WAR LOOT

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 62, 7 December 1918, Page 8

WAR LOOT

__» . ,'a contrast in notice BOARDS (By Lieutenant C. D. Stoning.) At a junction of ronils in a rccenllycaptured village of Northern France, where a military policeman stands nil day and all night controlling the traffic, 1 " saw a notice-board that bore the words :— Any Soldier Found Looting' Will be Shot. By Order. It is a peremptory order, and does, not minco words. There can bo no doubt of what it means. Official language is not always clenr to the ln.y niiml, but no m<lll who can read can have any ]>os= siblo doubt ius to the British official view of looting—it is an offence punishable by death. In the same village of Rnisel, over the entrance to what appears once to have been a shop, I saw. nether notice, printed in German lettering, on n'bonrd nailed into tlio doorway. It ran Houtesainmlungstelle. All in one word, and something of a mouthful for the Germans, who worship size, like to make colossal rich-sounding words by grouping several together. The meaning of the monstrosity .is , simply—Loot Collecting Station. Your IJocho is nothing if not systematic, bo he hesitated to leave the important work of amassing plunder to be a matter of private enterprise. It must be duly organised by the Fatherland, just in the same way as.murder, arson, rape, and eimila/ diversions organised in the German Army. Every German Division has ils officer in charge of Looting Arrangements, who issues orders, concerning the class of commodity it is desired to loot, and is responsible for the collection of loot and its transport to the- loot collecting stations. In other words, looting, which in theBritish Army is regarded as a crime punishable by death, in the German Army u officially and organised. The- UeutceaminlungstellcJ I fiaw in the village of Roisel, just after wo had chnsed the Germans out of it, was no exceptional institution, but a regular organised unit of the German Army of today. Therov is booty of war which is j legitimate—such as all forms of military material—and there is booty which is illegitimate and .wholly immoral. At the loot-collecting stations of the Gernvau Army no distinction is made. Tho trained robbers come down upon the unfortunate towns and Villages ;of occupied Franco and Belgium like a devastating swarm of white-ants. And when they have passed nothing is. left. ; Nothing is sacred from their despoiling hands. . A strange feature of this German business of organised looting is that their military leaders did fully realise a few years ago, if not tho immorality, at any rate the inexpediency of the practice. In the German War Book (Kriegfibrauch Im Landskrie'ge), the official publication of the German General Stiiff, it is explicitly stated in' the chapter headed "Booty and Plunder" (Pt. IT, Chop. HI): "Plundering is to be regarded as the worst form of appropriation of a stranger's property. ... It is not plundering but downright burglary if a man pilfers things out of uninhabited houses or at a time when the owner is absent. Plundering is by tho law of nations to-day regarded as invariably inlawful." (Translation by Professor X. H. Morgan), and in a footnote is approvingly quoted a dictum of Napoleon:— ■ ''Nothing is mare calculated to disorganise and completely ruin an army (thw pillage). From the moment he is allowed to pillage, a soldier's discipline is gone." How true were these words of Napoleon the Germans have learnt to their cost. Their two most decisive defeats of the war—the First and Second Battles of tho Marne—were immediately preceded by periods of licensed pillage and debauchery. And to : day, in defeat, the German soldier, having learnt how to loot; is profiting bv his lesson to loot his own stores. That is but a minor-phenom-enon illustrative of flie indiscipline that is spreading like a blight through -.'the German,ranks. I ' ■ '■ • That single elephantine Germanic word "Benlesammlungstelle" on tho notice board in Roisel goes far to explain the demoralisation of the German Army and its doom. Germany did not know how 'toaise victory, and thus paved the way to defeat. The German Army organises looters, the British Army shoots them.