DEGREES OF RESPONSIBILITY. CONCLUSION

At this point we shall give our conclusions. We think it necessary to establish the degrees of responsibility for the above attested facts: and the reader will think it right for us to add some precise mention of the authors of the facts. The omission of such a chapter would have the effect of helping to keep our indignation in the air, and thus leaving for objects of the blame contained in it only some multitudes of persons, amongst whom our indictment would be diluted and dispersed. Not that we desire to take away from the German people as such the responsibility which attaches to them, but we desire to add some names thereto.

The first responsible party whom we must mention is the German nation, and explicitly the German army judged by its private soldiers. It is upon the German private soldier, indisputably, that the shame of what we have just read recoils. It was the private soldiers who committed the greater part of the crimes which we have noticed: they were the principal authors of these crimes. But it must be added that the leaders consistently encouraged them. In several instances they acted on explicit instructions from officers, and even from generals.
The Responsibility of the Leaders

At the beginning of this book we noted the fatal teachings of the most famous military writers of[217] Germany, writers who formed the war-school in which was developed the military spirit of the officers of 1914. These teachings were theories of war carried on in defiance of international law. The putting to death of captured soldiers and defenceless civilians is latent in such doctrines.

If, then, we wish to sum up in a word the system practised by German officers, during the course of a war which is still in progress, we may describe it as the system of terrorising the enemy on the plea of military necessity.

German officers showed themselves liberal in their estimate of the urgency, extent, and oftener still of the bare existence of such necessity. Therein we find the source of so many cowardly cruelties and crimes. “War! it is war,” they say. As the French Commission of Inquiry observes, for all their exactions, even for all their crimes, there was no redress; and if any unfortunate dared to beg an officer to deign to intervene and spare his life, or protect his property, he received no other reply, if he was not met with threats, than this invariable formula, accompanied by a smile and ascribing to the inevitable disasters of war the most cruel atrocities.

The German officer, therefore, has made himself responsible for the cruelties that have been committed: (1) either by ordering them or suggesting them to his subalterns or his men; (2) or by himself performing them: (3) or, finally, by tolerating them when they were committed under his eyes, or by not punishing the guilty when he was informed about their crime. By acting in one of these three ways the German officer has justified the English writer who uttered the following judgment of the conduct of the Germans in 1870: “The world at least is indebted to the[218] Germans for having thrown light upon war … in which the soldier, the thief and the assassin can hardly be distinguished” (J. A. Farrer, Military Manners and Customs, chap. iv., p. 119). It is true, and we cannot avoid saying so, that in the present war the German officer has shown an essentially criminal mind. And we now make this accusation, which we have established by facts; our investigations, and the profound study which we have made of the subject, allow us completely to justify the declaration of the French Commission of Inquiry, “the higher command, up to its most exalted personalities, will bear before the world the crushing responsibility of crimes committed by the German army.”
The Names of the Officers

We shall mention here the names of the officers in question. But we must, above all, begin with the princes in whose name so many outrages have been committed.

1. The Emperor William II. In a speech addressed to his troops, on the eve of the battle of the Vistula, the Emperor William himself uttered these words, which form as it were the savage programme of all the atrocities that have been committed: “Woe to the conquered. The conqueror knows no mercy.”

2. The Emperor Franz Joseph. In an Imperial order, which includes instructions to the Austrian soldiers in the war against the Serbs, the Emperor Franz Joseph depicts the latter as “moved by a savage hatred against the Austrians. They deserve,” (he said) “no consideration either of humanity or of chivalry.” By the terms of this order all francs-tireurs who were captured were to be put to death.

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3. Prince Eitel-Frederic, son of the Emperor of Germany. The Prince stayed for eight days in a chateau near Liège. The owner was present. Under the eyes of his hosts the Prince had all the dresses packed up which he found in the chests of the mistress of the house and her daughters.

4. The Duke of Brunswick. The Prince took part in the pillage of the same chateau, near Liège.

5. Marshal von Hindenburg, commander-in-chief of the Imperial troops in East Prussia. This marshal ordered that the bread found in this province, which had been soaked with petrol, should serve as food for Russian prisoners.

6. Marshal von der Goltz, military governor of Belgium. In a notice signed by him and posted up on the 5th October, 1914, at Brussels, the marshal decreed the penalty of death against the inhabitants, whether guilty or not, in places near which the telegraph wires had been cut or the railway destroyed.

7. General von Bülow, commander-in-chief of the Second German army. This general ordered the first bombardment of Reims: on the 22nd August, after the sack of Ardennes, he had the following notice posted up: “It was with my consent that the general-in-chief had the whole locality burnt and that about a hundred persons were shot.” On the 25th August, at Namur, another proclamation from his hand read as follows: “Belgian and French soldiers must be given up as prisoners of war before four o’clock, before the prison. Citizens who do not obey will be sentenced to forced labour for life in Germany. A strict inspection of houses will begin at four o’clock. Every soldier found will be immediately shot. Arms, powder, dynamite, must be given up at four o’clock. The penalty for default will be a[220] fusillade. All the streets will be occupied by a German guard, who will take ten hostages in every street. If any outbreak takes place in the street, the ten hostages will be shot.”

8. The Austrian General Horschstein, commander of the 6th army corps operating against the Serbians. He is the author of the following order, issued on the 14th August at Rouma: “Seeing the hostile attitude of the inhabitants of Klenak and Chabatz, we must, in all Serbian localities which have either been occupied or will be occupied, take hostages who will be kept close to our troops. In cases where the inhabitants commit any offence, or make any attack, or are guilty of any treachery, the hostages will immediately be put to death and the locality ravaged by fire. The headquarters staff alone has the right to fire any locality situate in our territory. This order will be published by the civil authorities.”

9. General Heeringen, commander of the German army of Champagne. He continued the bombardment of Reims, and was the cause of the destruction of the cathedral.

10. General Klauss, was the cause of the butcheries at Gerbeviller and Traimbois.

11. General Forbender, the author of the monstrous and inhuman proclamation by which Lunéville found itself mulcted in taxes.

12 and 13. General Durach and the Prince of Wittenstein, commanders of the Wurtemburg troops and Uhlans during the burning of Clermont in Argonne.

14. The Baden General Fabricius. He emptied the cellars of Baccarat.

15. General de Seydewitz. He was present, and did not interfere to prevent it, at the pillage of Chalons-sur-Marne, ordered by one of his subalterns.

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16. General Heindrich, commander of the German troops at Lille, who, by exorbitant requisitions, reduced the population of this town to starvation, and made away with the appeal for help which the mayor of Lille, on his own advice, had addressed to the President of the Swiss Republic.

17. General Stenger, commander of a brigade in France, who issued the well-known order of the day giving instructions to kill the wounded and to execute prisoners of war.

18. Lieutenant-general Nisher. He demanded of the little town of Wavre the exorbitant war-contribution of 3,000,000 francs, which General Bülow had imposed. “The town of Wavre will be burnt and destroyed if payment is not made in good time, without respect of persons—the innocent will suffer with the guilty.”

19. General Sixtus of Arnim, commander of the 4th German army corps, who mulcted the town of Brussels and the province of Brabant in the monstrous contribution of 500,000,000 francs.

20. General von Bissing, commander of the 7th German army corps, who, in a proclamation to his troops in Belgium, told them that when “civilians take upon them to fire on us, the innocent must suffer with the guilty”; that “the German authorities have on several occasions in their instructions to the troops said that human life must not be spared in repressing such acts”; that “it is doubtless regrettable that houses, flourishing villages, and even whole towns should be destroyed, but this must not cause us to be carried away by feelings of misplaced pity. All that is not worth the life of a single German soldier.”

21. General de Doehm, commander of the 9th German army corps. When an American journalist[222] of The World and Mr. Gibson, secretary of the United States Embassy at Brussels, told him they had seen the bodies of mutilated women and children at Louvain, this general replied that such incidents were “inevitable in street fighting.” The American journalist remarked that a woman’s body had the feet and hands cut off; that of an old man showed twenty-two bayonet thrusts in the face; that an old man’s body had been found hanging by his hands to the beams of his house, and that he had been burnt alive by lighting a fire underneath him. All that General de Doehm could say was that he was not responsible.

22. Baron Merbach, who, with P............