Golden Lads Part 3

Then you gave her death for her laughter, As you looked on her mischievous face.

You hated the tiny peasant, With the hate of your famous race.

You were not frenzied and angry; You were cold and efficient and keen.

Your thrust was as thorough and deadly As the stroke of a faithful machine.

You stabbed her deep with your rifle: You had good reason to sing, As you footed it on through Flanders Past the broken and quivering thing.

Something impedes your advancing, A dragging has come on your hosts.

And Paris grows dim now, and dimmer, Through the blur of your raucous boasts.

Your singing is sometimes broken By guttural German groans.

Your ankles are wet with _her_ bleeding, Your pike is blunt from _her_ bones.

The little peasant has tripped you.

She hangs to your b.l.o.o.d.y stride.

And the dimpled hands are fastened Where they fumbled before she died.

THE STEAM ROLLER

The Steam Roller, the final method, now operating in Belgium to flatten her for all time, is the most deadly and universal of the three. It is a calculated process to break the human spirit. People speak as if the injury done Belgium was a thing of the past. It is at its height now.

The spy system with its clerks, waiters, tourists, business managers, reached directly only some thousands of persons. The atrocities wounded and killed many thousands of old men, women, and children. But the German occupation and sovereignty at the present moment are denationalizing more than six million people. The German conquerors operate their Steam Roller by clever lies, thus separating Belgium from her real friends; by taxation, thus breaking Belgium economically; by enforced work on food supplies, railways, and ammunition, thus forcing Belgian peasants to feed their enemy's army and destroy their own army, and so making unwilling traitors out of patriots; by fines and imprisonment that hara.s.s the individual Belgian who retains any sense of nationality; by official slander from Berlin that the Belgians are the guilty causes of their own destruction; and finally by the fact of sovereignty itself, that at one stroke breaks the inmost spirit of a free nation.

I was still in Ghent when the Germans moved up to the suburbs.

"I can put my artillery on Ghent," said the German officer to the American vice-consul.

That talk is typical of the tone of voice used to Belgians: threat backed by murder.

The whole policy of the Germans of late is to treat the Belgian matter as a thing accomplished.

"It is over. Let bygones be bygones."

It is a process like the trapping of an innocent woman, and when she is trapped, saying,

"Now you are compromised, anyway, so you had better submit."

A friend of mine who remained in Ghent after the German occupation, had German officers billetted in his home. Daily, industriously, they said to him that the English had been poor friends of his country, that they had been late in coming to the rescue. Germany was the friend, not England. In the homes throughout Belgium, these unbidden guests are claiming slavery is a beneficent inst.i.tution, that it is better to be ruled by the German military, and made efficient for German ends, than to continue a free people.

For a year, our Red Cross Corps worked under the direction and authority of the Belgian prime minister, Baron de Broqueville. The prime minister in the name of his government has sent to this country an official protest against the new tax levied by the Germans on his people. The total tax for the German occupation amounts to $192,000,000. He writes:

"The German military occupation during the last fifteen months has entirely prevented all foreign trade, has paralyzed industrial activity, and has reduced the majority of the laboring cla.s.ses to enforced idleness. Upon the impoverished Belgian population whom Germany has unjustly attacked, upon whom she has brought want and distress, who have been barely saved from starvation by the importation of food which Germany should have provided--upon this population, Germany now imposes a new tax, equal in amount to the enormous tax she has already imposed and is regularly collecting."

[Ill.u.s.tration: One of the dangerous Belgian franc-tireurs, who made it necessary for the German Army to burn and bayonet babies and old women.

His name is Gaspar. He is three years old.]

The Belgian Legation has protested unavailingly to our Government that Germany, in violation of The Hague Conventions, has forced Belgian workmen to perform labor for the German army. Belgian Railway employees at Malines, Luttre and elsewhere refused to perform work which would have released from the transportation service and made available for the trenches an entire German Army Corps. These Belgian workmen were subjected to coersive measures, which included starvation and cruel punishments. Because of these penalties on Belgians refusing to be traitors, many went to hospitals in Germany, and others returned broken in health to Belgium.

After reading the chapter on the German spy system, a Belgian wrote me:

"That spying business is not yet the worst. Since then, the Germans have succeeded in outdoing all that. The basest and the worst that one can dream of is it not that campaign of slander and blackmail which they originated after their violation of Belgium's neutrality? Of course they did it--as a murderer who slanders his victim--in the hope to justify their crime."

It is evil to murder non-combatants. It is more evil to "rationalize"

the act--to invent a moral reason for doing an infamous thing. First, Belgium suffered a vivisection, a veritable martyrdom. Now, she is officially informed by her executioners that she was the guilty party.

She is not allowed to protest. She must sit quietly under the charge that her sacrifice was not a sacrifice at all, but the penalty paid for her own misbehavior. This is a more cruel thing than the spying that sapped her and the atrocities practised upon her, because it is more cruel to take a man's honor than his property and his life.

"If the peasants had stayed in their houses, they would have been safe."

When they stayed in their houses they were burned along with the houses.

I saw this done on September 7, 1914, at Melle.

"The peasants shot from their houses at the advancing German army."

I saw German atrocities. The peasants did not shoot. It is the old familiar formula of the _franc-tireur_. That means that the peasant, not a soldier, dressed in the clothing of a civilian, takes advantage of his immunity as a noncombatant, to secrete a rifle, and from some shelter shoot at the enemy army. The Bishop of Namur writes:

"It is evident that the German army trod the Belgian soil and carried out the invasion with the preconceived idea that it would meet with bands of this sort, a reminiscence of the war of 1870. But German imagination will not suffice to create that which does not exist.

"There never existed a single body of _francs-tireurs_ in Belgium.

"No 'isolated instance' even is known of civilians having fired upon the troops, although there would have been no occasion for surprise if any individual person had committed an excess. In several of our villages the population was exterminated because, as the military authorities alleged, a major had been killed or a young girl had attempted to kill an officer, and so forth.... In no case has an alleged culprit been discovered and designated by name."

This lie--that the peasants brought their own death on themselves--was rehea.r.s.ed before the war, as a carefully learned lesson. The army came prepared to find the excuse for the methodical outrages which they practised. In the fight in the Dixmude district, a German officer of the 202e Infantry had a letter with this sentence on his body:

"There are a lot of _francs-tireurs_ with the enemy."

There were none. He had found what he had been drilled to find, in the years of preparedness. The front lines of the Yser were raked clear by sh.e.l.l, rifle, and machine-gun fire. The district was in ruins. I know, because I worked there with our Red Cross Corps through those three weeks. The humorous explanation of this is given by one of the Fusilier Marin Lieutenants--that the blue cap and the red pompon of the famous fighting sailors of France looked strangely to the Germans, who took the wearers for _francs-tireurs_, terror suggesting the idea. But this is the kindly humor of Brittany. The saucy sailor caps could not have looked strangely to German eyes, because a few weeks earlier those "Girls with the red pompon" had held the German army corps at Melle, and not even terror could have made them look other than terribly familiar.

No. The officers had been faithfully trained to find militant peasants under arms, and to send back letters and reports of their discovery, which could later be used in official excuses for frightfulness. This letter is one that did not get back to Berlin, later to appear in a White Paper, as justification for official murder of non-combatants.

The picture projected by the Great German Literary Staff is too imaginative. Think of that Army of the Invasion with its army corps riding down through village streets--the Uhlan cavalry, the innumerable artillery, the dense endless infantry, the deadly power and swing of it all--and then see the girl-child of Alost, and the white-haired woman, eighty years old--aiming their rifles at that cavalcade. It is a literary creation, not a statement of fact. I have been in villages when German troops were entering, had entered, and were about to enter.

I saw helpless, terror-stricken women huddled against the wall, children hiding in their skirts, old men dazed and vague.

Then, as the blue-gray uniforms appeared at the head of the street, with sunlight on the pikes and helmets, came the cry--half a sob, "Les Allemands."

The German fabrications are unworthy. Let the little slain children, and the violated women, sleep in honor. Your race was stern enough in doing them to death. Let them alone, now that you have cleared them from your path to Paris.

Doctor George Sarton, of the University of Ghent writes me:

"During the last months, the Germans have launched new slanders against Belgium. Their present tactics are more discreet and seem to be successful. Many 'neutral' travelers--especially Americans and Swiss--have been to Belgium to see the battlefields or, perhaps, to get an idea of what such an occupation by foreign soldiers exactly amounts to. Of course, these men can see nothing without the a.s.sistance of the German authorities, and they can but see what is shown to them. The greater their curiosity, the more courtesy extended to them, the more also they feel indebted to their German hosts. These are well aware of it: the sightseers are taken in their net, and with a very few exceptions, their critical sense is quickly obliterated. We have recently been shown one of the finest specimens of these American tourists: Mr. George B. McCellan, professor of History at Princeton, who made himself ridiculous by writing a most superficial and inaccurate article for the "Sunday Times Magazine".

"When the good folks of Belgium recollect the spying business that was carried on at their expense by their German 'friends,' they are not likely to trust much their German enemies. They know that the Germans are quite incapable of keeping to themselves any fact that they may learn--in whatever confidential and intimate circ.u.mstances--if this fact is of the smallest use to their own country. As it is perfectly impossible to trust them, the best is to avoid them, and that is what most Belgians are doing.

"American tourists seeing Belgium through German courtesy are considered by the Belgians just as untrustworthy as the Germans themselves. This is the right att.i.tude, as there is no possibility left to the Belgians (in Belgium) of testing the morality and the neutrality of their visitors.

The result of which is that these visitors are entirely given up to their German advisers; _all their knowledge is of German origin_. Of course, the Germans take advantage of this situation and make a show of German efficiency and organization.--'Don't you know: the Germans have done so much for Belgium! Why, everybody knows that this country was very inefficient, very badly managed ... a poor little country without influence.... See what the Germans have made of it.... There was no compulsory education, and the number of illiterates was scandalously high,' (I am sorry to say that this at least is true.) 'They are introducing compulsory and free education. In the big towns, s.e.xual morality was rather loose, but the Germans are now regulating all that.'

(You should hear German officers speak of prost.i.tution in Antwerp and Brussels.) 'The evil was great, but fortunately the Germans came and are cleaning up the country.'--That is their way of doing and talking. It does not take them long to convince ingenuous and uncritical Americans that everything is splendidly regulated by German efficiency, and that if only the Belgians were complying, everything would be all right in Belgium. Are not the Belgians very ungrateful?

"The Belgians do appreciate American generosity; they realize that almost the only rays of happiness that reach their country come from America. They will never forget it; that disinterested help coming from over the seas has a touch of romance; it is great and comforting; it is the bright and hopeful side of the war. The Belgians know how to value this. But, as to what the Germans are doing, good or not, they will never appreciate that--what does it matter? The Belgians do not care one bit for German reforms; they do not even deign to consider them; they simply ignore them. There is _one_--only one--reform that they will appreciate; the German evacuation. All the rest does not count. When the Germans speak of cleaning the country, the Belgians do not understand. From their point of view, there is only one way to clean it--and that is for the Germans to clear out.