MURDER MOST FOUL!

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 164, 1 April 1918, Page 6

MURDER MOST FOUL!

AN AMERICAN PREACHER ON THE WESTERN FRONT THINGS SEEN THAT ALL SHOULD REMEMBER (By Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis.) I. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, ouo of, America's foremost ministers, of Ply-' mouth Church, Brooklyn (of which the first pastor was Henry Ward Beeclier). spent July and August in a personal investigation of the battlefields of France and Belgium from which the Gormans had been cxpeJled. He cfesired to learn for himself the exact conditions and to find out whether all the reports of German atrocities would be confirmed by a personal study. Since he returned to America, Dr. Hillis has delivered a number of public addresses. The discourse printed in the following pages was delivered from the pulpit at Baltimore to a church packed to the doors. It attracted enormous interest, enabling Americans to grasp the meaning of Prussia's war against civilisation, Christianity and democracy.

To many in Great Britain tho facts set out by Dr. Hillis are known. But they are not known to all. They should be known to all. Once the truth of this indictment sinks into the heart and mind of every citizen, and the date when the war will end is determined. The war can only end when the Prussian Government, responsible for these fearful outrages, is .shorn of its power for evil. "We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose," declared President Wilson, "because we knowthat in such a Government following such methods we can never have a friend, and that in the presence of its organised power, always lying in wait to accomplish we know not what purpose, thero can bo no assured security for the democratic Governments of the world."

Every American who has parsed through France and the edge of Belgium this year has returned home a permanently saddened man. German cruolty and French agony have cut n bloody gash in the heart, and there is no Dakin solution that can heal the wound. Here upon this pulpit rests a reproduction of an iron coin given as a token to each German soldier. At the top is a German portrait of Deity, and underneath are theso words: "The good old German God." To encourage the German soldier to cruelty and atrocity against Beleians and .French the Deity holds a weapon in his right hand, and to dull his conscience and steel his heart to murder the token holds these words: "Smite vour onninv dead. The Day of Judgment will tint, ask you for your reasons." To this native characteristic Goethe was referring when he said:'"Tho Prussian is naturally cruel; civilisation will intensify that cruelty and make- him n savage." The Gorman atrocities of the last three years simply illustrate Goethe's words, for we must confess that Germany efficiency reached its highest point in the discovery , of new and horrible devices for torturinc old men, helpless women, and little children.

For threo years Gorman-Americans have protested that the stories of Gorman atrocities were to be disbelieved as English inventions, Belgian lies, and French hypocrisies, but that day has gone by for over. When the representatives of the nations assemble for the final settlement there will lio laid before the representatives of Germany affidavits, photographs, with other legal proofs that make the German atrocities to be far hotter rstablished than the fiealpinjrs of the Sioux Indians on tho Western frontiers, the murders in the Black Hole of Calcutta, or the wimes of the Spanish Inquisition. On a battle-line 30(1 miles in longth in whatsoever village tho retreating Germans passed, the following morning accredited men hurried to the scene to make tho record against tho Day of Judgment. The nhotocraphs of dead and mutilated girls, children, and old men tell no lies. Jurists rank high two forms of testimony—the testimony of what maturo men have seen and heard and the testimony of children too innocent to invent their statements but old enough to tell yt hat they saw. For the first time, in history the German has reduced savagery to n science; therefore this great war for peace must go on until tho German cancer is cut clean out of the body.

i The cold catalogue of German atrocities now documented and in thn Gov- ! envment archives of the different na- | tions makes up the most sickening I page in history. Days spent upon the J records preserved in Southern Belgium, Northern France, or in and j about Paris, days spent in the ruined villages of Alsace and Lorraine, leave one nauseated, physically and mentally It is one long, black serins of legallydocumonted atrocities. Every solemn pledge- that Germany signed a year and I a half before at the Hacue Convention j as to safeguarding the Red Cross, hospitals, cathedrals, libraries, women and children and unarmed citizens,are scofj fed at ns a "scrap of paper." TheseI atrocities also were committed, not in ! a mood of drunkenness nor nn hour of I anger, hut were organised toy a soi called German efficiency and perpetrated on a deliberate, cold, precise, .scientific policy of German friftlitfulness. It is not simply that they looted factories, carried away machinery, robbed houses, bombed every farmhouse and granary, left no plough nor reaper, chopped down every pear tree, and plum tree, with every grape vine, and poisoned all wells I The, Germans j slaughtered old men and matrons, j mutilated captives in ways that can only be spoken of by men in whispers ; violated little girls until they were dead; finding a calfskin nailed upon a barn door to be dried, they nailed a j babe beside it, and wrote beneath the word "Zwei"; they thrust women and children between themselves and soldiers coming up to defend their native bombed mid looted hospitals. Red Cross buildings; violated the white flag—while the worst atrocities cannot even bo named in a mixed audience. The Kaiser Branded His People as "Huns." No one understands the Gorman people as well as the Kaiser. President Wilson, in a spirit of magnanimity, patience, and good will, distinguished between the Kaiser and the Prussian ; Government, and over against thoiii put the German people. But Germany's Chambers of Commerce, Hamburg's Board of Trade, and certain popular assemblies would have none of this, and in the fury of their auger passed resolutions, saying: "Wimt our Government is we aro. Their nets arc our acts. Their deeds and mili-1 tary plans are our plans." Knowing his' pcoplo through and through, the •Kaiser called his soldiers before him and gavo them this chargo (at Wilhclmshnven on July 3, 1900, when German troops were embarking for China): "Make yourselves more- frightful than the Huns under Attila. See that for a thousand years no enemy mentions the very name of 'Germany' without shuddering." Why do the Gorman peoplo say they feel .so terribly because the authors of tho world call thorn "Huns" and "barbarians"? Who named them "Huns"? Their. Knisor. ■Who christened them "barbarians"? Their Kaiser. Who likened the Gorman soldiers to bloodhounds held upon the leash by tho Kaiser's thong as they strained upon the leash with bloody jaws, longing to tear their French and Belgian proy? With

bloody fingers the Kaiser said: "1 baptise theo 'Hun' and Jbarbarian.' " Let tile Kaiser's words stand —"i'or a thousand years no man shall speak the word 'Hun' without shuddering." All wiso men trace deeds, wicked or gooiT, back to the philosophic thinking of the doer, just as they trace bitter water back to a poisoned spring. What tho individual or the nation thinks in his heart, that 'he does, in life. Jadtis thinks in terms • of avarice and greed, aud his philosophy results in troason and murder. The Kaiser, Nietzsche, Ucthraann-llollweg, von Bissing, and Plauss think and teach, tho theory of iron force the right of big Germany to loot littlo Belgium or Northern France, and drill them in the belief that Germany's right is the right of tho lion over tho lamb, and that no questions w.iLL be asked i)\ a. just God on tho Day of Judgment. Tho originator of this world war was the Kaiser; Treitschke was its historian: Nietzsche its philosopher; Von Bissing and Von Hindenburg its executives. Tho murder of Edith t'avell and of hundreds of women and children on the Lusitania, the rope of Belgium, the assassination of Northern France, were the outer exhibition in deeds of the inner philosophy of force. Their great master, whom they celebrate and never tire of praising" Nietzsche, judges Germany aright. On page 38, in liis "Ecco Homo," Nietzseho says: "Wherever Germany extends her sway she ruins culture." On page 124 of the samo volume he says: "I feel it my duty to tell tho Germans that every crime against culture lies on their conscience." By "culture" Nietzsche means painting, sculpture, cathedrals, international laws, the Athenian sweetness, reasonableness, 'and ligl*. "Germany's , goal should be a super-Hercules or fleliath, with the cluh. Germany has no gift for culture of the intellect. As to that there is no other culture beside France."

The International Burglar's Excuse, Consider the reliex influence of Germany's philosophy of militarism upon her statesmen and diplomats. In one of his greatest speeches Edmund Burke speaks of "the peculiar sanctity attaching to tho word of a foreign minister." ° From Phocion to John Hay prime ministers have been jealous of their pledges. Lincoln speaks of tho failure of a -government, to inako good its word as "a crime against civilisation." Business men scoff at the trickster, who does not count his written pledge more precious than life itself. With the standards of civilised States in mind, recall the intellectual and moral atiooities of tho Kaiser and Bethmami-Hollweg. In 1911 the German Foreign Office reaffirmed tho treaty with England and France to observe the neutrality of Belgium in the event of war with France. The French and English Governments now have full knowledge of the conference between the Austrian Emperor and the Kaiser at the Potsdam Palace on July 5, with the agreement to launch the war on August 1. When the war proclamation was delayed until August 3, tho Kaiser's representative used this sentence in his speech in the Reichstag: "We must not postpono _ tho agreement entered into with Austria at the conference <A July 5." For more than three jwooks, therefore, before war was declared, Germany and Austria were preparing cannon, guns, equipment, and as soon as the last buckle vas on the harness and tho last rifle in tho hands of tho soldiers on August 3, war was declared. Lien Betiimann-Hollwcg sent out this statement to the world as to why the Kaiser and himself counted an international treaty a. 'scrap of paper." He said: "As to Belgium—we are now in a state of necessity,-and necessity knows no law. The wrotig— l speak "openly—that we aro committing we will endeavour to nutfio good as soon as our military goal has been reached. Wo have now only one thought-how to hack our way throuMi." So the international burglar's excuse is that he must hack his way through his "neighbour's house.and kill his Taniily because that house stands between himself and the Frenchman's vault whoso gold he wants to steal! Degraded Officers and Soldiers. That is why President Wilson, answering the Pope, said that noi treaty signed by tho Kaiser and his Government meant anything. And here is Bernstorff, Germain Ambassador in Washington, who forgets that cannibals and savages even consider that eating salt in another Indians tent or white man's house, is a p edge or truth- whilo this Judas Ambassador dines at tho White House at night and «oes on plotting seditions in Mexico, the blowing up of our munition factories and the killing of our people Bcrustorff smiled as he kept one hand above, the table and in the other hand under the table whetted a dagger on his boots with which to stab his°'host, in the back. • , Witness the discovery of treachery to Norway. After several Norwegian steamers had been mysteriously sunk at sea the German Consul was found travelling back and forth from the Foreign Office in Berlin, falling his trunk with bombs and glass tubes containing tho cultures of glanders o> spread one of the most deadly diseases, to annihilate men, horses, and cattle, and protecting these instruments or death by the seals of the Berlin Foreign Office. The substance of &ermanyV answer u> Norway's protest was the sneering answer: 'What are you going to do about it?" Germany s Ambassador to the Argentine Republic advising the sinking oi the Argentine shins so as to leave no trace behind is a part of tho samo cunning, devilish Germany diplomacy that exhibits these German Ambassadors as a composite Judas, Machiavelh, and Mephistcpheles, united and carried up to the nth power of diabolism. No wonder the Kaiser baptised them "Huns" and "barbarians"! Tho German philosophy has deliuiranised Germany's officers and men. Later on I shall give a detailed account (U 'the devastated regions ot Northern France, hut here and now let us confine observations to tho mined villages and towns of Eastern Franco. " Pulling his iron token out of his pocket-that exhibited Deity as a destroying soldier-the German officer and private reads the words beneath: "Smite your enemy dead. J He Dav of Judgment will not ask you for vmir reasons." Having, therefore, full liberty to loot, these Germans beMme wild beasts. The pan.had been "Brussels in one week, Pans in ho wooks London in two months, , and then two pockets filled with rings, bracelets, and watches from Pans or Nancy for the sweethearts at. home. When tho Germany Army m Lorraine was defeated by one-half its number it fell northward, passing through French towns and villages where there woro no Frenchmen, no guns, and whore no shots were hred During July and August we went slowly roni one ruined town to another, taking wlith Klici Women and the children, comparing the photographs and the full official records made at tho time with the statements of the poor, wretched survivors, who lived in cellars where once there had been beautiful houses, orchards, vineyards-but where now was only desolation. ..-,,,• In Gorhcvi.llinr. standing beside their craves, I studied the photograph of the bodies of fifteen old men whom the Germans lined up and shot because there were no young soldiers to kill; heard tho detailed story of a woman whose son was first hung to a poar tree in the garden, and when the officer and soldier had left him and were busy setting fire to the next house, sho cut tho rope, revived tho strangled

youth, only to find the soldiers had returned, and while tho 'oiiicer held her huuds behind her back, his assistant poured petrol on thn Eon's head and clothes, set iire to him, aud, while hu staggered about, a llamiiig torch, thoy shrieked with laughter. When they had burnwl all tlio houses and retreated the next morning, the Prefect of Lorraine reached that Gothsemauo and photographed the bodies of thirty aged men lying as they fell, tho bodies of women stripped and at last slain. in the next village stood the ruined square belfry into which the Germans had lifted machine-guns, thon forced every woman and child—27s in number —into the little church, and notified the French soldiers that if they lired upon tho machine-guns the) would kill their own women and «bildren. After several days' hunger and thirst, at midnight these bravo women slipped a little boy through the church 7indow and bade their husbands fire upon the Germans in the belfry, saying they preferred death to tho indignities they vrcre suffering. And so these Frenchmen turned their guii=, and in blowing that machine-gun out of tho belfry killed twenty of their own wives and children. In a hundred years of history where shall you find a record of any othet race who call themselves civilised who are such sneaking cowards that they could not fight like men or play tho game fairly, but in their chattering terror put women and little children before them as a shield? (To be continued.)