At Von Bissing's Headquarters

OCTOBER, 1917

BY VERNON KELLOGG

I

TWENTY years ago the Samoan Islands belonged to England, Germany, and the United States. The Gordian knot of trouble inevitably tied by such a handling of Samoan affairs had its cutting hastened by the famous hurricane of 1895, which piled up some men-of-war of the ruling nations on the vicious coral reefs of Apia harbor, and drove others in safety out to sea.

This terrible common experience made temporary friends of the struggling English, German, and American sailors and Samoan boatmen, who had all been mutual enemies, and helped to hasten the arrangement by which England exchanged her interests in Samoa for another South Sea quid pro quo, and the four principal islands were divided between Germany and America, two to each. The Germans got Savaii with its volcano and Upolu with its cocoanut groves, while we got beautiful Tutuila with its harbor and little Manua without much of anything.

The money in use in Upolu, and in its chief town, Apia, had been, for years, English money, its lesser pieces known to the natives as ‘shillins’ (accent on the second syllable), ‘seese-apennies,’ and ‘kolu-pennies,’ kolu being the native word for three. When the Germans took full possession of Upolu, they, of course, introduced their own currency. But the natives persisted in calling a silver mark a ‘shillin,’ and a fifty-pfennig piece a ‘seese-apenny.’ A mark looked like a shilling and it bought no more or less of anything than a shilling; the same with fifty-pfennigs and six pence. Why new names, then?

But though the natives persisted, the Germans insisted. The Governor of German Samoa — now head of a great department of the Imperial German Government at Berlin — gave much time and energy to trying to change ‘shillin’ to mark. But he never succeeded. So with a host of other trivial things. He could tell a German to say this for that, or do that for this, and it was said and done; why not a Samoan? He could not understand it. Apparently no German can understand it.

So it has been in all the other onetime German colonies. And so it has been in Belgium.

Governor-General von Bissing died from too much telling the Belgians to do things, — some important, many trivial, — and too much trying to make them do them. He fumed and worried and suffered because they would not behave properly. Why would they not ? Why should not Belgians be managed as Germans are managed? Why would they not? He died unenlightened. He had a large staff of subordinates; department heads, provincial governors, and what not. None of them enlightened him. None of them could enlighten him. I almost believe that no German could.

Von Bissing is dead and von Falkenhausen has stepped into his shoes, and is going on trying to rule Belgium in the same way. But he will succeed no better. He will never know the Belgians, as Solf did not know the Samoans, and the statesmen and rulers of Germany do not know the English, or the French, or the Americans. How often have I been asked, angrily, pathetically, always insistently, ‘Why do you Americans do as you do? Germans would not.’

At first I tried to explain. But they could not understand. Some few understood that they did not understand, but even they could not understand why they did not, why they could not. I say some few; really I remember only one. He was a business man of proved capacity. For the moment, he was in an officer’s uniform and head of an important department of von Bissing’s government; a man of good mind, and university-trained. Most of the German officers and officials are men of good mind and university-trained.

He said, ‘You say we can’t understand other people, their minds, their points of view, their feelings. Look at us in South America. Our traders were getting the best of the English traders and your own keen Yankee traders. We understood better than you the wants and business methods of the South Americans. We made the goods the way they wanted them made; we packed them the way they wanted them packed; we gave them the credit in the way they preferred to have it. We were more adaptable than either you or the British. But — yes, it is true, our statesmen do not understand your statesmen or your people; our diplomats do not understand the people to whom we send them. Everything you do surprises them, disappoints them, dismays them. And we lose by it. We suffer by it. What is the reason?’

But he was the only one I remember out of the many I talked with who understood that they did not understand. And he himself did not really understand that he did not understand the Belgians whom he was helping to govern! He thought they were just insolent and liars and rebels! Yes, because they did not do, if they could help it at all, whatever and everything the Germans ordered them to do, they were ‘rebels.’

Had not the German army beaten their army and occupied their land? Well, then, were they not rebels and traitors if they did not do things that the Germans told them to do, and did things that they were told not to do? Could they not learn to behave properly after having to have thousands of their civilian citizens and their women and children shot in groups at the beginning, and hundreds shot scatteringly along through the wearying months, and other hundreds sent to prison in Germany?

‘Idiots and ingrates, these Belgians.’ I use the word actually as used to me: ingrates. For had not His Excellency, Governor-General von Bissing, expressed in a score or more of proclamations his own interest and the interest of the Imperial German Government in the welfare of the people? Had His Excellency not actively displayed this interest by tangible things done for their advantage?

I studied earnestly for a moment, but I had to ask for help. ‘What things, for example?’ I asked.

‘Well ’ — he studied too for a moment; then triumphantly, ‘Well, for example, the reëstablishment of the Flemish university at Ghent. You ought to remember that, for I heard His Excellency tell you that you could lecture there.’

I remembered that saturnine jest. General von Bissing had reëstablished the old Flemish university at Ghent just as General von Beseler reëstablished the old Polish university at Warsaw — recently closed, by the way. In Poland this was a slap at Russophil Poles; in Belgium, a slap at the ruling Walloons. Von Bissing had arranged for fifty professors, some German, some Dutch, and a few renegade and bribable Flemish, to accept chairs at Ghent. The bribe for these men was a good immediate salary and a pension for life after cessation — for cause — of teaching. That cessation will come the minute that Belgium is free again, and the cause will be a swift flight from the country. For not one of these renegade Flemish professors can live in Belgium after the Germans go out, nor even anywhere within reach of Belgian vengeance. They will urgently need their pensions.

With a grand flourish — but an allGerman flourish — the reëstablished Flemish university at Ghent opened with fifty professors — and forty students! These students will need pensions, too.

My companion’s remark about the Governor-General’s offer to let me lecture at Ghent had reference to a grim jest on the part of His Excellency. I had acted for a few months in 1915 as the Relief Commission’s director in Brussels, on leave from my university in California, but had had to return for the second half of the college year. This finished, I went back, at Mr. Hoover’s request, to take up the directorship again. Soon after my arrival in Brussels, I made my call of formality on von Bissing, in company with the German head of the department having chief cognizance of our relief work. The Governor-General received me not unkindly, in his stiffly pleasant manner, and said he hoped I would not have to leave again while the relief work went on, adding that, if I felt once more the need of giving some university lectures, I might give a course in the new university at Ghent!

It was meant as a jest, but, as he knew as well as I did what fate was in reserve for the lecturers in his new university, it had a grimness that made his smile, under the stiff clipped mustache, no less awry than mine. I had a horrible temptation, fortunately resisted, to return jest for jest by asking the figure of my pension.

All this great and affectionate interest in matters and people Flemish, exhibited by General von Bissing and his staff, and by the German Chancellor and his Berlin associates, and now by von Schaibele, the new special subgovernor for Flemish Belgium, is so simple and obvious in its reason and intent that it is nothing short of astounding that any Germans, ‘of good mind and university-trained,’ can, for a moment, believe that it could fool any one, least of all the people most immediately concerned. The naïveté of the whole performance is simply pathetic. To hire a few cheap Flemings to come to Berlin and do a stage chat with the Chancellor, and have their pictures taken in a top-hatted group with him, and then expect to palm off this infantile performance as evidence of German and Flemish-Belgian rapprochement, is to betray a simplicity that is past conception. Copies of that group photograph, as published in Die Woche, are being religiously kept by hundreds of Belgians as evidence, when the time comes, on which to hang these paid Flemish renegades. I hope that they, like the professors, have been pensioned, and have reserved future lodgings in the heart of Germany. They will be safe nowhere else — perhaps not there.

That is the simple naïve side of German rule: there is another and fearfully contrasting side. It is the side of blood and iron. And Belgium has had full measure of laughable and tragic experience of both sides. Her keen wits have often bested the rule of naïveté — by paying a fine: her bravest hearts have often bested the rule of brutality — by paying their lives. No week has passed in all the many since Germany violated her own honor, and that of Belgium, three years ago, without a new Verordnung placarded on the hoardings, prescribing some trivial doing or not doing, — which meant smiles and shrugs and quick little schemes of avoidance to the reading Belgians; nor has a week passed without some grim courtmartial running its fated course of judicial travesty, which meant imprisonment or death to some devoted woman or brave man of Belgium.

Some woman or some man, do I say? Some tens or twenties of women and men, I ought to say. The trials and condemnations at Hasselt alone are of scores at a time.

II

The German government of Belgium is three fourths strictly military and one fourth quasi-civil. There is a CivilVerwaltung, or department of civil government; a politische Abteilung, or ‘political’ department, having to do with the diplomatic and general political relation of the government to the Belgian people generally, and the Belgian and American relief organizations specially; a Bank-Abteilung whose most conspicuous activities have had relation to the forced removal of 450,000,000 marks from the vaults of two great Belgian banks to those of the Reichsbank in Berlin, and the putting of proper pressure on all the Belgian banks to produce the huge monthly indemnity, first of forty million francs, then fifty, and now sixty, that is collected from Belgium by Germany; a Press-Abteilung, presided over by a capable sculptor, which looks after the editing of all the Belgian newspapers — except La Libre Belgique! a Vermittlungsstelle, or special bureau of the political department, through which all negotiations of the Belgian Comité National and the American Commission with the German government, either in Brussels or Berlin, are taken up; a Central Harvest Commission (Central Ernte Kommissian) with special charge of the native food-crops and live stock (horses excepted); and last, but very far from least, the Military ‘Intendance’ which represents the army’s interests and control.

In addition to these various chief departments — and I may have overlooked one or two; it does not matter — there is a series of bureaus or organizations of lesser rank, called Centrale, which take special cognizance and charge of different kinds of local foodstuffs and related commodities.

The Central Harvest Commission ought, perhaps, more properly to be listed as the first and most important of this group, rather than among the chief departments as noted above. It is composed of five German officials representing, respectively, the GovernorGeneral himself, the civil department, the bank department, the political department, and the military department, and a Belgian representing the Comité National, and an American representing the Relief Commission. The Belgian and American members were tolerated rather than welcomed, and their voices, although heard, rarely carried conviction to the already unanimously convinced German members. They had, however, full voting privilege, but the minutes of the bi-monthly meetings— solemn, formal affairs with an occasional relieving glimpse of uncovered feeling and humanness — record a monotonous list of motions carried by five voices to two, and other motions lost by two to five!

There are, in addition to the principal Harvest Commission, a barley central; an oats central, wholly in military hands; a sugar central; a general fats and oils central, with a special butter central; a vegetables central, with special potato and chicory centrals; a brandy central, for the controlling and taxing of all alcoholic production, this alcohol coming chiefly from the yeast factories; and, finally, a coal central, which, oddly enough, controls the fertilizers as well as the coal.

I may also have overlooked a central or two; but, again, it does n’t matter. There were enough, if not too many; enough, that is, to give a very plausible seeming of what one expects from German organization, namely, careful and meticulous specialization and subdivision of labor, responsibility and authority, but all tied together and subject to the superior understanding and direction.

At a distance, the German government of Belgium seems admirably organized and even well managed. At close range, especially at the close range of personal contact and experience, it reveals itself as absurdly over-organized and inefficiently managed. The German government of Belgium has proved itself incapable, except in those matters where results were got by sheer brutal force alone, and in these the force has been too often used blindly as well as brutally, and has never satisfied the Germans themselves, either in Belgium or in Berlin. This is a statement that I can make with confidence and without breach of confidence. For it is well known in Holland, which sees and knows by one means or another practically all that goes on in Belgium and Germany.

Governor-General von Bissing wished to gain a certain measure of Belgian approval of his administration of the country. His first approval, naturally, should come from Berlin; his second, from Germany; his third, if there could be anything for Belgians to approve of what must first be commended by Berlin and Germany, was to come from Belgium. And he really wanted this approval.

Hopeless cynics might explain his desire simply as dictated by pure personal selfishness and ambition. A successful civil administration should receive some measure of approval from the administered. Von Bissing’s government was always a quasi-civil government. He would commend himself and his administration to his over-lords if things went fairly quietly in Belgium. But he would not if Berlin’s already fatigued ears had to be assaulted by the disquieting rattle of machine-guns in the streets of Brussels and Antwerp, and the screams, groans, and last sobbing coughs of the dying Bruxellois and Anversois. The world seemed inclined to give a too attentive ear to noises from Belgium, and Berlin’s own ears, usually only too deaf to the cries of the tortured, had become, by virtue of this fact, a little sensitive also to sounds from Brussels. It is a popular belief that Berlin cares not a rap for the world outside. But this is not true. She does care, and does not at all relish being so continually and distressfully ' misunderstood.’ What is true is that it is only with the utmost difficulty and only rarely that Berlin can understand what the reaction of the world outside is going to be to German behavior. I believe that it is chiefly this limitation that is leading Germany to defeat and near-destruction.

But I am not a hopeless cynic — to get back to the matter of General von Bissing’s rather pathetic desire for Belgian approval. And I think that the past governor’s wish was based partly on less questionable grounds than pure selfishness. He had in some degree a feeling of personal responsibility for the five million or more human bodies and souls, nameless and hardly distinguishable to him, with social traditions and natural inheritance utterly uncomprehended by him, which had, by the inexplicable hazards of human fate, been thrust, willy-nilly, into his hands. It would be a bit too supermannish not to feel a little anxious, for the people’s own sake, about the fate of individuals in such a mass of people hanging ever on the verge of starvation and kept from literal destruction only by the interference of an incomprehensible foreign neutral organization.

But, some way, for whatever Governor von Bissing was able to do, there was not approval enough to go around. After Berlin and Germany had approved, there was never any to come from Belgium. In the face of what he did, or allowed to be done, how in the name of humanity, of honor, and of what there is of God in man, could there be?

And so the Germans in Belgium have been an ostracized people. The Belgians on the streets look another way as they pass the spurred, field-gray officers. The German soldiers have learned to ride on the platforms of the tramcars; it is less chilling there than inside. The few open hotels and shops have become differentiated into places for Germans and places for Belgians. It is an odd victory that these conquered people win over their conquerors every day.

For the Germans feel it. They have wanted friendly civil treatment from the Belgians; they have tried in their uncomprehending, unsympathetic, stiffly patronizing, semi-contemptuous way to get it, and they have expected it. Indeed, it was more than civility, it was deference that they first expected, — in parts of occupied France the people have to salute the German officers, or get shot, — but when the deference was seen to be hopeless, they expected civility.

Well, they have not got it; they have not had it. And this complete withholding of Belgian approval of the German administration and the complete lack of any personal rapprochement between German officers and officials and Belgians during the long period of enforced relationship and companionship is, to me, vivid evidence of two things: Belgian spirit, and German mal-administration and utter lack of human consideration of the people and persons they are ruling and professing to be trying to placate, befriend, and elevate. For the Belgians are no more than human, and human consideration would inevitably have had its usual effect in some visible measure.

This condition is also a sufficient proof, if the world needs further proof, of the utter inability of the Germans to help the world in its efforts to humanize and socialize and lift up its peoples. Even were German Kultur that most desirable thing that the German intellectuals have said it is, — and that most of us are convinced it is not, — the Germans are utterly unable to make it over to any other people. The NinetyThree Intellectuals were quite sure that Germany could spread and bestow its Kultur on the backward nations of the earth by conquering them by arms. But Kultur cannot be imposed on a people, even though its rule can. The Belgians are ruled by German Kultur, but they are not penetrated by it.

From the depths of their bleeding hearts they execrate it. They have seen what it does to a people, — to two peoples, the Germans and themselves. It makes brutes and martyrs: brutes of its possessors, martyrs of those who come in contact with its possessors. German Kultur stifles the good in man for the good of a man-made Juggernaut called the State.

Whatever headway any German singly might have been able to make in gaining the tolerance or friendship of the Belgians, — and there have been and arc to-day individual Germans in Belgium of a certain warmth of heart and human sympathy, — this man, as member of the German administrative organization in Belgium, was no longer ‘any German singly,’ but a nameless, individual-less, rigid little cog on one of the myriad wheels of the Great German Machine. He could move only as his wheel moved, which in turn moved — or should move — only in perfect relation to the moving of the other wheels.

This ‘any German singly’ gave up, in all matters in which he acted as a part of the German administration, all of the thinking, all of the feeling, all of the conscience which might be characteristic of him as an individual, a free man, a separate soul made sacred by the touch of the Creator. And he did this to accept the control and standards of an impersonal, intangible, inhuman, great cold fabric made of logic and casuistry and utter, utter cruelty, called the State — or often, for purposes of deception, the Fatherland. There is fatherland in Germany, but it is not the German State. It is German soil and German ancestry, but not the horrible, depersonalized, super-organic state machine, built and managed by a few ego-maniacs of incredible selfishness and of utter callousness to the sufferings, bodily and mental, of their own as well as any other people in their range of contact.

But this machine is a Frankenstein that will turn on its own creators and work their destruction together with its own. Such sacrifice and stultification of human personality as national control by such a machine requires, can have no permanence in a world moving certainly, even if hesitatingly and deviously, toward individualism and the recognition of personal values.

III

The experience of our Relief Commission with this machine has been wearing. It has also been illuminating. For it has resulted in the conversion of an idealistic group of young Americans of open mind, and fairly neutral original attitude, into a band of convinced men, most of whom since their forced retirement from Belgium have ranged themselves among four armies devoted to the annihilation of that machine and to the rescue and restoration of that one of its victims, the sight of whose mangling and suffering brought unshed tears to the eyes and silent curses to the lips of these Americans so often during the long two and a half years of the relief work.

We were not haters of Germany when we went to Belgium. We have simply, by inescapable sights and sounds and knowledge forced on us, been made into what we have become. It we hate Prussians and Prussianism now, it is because Prussia and Prussianism have taught us to hate them. Whom have they ever taught to love them?

The work of the Relief Commission was carried on under a series of guaranties given by the succeeding German governors-general, the Berlin Foreign Office, and the Great General Staff of the German armies. These guaranties committed the German authorities, from the beginning of the work, to the non-requisition of the food-supplies imported into Belgium and to non-interference with our distribution of these supplies. Later they included the nonrequisition of the food-stuffs produced within the country, and the non-purchase of these native crops for the use of the German army. Also they contained the positive promise that the Commission should enjoy all reasonable facilities to do its beneficent work and to be able to satisfy itself that the guaranties as to non-requisition and purchase were strictly lived up to.

In general these guaranties have been maintained; the one respecting the nonrequisition of the imported supplies in particular has been scrupulously regarded. Of course, if it had not been, the work would have stopped abruptly at the moment of its disregard. But in detail, in the relationship with German officialdom and German soldiery, made necessary in the carrying on of the work, difficult in itself under the most favorable circumstances, we were harassed and delayed and tricked and bullied in a thousand ways, but almost always under cover of a sophisticated and specious reasoning. A German official is no less plausible than brutal. There was always a protracted debate, a delaying argument, an exasperating show of consideration and conference, whenever we protested and pleaded and demanded that our work be not interfered with.

The dying of children, the weakening of women and men, the advance of disease, were not arguments that we could push forward to our advantage; there was always a convenient ‘military exigency’ to put these summarily out of court. The argument had to turn on the form of words in the guaranties; this was susceptible of debate, this was a matter to consider. The machine seemed to have a curious regard for our ‘scraps of paper’ except when it was more convenient to disregard them entirely, which was not often, although always possible. In this respect we were constantly surprised, having always in mind the original notorious scrap-ofpaper incident. Perhaps the machine has become a little sensitive to paper troubles.

A prolific source of difficulty for us was the lack of clear demarcation among the many wheels and parts of the machine, and a lack of coördination among these bits of mechanism. But sharp specialization and thorough coordination are generally supposed to be exactly the basis of the reputed high organization and efficiency of the German government. Be that true of all the rest of German administration or not, I do not know; I only know it is not true of German administration in Belgium. A difficulty over the movement of canal boats; over the censoring and transmission of our necessary mails between the Brussels central offices and the provinces; over the circulation of our workers and their motor-cars; over the printing and posting of our protecting placards on warehouses and railway wagons; or over what not else — it made no difference. Never was there a well-defined course of procedure for us; never could we quickly find the proper department of the government to which to apply and from which to obtain decision in any of these and the many other cases of trouble.

It was indeed precisely because of this constant uncertainty, and a final recognition of the difficulty by Governor-General von Bissing, that there was finally established — just a year after the relief work was begun — the Vermittlungsstelle, to which all our troubles were first to be referred, to be in turn passed on by it into the whirring interior of the creaking machine, there to be whirled around until some kind of final or provisional decision was ejected.

But these interior processes of digestion and resynthesis — for what went in always came out in a different form — took time, and time too often freighted with awful significance to the helpless, waiting, hungering Belgians. But the machine took little account of human suffering, or human lives, even. It took the time that its incapacity made necessary, and turned out its work in the incomplete or distorted form that its clumsiness assured. This must seem, in the face of the popular conception of German administrative organization, like unconsidered and exaggerated writing. But it is not. It is the revelation of simple truth.

Under whatever detailed guaranties, or on the basis of no matter how elaborate regulations, an inevitable requirement for the carrying on of our work was a certain element of trust by the German authorities in the correct behavior of our American workers. The struggle between German officialdom’s need for an absolute control of us, because any or all of us were potential spies, — we were, of course, — and the impossibility, under existing circumstances, of establishing any such effective control, resulted in a state of affairs that was ludicrous when it was not too irritating to be anything else.

The control was attempted by a rigorous set of restrictive rules concerning the movements of the Americans and their cars, prohibitions against carrying any letters, except certain censored official ones, and a careful reissuing of passes each month for all of the men connected with the relief work. Our compliance with these regulations was checked on all motor trips by a regular inspection of passes, including the special ones of chauffeur and motor, a recording of the movement of the car, and sometimes an examination of the contents of bag and pockets, at all the sentry posts scattered along the roads. These posts were so abundant in the early days — when there were soldiers to spare—that we would be stopped a dozen times between Brussels and Antwerp, less than a two-hour trip. In addition to the regular inspection, there was another irregular one, which consisted of the sudden halting of the car any day anywhere along the road by a group of military-secret-service men, who made a close examination, not only of passes and papers, but of cars and persons. The cars would be fairly taken to pieces, tires deflated and searched, and gasoline tanks fished in. The examination of the clothing and bodies of our men was no less thorough — and more disgusting.

Now all this was good control to prevent — what? It prevented our carrying any persons unauthorized to travel by motor, or any dangerous information in letters, from one part of Belgium to another — from Brussels to Antwerp, say. But these possible would-be travelers could go without hindrance or examination from Brussels to Antwerp by any one of several trains a day or by a combination of tram-lines and buses, or on foot. What they might not do was to joy-ride! And if we wished to carry any dangerous information we certainly should not have confided it to letters, but should simply have taken it as told us or discovered by us, and made it over to whomever we cared to, provided he could understand our kind of French. We were allowed — the circumstances of the work made it absolutely necessary, as the German authorities recognized — to talk when and where and to whom we pleased.

More than this and much more important than this, we sent out — with the consent, of course, of the Germans — three times a week a mail courier from Brussels through the electrified wire fence and across the Belgian frontier into Holland. The mails he carried had been censored and sealed, — the seals to be examined at the frontier, — and he was subject to search, regular and irregular, at any time before reaching the wire. But he was a very intelligent young man, who spoke French, German, Flemish, Dutch, and English, and when in Holland was free to tell to any one there, — and Holland’s population is, at present, most interestingly cosmopolitan, — or write to any one anywhere — to a man in England, say, with an interest in matters in Belgium — anything he pleased. In Holland he had but one control — his honor. And there was an alternate courier with this same privilege, and several others of us had to go out often to Holland. Mr. Hoover and myself went back and forth often — Mr. Hoover very often and more or less regularly — between London and Belgium. In other words, if we could not be trusted, there was absolutely no hindrance in the German scheme of control to our conveying information at any time to the enemy. And yet the exercise of the absurd control attempted was evidence that we were not trusted. The repeated personal examinations, carefully planned to catch any guilty one off his guard, outraged our sense of honor — and decency. The whole situation might well have stimulated a man to accept the implication of dishonesty which it placed on him as a recognition that he might spy, if he could get away with it! All this absurd pseudo-control was stupid in the psychology that dictated it, and stupid in the method of its carrying out. It was inexpedient and inefficient.

And it was unnecessary. We were not spies, and the German officials knew it. If we were, or if they really thought we were, their only sensible and safe action would have been to remove us. But knowing that we were not spying, — in a few cases in which some over-eager ‘flat-foot’ thought he had found proof that we were, we were able brilliantly to prove the contrary, — they nevertheless treated us in a way to make us feel and seem suspect, but not in a way which would have prevented us from spying and informing had we really been inclined to. That is machinery, but not brains. And wheels can never really replace brain-cells in human functioning.

IV

However, a pacifist, or a neutral, is hardly to be made into an adherent of a war against any people on die basis of being ever so convinced of the stupidity of that people’s form of government, or because of an ego-maniacal overestimate, on the part of this people, of its form of Kultur. And it was something more than any conviction of this kind that turned our group of American neutrals in German-occupied Belgium and North France into a shocked, then bitter, and finally blazing band of men wishing to slay or be slain, if necessary, to prevent the repetition anywhere of the things they had to see done in these tortured lands.

The Germans entered Belgium in August and September, 1914; we began to come in November. Hence we saw none of the ‘atrocities’ of the invasion — we saw only results of them. Amongthese results, as seen by us, were, I hasten to say, no women without breasts or children without hands. But there were women without husbands and sons and daughters, and children without mothers and fathers. There were families without homes, farms without cattle or horses or houses, towns without town halls and churches and most of the other buildings, and even some without any buildings at all, and a few without many citizens. But there were cemeteries with scores and hundreds of new graves — not of soldiers; and little toddling children who came up eagerly to you, saying, ‘ Mon père est mort; ma mére est mort.’ They were distinguished from some of their playmates by this, you see!

And we had to hear — and endure — the stories, the myriad stories, of the relicts of Dinant, Visé, Tamines, Andennes, and all the rest. Of course, there were stories exaggerated wilfully, and others exaggerated unintentionally, simply by the inevitable inaccuracies that come from excitement and mental stress. But there were stories that were true, all true.

If we had had but to make acquaintance this way with happenings of the days before we came! But there was no escape for us; the civilizing of Belgium did not cease with the terrible rush over the land to the final trench-lines in the West. It kept, and is keeping, everlastingly on. And we had to see it, and hear it, and feel it. We had to see the citizens of a proud and beautiful capital barred from walking in certain of its streets and parks, that elderly Landsturmers and schneidige boy officers might stroll and smoke there; and to be sent indoors to bed every night for a fortnight at eight o’clock to learn to be deferential and friendly to soldiers who had slain their relatives and friends, not in the heat of battle, but at cool dawn in front of stone-walls.

And we had to be there the fateful night of Nurse Cavell’s death; and the days and nights of many other like deaths and travestied trials that preceded them. And we had to make the acquaintanceship of noble men and women, giving all the hours of all their days to the relief and encouragement of their people, only to have them disappear, carried oil without an opportunity for a good-bye, for imprisonment in Germany, because of some trivial word or act of indignation at the sufferings of their people. Which carrying off brings us to the final word: Deportations.

There have been deportations of one kind or another from Belgium ever since the war began. Removal to Germany has been a punishment much favored by the German authorities for indiscreet or too uncomfortable Belgians. But most of these removals have been made of citizens singly or in small groups, usually after a military trial; and the official morning placards on the street walls have announced the alleged special reason for each removal and the particular period of years to be suffered by the victim in Germany. Or, rather, did until it seemed better — or worse for the friends — not to make any announcements at all.

But these removals are not what the world understands by deportations. The world knows hazily of the rapid gathering together and sending in large gangs to Germany — or to regions in occupied France near the west front — of thousands, tens of thousands, altogether a total of something more than one hundred thousand ablebodied Belgian men. With the exception of a few flax-workers from West Flanders, no women were sent away, as some sensational newspaper accounts have declared.

The world knows too, hazily, that these deportations were made in many, perhaps most, instances in a peculiarly brutal and revolting manner, with a treatment of human beings comparable only with that which might have been given to an equal number of cattle, sheep, or swine driven to the railways, held in yards in the rain or sun for a cursory examination for possible infectious disease and physical condition generally, — for the importers wanted only sound animals, — and then packed tightly into box-cars with enough feed and water for the trip to the distant abattoirs — enough feed, that is, if the trains got through on schedule, which they never did.

The world knows this hazily, I say. Much has been written about this deporting; about its causes, the conditions that incited German authority to do it, — it was the highest military authority that decreed it, not von Bissing’s Belgian government, — the manner of its doing, its results. But the world needs the whole story. Unfortunately it cannot yet be written. Among other things lacking is the knowledge of just how many of the hundred thousand Belgian slaves have died and are to die in Germany. Some have been sent back hastily, so that they would not die in Germany; they die on the returning trains, or soon after they get back. Or, what is worse, some do not die, but continue to live, helpless physical wrecks.

The deportations were not hazy to us. They were the most vivid, shocking, convincing, single happening in all our enforced observation and experience of German disregard of human suffering and human rights in Belgium. We did not see the things that happened to the deported men in Germany. But we could not help knowing some of them. When the wrecks began to be brought back, — the starved and beaten men who would not sign the statements that they had voluntarily gone to Germany to work! and the starved and beaten ones who would not work at all; and the ones who could not work even when, driven by fear of punishment, they tried to, on the acorn soup and sawdust bread of the torture camps, — when these poor wrecks came back, they brought their experiences with them, and revealed them by a few words and the simple exhibition of their scarred and emaciated bodies.

The deportations occurred near the end of the period of our stay in Belgium. They were the final and the fully sufficient exhibit, prepared by the great German Machine, to convince absolutely any one of us who might still have been clinging to his original desperately maintained attitude of neutrality that it was high time that we were somewhere else — on the other side of the trench-line, by preference. There could be no neutrality in the face of the deportations; you are for that kind of thing, or you are against it.

We are against it; America is against it; most of the civilized nations are against it. That is the hope of the world.