, by murder, arson and lust--let no man
+think that he is successful.
+
+The two Biddle brothers looted the Bank of England, but they became
+outcasts upon the face of the earth, and always the dungeon yawned for
+them, just as the Kaiser and von Hindenburg never sleep at night without
+a vision of an oak tree, a long bough and a hemp rope dangling at the
+end, for the hemp is now twisted that will one day choke to death the
+murderous Kaiser and his War Staff.
+
+Let no patriot, whether he lives in Spain, Russia or the United States,
+forget that ours is a world ruled by men who were defeated.
+
+To-day on the thrones of the world are the heroes, like Paul and
+Demosthenes; the martyrs who were burned with Savonarola in Florence or
+poisoned with Socrates in Athens.
+
+To-day, the soldiers of Marathon and Marston Moor, Gettysburg and the
+Marne now rule the world.
+
+The treasure of the burglar and the brigand dissolves like snowflakes in
+a river.
+
+Long ago the Hebrew poet said: "I have seen the wicked flourish like a
+green bay tree, and then I lifted up my eyes, and, behold! he was not."
+And when a little time has passed all lovers of liberty and humanity
+will exclaim: "During four years I have seen the Kaiser and von
+Hindenburg flourish as the green bay tree, and I lifted up mine eyes,
+and, behold! they were not. For the breath of His nostrils had slain
+them."
+
+
+6. Germans Who Hide Behind the Screen
+
+Two thousand years are a long time in terms of history.
+
+Many damnable tools have been invented during these twenty centuries.
+The rack, the thumbscrew, the tomahawk, the fagot belong among these
+devilish instruments.
+
+Cruelties so terrible have been devised that old scholars often felt
+unwilling to believe that men were so low in the scale as to have been
+the authors of these methods of fiendishness.
+
+In the hope, therefore, of keeping respect for man many scholars
+transferred all responsibility unto devils. They called in Satan and
+made him to be the father of hate and cruelty. They could not believe
+that Nero, Judas or Torquemada could conceive such wickedness. They
+therefore made the devil with his cloven feet and his long tail to
+whisper these cunning suggestions in the ear of the traitor. Thus the
+responsibility for unwonted cruelty was divided between the murderer and
+the devil who counselled the black crime.
+
+Perhaps the most damnable thing that was ever suggested by the devil in
+two thousand years is this little object called the German soldier's
+token. Never did an object so small send forth cruelties so large and
+manifold.
+
+The little disc is stamped out on thick paper for German privates and
+upon aluminum for the officers. At the top of this cardboard is the
+portrait of that awful being called by the Kaiser "our good old German
+God."
+
+Look at his white hair, the long beard and the great sword in the right
+hand, with the suggestion that since God uses the sword the German
+soldier must cut men to pieces also.
+
+Beneath you see flames gushing up, suggesting to the German soldier that
+he is quite right in burning the houses of France and Belgium after he
+has looted them, and for flinging the dead bodies into the blazing
+rafters. Now read the words written beneath the face of the being the
+Germans call God.
+
+"Strike them all dead. The Day of Judgment shall ask you no questions."
+
+Strike dead old men and women! Dash the children's brains out against
+the stone wall! Violate young girls! Mutilate their fair bodies so that
+they will be unseemly when they are found by the husband or father.
+Burn, steal, kill--but remember that your Kaiser and the War Staff have
+promised to stand between you and God Almighty and the Day of Judgment!
+Even if Jesus did say, "Woe unto them that offend against my little
+ones," you must remember that your Kaiser and officers have promised you
+immunity on the Day of Judgment.
+
+That is what is meant by the sentence on page thirty-one in the German
+handbook of "War on Land": "That which is permissible to the German
+soldier is anything whatsoever that will help him gain his goal
+quickly."
+
+Nothing better illustrates the total collapse of manhood in the Germans
+than this soldier's token.
+
+A coward by nature, the German is afraid to kill and steal, and so he
+invented a screen behind which he could hide and named it "the soldier's
+token."
+
+Going into a French village the Germans collect the women and children,
+order them to march in advance, shoot a few to terrorize the rest, and
+then, hiding behind this living screen, the Germans march forward. In
+this way they protect themselves.
+
+The whole history of the human race contains no chapter of atrocity like
+the atrocity of the Germans. The history of the world contains no story
+of cowardice so black and damnable as the cowardice of the Germans. Out
+of cowardice the soldier's token was born.
+
+And so the Kaiser and the War Staff invented this round piece of
+cardboard, with the representation of God as going forth with His sword
+to kill men and with His flames to burn them and with the motto: "Strike
+them all dead, for the Day of Judgment will ask you no questions."
+
+Therefore among the instruments of cruelty, called the rack, the fagot,
+the thumbscrew and the tomahawk, let us give the first place to the
+German soldier's token, the most damnable weapon that has come out of
+hell during the last two thousand years.
+
+
+7. Must German Men Be Exterminated?
+
+A singular revulsion of sentiment as to what must be done with the
+German army after the war, is now sweeping over the civilized world. Men
+who once were pacifists, men of chivalry and kindness, men whose life
+has been devoted to philanthropy and reform, scholars and statesmen,
+whose very atmosphere is compassion and magnanimity towards the poor and
+weak, are now uttering sentiments that four years ago would have been
+astounding beyond compare. These men feel that there is no longer any
+room in the world for the German. Society has organized itself against
+the rattlesnake and the yellow fever. Shepherds have entered into a
+conspiracy to exterminate the wolves. The Boards of Health are planning
+to wipe out typhoid, cholera and the Black Plague. Not otherwise, lovers
+of their fellow man have finally become perfectly hopeless with
+reference to the German people. They have no more relations to the
+civilization of 1918 than an orang-outang, a gorilla, a Judas, a hyena,
+a thumbscrew, a scalping knife in the hands of a savage. These brutes
+must be cast out of society.
+
+Some of us, hoping against hope, after the reluctant confession of the
+truth of the German atrocities, have appealed to education. We knew that
+Tacitus said, nearly two thousand years ago, that "the German treats
+women with cruelty, tortures his enemies, and associates kindness with
+weakness." But nineteen centuries of education have not changed the
+German one whit. The mere catalogue of the crimes committed by German
+officers and soldiers and set forth in more than twenty volumes of
+proofs destroys the last vestige of hope for their future. Think of the
+catalogue! Babies nailed like rats to the doors of houses! Children
+skewered on a bayonet midst the cheers of marching Germans--as if the
+child were a quail, skewered on a fork! Matrons, old men and priests
+slaughtered; young Italian officers with throats cut and hanging on
+hooks in butchers' shops; the bombing of Red Cross hospitals and nurses
+and the white flag; everything achieved by civilized man defiled and
+destroyed--reverence for childhood and age, the sanctity of womanhood,
+the standards of honour, fidelity to treaties and all destroyed, not in
+a mood of drunkenness or a fit of rage, but on a deliberate, cold,
+calculated policy of German frightfulness.
+
+The sense of hopelessness as to civilizing the German and keeping him as
+an element in the new society grew out of the breakdown of education and
+science in changing the German of the time of Tacitus. Plainly the time
+has come to make full confession of the fact that education can change
+the size but not the sort. The German in the time of Tacitus was
+ignorant when he took the children of his enemy and dashed their brains
+out against the wall; the German of 1914 and 1918 still butchers
+children, the only difference being that the butchery is now more
+efficient and better calculated, through scientific cruelty, to stir
+horror and spread frightfulness. The leopard has not changed its spots.
+The rattlesnake is larger and has more poison in the sac; the German
+wolf has increased in size, and where once he tore the throat of two
+sheep, now he can rend ten lambs in half the time. In utter despair,
+therefore, statesmen, generals, diplomats, editors are now talking about
+the duty of simply exterminating the German people. There will shortly
+be held a meeting of surgeons in this country. A copy of the preliminary
+call lies before me. The plan to be discussed is based upon the Indiana
+State law. That law authorizes a State Board of Surgeons to use upon the
+person of confirmed criminals and hopeless idiots the new painless
+method of sterilizing the men. These surgeons are preparing to advocate
+the calling of a world conference to consider the sterilization of the
+ten million German soldiers, and the segregation of their women, that
+when this generation of German goes, civilized cities, states and races
+may be rid of this awful cancer that must be cut clean out of the body
+of society.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK SOUL OF THE HUN
+
+III
+
+
+1. German Barbarism Not Barbarism to the German
+
+Strictly speaking, the only man who thoroughly understands the cruelty
+of the Germans is the German himself. No American or Englishman, no
+Belgian or Frenchman has the gift of telepathy that enables him to know
+what is going on in the German mind that guides the German's hand in
+committing his horrible atrocities. Now and then, in a moment when he is
+off guard, an occasional German reveals the explanation, and we look in,
+just as John Bunyan's pilgrim saw the door into Hades opened by a little
+crack, through which he looked upon the flames. Not otherwise was it
+with that German in Baltimore, who recently exposed the German mind, and
+from the German view-point explained the Germans in their hour of
+brutality.
+
+During a most intimate and personal conversation with a banker, this
+German, the other day, explained his people's atrocities by saying that
+what is barbarism and atrocities to England, France or the United States
+is not barbarism at all to the Germans. In proof of this astounding
+statement the German gave this personal incident of his boyhood. He said
+that in his gymnasium there was another boy who had something that he
+wanted. When the opportunity came, being the stronger, he jumped upon
+the other boy, beat him up terribly and made him a cripple for life. On
+reaching his home he showed his parents what he had stolen, and he was
+patted on the back, praised for his might with his fists, and told that
+that was the method he was to follow in after life.
+
+He insisted that this sort of thing was drilled into every German boy,
+and for that reason it never once even occurred to him that he had done
+wrong. "After I became a man I settled in America, and as I came to
+understand the spirit of American civilization it grew upon me that I
+had committed a crime, and now for twenty-two years, as some atonement
+for my sin, I have been supporting that crippled man and his widowed
+mother."
+
+The modern banker has become a sort of confessor, and to the banker many
+sins are revealed as once to the priest. Nothing is more significant
+than this German confession and his philosophy of the German atrocity.
+In his own written letter concerning that crime of his boyhood this
+German adds: "Had I remained in Germany no one would ever have thought
+of suggesting to me that I had done wrong, and it would never have
+entered into my head that I was under any obligation to the man I had
+maimed. In the light of American civilization I understand the
+difference, and I am seeking to atone for my sin, but all Germans have
+been taught, as I was taught. The Germans, therefore, in their campaign
+of frightfulness, are committing deeds which from the view-point of
+American civilization are barbarous, but from the view-point of Germans
+are not crimes at all."
+
+The significance of this frank confession of a German, his story of how
+America had redeemed his soul out of the spirit of force and cruelty
+into the spirit of kindness, humanity and justice, reveals more of the
+real nature of the German beast and the Potsdam gang than a thousand
+volumes on the philosophy of German atrocities. The simple fact is that
+the crimes of the Germans are abominable atrocities to us, but that
+intellectually and morally the German officer and soldier simply do not
+know what we mean by our horror and the wave of moral indignation that
+has swept over the earth. Jesse Pomeroy used to pull canary birds apart,
+and tortured children to death. But the boy was deficient in the nerve
+of humanity. He simply stared with blank eyes when the judge and the
+jury condemned him. He was incapable of knowing what the excitement over
+the dead body was about. On the side of compassion and humanity the
+German is, as it were, colour blind, is without musical sense, and the
+nerves of kindness and humanity are atrophied. The ordinary German
+prisoner when shown the bodies left behind after the flight of the
+German army simply looks blankly at the mutilated corpse and exclaims:
+"Well, what of it? Why not? Why shouldn't we?" and shrugs his shoulders,
+taking it as a matter of course. That is another reason why a great
+number of American business men, bankers, merchants, manufacturers,
+scholars, statesmen, have reluctantly been forced to the conviction that
+the ten millions of German soldiers should be painlessly sterilized,
+that the German people (saving only the remnant who accept Jesus' idea
+of compassion and kindness towards God's poor and weak) should be
+allowed to die out of the world. Re-read, therefore, what this German
+has said about the teaching of his German parents and the German people
+in praise of cruelty, and how for twenty years now, redeemed by life in
+the United States, he has tried to make atonement by supporting the man
+whom he had crippled, and also his mother. Who shall explain to us the
+reason why German barbarism is not barbarism to the Germans? Why, this
+German shall explain it, through his personal experience as a criminal.
+But the day will come when the Potsdam gang and ten million German
+soldiers will stand before the judgment seat of God. And what shall be
+the verdict then pronounced? You will find it in the New Testament:
+"'Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee,' thou wicked and cruel
+German!"
+
+
+2. The German "Science of Lying"
+
+For the first time in history a nation has organized lying into a
+science and taught deceit as an art.
+
+At the very time when the diplomats of the world have refused any form
+of secrecy and insist upon publishing all international treaties and
+doing everything in the open, Germany has organized lying into a
+national science. Even Maximilian Harden, editor of _Zukunft_, openly
+acknowledges this in one of his editorials reproduced in the papers of
+Denmark and Holland.
+
+Harden comes right out in the open. He tells the German people that at
+the beginning of the war it was necessary to say to the world that
+Germany was fighting a defensive war, that her back was against the
+wall, that those wicked enemies named England and France, Russia and
+Belgium were leaping upon her like wolves.
+
+Of course, says Harden, at first that was good diplomacy, but now that
+we are successful, "Why say this any longer? Let the Kaiser and his
+Chancellor tell the world plainly that we decided upon this war
+twenty-five years ago; that during all of these years we were preparing
+cannons and shells; that we drilled ten million men against 'Der Tag';
+that we wanted this war, that we planned this war, that we forced this
+war and that we are proud of it."
+
+With one stroke Harden has torn off the mask. He exhibits the Kaiser as
+the prince of liars. If his words mean anything, they mean that what has
+long been surmised is absolutely true, namely, that Germany wished some
+one would kill the Austrian Prince and Princess so as to start the war,
+for which Berlin had prepared everything, down to the last buckle on the
+harness of the horses.
+
+General von Bissing is not less open. Dying men are not apt to tell
+lies. When he saw that the end was coming the Governor-General of
+Belgium prepared what he called his "last will and testament."
+
+As a close and intimate friend of the Kaiser, he left a letter with his
+will asking the German Government carefully to consider his wishes. He
+says plainly that all of the statements that Berlin never intended to
+annex Belgium were pure camouflage. He urges the Berlin office to flatly
+declare its purpose never to give up a foot of the Belgian coast nor an
+acre of the conquered territory of north France and Belgium.
+
+"It is of no consequence," he says, "that we have given a solemn pledge
+not to annex Belgium. Why not tell the world that we will have failed in
+the one thing for which we set out if we evacuate Belgium? We need
+Belgium's coast line for our shipping."
+
+He adds that Germany has used twenty-three million tons of Belgian coal
+and has taken as much more iron ore out of France's basin in Briey. "We
+cannot live and compete with France and England if we give up the coal
+and iron mines that we have conquered and the harbours that we have
+won."
+
+Having affirmed, therefore, that the German Government lied at the
+beginning in claiming that they entered Belgium fighting a defensive
+warfare, General von Bissing cast about for some one behind whom he can
+hide as a screen and who can be used as an authority for lying. He finds
+his guide and leader in "The Prince," written by Machiavelli. That book
+has often been called the treatise on the art of lying. Never was such
+cunning exhibited. Never was the father of lies invoked with such skill
+as by the German leaders. In their sight truth is contemptible,
+kindness is weakness, honour is a figment.
+
+But the individual, the city, or the empire that builds its life on lies
+builds its house on sand. Soon the rains will descend and the floods
+come, the winds will blow, and the house will fall, and great will be
+the fall of it.
+
+The German is like a thirsty man who tries to quench his thirst by
+drinking scalding water. He is like a hungry man who tries to satisfy
+his appetite by eating red-hot coals.
+
+
+3. The Malignity of the German Spies
+
+Disturbed by many events in their city, the Secret Service men guard
+very carefully the speakers for the Liberty Loan, the Red Cross or the
+Y. M. C. A. hut work. Fearing lest some German agent might injure the
+good name of their town, the Secret Service men of a certain community
+recently told the following incident, merely as a warning to all public
+speakers who might, by their words, arouse the enmity of half-balanced
+German fanatics. Because it was intended to put us all upon our guard,
+and because no interest could possibly be injured, but many persons be
+benefited, the incident is here set forth in detail. The speaker was a
+young lawyer, of position, influence and fine education, who was serving
+his country during the period of the war.
+
+"One morning I received my assignment through a sealed envelope.
+Experience told me that I was to take up the work of some other Secret
+Service man and complete the task. Of course, one Secret Service man
+does not know who else is in the service. Since the war began we go by
+numbers, rather than by our names. When I opened my envelope I found
+these directions: 'Go to No. ---- ----. Wait until there is no customer
+in the tobacco store. Then put down on the counter two ten-cent pieces,
+and say to the woman, "I want that package of green leaf tobacco." When
+you have left the store, open the package, and you will find full
+directions therein.' I followed the instructions strictly, and out on
+the street I opened the package, and found a large key and a small one,
+with these words written: 'Go to No. so-and-so (mentioning a third-class
+little apartment house in one of the worst districts in the city). The
+large key will open room No. 14. The small key will open a little
+writing table in the room. In the drawer of that table you will find
+full directions.'
+
+"I soon found the apartment house, climbed to the second floor, found my
+large key turning in the lock, and the small key opened the drawer in
+the desk. In that drawer I found these words: 'The man we want is in the
+adjoining room. He will come in about seven o'clock, but he may not come
+until eleven or twelve. It is important that we have his testimony.
+Don't wound him seriously or kill him. You will find a hole bored
+through the door between your room and his. That hole is filled with
+putty, but underneath the putty is wax. Warm the wire in the drawer in
+the gas jet and melt the wax.'
+
+"I waited until eleven o'clock for the man to come in. For a while he
+sat on the bed, with his back towards me. He was reading. Finally he
+lifted his pillow to shake it up, and I caught sight of a big revolver
+under the pillow. For several reasons I decided to do nothing until he
+had fallen asleep. I kept my ear glued to that little hole for one hour
+after he turned out his light. When he was sleeping soundly I went into
+the hall, with my skeleton key turned the lock in the door, and then
+with my lantern in the left hand and my revolver in the right made one
+bound into the room, struck my light and my revolver into his face under
+the light and shouted: 'Hands up!' Within three minutes I had him
+handcuffed and within ten had him bound. In that room, when the police
+came at my call, we found enough chemicals and powerful explosives to
+have blown up the entire block. In his satchel were found incriminating
+letters, secret documents, and, with their help, we soon landed the
+entire crowd. All have now been taken care of. Their flames were stamped
+out before they were kindled." That one incident was only one of a
+series of closely-related dramatic events. Outwardly, life in that city
+is very safe, simple and straightforward, but as to the forces of evil,
+the anarchists, the I. W. W.'s and German plotters the patriot can only
+say that but for the Secret Service and the police and the Department of
+Justice, society could not go on for one single month.
+
+
+4. The Cancer in the Body-Politic of Germany
+
+To-day, physicians and surgeons count the cancer man's deadliest enemy.
+Every year this baffling disease takes large and larger toll of human
+life. From time to time experts come together to plan its limitation,
+but meanwhile the terrible disease increases. Addressing a company of
+experts recently, a great physician exclaimed: "Even if we can stop its
+growth by radium, it still remains for us to get rid of the growth
+itself. There seems to be no way to lift the evil cells out save through
+the knife, after which nature must heal the wound. Science knows no
+other way." Plainly, no magic can be invoked. No miracle assists the
+surgeon. His one recourse is to the knife, and after that the healing
+forces of nature.
+
+Let us confess that the knife has a large place in the extermination of
+social diseases. Militarism is a cancer on the German body-politic, just
+as slavery was once a cancer fastened on the fair body of the great
+South. That disease had fastened itself upon the South many years before
+the Civil War. Like a cancer, it spread its roots throughout the whole
+social and economic structure of the Southern States. It poisoned trade.
+Its virus was in the body of law. It destroyed kindness and sympathy for
+the weak. Slavery debased the poor white working-man. It made the white
+fathers of mulatto children so cruel that they sold their own flesh and
+blood. Overseers became brutes. Slave drivers stood up and bid upon
+their own children in the auction markets. Slowly the disease spread.
+Men became alarmed. They tried everything excepting the knife held in
+the hand of war surgeons. Clay recognized the cancer in the body
+politic. He proposed compromise as a poultice. Garrison and Phillips
+proposed the amputation of the diseased limb. John Brown tried to put
+sulphuric acid upon the sore spots and eat it out through the flames of
+insurrection. Lincoln knew that it was a case of life or death. The
+Republic could not endure half slave and half free. All measures failed.
+Finally the god of war went forth and lifted a knife heated red hot and
+cut the foul cancer out of the body and saved the fair South. When many
+years had passed nature healed the wound and saved the life of the
+Republic.
+
+Germany, Austria and Turkey to-day are patients in a world hospital. It
+is plain that they are stricken with death. The foul cancer of
+militarism has fastened itself upon Germany. The cancer of autocracy is
+eating into the vitals of Austria. The cancer of polygamy is enmeshed in
+the life of Turkey. Of late the disease has been spreading. Now these
+surgeons, named Foch, Haig and Pershing, have been anointed by the
+ointment of war black and sulphurous, and, lifting their scalpel, these
+men have been ordained to cut out the foul growth from the body-politic
+of Germany. Perchance there is still enough vital force left therein to
+heal the wound after the disease has been removed. Meanwhile, the sick
+man of Turkey struggles. The patient hates the knife. The diseased body
+will not have the only instrument that holds possible cure, and yet,
+despite all his struggle, the disease must come out. Slowly the surgical
+process goes on. One root at Verdun was cut, and now another is being
+sundered in the West. Much blood flows, but the blood is black and foul.
+Every cell in the German body-politic seems to be diseased. Medicines
+must be found. The stimulants of sound ethics and morals must be
+invoked--after that it is a question of the recuperative forces of
+intellect and conscience in the German people. These forces alone can
+heal the wound left after the foul cancer has been cut away. To-day, men
+with a large mind, blessed with magnanimity, kindness and good-will must
+stay their hearts upon history, that shows us that in the past in our
+own country slavery was a cancer cut out by the surgeons of war, and
+that after a long time the great South recovered its health, its beauty
+and its usefulness.
+
+
+5. Polygamy and the Collapse of the Family in Germany
+
+The unexpected influences of this war upon Germany herself is a striking
+consideration. Few men anticipated the far-off results of the Kaiser's
+alliance with the Sultan and his polygamous philosophy. During the past
+two years the German newspapers, magazines and debates in the Reichstag
+have been filled with startling suggestions concerning the family. The
+_Berliner Lokalanzeiger_, on March 7, 1916, published a statement urging
+that "every girl should be given the right on reaching twenty-five
+years to have one child born out of wedlock, for which she should
+receive from the state an annual allowance."
+
+Dr. Krohne, in his address before the House, says: "The decline of the
+birth rate in Germany has proceeded three times as fast as in the
+preceding twenty-five years. No civilized nation has hitherto
+experienced so large a decline in so short a time. Our annual number of
+births falls already to-day by 560,000 below what we had a right to
+expect. We should have to-day 2,500,000 more inhabitants than we have."
+Commenting thereupon, the _Berliner Lokalanzeiger_ demands that
+"illegitimate children should be put socially and morally on a level
+with the legitimate."
+
+When, therefore, the Kaiser cast about for an alliance with some man who
+could be his bosom friend and could love what he loves, the Kaiser chose
+the Sultan with his polygamy and the Moslem teaching with its harem. No
+British or French officer, therefore, was surprised when documents like
+the following began to be found on the dead bodies of young German
+officers. This document is a verbatim and absolutely accurate copy of
+one of the many now deposited in the various departments of Justice and
+the War Departments in Havre and Paris:
+
+"Soldiers, a danger assails the Fatherland by reason of its dwindling
+birth rate. The cradles of Germany are empty to-day; it is your duty to
+see that they are filled. You bachelors, when your leave comes, marry at
+once the girl of your choice. Make her your wife without delay. The
+Fatherland needs healthy children. You married men and your wives should
+put jealousy from your minds and consider whether you have not also a
+duty to the Fatherland. You should consider whether you may not
+honourably contract an alliance with one of the million of bachelor
+women. See if your wife will not sanction the relation. Remember, all of
+you, the empty cradles of Germany must be filled.
+
+"Your name has been given us as a capable man, and you are herewith
+requested to take on this office of honour, and to do your duty in a
+proper German way. It must here be pointed out that your wife or fiancee
+will not be able to claim a divorce. It is, in fact, hoped that the
+women will bear this discomfort heroically for the sake of the war. You
+will be given the district of ----. Should you not feel capable of
+carrying on the task allotted to you, you will be given three days on
+which to name some one in your place. On the other hand, if you are
+prepared to take on a second district as well you will become
+'drekoffizier' and receive a pension. An exhibition of photographs of
+women and maidens in the district allotted to you is to be seen at the
+office of ----. You are requested to bring this letter with you."
+
+This is an amazing document. Plainly the German family has broken down.
+But no household can be built on free love in 1918, just as no stone
+building can be erected on hay, stubble or sand. The German family has
+gone, and German society is tottering towards its final ruin.
+
+
+6. The Red-Hot Swords in Sister Julie's Eyes
+
+The history of heroism holds nothing finer than the story of Sister
+Julie, decorated by the French Government with the Cross of the Legion
+of Honour. She lived in the little village of Gerbeviller, now called
+"Gerbeviller the Martyred." On August 27th the French army broke the
+line of the German Crown Prince and compelled the Huns' retreat. General
+Clauss was ordered to go northeast and dig in on the top of the ridge
+some twelve miles north of Gerbeviller. The Germans reached the village
+at nine o'clock in the morning, and by half-past twelve they had looted
+all the houses and were ready to burn the doomed city. The incendiary
+wagons were filled with the firebrands stamped 1912. Beginning at the
+southern end of the village, the German officers and soldiers looted
+every house, shop, store and public building, and then set fire to the
+town. At last they came to the extreme northern end, where a few houses
+and the little hospital over which Sister Julie had charge, were still
+standing.
+
+About noon a German colonel with the blazing firebrand in his right hand
+stood in front of Sister Julie's house. It has been said that there are
+flaming swords in the eyes of every good woman. In that terrible hour
+the face of Sister Julie proved the proverb. She told the German officer
+that these few houses that were left were filled with wounded French
+soldiers, with here and there a wounded German. The Hun answered that
+his men would remove the Germans who were wounded, but that the
+buildings must be fired. Behind him were several hundred buildings
+blazing like one fiery furnace. Sister Julie stood squarely across the
+path of the Hun. "While I live you shall not enter. You shall not kill
+these dying men. I swear it by this crucifix! Your hands are already red
+with blood. God dwells within this house. Look at this figure of Jesus,
+who said, 'Woe unto him that offends against one of my little ones.
+These shall go away into everlasting hell.' I myself will bear witness
+against you. You have murdered our fifteen old men. All their lives long
+these old men did us good and not evil. Look at the little girls you
+have slain. God Himself will strike you dead." General Clauss stood
+dumb. He was embarrassed beyond all words. Fear also got hold upon him.
+He turned and disappeared into a group of his soldiers. Two or three
+minutes passed by. A German colonel came to Sister Julie. He told her
+that the houses used for wounded soldiers would be spared by General
+Clauss provided Sister Julie would agree to continue her ministrations
+to the wounded Germans lying in her hospital. As General Clauss already
+knew that this had already been done, and would be, the Germans marched
+away, leaving the hospital buildings uninjured. It was a victory of the
+soul of a noble woman.
+
+One morning last summer Sister Julie showed her decorations. Her face
+was kind, gentle and motherly. Her atmosphere was peace and serenity.
+She seemed a tower of strength. It must have been easy for dying French
+boys in those rooms to have identified Sister Julie with Mary the
+Mother, who saw her son dying on the cross. Later on we met an aged
+woman of martyred Gerbeviller. She had been nursing in the hospital and
+had stood behind Sister Julie when she forbade General Clauss to light
+the firebrands. "What did Sister Julie say?" we asked the old woman.
+"Oh, sir, I do not know, and yet I do know. She told them that she would
+ask God to strike them dead. In that moment I was afraid of her. She
+seemed to me more to be feared than General Clauss and all his wicked
+army. I can tell you what our good priest says about Sister Julie." "And
+what is that?" The old woman could not quote the verse accurately, but
+from what she said we were soon guided to a chapter in the old Bible,
+and there was the verse that described Sister Julie, with arms uplifted
+at the door of her hospital and denying access to General Clauss. The
+verse was this: "And lo! an angel with a flaming sword stood at the gate
+and kept the garden."
+
+
+7. The Hidden Dynamite; the Hun's Destruction of Cathedrals
+
+In one group of ruined cellars that was once a splendid French city,
+there is a beautiful building standing. It is rich with the art and
+architecture of the sixteenth century. The lines are most graceful and
+the structure is the fulfillment of Keats' line: "A thing of beauty is a
+joy forever." Such a building belongs not to the French nation, but to
+the whole human race. An architect like the man who planned this noble
+building is born only once in a thousand years. Every visitor to that
+ruined town asks himself this question: "Why did the Germans allow this
+building to remain?" An incident of the story of Bapaume throws a flood
+of light upon the problem.
+
+One year ago, when the Germans were retreating from Bapaume, they looted
+every house, burned or dynamited every building save the Hotel de Ville.
+That city hall the Germans left standing in all its majesty and beauty.
+In front of the building they placed a placard containing in substance
+the statement that they left this building as a monument to Germany's
+love of art and architecture.
+
+Secretly, however, in the cellar of this noble building the Germans
+buried several tons of dynamite. To this dynamite they attached a
+seven-day clock. They set the seven-day clock to explode at eleven
+o'clock one week after the Germans had retreated. These beasts worked
+out the theory that the largest possible number of British and French
+officers and public men would be inspecting the building at that hour of
+the day.
+
+The plot was successful. Their devilish cunning was rewarded and their
+hate glutted. The clock struck the detonator, the dynamite exploded,
+blew the building and the visitors into atoms. Standing in the ruined
+public square, one sees nothing but that great shell pit where the earth
+opened up its mouth and swallowed a monument builded to beauty and
+grandeur. This other building, therefore, that stands in the city fifty
+miles to the south of Bapaume is there for the sole reason that the
+seven-day clock failed to explode the dynamite--not because of any love
+of architecture that possessed the Germans. It is there to tell us that
+some part of the mechanism of death failed to connect.
+
+In analyzing the German mind nothing is more certain than the fact that
+they lack a fine sense of humour and are often quite devoid of
+imagination.
+
+As for sculpture, nothing can be more hideous than the statues of the
+fifteen Prussian kings that do not decorate, but simply vulgarize, the
+avenue leading towards Magdeburg. The vast broad statue of Hindenburg,
+to which the Germans come to drive nails and scratch their names in lead
+pencils, reminds one of the occasional public buildings in this country
+defaced by thoughtless and vulgar boys. Nor is there anything in the
+world as ugly as the German sculptor's statue of the present Kaiser out
+at Potsdam Palace, unless it be the statue of an Indian in front of a
+tobacco store down in Smithville, Indian Territory, though even this is
+doubtful. It hardly seems possible that one earth only 7,000 miles in
+diameter could hold two statues as ugly as that of the Kaiser!
+
+It is this singular lack of imagination and failure to understand the
+beautiful that explains the systematic destruction by the German army of
+the glorious cathedrals, the fourteenth century churches, libraries,
+chateaux and hotels des villes that were the glory and beauty of France.
+
+"If we cannot have these vineyards and orchards," said the Germans,
+"Frenchmen shall not have them."
+
+So they turned the land into a desert. Not otherwise the German seems to
+feel that if he cannot build structures as beautiful as these glorious
+buildings in France that he will not leave one of them standing.
+
+Next to the Parthenon in Athens and St. Peter's in Rome, perhaps the
+world's best loved and most admired building was the Cathedral of
+Rheims. There Joan of Arc crowned Charles IX; there for centuries the
+noblest men of France had gone to receive their offices and their
+honours. A building that belonged to the world. What treasures of beauty
+for the whole human race in the thousand and more statues in the
+cathedral! How priceless the twelfth-century stained glass! What
+paintings which have come down from the masters of Italy! Whoever
+visited the library and the Cardinal's palace without exclaiming: "What
+beautiful missals! What illuminated manuscripts?"
+
+Fully conscious of the fact that they were impotent to produce such
+treasures the Germans, unable to get closer to the cathedral than four
+miles, determined to destroy them. Day after day they bombed the noble
+cathedral. Gone now, too, the great stone roof! Fallen the flying
+buttresses, ruined the chapels. Perished all the tapestries, the rugs
+and the laces. Water stands in puddles on the floor. The cathedral is a
+blackened shell.
+
+The victim of grievous ingratitude, King Lear, was turned out into the
+snow and hail by his wicked daughters; and the white-haired old king
+wandered through the blackness of the night beneath the falling hail.
+And, lo! the Cathedral of Rheims is a King Lear in architecture--broken,
+wounded, exposed to the hails of the autumn and the snow of the winter,
+through the coarseness and vandalism of the Germans.
+
+The German Foreign Minister put it all in one word: "Let the neutrals
+cease their everlasting chatter about the destruction of Rheims
+Cathedral. All the paintings, statues and cathedrals in the world are
+not so much as one straw to the Germans over against the gaining of our
+goal and the conquest of their land."
+
+Never was a truer word spoken. The German lacks the imagination and the
+gift of the love of the beautiful. He would prefer one bologna sausage
+factory and one brewery to the Parthenon, with St. Peter's and Rheims
+Cathedral thrown in.
+
+
+8. The German Sniper Who Hid Behind the Crucifix
+
+For hundreds of years the French peasants have loved the crucifix. Many
+a beautiful woman carries a little gold cross with the figure of Jesus
+fastened thereto, and from time to time draws it out to press the
+crucifix to her lips. Even in the harvest fields and beside the road,
+travellers find the carved figure of the Saviour lifted up to draw poor,
+ignorant and sinful men to His own level.
+
+One of the most glorious pieces of carving in France was wrought in
+walnut by a great sculptor and lifted up on a tree in the midst of an
+estate, where the peasants, resting from their work, could refresh their
+souls by love and faith and prayer.
+
+One day last summer, during the Teuton advance, a German officer stood
+beneath that divine figure. Mentally he marked the place. That night
+when the darkness fell a company of German officers returned to that
+spot. One of them climbed up on the tree. He found that the carved
+figure of Jesus was life size.
+
+With the end of a rope a little platform was drawn up level with the
+foot of the crucifix. Two ropes were fastened to the outstretched arms
+of the Saviour. Another rope was fastened around the neck of Jesus,
+until the platform was made safe. Then a German sniper with his gun
+climbed up on the platform. He laid his rifle upon the shoulders of the
+Divine Figure, hiding his body behind that of Jesus. The German officer
+must have chuckled with satisfaction, for he knew that he had found a
+screen behind which a murderer might hide, and the German villain was
+quite right in his psychology.
+
+It was true that the French soldiers loved that beautiful figure. To
+them the crucifix was sacred. So beautiful were their ideals, so lofty
+their spirit, so pure and high their imagination, that they were
+incapable of conceiving that a German could use the sacred crucifix as a
+screen from which to send forth his murderous hail.
+
+The green boughs of that tree hid the little puff of smoke. From time to
+time a French soldier would fall dead with a hole through his forehead.
+Once a French officer threw up his hands while the blood streamed from
+his mouth and he pitched forward dead.
+
+At last the French soldiers understood. There was a sniper behind
+Christ's cross. The French could have turned their cannon against that
+tree, but instead they simply kept below the trench until the night
+fell. Then in the darkness some French boys took their lives in their
+hands and crawled on hands and knees across No Man's Land. Lying on
+their backs they cut the wires above their heads.
+
+By some strange providence they dropped safely into the German trench
+and crawled ten yards beyond. Then they climbed into the tree, removed
+that glorious crucifix with the carved figure, brought it back in
+safety and at daybreak turned their cannon on the tree and blew the
+platform to pieces.
+
+Foul Huns had made a screen of that sacred figure, but the French were
+not willing to injure their ideals by shooting the crucifix to pieces.
+
+To-day all the world despises the Germans. Nothing is sacred to them.
+Their souls are dead within them and when the soul dies, everything
+dies.
+
+The German's body may live on for twenty years, but you might as well
+pronounce the funeral address to-day, for the soul of Germany is dead.
+Nothing but a physical fighting machine now remains.
+
+Meanwhile, France lives. Never were her ideals so lofty and pure. That
+is why the world loves France. She has kept faith with her ideals.
+
+
+9. The Ruined Studio
+
+I have in my possession several photographs of a ruined studio. Some
+twenty or thirty Germans dashed into a little French village one day,
+and demanded at the point of their automatic pistols the surrender by
+the women of their rings, jewelry, money and their varied treasure. At
+the edge of the village was a simple little summer-house, in which one
+of the French artists had his studio. He had been in that valley for
+three months, sketching, and working very hard. Knowing that they had
+but a little time in which to do their work as vandals, the Huns started
+to ruin the studio. With big knives they cut the fine canvases into
+ruins. They knocked down the marbles, and the bronzes; the little bust
+from the hand of Rodin was smashed with a hammer. The bronze brought
+from Rome was pounded until the face was ruined. One blow of the hammer
+smashed the Chinese pottery, another broke the plates and the porcelain
+into fragments. Then every corner of the room was defiled, and the pigs
+fled from their filthy stye. Across one of the canvases the German
+officer wrote the words, "This is my trademark." And every other part of
+the canvas was cut to ribbons with his knife. No more convincing
+evidence of the real German character can possibly be found than these
+photographs of the interior of that ruined studio.
+
+Here we have the reason why the Kaiser himself, who knew the German
+through and through, called his people Huns. Long ago the first Huns
+entered Italy. They found a city of marble, ivory, and silver. They left
+it a heap and a ruin. They had no understanding of a palace; they did
+not know what a picture meant, or a marble; they were irritated by the
+superiority of the Roman. What they could not understand they determined
+to destroy. That is one of the reasons why all the marbles and bronzes
+that we have in Italy are marred and injured. The head of Jupiter is
+cracked; the Venus di Milo has no arms; Aphrodite has been repaired with
+plaster; Apollo has lost a part of his neck and one leg. From time to
+time an old marble is dug up in a field, where some ploughman has
+chanced upon the treasure. Owners hid their beautiful statues, ivories
+and bronzes, to save them from the vandals. Unfortunately, the modern
+Huns rushed into the French towns, riding in automobiles, and sculptors
+and painters had no time to hide their treasures. The great cathedrals
+could not be hidden. The Kaiser in one of his recent statements boasted
+that he had destroyed seventy-three cathedrals in Belgium and France. It
+is all too true. From the beginning, the Cathedral of Rheims, dear to
+the whole world, and glorious through the associations of Jeanne d'Arc,
+was doomed, because the Germans, having no treasure of their own, and
+incapable of producing such a cathedral, determined that France should
+not have that treasure. The other day, in Kentucky, a negro jockey came
+in at the tail end of a race, ten rods behind his rival. That night, the
+negro bought a pint of whiskey, and determined to have vengeance, so he
+went out at midnight, and cut the hamstrings of the beautiful horse that
+had defeated his own beast. Now that is precisely the spirit that
+animated the German War Staff and the men that have devastated France
+and Belgium, and every man who has witnessed these German crimes with
+his own eyes will never be the same person again. His whole attitude
+towards the Hun is an attitude of horror and revulsion. A certain noble
+anger burns within him, as burned that noble passion in Dante against
+those criminals who spoiled Florence of her treasures.
+
+
+10. Was This Murder Justified?
+
+One raw, December day, in 1914, an American gentleman, widely known as
+traveller and correspondent, was in a hospital in London, recovering
+from his wound, received in Belgium. He was startled by the appearance
+of an old Belgian priest, and a young Belgian woman. The American author
+was travelling in Belgium at the time of the German invasion. Quite
+unexpectedly he was caught behind the lines, near Louvain. Having heard
+his statement, the German officer recognized its truthfulness and
+sincerity, and insisted that this American scholar should be his guest
+at the Belgian chateau of which he had just taken possession. The German
+had already shot the Belgian owner, and one or two of the servants, who
+defended their master. To the horror and righteous anger of the
+American, the German officer took his place at the head of the table,
+waved the American to his seat, and ordered the young Belgian woman to
+perform her duties as hostess. In that tense moment, it was a matter of
+life and death to disobey. That German officer had his way, not only
+with the young Belgian wife, half dazed, half crazed, wholly broken in
+spirit, but with the American whom he sent forward to Brussels.
+
+Plunged into the midst of many duties in connection with Americans and
+refugees who had to be gotten out of Belgium into England, this American
+author had to put aside temporarily any plan for the release of that
+young Belgian woman held in bondage. Later, when he was wounded, the
+American crossed to London for medical help. When the old Belgian priest
+and that young woman stood at the foot of his bed in the hospital in
+London, all the events of that terrible hour in the dining-room of the
+Belgian chateau returned, and once more he lived through that frightful
+scene. The purpose of the visit soon became evident. The old Belgian
+priest stated the problem. He began by saying that God alone could take
+human life since God alone could give it. He urged that the sorrow of
+the young woman's present was as nothing in comparison to the loss of
+her soul should she be guilty of infanticide. It was the plea of a man
+who lived for the old ideals. His white hair, his gentle face, his pure
+disinterested spirit lent weight to his words. Then came the statement
+of the young Belgian woman. She told the American author of the dreadful
+days and weeks that followed after his departure, that every conceivable
+agony was wrought upon her, and that now within a few months, she must
+have a child by that wicked German officer. She cried out that the very
+babe would be unclean, that it would be born a monster, that it was as
+if she was bringing into the world an evil thing, doomed in advance to
+direst hell. That every day and every hour she felt that poison was
+running through her veins. She turned upon the old priest, saying, "You
+insist that God alone gives life! Nay, no, no, no! It was a German devil
+that gave me this life that now throbs within my body! And every moment
+I feel that that life is pollution. German blood is poisoned blood.
+German blood is like putrefaction and decay, soiling my innermost life."
+The young woman wept, prayed, plead, and finally in her desperation
+cried out, "Then I decide for myself! The responsibility is mine. I
+alone will bear it." And out of the hospital she swept with the dignity
+and beauty of the Lady of Sorrows.
+
+A year later, in Paris, the French judge and court cleared the young
+girl who choked to death with a string the babe of the German officer
+who had attacked her. But since that time, all France and Belgium and
+the lands where there are refugees are discussing the question--Where
+does the right lie? Has the French mother, cruelly wounded, no right?
+And this foul thing forced upon her a superior right? Which path for the
+bewildered girl leads to peace? Where does the Lord of Right stand? What
+chance has a babe born of a beast, abhorred and despised, when it comes
+into the world? The women of the world alone can answer this question.
+
+
+
+
+IN FRANCE THE IMMORTAL!
+
+IV
+
+
+1. The Glory of the French Soldier's Heroism
+
+As much as the German atrocities have done to destroy our confidence in
+the divine origin of the human soul, the French soldiers have done to
+vindicate the majesty and beauty of a soul made in the image of God.
+
+I have seen French boys that were so simple, brave and modest in their
+courage, so beautiful in their spirit, as to make one feel that they
+were young gods and not men. One day, into one of the camps, came a
+lawyer from Paris. He brought the news of the revival of the Latin
+Quarter. For nearly three years a shop near the Beaux Arts had been
+closed. During all this time the French soldier had been at the front.
+When the first call came on that August day he put up the wooden
+shutters, turned the key in the lock, and marched away to the trenches.
+
+Said the lawyer: "I come from your cousin. The Americans are here in
+Paris. Your cousin says that if you will give me the keys and authorize
+her to open the shop she will take your place. She can recover your
+business, and perhaps have a little store of money for you when you have
+your 'permission' or come home to rest. She tells me that she is your
+sole relative." The soldier shook his head, saying: "I never expect to
+come home. I do not want to come home. France can be freed only by men
+who are ready to die for her. I do not know where the key is. I do not
+know what goods are in the shop. For three years I have had no thought
+of it. I am too busy to make money. There are other things for
+me--fighting, and perhaps dying. Tell my cousin that she can have the
+shop." Then the soldier saluted and started back towards his trench.
+"Wait! Wait!" cried the attorney. Then he stooped down, wrote hurriedly
+upon his knee, a little paper in which the soldier authorized his cousin
+to carry on the business, in his name. Scrawling his name to the
+document, the soldier ran towards the place where his heart was--the
+place of peril, heroism and self-sacrifice.
+
+This was typical of the thousands of soldiers at the front, for French
+soldiers suffer that the children may never have to wade through this
+blood and muck. The foul creature that has bathed the world in blood
+must be slain forever. With the full consent of the intellect, of the
+heart and the conscience, these glorious French boys have given
+themselves to God, to freedom, and to France.
+
+
+2. Why the Hun Cannot Defeat the Frenchman
+
+One morning in a little restaurant in Paris I was talking with a British
+army-captain. The young soldier was a typical Englishman, quiet,
+reserved, but plainly a little excited. He had just been promoted to his
+captaincy and had received one week's "permission" for a rest in Paris.
+We had both come down from near Messines Ridge.
+
+"Of course," said the English captain, "the French are the greatest
+soldiers in the world."
+
+"Why do you say that?" I answered. "What could be more wonderful than
+the heroism, the endurance of the British at Vimy Ridge? They seem to me
+more like young gods than men."
+
+To which the captain answered: "But you must remember that England has
+never been invaded. Look at my company! Their equipment is right from
+helmet to shoe, so perfectly drilled are they that the swing of their
+right legs is like the swing of one pendulum. I will put my British
+company against the world. Still I must confess this, that, so far as I
+know, no English division of fifteen thousand men ever came home at
+night with more than five thousand prisoners.
+
+"But look at the French boys at Verdun! As for clothes, one had a
+helmet, another a hat, or a cap, or was bareheaded. One had red
+trousers, one had gray trousers and one had fought until he had only
+rags left. When they got within ten rods of the German trench they were
+so anxious to reach the Boche that they forgot to shoot and lifted up
+their big bayonets, while they shouted, 'For God and France!'
+
+"That night when that French division came back ten thousand strong they
+brought more than ten thousand German prisoners with them to spend the
+night inside of barbed wire fences.
+
+"The reason is this: These Frenchmen fought for home and fireside. They
+fought against an invader who had murdered their daughters and mothers.
+The Huns will never defeat France. Before that could be done," exclaimed
+the English captain, "there would not be a man left in France to explain
+the reason for his defeat."
+
+
+3. "I Am Only His Wife"
+
+Human life holds many wonderful hours. Love, marriage, suffering,
+trouble, are crises full of romance and destiny, but I question whether
+any man ever passed through an experience more thrilling than the hour
+in which he stands at the Charing Cross or Waterloo Station in London or
+in the great station in Paris and watches the hospital trains come in,
+loaded with wounded soldiers brought in after a great battle.
+
+Often fifty thousand men and women line the streets for blocks, waiting
+for the trains. Slowly the wounded boys are lifted from the car to the
+cot. Slowly the cot is carried to the ambulance. The nurses speak only
+in whispers. The surgeons lift the hand directing them. You can hear the
+wings of the Angel of Death rustling in the air.
+
+When the automobile carrying two wounded boys moves down the street, the
+men and women all uncover while you hear whispered words, "God bless
+you!" from some father or mother who see their own son in that boy.
+
+Now and then some young girl with streaming eyes timidly drops a flower
+into the front of the ambulance--pansies for remembrance and love--upon
+a boy whom she does not know, while she thinks of a boy whom she knows
+and loves who is somewhere in the trenches of France.
+
+One morning a young nurse in the hospital in Paris received a telegram.
+It was from a young soldier, saying: "My pal has been grievously
+wounded. He is on the train that will land this afternoon. He has a
+young wife and a little child. You will find them at such and such a
+street. I do not know whether he will live to reach Paris. Can you see
+that they are at the station to meet him? That was his last whispered
+request to me."
+
+That afternoon at five o'clock, with her face pressed between the iron
+bars, a young French woman, with a little boy in her arms, was looking
+down the long platform. Many, many cots passed by, and still he did not
+come. At last she saw the nurse. The young wife did not know that her
+soldier husband had died while they lifted him out of the car.
+
+The young nurse said that she never had undertaken a harder task than
+that of lifting the boy in her own arms and leading the French girl to
+that cot, that she might know that henceforth she must look with altered
+eyes upon an altered world. A few minutes passed by and then a miracle
+of hope had happened.
+
+"I saw her," said the nurse, "with one hand upon his hair and the other
+stretched upward as she exclaimed: 'I am only his wife, France is his
+mother! I am only his wife, France is his mother! I give him to France,
+the mother that reared him!'"
+
+
+4. A Soldier's Funeral in Paris
+
+The two boys were incredibly happy. Two mornings before they had landed
+in Paris. What a reception they had had in the soldiers' club from the
+splendid French women! How good the hot bath had seemed! Clean linen, a
+fresh shave, a good breakfast, a soft cot, plenty of blankets,
+twenty-four hours' sleep, and they had wakened up new men. The first
+morning they walked along the streets, looking into the shop windows; in
+the afternoon one of the ladies took them to a moving picture show, and
+now on the second day here they were, at a little table before the cafe
+in one of the best restaurants in the Latin Quarter, with good red wine
+and black coffee, and plenty of cigarettes, and not even the boom of
+cannon to disturb their conversation. Strange that in three days they
+could have passed from the uttermost of hell to the uttermost of safety
+and peace. "These are good times," said one of the boys, "and we are in
+them."
+
+Then they heard a policeman shouting. Looking up, they saw a singular
+spectacle. Just in front of them was a poor old hearse drawn by two
+horses, whose black trappings touched the ground. Shabbier hearse never
+was seen. Strangest of all, there was only a little, thin, black-robed
+girl walking behind the hearse. There were no hired mourners as usual.
+There was no large group of friends walking with heads bared in token of
+reverence; there was no priest; no carriages followed after. Saddest of
+all, there was not even a flower. What could these things mean? How
+strange that when they were so happy this little woman could be so sad.
+
+Suddenly one of the soldier boys arose. He stepped into the street and
+looked into the hearse. There he saw these words: "A soldier of France."
+He began to question the woman. Lifting her veil, he saw a frail girl,
+and while the traffic jam increased she told her story. The soldier had
+been wounded at the Battle of the Marne. He was one of the first to be
+brought to Paris. He never walked again. "I am very poor; I have only
+one franc a day. We have no friends. I borrowed money for the hearse."
+
+The boy returned to his fellows. "Fall in line, boys!" he shouted. "Here
+is a soldier of France. This little girl has taken care of him for three
+years on one franc a day. Line up, everybody, and tell the men to
+swallow their coffee and wine and fall into the procession. Go into the
+shops and say that a soldier of France lies here." When that hearse
+began to move there were twenty men and women walking as mourners behind
+the body. Two soldier boys walked beside the frail little girl with her
+heavy crepe. As the soldiers walked along beside the hearse the
+procession began to grow. On and on for two long miles this slowly
+moving company increased in number until one hundred were in line, and
+when they came into God's Acre they buried the poor boy as if he were a
+king coming in with trumpets from the battle. For he was a soldier of
+France.
+
+
+5. The Old Book-Lover of Louvain
+
+Among the fascinating pursuits of life we must make a large place for
+the collection of old books, old paintings, old missals and curios.
+Certain cities, like Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Madrid, have
+been for a thousand years like unto the Sargasso Sea in which beautiful
+things have drifted.
+
+Fifty years ago, men of leisure began to collect these treasures. Some
+made their way into Egypt and Palestine, and there uncovered temples
+long buried in sands and ruins and all covered with debris. From time to
+time old missals were found in deserted monasteries, marbles were digged
+up in buried palaces. Men came back from their journeys with some lovely
+terra cotta, some ivory or bronze, some painting by an old master, whose
+beauty had been hidden for centuries under smoke and grime. The
+enthusiasm of the collectors exceeds the zest of men searching for gold
+and diamonds amid the sands of South Africa.
+
+Fifty years ago a young scholar of Louvain won high praise because of
+his skill in dating and naming old pictures and manuscripts. When ten
+years had passed by, this scholar's name and fame were spread all over
+Europe. Many museums in different countries competed for his services.
+
+The time came when the heads of galleries in London and Paris and Rome
+sent for this expert to pass upon some art object. During the fifty
+years this scholar came to know every beautiful treasure in Europe.
+
+In the old castles of Austria, in a monastery of Bohemia, in the house
+of an ancient Italian family, in certain second-hand bookstores, in
+out-of-the-way towns he found treasures as precious as pearls and
+diamonds raked out of the muck-heap.
+
+When death took away his only son and left his little grandchildren
+dependent upon himself the old book-lover looked forward serenely into
+the future. He knew that every year his treasures were growing more and
+more valuable. Living in his home in Louvain he received from time to
+time visits from experts, who came in from all the cities of the world
+to see his treasures, and if possible, to buy some rare book.
+
+Then, in August, 1914, came the great catastrophe, as came the explosion
+of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii under hot ashes and flaming fire.
+
+One morning the old scholar was startled by the noise and confusion in
+the street. Looking down from his window he saw German soldiers, German
+horsemen, German cannon. He beheld women and children lined up on the
+sidewalk. He saw German soldiers assault old men. He saw them carrying
+the furniture, rugs and carpets out of the houses. He saw the flames
+coming out of the roofs of houses a block away.
+
+A moment later an old university professor pounded upon his door and
+called out that they must flee for their lives. There was only time to
+pick out one satchel and fill it with his precious manuscripts and
+costly missals. Then the two old scholars fled into the street with the
+grandchildren. Fortunately a Belgian driving a two-wheeled coal cart was
+passing by. Into the cart climbed the little grandchildren. Carefully
+the satchel filled with its treasures was also lifted into place.
+
+At that moment a German shell exploded beside the cart. When the old
+book-lover recovered consciousness the cart was gone, the grandchildren
+were dead and of all his art treasures there was left only one little
+book upon which some scholar of the twelfth century had toiled with
+loving hands.
+
+Carried forward among the refugees several hours later, Belgian soldiers
+lifted the old man into a train that was carrying the wounded down to
+Havre. In his hand the collector held the precious book. Excitement and
+sorrow had broken his heart. His mind also wandered. He was no longer
+able to understand the cosmic terror and blackness. A noble officer,
+himself wounded, put his coat under the old man's head and made a
+pillow and bade him forget the German beast, the bomb shells, the
+blazing city. But all these foul deeds and all dangers now were as
+naught to the old man.
+
+"See my little book," he said. "How beautiful the lettering! Why, upon
+this book, as upon a ship, civilization sailed across the dark waters of
+the Middle Ages. Look at this book of beauty. The ugliness of the tenth
+century is dead. The cruelty and the slavery of bloody tyrants is dead
+also. The old cannon are quite rusted away. But look at this! Behold,
+its beauty is immortal! Everything else dies. Soon all the smoke and
+blood will go, but beauty and love and liberty will remain."
+
+And then lifting the little book the old collector of Louvain pressed
+his lips to the vellum page, bright with the blue and crimson and gold
+of seven hundred years, and in a moment passed to the soul's summer
+land, where no shriek of German shells rends the air, where wicked
+Germans have ceased from troubling and where the French and Belgians,
+worn by the cruelty of the Huns, are now at rest and peace.
+
+
+6. A Vision of Judgment in Martyred Gerbeviller
+
+To-day everybody knows the story of Gerbeviller, the martyred.
+
+To the northwest is that glorious capital of Lorraine, Nancy. Farther
+northwest are Verdun and Toul, with our American boys. The region round
+about the martyred town is a region of rich iron ores.
+
+Some years ago, Germany found herself at bay, by reason of the
+threatened exhaustion of her iron mines in Alsace-Lorraine. The news
+that France had uncovered new beds of iron ore stirred Germany to a
+frenzy of envy and longing.
+
+High grade iron ore meant a new financial era for France. The exhaustion
+of Germany's iron mines meant industrial depression, and finally a
+second and third rate position. Rather than lose her place Germany
+determined to go to war with France and Belgium and grab their iron
+mines. To break down resistance on the part of the French people, the
+Germans used atrocities that were fiendish beyond words. The richer the
+province she wished to steal, the more terrible her cruelties.
+
+At nine o'clock in the morning on August 27, General Clauss and 15,000
+soldiers entered Gerbeviller. Ten miles to the south was the remainder
+of the German army, utterly broken by the French attack. Clauss had been
+sent north to dig his trenches until the rest of the German army could
+retreat.
+
+Every hour was precious. The Germans remained in the little town from 9
+A. M. until 12:30 P. M. They found in the village thirty-one hundred
+women, girls and children, fifteen old men (the eldest ninety-two), one
+priest and one Red Cross ambulance driver. Even the little boys and men
+under seventy had gone to the front to dig ditches and carry water to
+the French.
+
+It took the Germans only two and one-half hours to loot all the houses
+and load upon their trucks the rugs, carpets, chairs, pictures, bedding,
+with every knife and fork and plate. At half-past eleven General Clauss
+was in the Mayor's house, when the German colonel came in and reported
+that everything in the houses had been stripped and that they were ready
+to begin the firing of the buildings.
+
+The aged wife of the secretary to the Mayor told me this incident:
+
+"We find no weapons in the houses, and we find only these fifteen old
+men, one Red Cross boy, and this priest," said the colonel.
+
+"Line up the old men then and shoot them," shouted General Clauss. "Take
+the priest as a prisoner to do work in the trenches."
+
+The old men were lined up on the grass. General Clauss himself gave the
+signal to fire. Two German soldiers fired bullets into each one of the
+old men.
+
+One of the heart-broken onlookers was the village priest. The Germans
+carried him away as prisoner and made him work as a common labourer;
+through rain and sun, through heat and snow, he toiled on, digging
+ditches, carrying burdens, working eighteen hours a day, eating spoiled
+food that the German soldiers would not touch, until finally
+tuberculosis developed and he was sick unto death. Then the Germans
+released him as a refugee, so the priest returned to Gerbeviller to die.
+
+Then came the anniversary of the murder of the fifteen old men and of
+the one hundred and two women, girls and children. On the anniversary
+day of the martyrdom the noble Governor of the province assembled the
+few survivors for a memorial service about the graves of the martyrs.
+
+Knowing that the priest would never see another anniversary of that day
+the Prefect asked the priest to give the address at the memorial
+service. No more dramatic scene ever occurred in history. At the
+beginning the priest told the story of the coming of the Germans, the
+looting of the houses, the violation of the little girls, the collecting
+of the dead bodies. Suddenly the priest closed his eyes, and all
+unconsciously he lived the scene of those three and a half hours.
+
+"I see our fifteen heroes standing on the grass. I see the German
+soldiers lifting up their rifles. I hear General Clauss cursing and
+shouting the command to fire.
+
+"I see you, Thomas; a brutal soldier tears your coat back. He puts his
+rifle against your heart. When you sink down I see your hands come
+together in prayer.
+
+"I see you, Francois. I see the two big crutches on which you lean. You
+are weary with the load of ninety years. I hear your granddaughter when
+she sobs your name, and I see your smile, as you strive to encourage
+her.
+
+"I see you, Jean. How happy you were when you came back with your
+wealth to spend your last years in your native town! How kind you were
+to all our poor. Ah! Jean, you did us good and not evil, all the days of
+your life with us!
+
+"I see you, little Marie. You were lying upon the grass. I see your two
+little hands tied by ropes to the two peach trees in your mother's
+garden. I see the little wisp of black hair stretched out under your
+head. I see your little body lying dead. With this hand of mine upon
+that little board, above your grave, I wrote the words, 'Vengeance is
+mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.'
+
+"And yonder in the clouds I see the Son of Man coming in His glory with
+His angels. I see the Kaiser falling upon Gerbeviller. I see Clauss
+falling upon our aged Mayor. But I also see God arising to fall upon the
+Germans. Berlin, with Babylon the Great, is fallen. It has become a nest
+of unclean things. There serpents dwell. Woe unto them that offend
+against my little ones. For, lo, a millstone is hanged about their necks
+and they shall be drowned in the sea with Satan."
+
+The excitement was too much for the priest. That very night he died.
+Henceforth he will be numbered among the martyrs of Gerbeviller.
+
+
+7. The Return of the Refugees
+
+The return of the refugees to Belgium and France holds the essence of a
+thousand tragedies. From the days of Homer down to those of Longfellow,
+with his story of Evangeline, literature has recounted the sad lot of
+lovers torn from one another's arms and all the rest of their lives
+going every whither in search of the beloved one, only to find the lost
+and loved when it was too late.
+
+But nothing in literature is so tragic as the events now going on from
+week to week in the towns on the frontier of Switzerland.
+
+When the Germans raped Belgium and northern France they sent back to the
+rear trenches the young women and the girls, and now, from time to time,
+those girls, all broken in health, are released by the Germans, who send
+them back to their parents or husbands.
+
+Multitudes of these girls have died of abuse and cruelty, but others,
+broken in body and spirit, are returning for an interval that is brief
+and heart-breaking before the end comes.
+
+Three weeks ago an old friend returned from his Red Cross work in
+France. By invitation of a Government official he visited a town on the
+frontier through which the refugees released by Germany were returning
+to France.
+
+It seemed that during the month of September, 1914, the Germans had
+carried away a number of girls and young women in a village northeast of
+Luneville. When the French officials finished their inquiry as to the
+poor, broken creatures returning to France they found a French woman,
+clothed in rags, emaciated and sick unto death. In her arms she held a
+little babe a few weeks old. Its tiny wrists were scarcely larger than
+lead pencils. The child moaned incessantly. The mother was too thin and
+weak to do more than answer the simple questions as to her name, age,
+parents, and husband.
+
+Moved with the sense of compassion, the French official soon found in
+his index the name of her husband, the number of his company and
+telegraphed to the young soldier's superior officer, asking that the boy
+might be sent forward to the receiving station to take his wife back to
+some friend, since the Germans had destroyed his village. By some
+unfortunate blunder the officials gave no hint of the real facts in the
+case.
+
+Filled with high hope, burning with enthusiasm, exhaling a happiness
+that cannot be described, the bronzed farmer-soldier stepped down from
+the car to find the French official waiting to conduct him to one of the
+houses of refuge where his young wife was waiting.
+
+My American Red Cross friend witnessed the meeting between the girl and
+her husband. When the fine young soldier entered the room he saw a poor,
+broken, spent, miserable creature, too weak to do more than whisper his
+name. When the young man saw that tiny German babe in his young wife's
+arms he started as if he had been stung by a scorpion. Lifting his hands
+above his head, he uttered an exclamation of horror. In utter amazement
+he started back, overwhelmed with revulsion, anguish and terror.
+
+Gone--the beauty and comeliness of the young wife! Gone her health and
+allurement! Perished all her loveliness! Her garments were the garments
+of a scarecrow. Despite all these things the girl was innocent. But she
+realized her husband's horror and mistook it for disgust. She pitched
+forward unconscious upon the floor before her husband could reach her.
+
+The history of pain contains no more terrible chapter. That night the
+dying girl told the French officials and her husband the crimes and
+indignities to which she had been subjected. Two other babes had been
+born under German brutality, and both had died, even as this infant
+would die, and when a few days later her husband buried her he was
+another man. The iron in him had become steel. The blade of intellect
+had become a two-edged sword. His strength had become the strength of
+ten. He decided not to survive this war. Going back to the front, he
+consecrated his every day to one task--to kill Germans and save other
+women from the foulest degenerates that have ever cursed the face of the
+earth.
+
+
+8. An American Knight in France
+
+Coming around the corner of the street in a little French village near
+Toul, I beheld an incident that explained the all but adoring love
+given to our American boys by the French children. The women and the
+girls of that region had suffered unspeakable things at the hands of the
+German swine. Photographs were taken of the dead bodies of girls that
+can never be shown. The terror of the women at the very approach of the
+German was beyond all words. The very words "Les Boches" send the blood
+from the cheeks of the children. The women of the Dakotas on hearing
+that the Sioux Indians were on the war-path with their scalping knives
+were never so terrified as the French girls are on hearing the German
+soldiers are on the march. Even the little children have black rings
+under their eyes, with a strained, tense expression as they stand
+tremulous and ready to run.
+
+On the sidewalk near me was a little French girl of about six, with her
+little brother, perhaps four years of age. Suddenly around the corner
+came an American boy in khaki. He was swinging forward with step sure
+and alert. The children turned, but there was no terror in their eyes
+and no fear in their hearts. They did not know the American soldier;
+never before had they seen his face, but his khaki meant safety. It
+meant a shield lifted between the German monster and themselves.
+Forgetting everything, the little French girl started on a run towards
+the American soldier, while her little brother came hobbling after. She
+ran straight to the American boy, flung her arms around his legging,
+rubbed her cheek against his trousers and patted his knee with her
+little hands. A moment later when her little brother came up the
+American boy stooped down, lifted the boy and girl into his arms, and
+while they were screaming with delight carried them across to a little
+shop, and found for them two tiny little cakes of chocolate, the only
+sweet that could be had. The French children understand.
+
+The German motto was: "Frightfulness and terrorism are the very essence
+of our new warfare."
+
+Pershing's charge was: "You will protect all property, safeguard all
+lives, lift a shield above the aged, be most courteous to the women,
+most tender and gentle to the children."
+
+In France our boys have lifted a shield above the poor and the weak,
+and, having given service, they are receiving a degree of love beyond
+measure; but there is no danger that they will be spoiled by the
+adulation of the French women and children, who rank them with the
+knights and the heroes of old.
+
+
+9. An American Soldier's Grave in France
+
+One August morning I was in the wheat fields near Roye. Somewhere in
+that field the body of a noble American boy was lying. He was a graduate
+of the University of Virginia; his mother and his sister had a host of
+friends in my old home city, Chicago. Guided by a white-haired priest,
+out in the wheat we found at last a little mound with a part of a broken
+airplane lying thereupon. I pulled the rest of his machine upon his
+grave and learned that when the French boys picked him up they found
+that four explosive bullets had struck him while flying in the air after
+his victory over many German enemies.
+
+With my knife I cut a sheaf of golden grain and an armful of scarlet
+poppies and said a prayer for the boy and his mother and his sister.
+
+Standing there in the rain I wrote a letter to those who loved him,
+saying: "When you see this head of wheat, say to yourself 'One grain
+going into the ground shall in fifteen summers ripen into bread enough
+to feed sixteen hundred millions of the family of men.' When you look at
+this pressed poppy, say, 'His blood like red rain went to the root to
+make the flowers crimson and beautiful for all the world; soon the
+fields of France shall wave like a Garden of God, and peace and plenty
+shall dwell forever there. "Without shedding of blood there is no
+remission." Wine means the crushing of the grapes. At great price our
+fathers bought Liberty.'"
+
+Two thousand years ago Cicero, sobbing above the dead body of his
+daughter Tullia, exclaimed: "Is there a meeting place for the dead?"
+What becomes of our soldier boys who died on the threshold of life? This
+is life's hardest problem. Where is that young Tullia so dear to that
+gifted Roman orator? Where is that young musician Mozart? Where is young
+Keats? And where is Shelley? And where are young McConnell and Rupert
+Brooke and young Asquith? And ten thousand more of those young men with
+genius. Where also is that young Carpenter of Nazareth, dead at thirty
+years of age?
+
+The answer is in this: They have passed through the black waters and
+have come into the summer land. There they have been met by the heroes
+coming out with trumpets and banners to bring them into a world
+unstained by the smoke and din of battle. There they will write their
+books, invent their tools, complete their songs and guide the darkling
+multitudes who come in out of Africa, out of the islands of the sea,
+into the realm of perfect knowledge, love and peace.
+
+
+10. "These Flowers, Sir, I Will Lay Them Upon My Son's Grave"
+
+Last August, at an assembly in Paris, Ambassador Sharp held a little
+company spellbound, while he related several incidents of his
+investigations in the devastated region near Roye. One afternoon the
+captain stopped his military automobile upon the edge of what had once
+been a village. Surveyors were tracing the road and making measurements
+in the hope of establishing the former location of the cellar and the
+house that stood above it. An old gray-haired Frenchman had the matter
+in charge. He had lost the cellar of his house. Also, the trees that had
+stood upon his front sidewalk, also his vines and fruit trees. His story
+as stated by Ambassador Sharp was most pathetic. The old man had retired
+from business to the little town of his childhood. When it became
+certain that the Germans would take the village, the man pried up a
+stone slab in the sidewalk and buried his money, far out of sight. A
+long time passed by. When the Hindenburg plans were completed, the
+Germans made their retreat. Among other refugees who returned was the
+aged Frenchman. To his unbounded amazement the old man could not locate
+the site of his old home. In bombarding the little village, the Germans
+dropped huge shells. These shells fell into the cellar, and blew the
+brick walls away. Other shells fell in the front yard, and blew the
+trees out by the roots. Later other shells exploding blew dirt back into
+the other excavations. Little by little, the ground was turned into a
+mass of mud. Not a single landmark remained. Finally the old man
+conceived the idea of beginning back on the country road, and measuring
+what he thought would have been the distance to his garden. But even
+that device failed him. For the huge shells had blown the stone slab
+into atoms, scattered his buried treasure, and left the man in his old
+age penniless and heart-broken.
+
+Long ago Dumas represented the man who had taken too much wine as trying
+in vain to enter his own home, explaining to his inebriated friend that
+the keyhole was lost. But think of a cellar that is lost! Think of shade
+trees, whose very roots have disappeared! Think of a lovely little
+French garden with its roses and vines, and fruit trees, all gone! "Why,
+the very well was with difficulty located," said the Ambassador. But
+after all, the loss of buried treasure that could never be found is only
+a faint emblem of the loss of human bodies and human minds. Think of the
+soldiers who have returned to find that the young wife or daughter whom
+they loved has disappeared forever! And think of the wives and
+sweethearts who have received word from their officers that the great
+shell exploded and killed the lover, but that no fragment of his body
+could be found! During one day Mr. Chamberlain and myself were driven
+through twenty-four series of ruins, that once had been towns and
+villages, but where there was nothing left but cellars filled with
+twisted iron and blackened rafters. Already, men are anticipating the
+hour of victory and talking about the reconstruction of the devastated
+regions, the enforced service of a million German factories, building up
+what once they had torn down. But the restoring of houses, the
+restoration of factory and schoolhouse, of church and gallery, represent
+a material recovery. But the other day, a French woman was invited
+before the general who decorated the widow and praised her, returning to
+her the thanks of France, in that her last and seventh son had just been
+killed. Her response was one of the most moving things in history. "I
+have given France my all. These flowers, ah, sir, I have but one use for
+them. I will take them out, and lay them on my son's grave."
+
+
+11. The Courage of Clemenceau
+
+One Sunday afternoon, last August, in Paris, Alexandre, head of the Fine
+Arts Department of the Government, brought me an invitation from Rodin
+to visit his studio. We found the successor to Michael Angelo turning
+over in his hand an exquisite little head of Minerva, goddess of wisdom,
+carved with the perfection of a lily or a rose. "He is always studying
+something," exclaimed the author. But what Rodin wanted us to see was
+his head of Clemenceau. When the covering was lifted, there stood the
+very embodiment of the man who is supreme in France to-day,--Clemenceau.
+The sculptor's face kindled and lighted up. "The lion of France!" How
+massive the features! How glorious the neck and the shoulders!
+Clemenceau makes me think of a stag, holding the wolves at bay, while
+his herd finds safety in flight. He makes me think of the lion, roaring
+in defence of his whelps. Our descendants will say, of a truth there
+were giants in those days, and among the giants we must make a large
+place for Clemenceau.
+
+The invincible courage of Clemenceau is in the challenge he has just
+flung out to the enemies of France. Reduced to simple terms it comes to
+this,--"It is said that the Germans can get within bombing distance of
+Paris, or reach the capital, providing they are willing to pay the
+price. Well,--the Allies can break through the German line and gain the
+Rhine, providing they are willing to pay the price. To destroy Paris
+means a price of 750,000 Germans at least. The probabilities are that so
+heavy a price would mean a political revolution in Germany. But what if
+Ludendorff gets to Paris? Rome was twice destroyed, and later the city
+of brick was rebuilt as a city of marble. Nearly fifty years ago the
+people of Paris destroyed their own city, at an expense of hundreds of
+millions of francs. The motive back of the destruction was the desire to
+replace an old and ugly city by a new and the most beautiful city in the
+world. Fire destroyed Chicago, intellect rebuilt it,--earthquake and
+flame levelled San Francisco, courage restored the ruins. Enemies may
+destroy Paris, genius and French art and skill and industry and will,
+will replace it. Our eyes are fixed on the goal, namely, the crushing of
+Prussianism. What if Paris must decrease? It will only mean that
+civilization in France, and humanity, will increase." Reduced to the
+simplest terms, that is the substance of Clemenceau's appeal. Never was
+there courage more wonderful. Not even Leonidas at Thermopylae ever
+breathed nobler sentiments. That is why Paris is safe to-day. That is
+why France is secure. That is why we await with confidence and quietness
+the next great offensive for the Germans.
+
+In her darkest hour what France and the world needed was a hero, a man
+of oak and rock, a great heart, a lion,--and the world found such a man
+in Clemenceau. Nothing fascinates the listeners like tales of courage.
+Not even stories of love and eloquence have such a charm for children
+and youth. Many of us remember that in our childhood the crippled
+soldier of the Civil War became a living college, teaching bravery to
+the boys of the little town. For months Clemenceau has been going up and
+down France, heartening the people. This Prime Minister with his great
+massive head, the roaring voice, the clenched fist, is an exhilarating
+spectacle. That hero of Switzerland, William Tell, left behind him a
+tradition that it meant much to him to waken each morning and find Mont
+Blanc standing firm in its place. Not otherwise all patriots, soldiers,
+and lovers of their fellow men to-day can look on the great French
+statesman and patriot and gather comfort and courage from the fact that
+he still stands firmly in his place.
+
+
+
+
+OUR BRITISH ALLIES
+
+V
+
+
+1. "Gott Strafe England"--"and Scotland"
+
+At the crossroads near the city of Ypres is a sign-board giving the
+directions and the distances to various towns. One day the Germans
+captured that highway.
+
+There was a man in the company who had lived in some German-American
+city of the United States. He knew that but for England Germany would
+have gotten through to the Channel towns and looted Paris. Climbing up
+on the sign-board that German-American wrote in good plain English these
+words: "God ---- England!"
+
+That afternoon the Australian and the New Zealand army pushed the
+Germans back and recaptured the highway. Among other soldiers was a
+Scotsman named Sandy.
+
+He read the sign, "God ---- England!" with ever increasing anger.
+Finally he flung his arms and legs around the sign-post, pulled himself
+up to the top and, while his companions watched him, they saw him do a
+most amazing thing.
+
+They were cheering him because they expected him to rub out the word
+"England." But not Sandy! Holding on by his left hand, with his right
+Sandy added to the words "God ---- England!" these words, "and
+Scotland."
+
+He felt that it was an outrage that Scotland should be overlooked in any
+good thing. Blessed was the people who had won the distinction of being
+hated by the German, and therefore Sandy added the words "and Scotland"!
+
+Now Scotland deserved that high praise. When the historian comes to
+write the full story of this great war it will make a large place for
+the words "and Scotland." Wonderful the heroism of the British army!
+Marvellous their achievements! But who is at the head of it? A great
+Scotsman, Sir Douglas Haig.
+
+What stories fill the pages of the achievements of English sailors ever
+since the days of Nelson, standing on the deck of the _Victory_, down to
+the battle of Jutland! But that gallant Scot, Admiral Beatty, holds the
+centre of the stage to-day. There came a critical moment also when a man
+of intellect and a great heart must represent Great Britain in her
+greatest crisis in the United States, and in that hour they sent a
+Scotsman, Arthur James Balfour, philosopher, metaphysician, theologian,
+statesman, diplomat and seer.
+
+And what shall one more say save that the finances of this war have been
+controlled by a Scotch Chancellor of the Exchequer, and her railways
+organized by a Scotch inventor. Wonderful the achievements of
+England--that "dear, dear land." Marvellous the contribution of Wales,
+through men like the Prime Minister, Lloyd George!
+
+Who can praise sufficiently the heroes of Canada, Australia and New
+Zealand? In Ireland, for the moment, things are in a muddle. "What is
+the trouble with the Emerald Isle?" was the question, to which the
+Irishman made instant reply: "Oh, in South Ireland we are all Roman
+Catholics, and in North Ireland we are all Protestants, and I wish to
+heaven we were all agnostics, and then we could live together like
+Christians."
+
+But Ireland will soon iron out her troubles. To the achievements of the
+various people of the great British Empire let us make a large place for
+the contributions of Scotland. The Germans hate with a deadly hatred any
+country and any race that has stopped them in their headlong career
+towards crime.
+
+But the next time that a German-American has gone back to Berlin and has
+reached the western front and puts up a sign reading "Gott strafe
+England" let him not fail to add these words, "and Scotland."
+
+
+2. "England Shall Not Starve"
+
+Despite all warnings, rumours, and alarms, no dire peril known to
+passengers disturbed our voyage. The nearest approach came on a morning
+when the ship was two hundred miles off the coast of Ireland.
+
+The steamer was making a letter S and constantly zigzagging, when
+suddenly the lookout called down that there was a rowboat dead ahead.
+With instant decision the officer changed the ship's course and we
+passed the life-boat a half mile upon our right.
+
+The usual rumour started up and down the deck that there were dead
+bodies in the boat, but the petty officer answered my question by saying
+that it was 2,000 lives against one possible life that every drifting
+boat must be looked upon as a German decoy; that if the steamer stopped
+to send sailors with a life-boat to investigate it would simply give a
+German submarine a chance to come up with torpedoes. At that very moment
+one of the men beside the gun sighted a periscope and a moment later the
+gun roared and then boomed a second time and then a third. Because the
+object disappeared, all passengers said it was a submarine, but the
+officers said it was a piece of driftwood, tossed up on the crest of a
+wave.
+
+That night, on deck, a close friend of the purser came for an hour's
+walk around the deck. The memory of those three shots rested heavily
+upon his mind.
+
+It seemed that some months before he had been a purser on an East Indian
+liner. On the home voyage, twenty-four hours after they left Cairo, when
+well out into the Mediterranean, this officer went below for an hour's
+rest. Suddenly a torpedo struck the steamer. The force of the explosion
+literally blew the purser out of his berth. Grabbing some clothes, he
+ran through the narrow passageway, already ankle deep in rushing water.
+The great ship carried several thousand soldiers and a few women who
+were coming home from India or from Egypt. Despite the fact that all
+realized the steamer would go down within a few minutes, there was no
+confusion and the soldiers lined up as if on parade.
+
+The boat went down in about eight minutes, but every one of the women
+and children had on their life-preservers and were given first places in
+the life-boats that had not been ruined by the explosion.
+
+The purser said that he decided to jump from the deck and swim as far as
+possible from the steamer, but despite his struggles he was drawn under
+and came up half unconscious to find himself surrounded with swimming
+men and sinking rowboats that were being shelled by the German
+submarine. Suddenly a machine-gun bullet passed through his right
+shoulder and left an arm helpless. For half an hour he lay with his left
+arm upon a floating board, held up by his life-preserver. The submarine
+had disappeared. At distances far removed were three of the ship's
+boats and one raft. It was plain that there was no help in sight.
+
+Near him was a woman, to whom he called. The purser told the woman that
+he had been shot in the right arm and could not help her nor come near
+to her. She answered that it was good to hear his voice.
+
+The water was very cold. He began to be alarmed and reasoned as to
+whether the cold water would not stay the bleeding. From time to time he
+would call out to the woman to keep up hope and courage and not to
+struggle, but at last he saw she was exhausted. With infinite effort,
+swimming with his left arm, he managed to draw near to her.
+
+"Is drowning very painful?" the woman asked.
+
+"No," answered the officer. "Once the water rushes into the lungs one
+smothers."
+
+To which the English girl answered, "Then I think I will not wait any
+longer. Good-bye! Good luck!"
+
+Utterly exhausted she let her head fall over and in a moment the
+life-preserver was on the top and that was all that he saw.
+
+"The next thing I remember," said the officer, "was waking up to find a
+nurse trying to pour a stimulant down my throat."
+
+A destroyer had come up in response to the signals for help and picked
+up the survivors.
+
+For months he was in the hospital before he could be carried to England.
+Even now he was not able to lift a hat from his head with his right arm,
+but he could write a little. This was his first voyage to test his
+strength to prove to the Government that he could take his old task as
+purser.
+
+"How did you feel, purser, when you heard that cannon roar this morning
+against that submarine?"
+
+You should have seen the fire flash in the man's eyes.
+
+"How did I feel?" answered the officer. "I felt like a race-horse
+snuffing the battle from afar. Let them sink this ship--I will take
+another. Let them sink every steamer, I'll take a sailing vessel. Let
+them sink all our sailing vessels, we will betake ourselves to tugs.
+
+"We have 5,000 steamers that come and go between any Sunday and Sunday.
+Some are old cattle-boats, some are sea tramps and some are ocean
+hounds. They have carried 10,000,000 men and 20,000,000 tons of war
+materials, and 8,000,000 tons of iron ore and $3,000,000,000 worth of
+goods.
+
+"We have lent six hundred ships to France and four hundred ships to
+Italy. Our ancestors smashed the Spanish Armada. Our grandfathers
+baffled Napoleon and their sons defy the Hun and his submarine.
+
+"When I go down my son will take my place. When Germany beats England
+there will not be an Englishman left to tell how it happened."
+
+Then, leaning over the railing of the ship, the officer pointed to the
+setting sun, and lo, right out of the sea, sailing into our sight, came
+a fleet of English merchantmen, laden with wheat, and the purser said:
+
+"By God's help, England shall not starve."
+
+
+3. German-Americans Who Vilify England
+
+The biography of Grant holds many exciting incidents. One of them
+concerns a spy who nearly wrecked Grant's plans. It seems that a rumour
+came saying that Sheridan had been defeated at Winchester. A telegram
+came a few minutes later saying that Sheridan was recovering from the
+disaster. Meanwhile, Grant noticed one of his young assistants was
+endeavouring in vain to conceal his pleasure over the news of Sheridan's
+defeat. That feeling seemed inexplicable to Grant. The Commander-in-Chief
+had three armies--Sherman's in the South, Sheridan's in the Valley of
+the Shenandoah, and his own army of the Potomac. How could a young aide
+rejoice over Sheridan's defeat without down in his heart wanting Grant
+defeated, the Union destroyed, and secession made a success? Grant
+became more and more alarmed. He told one of his associates to follow
+this youth, whom he feared was a spy. Shortly afterwards the man was
+discovered sending signals, was tried, the proofs of his treason
+uncovered, and finally he was executed.
+
+To-day certain German-Americans never tire of announcing their
+Americanism. Their favourite expression is: "Germany was the Fatherland,
+but the United States is the wife." Not daring, therefore, to attack our
+Government, afraid to confess that they want Germany to succeed, and
+when that time comes expect to hold certain offices under Germany, they
+spend all their time vilifying Great Britain. There is one absolute and
+invariable test of the German-American's treason to this country, and
+that is bitterness towards England, because England is doing all she can
+to prevent Germany's victory. One thing has saved this country during
+four years, giving us a chance to prepare--Great Britain's fleet,
+holding Germany's battle-ships behind the Kiel Canal. To-day our
+Republic is defended by three armies--General Pershing's, Marshal Foch's
+and Marshal Haig's. But whenever a German-American vilifies Haig and
+attacks England you may know that down in his heart he wants Pershing
+defeated, the United States conquered, and Germany made victorious. The
+German-American who vilifies Great Britain is angry because Great
+Britain has prevented Germany from loading a million German veterans
+upon her six or eight thousand passenger ships, freight ships, sailing
+vessels and war fleet, and sailing to New York and assessing fifty
+billion dollars indemnity upon us.
+
+In a certain Western State a German professor of electricity resigned
+from his institution. He was receiving about $3,000 a year. Many months
+passed by. One day this man was heard defaming England. "England has
+destroyed the freedom of the seas. England controls Gibraltar and the
+Suez Canal. England is the great land pirate. England is the world
+butcher." A Secret Service man followed the German professor, and found
+that he was working as fireman at the wireless station of that great
+city. This German professor of electricity had resigned a $3,000 a year
+position to work for $75 a month as fireman. As soon as he found that
+the United States Government was upon his track he fled to Mexico. This
+spy's camouflage was love for the United States, but his treason was
+revealed through his hatred of England. That man should have been
+arrested at dark, tried at midnight, and shot at daybreak.
+
+There is a newspaper reporter in this country. This German-American was
+caught by a trick. Another reporter faked a story, writing out on his
+typewriter an account of several German submarines getting into the
+harbour of Liverpool and blowing up half a dozen English steamers and
+killing several thousand Englishmen, and this German-American reporter
+lifted his hands into the air in glee, and in the presence of half a
+dozen fellow reporters shouted: "I knew it! I knew it! I knew the
+Germans would smash Hades out of them!" In that moment he revealed his
+real attitude towards the United States. Any man that wants Admiral
+Beatty defeated wants the American transports sunk and American soldiers
+murdered. That reporter should also have been arrested at dark, tried at
+midnight, and shot at daybreak.
+
+In another city there is a young Irish writer. He fulfills all the
+proverbs about the crazy Irishman. In connection with the Sinn Fein
+conspiracy this young writer proposed a toast to the memory of Sir Roger
+Casement, the success of the revolution, and poured forth such
+bitterness upon England as cannot be described by those who hate
+ingratitude towards a country that has given us a chance to prepare.
+Wherever that man goes he carries hate with him towards Great Britain.
+His atmosphere is malign; his presence breathes treason towards England.
+That is another man who should have been arrested at dark, tried at
+midnight, and shot at daybreak. No man can serve God and Mammon. No man
+can be faithful to the United States who hates England and loves
+Germany. He must love the one and hate the other; he must hold to the
+one and despise the crimes of the other. No man can serve God and the
+Allies, Germany and the devil, at one and the same time.
+
+
+4. British vs. American Girls in Munition Factories
+
+To-morrow morning at eight o'clock one million British girls will enter
+the munition and related factories. To-morrow afternoon at four o'clock
+another million girls will enter the same factories, to be followed at
+midnight by the third shift of women.
+
+These factories average forty feet wide, and end to end would be 100
+feet in length. The roar of the machinery is never silent by day or
+night.
+
+In one factory I saw a young woman who was closely related, through her
+grandfather, to a man in the House of Lords. Her arms were black with
+machine oil, her hair was under a rubber cover, she wore bloomers. Her
+task was pouring two tons of molten steel into the shell moulds. The
+great shells passed from the hands of one girl to another until the
+fiftieth girl, 1,500 feet away, finished the threads into which the
+cap's screw was fastened.
+
+Every twenty-four hours these women turn out more small calibre
+cartridges than all England did the first year of this war. Every
+forty-eight hours they turn out more large cartridges than all England
+did the first year of this war. Every six days, with the help of men not
+fit for the battle front, they turn out more heavy cannon than all
+England did the first year of this war.
+
+They have sent 17,000,900 tons of ammunition to the front. Their shells
+are roaring on five battle fronts in three continents. When the British
+boys thrust their huge shells into the cannon these boys literally
+receive the shells at the hands of the millions of English girls who are
+passing them forward.
+
+Wonderful the heroism of the British soldiers! The reason why the men
+fight well at the front is because there are women at home worth
+fighting for. In all ages battles have been won, partly by the strong
+arm of the soldier, but chiefly by the heart that nerves the arm. That
+is why John Ruskin once said that "the woman in the rear generally wins
+the victory at the front."
+
+It stirs one's sense of wonder to find that all classes and all social
+conditions are represented in these factories. Thousands of young
+school-teachers have left the schoolroom behind, closed the book and
+desk and gone to the factory. Tens of thousands of young wives and
+mothers have left their little children with the grandmother. Many
+rectors and clergymen and priests, unfit for service at the front by
+reason of age, work all day long in the munition factory. Many a
+professional man crowds his work in the office that he may reach the
+factory for at least a few hours' work upon shot and shell.
+
+One day in France, as I was entering the factory, I saw perhaps twenty
+young women come out, hurry across the street to a building where two
+old crippled soldiers were taking care of the little children. These
+young mothers nursed their babes, looked after the other children and
+then hurried back to the factory. Every minute was precious; every day
+was big with destiny. Their young husbands and brothers and lovers, when
+the German push came, must have their cartridges and shells ready and in
+abundance.
+
+Watching these women with their strained, anxious faces--women who cut
+each thread in the shell with the accuracy of the expert--you could see
+the lips of the woman murmuring, and needed no confession from her that
+she was silently praying for the man who would use this weapon to defend
+her beloved France, her aged mother and her little child.
+
+When the beast is slain and the Potsdam gang tried and executed for
+their crimes, and the boys come home with trumpets and banners, the
+ovations will be for the soldiers; but after the soldiers have had their
+parade and their honour and their ovation on the first day of the
+triumph, there should be a second great parade, in which, while the
+soldiers stand on the streets and observe, and the merchants and working
+men and the professional classes stand as spectators, down the street
+shall march the munition girls, who fashioned the weapons with which the
+soldiers slew the common enemy.
+
+For while the boys at the front have defended liberty the girls at home
+have armed the soldiers. Neither one without the other could have made
+the world safe for democracy.
+
+Through the imagination these women have a right, while they toil, to
+watch the shell complete their work. The smith who forges the chain for
+the ship's anchor has a right to exult when he looks out through his
+imagination upon the great boat held firm by his chain in the hour when
+the storm threatened to hurl the craft upon the rocks. The inventor has
+a right to say: "That granary full of wheat is mine; I invented the
+reaper." The physician has a right to rejoice over the battle and
+victory over the youth whose life was saved by the surgeon's skill. Not
+otherwise, the munition girl has a right when the long day of battle is
+over to say: "I safeguarded that cottage; I lifted a shield above that
+little child; I built a wall against the cathedral and the gallery and
+the homes of yonder city."
+
+For American girls of vision there is nothing that they so much desire
+as the immediate condemnation by our Government of 10,000
+luxury-producing plants in this country, which should immediately be
+taken over by our Government for munition purposes, and before the
+daybreak of the first morning there would be ten million American girls
+standing before the doors, trying to break their way in to obtain a
+chance to fashion the shells that would protect American boys in danger
+at the front.
+
+
+5. The Wolves' Den on Vimy Ridge
+
+The bloodiest battle of 1917 was fought on the slopes of Vimy Ridge.
+That ridge is seven and a half miles long and is shaped like a dog's
+hind leg. Lifted up to an elevation of several hundred feet, the hill
+not only commands an outlook upon the German lines eastward, but
+protects the great plains that slope westward towards the English
+Channel.
+
+To hold that ridge the Germans constructed a vast system of trenches,
+barbed wire barriers, Portland cement pill-boxes and underneath the
+ridge, at a depth of sixty feet, they made their prisoners dig a gallery
+seven and a half miles long, with rooms for the officers opening out on
+either side of the long passageways.
+
+One morning the Canadian troops started up the long sloping hillside,
+under skies that rained cartridges, shells and gas bombs. So terrific
+was the machine-gun fire that some cartridges cut trees in two as if
+they had been cut with a saw, while others did not so much strike the
+Canadian boys as cut their bodies into two parts.
+
+Lying upon their faces they crawled up the hillside, cutting the wires
+as they crept forward. Not until the second afternoon did the shattered
+remnants reach the German trench that crowned the hillcrest. Then they
+plunged down into the trench, while the Germans rushed down the long
+stairs into the underground chamber and fled through the lower openings
+of their long gallery northward towards safety.
+
+Not until the Canadian officers led us into one of those German chambers
+did we understand the black tragedy. The room was shell-proof. The soft
+yellow clay was shored up by rough boards. All around the walls were
+bunks. In that chamber the German officers had kept the captive French
+and Belgian girls. There were two cupboards standing against the wall.
+One was made of rough boards; the other was a large, exquisitely carved
+walnut bureau for girls' garments. When the German officers fled from
+the trench above they had just time to escape to the lower shell-proof
+rooms, grab some of the treasure and flee. Unwilling to give these
+captive girls their freedom, since they could not have the girls they
+determined that their French and Belgian fathers and sweethearts should
+not recover them.
+
+There was just time during the excitement of the flight to unlock the
+door, rush in and send a bullet through each young woman. A few minutes
+later the Canadian boys swarmed through the long connecting chambers and
+side rooms.
+
+In one of those rooms they found these young women now dead or dying.
+Gas bombs had already been flung down and the rooms were foul with
+poisoned air. Protected by their masks the Canadian boys had time to
+pick up these girls and carry them up the steps into the open air, where
+they laid them down on the grass in the open sunshine. But help came too
+late. Beginning with an attempt to murder the souls of the girls the
+German officers had ended by slaying their bodies.
+
+An officer saw to it that the official photographer kept the record of
+the faces of these dead girls. Once they must have been divinely
+beautiful, for all were lovely beyond the average. One could understand
+the pride and joy of a father or lover when he looked upon the young
+girl's face. The slender body made one think of the tall lily stem,
+crowned with that flower named the face and glorious head. Strangely
+enough they seemed to sleep as if peace had come, after long pain.
+Plainly death had been longed for.
+
+Weeks passed by. The photographs of the dead girls were shown in the
+hope that if possible word might reach their parents, but no friend had
+been found to recognize them. One day a Canadian officer, making slow
+recovery in a hospital near the coast, was asked by his nurse for the
+photograph.
+
+It seemed there was a Belgian woman working in the hospital. Her village
+had been entirely destroyed. Her home was gone and all whom she loved
+had disappeared. By some accident the Red Cross nurse remembered this
+photograph and decided to show it to the Belgian woman who had passed so
+swiftly from abundance and happiness to the utmost of poverty and
+heart-break. Almost unwillingly at first the woman looked at the print.
+A moment later she held the picture out at arm's length, rose to her
+feet, then drew it to her lips and hugged it to her breast.
+
+With streaming eyes she almost shouted, "Thank God! Julia is dead!
+Thank God! Julia is dead! Now I know there is a God in Israel, for Julia
+is dead, is dead--is dead! Thank God! Thank God!"
+
+Though for a long time the doves had been in the clutches of the German
+hawks; though for a long time the lambs had been in the jaws of the
+German wolves; when all else failed death came and released the lovely
+girls from the clutch of German assassins.
+
+
+6. "Why Did You Leave Us in Hell for Two Years?"
+
+For British soldiers it had been a long trying day on Messines Ridge.
+For many nights the boys had been coming up towards the front trenches.
+The next morning at 3:50 they were to go "over the top"; a feat which
+they accomplished, driving in a mile and a half deep, on a long, long
+line, only to be stopped by four days and nights of rain that drowned
+the trenches and drove them back out of the flooded valley to the
+hillside. Because the Germans knew what must come the next day, the
+German cannon were trying to bomb out the British guns.
+
+That night--tired out--we drove back eighteen miles behind the line for
+one good night's sleep. After dinner an English lieutenant told me this
+tragic tale:
+
+"It was an April night last spring. All day the wind and fog and rain
+had been coming in from the North Sea. The chill and damp went into the
+very marrow of the bones. When night fell a few of us officers crept
+down the long stair into a shell-proof room. There we had our pipes and
+gossiped about the events of the day and talked with the French captain,
+our guest, who was spending a week studying our sector. Finally the time
+came when we must go back into the trench to take our turn in the rain.
+
+"We were putting on our raincoats, when in my happiness I said, 'Well,
+men, you should congratulate me. One week from to-night I shall not be
+here in this rain and mud. I shall be home in England and have my little
+wife and my baby girl. Just one week! It seems like seven eternities
+instead of seven days and nights!'
+
+"I little dreamed the little tragedy that I had precipitated. My colonel
+was very kind. He told me that he would have his permission in three
+more months. The rest of the boys also said nice things. Suddenly we
+realized that the French captain was acting very strangely and saying
+excited things with his back towards us. We did not know how we had
+insulted him, nor could we understand what had happened. Finally my
+colonel said to him:
+
+"'Captain, I hope you will have your vacation soon and have a chance to
+go home and see your family.'
+
+"He turned on us like a crazy man. He put his fists in the air, he half
+shouted and half sobbed at us.
+
+"'How do you men dare talk to me about going home? Your land has never
+been invaded, nor your families ruined. Home! How can I go home? The
+Germans have had my town for a year. In their retreat they carried away
+my little girl and my young wife, and now the priest has gotten word to
+me that in six weeks my little girl and my young wife will both have
+babes by the German beast who carried them off.'
+
+"And then the Frenchman cursed God and cursed the devil! Cursed the
+Kaiser and cursed the Fatherland. Oh, it was so terrible. Doctor, I
+often wonder how Americans could have left the women and girls of
+Belgium and France in hell for two and a half years, while you men
+stood in safety and in peace."
+
+The historian will find it hard to answer that question. History will
+have it to say that England was the good Samaritan who helped the
+Belgians who had fallen among thieves, while Americans were among those
+who passed by on the other side.
+
+
+7. "This War Will End Within Forty Years"
+
+A New Zealand officer was giving directions to a group of his soldiers.
+They were in the field at the foot of Bapaume. The immediate task was
+that of cutting and rolling up the barbed wire. In that territory the
+Germans had left trenches foul with fever, wells filled with the corpses
+of men and horses, springs polluted with every form of filth, but worst
+of all, the barbed wire entanglements. Every sharp point was covered
+with rust and threatened lockjaw. Looking in every direction, the whole
+land was yellow with the barbed wire. The work was dangerous. The
+rebound of the wire threatened the eye with its vision, threatened the
+face and the hand, and all the soldiers were in a mood of rebellion. In
+an angry mood, the officer exclaimed, "There are a hundred million miles
+of German barbed wire in France!"
+
+And when later I asked the first lieutenant how long this war would
+last, he made the instant answer, "This war will continue forty years
+more! One year for the fighting, and thirty-nine years to roll up the
+wire."
+
+Because every soldier at the front hated the wire entanglements, that
+bright sentence ran up and down the entire line from Belgium to the
+Swiss frontier. And for men of experience there is more truth in the
+statement than one would at first blush think. It will take one more
+year for the fighting, but it will take thirty-nine years more to grow
+the shade trees. Five centuries ago the French began to develop the love
+of the beautiful. On either side of the roads running across the land
+they planted two rows of poplars, oaks or elms. When long time had
+passed the fame of the French roads and the shade trees went out into
+all the earth. Under these trees the French farmer stopped his cart, fed
+his horses and refreshed himself beneath the shade. Under these trees
+the old men at the end of their career rested themselves, and gossiped
+about old friends that had gone.
+
+And when the German found he could not hold the land and enjoy the shade
+trees, the splendid orchards, the purple vineyards, he determined that
+the Frenchman should not have them, and so he lifted the axe upon every
+peach and pear, plum and grape, cherry and gooseberry tree. Perhaps it
+was as black a crime to murder the land as it was to murder the bodies
+of the farmers, since the soul is immortal.
+
+"One more year of fighting and thirty-nine years" not to roll up the
+wire, but to rebuild the cathedrals and churches, the colleges and
+universities, the halls of science, the temples of art, the mills for
+the weaving of cotton and linen and wool, and above all for the
+rebuilding of the railways, the reconstruction of the canals and the
+bridges, great and small. But the most grievous loss is the human loss.
+Think of 1,500,000 crippled heroes and poor wounded invalids in the land
+of France alone! Think of another 1,500,000 young widows, or lovers and
+mothers! Gone the young men who promised so great things for the French
+essay, the French poem, for the paintings and the bronzes! Dead the
+young lawyers, physicians and educators! Gone the young farmers and
+husbandmen! Perished 1,000,000 old people and 500,000 little children,
+all dead of heart-break. The German beast has been in the land. Like a
+wolf leaping into the sheepfold to tear the throats of the young lambs
+and the mother ewes.
+
+What! Thirty-nine years more to recover ruined France and Belgium,
+Poland and Rumania? France will never be the same again. The scar of the
+beast will abide. That is why no man of large mind and great heart will
+ever make friends with a soldier from Germany, will ever buy an article
+of German stamp, so long as he lives, will ever read another German
+book, or support another German business. It is our duty to forgive the
+transgressor who is repentant, but it is a crime to forget the
+unspeakable atrocities, the devilish cruelties of the German Kaiser, the
+German War Staff and the German army, with its 10,000,000 criminals.
+
+
+8. "Why Are We Outmanned by the Germans?"
+
+Many thoughtful men have lingered long over the despatches announcing
+that Great Britain called thirty thousand farmers to the trenches, thus
+threatening the loss of a part of her harvest. One of the British
+editors and statesmen explains this event by the frank statement that
+for the moment the Allies are outmanned, and will be until another
+million Americans reach France. Many men are puzzled to understand what
+this means, but the explanation is very simple. The combined population
+of Germany, Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria is not far from 140,000,000.
+To this must be added seventy millions of conquered and impressed
+peoples of Belgium, Poland, Rumania, with the Baltic provinces of
+Russia, Ukraine and other regions. Over against this population stands
+the 125,000,000 living in Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada,
+Australia, New Zealand and the English people of South Africa, and
+India, and the Isles of the Sea. Concede, therefore, that the army of
+six millions of Allies are over against six millions of Germans. Why are
+we outmanned?
+
+Back of that British editor-statesman's statement lies a most dramatic
+fact. Our Allies keep their treaties, and will not use German prisoners
+to fight against their brothers. Therefore the six million of Allies'
+soldiers have no support behind them. But the Germans impress all
+conquered peoples and lifted into the air if the observer had a glass
+powerful enough, he would behold back of the German six millions another
+six millions of impressed prisoners and conquered peoples, who support
+the German army. These men, driven forward by an automatic pistol and
+the rifle, work within half a mile of the rear German trench. They dig
+ditches, fill shell holes, repair roads, bring up burdens, care for the
+horses, scrub the mud from the wagons, and the slightest neglect of the
+task means that they are shot down by the German guards. All this
+releases the German soldier from the deadly work that breaks the nerve,
+and unfits a man to go over the top. That means that the German soldier
+can fight eight hours, and have sixteen for rest and recreation.
+
+But over against this German army fighting eight hours, with the deadly
+work wrought by several million of impressed servants and slaves, stands
+the Allied army. But our men after eight hours of active service must
+then begin to dig ditches, fill shell holes, repair bridges, clean the
+mud from the wagons, bring up the munitions, and this deadly work for
+eight hours, added to their eight hours of active service, means only
+eight hours for sleep and recovery, while the German has sixteen hours
+off duty for recovery and sleep. The Allies keep their treaties, and do
+not ask a German prisoner to fight against his brother. The Allies obey
+the laws of right and wrong, but the Ten Commandments are a great
+handicap in time of war. Is there any one who supposes that six million
+of Allied soldiers, working sixteen hours a day, are as fresh and as fit
+as six million Germans, working only eight hours a day? That is why the
+situation is so perilous. Fortunately victories are not won by muscle
+without but by the soul within. The sense of justice in the heart lends
+a form of omnipotence to a youth. In a moral universe, therefore, we
+must win. The great problem is, how to carry on until we can get another
+million Americans across to France, with full equipment, and fifty
+thousand aeroplanes.
+
+
+
+
+"OVER HERE"
+
+VI
+
+
+1. The Redemption of a Slacker
+
+Out on the Ohio River there is a large steel town. During the last few
+years many foreigners who have the Bolsheviki spirit have crossed the
+ocean and found work in the great shops and factories. Little by little
+the foreign newspapers have developed the spirit that has now ruined
+Russia, and is here under the American name of the I. W. W. movement. In
+this steel city was an anarchist, with real power to move the mobs. The
+mere mention of the name of Carnegie or Rockefeller was to him like
+waving a red flag in the face of a bull. In the evenings it was his
+custom to climb upon a box at the corner of the street, close to a
+little park, and tell his hearers that all the wealth in the rich man's
+house was created by the workman's muscle. He made no allowance for the
+inventor, for the organizer, for the risks taken by the man who built a
+factory. A few weeks ago this anarchist laid down a newspaper,
+containing an account of the trial of the I. W. W. leaders in Chicago.
+That night, becoming alarmed, lest he himself be caught in the drag-net,
+and perhaps forced to enlist as an enemy alien, this agitator
+disappeared, leaving behind him his board bill, laundry bill, tailor's
+bill, not to mention many other forms of indebtedness--a disappearance
+that led every one of his creditors to give up any and all faith in the
+American Bolsheviki movement.
+
+Now there was a young boy of about twenty-three who had long been
+listening to this agitator. When, therefore, the second night after the
+anarchist's disappearance came, this young man, who aspired himself to
+be a leader of the mob, climbed up on the soap box, at the corner of the
+little park, and began to speak to the same old crowd.
+
+"Think of it, my friends! Just think of it! Think of some soldier coming
+in here and making me enlist! I have no grudge against the Germans. I
+don't want to kill them. My forefathers were all German! My name is
+German. And I am an American all right, all right! Still, I don't
+propose to have anybody tell me what I must do. If I want to enlist, I
+will enlist, and if I don't, I won't! I'd like to see some Government
+agent come along and grab me for the draft! When he comes, he'll hear a
+few things from me, and then some!"
+
+At that point a man lifted up his hand and said: "Now you may stop right
+there!" Throwing back his coat collar, he showed a little metal badge.
+Climbing up on the box, the stranger took the young anarchist by his
+shoulder and half choked him, saying: "So you want to have the people
+see some one take you to the draft office? Well," said the officer,
+"now's the time for them to see him, and I'm the man. And you people,"
+he went on, "just take a good look at this fellow. It'll be the last
+chance you're going to have, for he will be in jail to-night, and
+to-morrow we will decide whether or not he has been opposing the draft.
+If he has, he stands a good chance of being shot." Blowing a little
+whistle, the officer dragged the young anarchist to the edge of the
+street, half lifted and half kicked him into the police wagon, which
+soon disappeared. The enemy aliens who remained behind were stupefied,
+partly with astonishment and partly with terror. Aliens began to say,
+"What will come next?" That night a number more of pro-Germans
+disappeared from this town with its steel mills.
+
+The next morning, at ten o'clock, the officer entered the jail. "Get a
+move on you, young man!" he said brusquely. "You're going up to the
+court to be examined to see whether you are a slacker or a traitor. In
+the one case you will be interned and in the other case you will be
+hanged or shot."
+
+The young anarchist was on his feet in a moment. "But, officer, aren't
+you going to give me a chance to enlist?"
+
+"Young man, this Government does not want traitors to enlist, nor
+pro-Germans."
+
+"I am not a pro-German this morning," cried the excited man. "I have
+thought the whole thing over last night. I did not sleep a wink. I think
+this Government is the best government in the world. And I am willing to
+fight for it."
+
+The officer was astounded. "Well, my young enemy," he exclaimed, "a
+dungeon seems to have had a good effect upon your mind. What has
+regenerated you? Was it the cold water or the corn bread? Or the steel
+door before your dungeon? Or was it the bad air in your cell? Or
+possibly it was the fear of death, or God Almighty, or future
+punishment. Come now, out with it!"
+
+It was a thoroughly frightened boy who stood half an hour later in the
+prisoner's dock. "Give me some book on the Government of the United
+States," he exclaimed to the judge. "And give me a week in which to show
+that I am in earnest, and I will then volunteer." The judge was very
+grave. "Young man," he said sternly, "any boy that will eat the bread of
+the United States, that will enjoy the liberty of this country, and has
+had all the chances to climb to place that have come to you, and refuses
+to enlist, has something wrong with him, and it is only a question of
+time when he comes to the judgment day." To this the young man made the
+answer that he had been lazy, careless and ignorant; that he had allowed
+himself to become the tool of the runaway agitator, and then once more
+he asked that he might have a chance to enlist. With the help of
+friends, the judge and the draft board finally let him off and sent him
+to a camp for three months' intensive training. Then came the news that
+his company had been sent over seas, and within a short time thereafter
+in the list of casualties the name of this young foreigner appeared.
+But one letter reached this country, and that letter was notable for
+this sentence: "For the first time in my life I have had young Americans
+for my companions. The boys in my company have had a college education
+and they have taught me bravery, truth, self-sacrifice, kindness and
+chivalry. I have learned more in two months at the camp than in all the
+rest of my life put together. The companionship in my company and in my
+camp have saved my soul." It is this that explains the redemption of the
+slacker.
+
+
+2. Slackers versus Heroes
+
+Going through the long communication trench, between the ruined city of
+Rheims and an observation lookout, with its view of the German front
+trench, we passed several soldiers digging an opening in the soft white
+marl, into a parallel trench. The captain in charge called my attention
+to a French poilu. His hair was quite black, save for the half inch next
+to the scalp and that was white as snow. If one had lifted up his hair
+and estimated his age by the last two inches of the jet locks the poilu
+would have been about thirty-five, but the hair, pure white at the
+roots, and a glance at his face told us that he was fifty-five to sixty.
+
+"He passed inspection," said the captain, "by dyeing his hair, and
+several weeks ago he broke the bottle of dye. Now he is half scared to
+death for fear he will be thrown out, because he is at the beginning of
+old age. Still I have no better soldier, no stronger, braver man. But I
+am hoping much from a friend in Epernay, to whom I sent for a bottle of
+black hair dye."
+
+So long as the Frenchmen have that spirit France will never be defeated.
+
+Many weeks ago I was in a manufacturing town near Pittsburgh. The wind
+was sharp and chill. All overcoats were turned up at the collar. On a
+box stood a young Australian lieutenant. His cheeks held two fiery
+spots. He was telling the story of the second battle of Ypres. While he
+talked you walked with him the streets of the doomed city, you heard the
+crash of the great shells as they smashed through the public buildings;
+you witnessed the burning of the Cloth Hall and shivered as the noble
+structure fell. One laughed with him in his moments of humour and wept
+over the sorrows of the refugees. He pleaded with the Welshmen and the
+Cornishmen, and told them that the motherland was bleeding to death and
+that now every boy counted. He flogged his hearers, scoffed at them,
+praised them, wept, laughed, reviled, transformed and finally conquered
+them.
+
+At the close, shaking hands with him, lo! he was burning with fever,
+with skin hot and dry. "Lieutenant, you should be at the hotel, in bed.
+You will kill yourself speaking in this cold air."
+
+"Well," he answered, "there are plenty of our boys who are perfectly
+sound who will be killed inside of three months. I have the t. b.,
+(tuberculosis), but I believe that I can pull through a year. I have
+enlisted over one hundred coal miners from Wales and iron-workers from
+Cornwall. I am willing to die for the motherland, after a year of t. b.,
+since my pals will be dead within three months through bullets. And when
+I die I want to die with the consciousness that I have kept my manhood."
+
+I left that poor, wounded, half-dead young soldier with the feeling that
+I had been in the presence of a superior being.
+
+Over against these heroes stand the slackers. There are hundreds and
+thousands of young men from allied countries who are of draft age, who
+find refuge in this land. There are other thousands who have been
+exempted, one because he has a flat instep, another because he has had
+trouble with his eyes or his teeth; or has tuberculosis, in its initial
+form, or is a victim of bronchitis. Most of these men owe it to their
+country and themselves to tear up their exemption papers. They earn
+their living in this country, working ten hours a day, but they will not
+work six or eight hours a day for Old England, thus releasing some young
+man to go to the front.
+
+The question is not whether the youth has an exemption paper. The heart
+of the question is, Has he any moral right to accept an exemption? This
+war is being fought by untold thousands of soldiers who could obtain
+half a dozen exemptions. They prefer to run the risk of death in six
+months, to looking after their own hides and keeping well away from
+danger for the next six years or sixty. No one who has been in the coal
+regions or in the great mines of the Rocky Mountains but realizes that
+there are an enormous number of allied slackers in this country. They
+have left their country to its dire peril at a moment when Old England
+is bleeding to death--when every man counts and when the cripples, the
+invalids, the old men, the women, everybody who can give four hours or
+eight of work a day should enter the great war offices or commissary
+departments and do office work, and thus release the stronger men for
+their work at the front.
+
+The time has fully come when Americans should ask themselves the
+question whether or not they have a moral right to support with money
+that could be far better used, in the war stamp purchases or Red Cross
+work, all these slackers and cowards, at a time when the motherland asks
+them to throw away their exemption papers, in an hour when civilization,
+liberty and humanity are treasures trembling in the balance.
+
+
+3. German Stupidity in Avoiding the Draft
+
+Following the revolution of 1848 in Germany, multitudes of people fled
+from Prussia and Bavaria, and these fugitives, settling in the United
+States, organized colonies that grew until there were often one hundred
+families in a single community. Strangely enough, as the years went on,
+these Germans forgot the iron yoke they once had borne, until, when many
+years had passed by, it came about that time and distance lent a glamour
+to the landscape of the far-off Fatherland. Occasional letters from
+their relatives kept them in touch with the old German home. At last
+they quite forgot the militarism, the poverty, the cruel limitations and
+the hypocrisy of Germany. Familiarity also with the institutions of the
+Republic bred a kind of contempt. Through the imagination Germany became
+an enchanted land. When, therefore, war was declared these
+German-Americans came together in their clubs, beer gardens and German
+churches, to pledge unswerving fealty to the Kaiser and to the
+militarism from which once they had fled as from death itself.
+
+Last summer brought the Government draft to the young men of one of
+these German colonies. The week was approaching when the German boys
+must have their physical examination. American officers, American
+physicians and the members of the draft board were already in session
+in a certain town. One Sunday a German-American physician appeared in
+that community. That night some twenty or more young German-Americans
+met that physician. He told them plainly how deeply he sympathized with
+their unwillingness to turn their guns against their own German cousins
+and relatives in the Fatherland. Out of pity and compassion had been
+born his plan to save their limbs and perhaps their lives, and also to
+serve the Fatherland and the beloved Kaiser. "I have here," said the
+physician, "a certain heart depressant. It will slow your heart like the
+brake on an automobile. It is a simple coal-oil product. It is quite
+harmless. It was made by the well-known German firm of Baer & Company,
+chemists, and it is so cheap. I shall see to it that you are rejected
+for the draft. And--think of it!--only twenty-five dollars! For that
+little sum I will keep you from being wounded or killed. You will each
+one give me twenty-five dollars; then I will give you this bottle,
+holding five grains for Monday, ten grains for Tuesday, fifteen grains
+for Wednesday, twenty grains for Thursday, twenty-five grains for
+Friday, and on Saturday you will be rejected." Ten minutes later the
+necromancer had juggled twenty-five dollars out of the pocket of each
+newly drafted boy and into his own right-hand pocket.
+
+On Saturday these young men appeared before the draft board and the
+Government physicians. All the boys were in a dreadful condition
+nervously. Now the heart would drop to forty, and then at the slightest
+exertion run up to two hundred and twenty. All were dizzy, nauseated,
+yellow and green, feverish. But the Secret Service men knew every detail
+of what had taken place, and all the facts were in the hands of the
+draft board. A certain farmer's son, young Heinrich H----, was first
+examined. The United States physician counted a pulse that varied from
+forty to two hundred and twenty. The physician kept his face perfectly
+straight. "Marvellous heart! Regular as a clock! Strong as the throbbing
+of a locomotive. Seventy-two exactly! Absolutely normal. I congratulate
+you, young men, upon your fine heart action. A man is as old as his
+heart engine. A boy with a heart like yours ought to live to be a
+hundred years old. All you need is a change of climate. France will do
+the world for you. You may need a little heart stimulant, but I think
+that nothing hastens the pulse beat like a few rifle balls and bomb
+shells from Hindenburg." He sent every one of the twenty boys into the
+service, but separated them, one going to Camp Ayer, in Massachusetts;
+one to Camp Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, and the rest to camps in States
+between. In one Middle West community a German father and son went so
+far as to deaden pain through cocaine and then cut off the finger of the
+right hand. It is generally understood that both the father and son are
+now in two widely separated penitentiaries, reflecting each in his own
+cell upon the folly of treason and the crime of becoming a traitor to
+the kindest and best Government that has ever been organized upon our
+earth.
+
+
+4. "I'm Working Now for Uncle Sam"
+
+The long transatlantic train came to a dead stop at the division station
+in that great Southwestern State, where one was surrounded by
+sage-brush, the sand, the distant foot-hills and the far-off mountain
+range.
+
+One of the Pullman cars showed signs of a hot box, and a moment later
+the wheel burst into a mass of flame. In the thirty minutes' wait for
+repairs I made my way into the room where the conductors, engineers and
+firemen met. On a little table I found a copy of the address given
+before the railroad men of El Paso, Texas, by Secretary McAdoo.
+
+I called the attention of the different men to the address, to the
+clarity of the reasoning, the simplicity of the argument, the strength
+of the appeal and the glowing patriotism that filled all the pages. The
+pamphlet had been worn by much reading. It was covered with the black
+finger prints of busy men who had been working around the locomotives
+and tenders.
+
+Plainly Mr. McAdoo's speech had made a profound impression upon these
+employees. Having first of all called the attention of the large group
+of men to the creative work of Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary
+of the Treasury, who struck, as Daniel Webster said, "the dry rock of
+national credit and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth," I asked
+these men whether there had been in one hundred and twenty-five years
+any forward movement in finance that was comparable to the benefits
+derived from the national reserve bank law, under Secretary McAdoo, a
+law that not only had prevented a panic in this country during this war,
+but had raised more billions within four years than the total cost of
+the Government in the first century of our existence.
+
+Late that afternoon, on the train, the conductor sought me out. In the
+midst of the discussion he drew out a roll of bills. He told me that in
+those mountain towns many of the ranchers did not buy their tickets at
+the stations.
+
+To use his expression, "They had it in for the railroads." "They pay me
+their fare in cash, and when I give them the receipt they tear up the
+receipt and wink at me. I always feel," he said, "like resenting these
+actions, because I know that they are incitements to petty theft, but
+now," he said, "I have my chance. I always tell them," said the
+conductor, "that money belongs to Uncle Sam. He runs this railroad,
+Uncle Sam takes this money.
+
+"With it he will buy guns for the American boys at the front and build
+ships to carry food that will feed these soldiers. I would rather lose
+that right arm than take one penny of money that belongs to Uncle Sam.
+This is my job to run this train. I tell my crew every day that we must
+make the coal produce every possible pound of steam, that every waste
+must be saved, and every pound of energy used and that we must run this
+train so as to help win this war."
+
+From morning till night I found that conductor was preaching that
+sentiment. His words were directly traceable to the words of Secretary
+McAdoo at El Paso, Texas. That single speech transformed these men.
+
+Measured by the results--truth that transforms life and changes conduct
+and character--that was a truly great speech. We must all hope much from
+this new sense of devotion to the interests of Uncle Sam.
+
+
+5. The German Farmer's Debt to the United States
+
+There are literally thousands of small German colonies in different
+parts of this country. In one far distant State is a community settled
+by about two hundred German families, who took up the land immediately
+after the Civil War.
+
+By some good fortune they settled in what is now one of the very
+richest sections in the United States. Land that they bought for $1.25
+an acre is now worth $250 an acre. In that community there are two
+German churches.
+
+Both pastors came from Germany, both were educated in German colleges,
+both read German newspapers and both insist upon carrying on a
+colloquial German school, with German teachers, German text-books and
+German standards.
+
+Little pressure was brought to bear upon these farmers during the First
+Liberty Loan. By many devices they succeeded in getting their boys away
+before the draft registration. While it was never proved technically
+that they had all pledged themselves not to oppose Germany, morally this
+is known to be the fact.
+
+October of 1917 came and the Second Liberty Loan was on. One day all
+these farmers received a printed card, saying there would be a meeting
+on Monday night, in connection with the Second Liberty Loan. "I find you
+made no subscription whatsoever to the First Liberty Loan. There are
+reasons why I think it best for me to advise you to attend this
+meeting."
+
+Every German farmer read that card several times. Who was this stranger
+who was coming into the community? Was he a Secret Service man? How did
+he find out that there had been a secret meeting of the Germans
+immediately after war had been declared against Germany? Each farmer
+began to ask himself: "Has any one quoted me?" Each one decided to
+attend that meeting.
+
+The meeting began at precisely seven o'clock. Only one man who had
+received the notice was absent, and his son brought a message concerning
+his father's absence. The stranger arose in his place, but left it
+uncertain as to whether he was a Secret Service man, a banker or a
+patriot interested in his country. He began with substantially these
+words:
+
+"Men, you are all German-Americans. I find that not one of you
+subscribed to the First Liberty Loan. You came to this country poor men.
+This Government sold you Government land for from a dollar and a quarter
+to two dollars and a half an acre. But you seem to have forgotten one
+thing. Your title deed to your farm rests upon your loyalty as citizens
+of the Republic. Whenever you refuse to support the people of the
+Republic you have by your own act annulled the title deed of your land.
+
+"If you refuse to support your Government in this war, you are a
+traitor, and when this is proved you will be shot. If secretly you have
+been sending money to the Kaiser to buy guns with which to kill American
+boys you have forfeited the title deed to your farm. Your property has
+become again the possession of the Government and people of the United
+States."
+
+By this time these farmers had their mouths open, and their faces became
+tense and alarmed. When his words had had time to sink in, the stranger
+went on: "I have here a statement as to the number of acres in each farm
+owned by each man in this room. The first man's name is Heinrich ----;
+you own 320 acres of land. It is worth at least $75,000. There is no
+mortgage on this farm. Heinrich, I think you had better buy $2,500 worth
+of Liberty Bonds. I am simply advising with you as a friend. I have made
+out an application for you, and all you have to do is to sign it.
+
+"My advice to every one of you is that you buy from three to five per
+cent, of the value of your farm. I want to say incidentally that I
+trust that there will never again be held a secret meeting of the
+Germans in this room to discuss the best way to avoid supporting the
+United States Government in this war against Germany, and how you can
+best help the Kaiser."
+
+That little sentence worked like magic. Every farmer in the room rose to
+his feet in his anxiety to rush forward to the table. Men literally
+struggled to see who should sign up first. Their enthusiasm for the
+United States Government was as boundless as it was sudden in its
+manifestation.
+
+Remember that there were only two hundred farmers in the room. And yet
+there are the best of reasons for believing that the men in that room
+bought that night nearly $200,000 worth of Liberty Bonds.
+
+
+6. "Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth" Is an Ungrateful Immigrant
+
+One of the things that no patriot can ever understand is the ingratitude
+of the Germans who fled from the Fatherland to escape German militarism
+and autocracy.
+
+Lecturing in a Western State, I met a banker who had returned from a
+schoolhouse in a rural district where he had been talking about the
+Liberty Bonds to a German audience. One old German refused to attend
+this meeting. He was very bitter in his attacks upon our Government. He
+had made no subscription to the first two Liberty Loans; he had refused
+to help in the campaign for the Red Cross Fund; he insisted that he paid
+his taxes and that was all that the Government had any right to demand
+from him.
+
+He went one step further: The old man said that he had not read a single
+American newspaper since the war began, and that nothing but a German
+newspaper should cross his threshold until the war ended. Not until that
+banker descended upon this pro-German with the indignation of an
+outraged patriot did the rich old farmer capitulate.
+
+The story of that German is typical. He came to this country about 1859.
+When the homestead act was passed he received from the United States one
+hundred and sixty acres of land in the very centre of one of the richest
+States in this Union, and his one hundred and sixty acre farm is now
+worth about $100,000.
+
+When he ran away from Germany he was receiving twenty cents a day. He
+rose at daybreak, cleaned stables, milked cows, toiled in the field,
+began his milking after dark, worked sixteen hours a day, had nothing to
+eat except what could not be sold by his employer. He was a German
+plebeian, with no chance ever to improve his condition. He was ignorant,
+stupid, a mere beast of burden.
+
+So the German boy slipped across the line into Holland, came steerage to
+this country, slept among the rats of the ship, but the people of the
+United States welcomed that miserable refugee. The American school,
+without any charge, gave him four months' instruction every winter until
+he was twenty. The American people gave him a farm as a free gift. This
+Republic educated his children, his grandchildren and enriched them with
+land, office, honours and wealth. Once he hated autocracy and militarism
+in the Fatherland--but in 1918 he loved them.
+
+No sooner did the Kaiser invade Belgium and commit rape upon that land
+than this German farmer passed through a revulsion. Whatever the Kaiser
+did was right. If Germany did a thing it was proper. Germany had a right
+to break her solemn treaties; Germany had a right to sink the
+_Lusitania_; if Germany was out of iron ore she had a right to invade
+France and steal her iron mines. What had been crimes suddenly became
+virtues.
+
+Fleeing from the German tyrant in 1859, in 1918 the old farmer turned
+upon the United States that had befriended him.
+
+"If I have to make my choice, I choose the Kaiser."
+
+Mentally, it seems absurd. Morally, his was a monstrous position. But
+blood was thicker than water. Gratitude had no place in his heart.
+
+This old German regarded the gift of his farm by our people as a sign of
+weakness. The Republic gave him a homestead because he was a superior
+man. He actually had a belief that Germany would soon overrun the world;
+that the Kaiser would soon be enthroned in Washington; that some German
+in Iowa would supersede the Government in Des Moines, and he was simply
+getting ready, having made friends with the Kaiser's Government, to
+receive reward when the United States became a German colony.
+
+Who can explain the obsession?
+
+It is clear that the German-Americans had been drilled for forty years
+through their German newspapers in these ideas. Little by little they
+have been alienated from the institutions of the Republic. Slowly they
+have been led to believe that Berlin is soon to be a world capital and
+Kaiser Wilhelm the world emperor, while only Germans shall be allowed in
+this country to hold office or land, while all Americans become tenants
+and servitors thereto.
+
+Plainly this is what Siebert meant in his book, published five years ago
+in Berlin:
+
+"When we have reached our goal Germany must see to it that no race save
+the German race can have a title deed in land or carry weapons, just as
+in the first world empire no one but a Roman was allowed to own land or
+have a sword or spear."
+
+
+7. In Praise of Our Secret Service
+
+Of necessity our Secret Service work is carried on in silence and
+without blare of trumpets. The achievements of the Department of Justice
+cannot be proclaimed from the housetops. Everybody knows something about
+the crimes committed by the German agents. These spies, loyal with their
+lips, have in their hearts plotted innumerable crimes against our
+Government. They have dynamited our factories and warehouses; they have
+burned shops and planted bombs on ships; they have thrown trains from
+the track; they have poisoned the horses and mules upon the transports
+en route to France; they have fouled the springs of knowledge through
+their hired reporters; with all the cunning developed by long practice,
+they have spread their insidious and perilous influences into the
+remotest regions of the land. But over against these spies and secret
+agents have stood the United States Secret Service men, and with
+everything in favour of the German plotter, our defenders have beaten
+the German at his own game.
+
+War was declared against Germany on April 6, 1917. One Sunday night two
+or three weeks later a large company of German-Americans belonging to
+the secret German league met in their accustomed place of assembly.
+There were several hundred Germans present, but among them were three
+Secret Service men. The German lawyer who opened the meeting was very
+bitter. Having made certain that only German sympathizers were present,
+he went on to say that the occasion of this war could be traced to Wall
+Street. Certain rich bankers and American plutocrats had loaned perhaps
+a billion dollars to England. Since the war was going against England,
+these rich men were afraid that they would lose their investment. In
+their emergency they forced war upon Congress. The speech was clever,
+specious, cunning, shrewdly calculated to stir up passion. And the
+speech was applauded to the echo. The second speaker made a no less
+skillful appeal to the prejudices of the members of the secret
+German-American league. Since the war was a money war, originated by
+Wall Street, the Government could be defeated as to its plans only by
+money. Therefore, every member of the league must make his contribution;
+no one present but must give at least ten dollars. And, he added, in
+view of the fact that it was Sunday night and that some might be without
+money, and since no checks could be accepted, there were several German
+bankers present, who would be glad to advance money to the members who
+wished to make cash contributions. The Germans had provided in advance
+against every possible emergency.
+
+Then came the opportunity for the Secret Service men. The first one
+arose and began with an apology for a German brogue that in reality he
+was assuming. He spared no words in praising the first two speakers.
+"What a wonderful man was the Kaiser! What victories von Hindenburg had
+achieved! The Fatherland was standing with back against the wall. How
+wicked a nation was France, and Poland! What a black heart England had!"
+He pictured Germany as a lamb with fleece as white as snow, and a huge
+Belgian wolf jumping at the lamb's tender throat. "What an ambitious man
+was President Wilson. How eagerly had Congress waited until Germany was
+weak, and then rushed in to grab the fruits of war!" When this man sat
+down his hearers were in a state of rapturous upheaval. But scarcely had
+his voice ceased echoing in the air when the second Secret Service man
+arose. Having complimented the first two speeches by the German
+plotters, he said that he thought he represented the members in
+expressing the judgment that the third speaker had made a speech that
+was unrivalled in its statement as to the duty of the members toward the
+Kaiser and the beloved Fatherland. The second Secret Service man,
+therefore, moved that it be the sense of the meeting that the member who
+had just spoken be made secretary of the meeting, be custodian of the
+funds just contributed. In five minutes he had all the secrets of the
+meeting safely lodged in the hands of the first Secret Service man. At
+this point the third representative of the Government arose and
+nominated the second Secret Service speaker, who had just taken his
+seat, as teller to count the funds, and in recognition of this man's
+gifts the teller immediately afterwards appointed the third Secret
+Service man assistant teller. During the next three hours, in the
+secrecy of their own meeting, over twenty prosperous and influential
+Germans committed themselves against this Government.
+
+About midnight the secretary and the two tellers turned over to the two
+Germans who had made the two big speeches at the opening of the meeting
+the entire collection, which amounted to thousands of dollars. But at
+half-past twelve, as these two Germans were entering their hotel, four
+Secret Service men tapped them on the shoulder and promptly relieved
+them of the aforementioned thousands. One of these men is now working
+out his sentence in a Southern penitentiary and the other in a Western
+penitentiary. Their sentences were for twenty-eight years. The other men
+who defended Germany and attacked the United States are serving
+terms--some long and some short. It is a proverb that the wicked flee
+when no man pursueth. But Dr. Parkhurst coined a striking sentence when
+he added: "The wicked man makes better time in fleeing when the
+righteous Secret Service man pursues him with a sharp stick."
+
+
+_Printed in the United States of America_
+
+
+
+        *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+   Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLOT ON THE KAISER'S
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