THE BLONDE BEAST

New Zealand Times, Volume XLII, Issue 9690, 19 June 1917, Page 7

THE BLONDE BEAST

AS SEEN BY IRVIN COBB THE SLIMY TRAIL OF THE UNSPEAKABLE HUN. As though it happened yesterday, instead of thirty months ago, I can recreate in my mind the physical and mental stage settings of the moment (writes Irvin Cobb, in the -‘Saturday Evening Post”). I can shut my eyes and see the Gorman firing squad shooting two Belgian civilians against a brick wall. I can smell the odour of the burning houses. Yes, and the smell of the burning flesh of the dead men who were in those houses. I can hear the sound of the footsteps of the fleeing villagers and the rumble of the tread of the invaders going by so countlessly, so confidently, so magnificently disciplined and so faultlessly equipped. Host of ail, I can see the eyes and the faces of the sundry German officers with whom 1 spoke. And when I do this I see their- eyes shining with joy and their faces transfigured as though by a splendid vision; and I can hear thorn —not proclaiming the justice of their cause; not seeking excuse (or the reprisals they had ordered; not, save for a few- exceptions among them, deploring the unutterable misery and suffering their invasion of Belgium had wrought; not concerned with the ethical regrets of helpless and innocent non-combatants —hut proud and swollen with the thought that, at every onward step, ruthlessness and determination and being ready had brought to them victory, conquest, spoils of war. Why, these men were like beings from another world —a world of whose existence we, on this side of the water, had never dreamed. I was an eye-witness to crimes which, measured by the standards of humanity and civilisation, impressed me as worse than any individual excess, any individual outrage, could ever have been or could ever be; because these crimes indubitably were instigated on a wholesale basis by order of officers of rank and must have been carried out under their personal supervision, direction, and approval. the Servile hum.

Taking tlio physical evidence offered 1 before our own eyos, and buttressing ' it with the statements made to us, not . only by natives, but by German soldiers and German officers, we could reach but one conclusion, which was that here, in such-and-such a place, those in command had said to tho troops: “Spare this town and these > peoplel” And there they had said: . “Waste this town and shoot these peoplel” and hero the troops had discriminately spared, and there they had indiscriminately wasted in exact accordance with the word of their superiors. 1 Doubtlessly you read the published extracts from diaries taken off tho bodies of killed or captured Gorman soldiers in the first year of the war. Didn’t you often read where this soldier or that, setting .down his own private thoughts, had lamented at having been required to put his hand -to the task of killing and destroying? But, from this same source, did you ever get evidence that any soldier had actually revolted against this campaign of cruelty, and had refused to burn the homes of helpless civilians or to slay unresisting non-combatants? You did not, and for a very good reason: Because that rebellious soldier would never have lived long enough to write down the record of his humanity —ho would have been shot dead by the revolver of his own captain or his own lieutenant. I saw German soldiers marching through a wrecked and ravished countryside, singing their German songs about the home place, and tho Christmas tree, and the .Rhine maidencreatures so full of sentiment that they had no room in their souls for sympathy. And, by the same token, I saw German soldiers dividing their rations with hungry Belgians. They divided their rations with these famished ones because it was not verboten —because there was no order to the contrary. Had there been an order to the contrary, those poor women and those scrawny children might have starved, and no German soldier, whatever his private feelings, would have dared to offer them a crust of bread or a bone of beef. Of thpt I am very sure. “DON’T PLAY THE GAME.” And it seemed to mo then, and it seems to me now. a most dangerous thing for all the peoples of the earth, and a most evil thing, that into the world should come a scheme of military government so hellishly contrived and so exactly executed that, by the flirt of a colonel’s thumb, a thousand men may, a 1 will, be transformed from kindly courageous, manly soldiers into relentless, ruthless executioners and incendiaries; and, by another flirt of that supreme and arrogant thumb, bo converted back again into decent men. In peace the mental docility of the Gorman, his' willingness to accept an order nnquestionmgly and mechanically to obey it, may be a virtue, as wo reckon racial traits of a people among their virtues; in war this same trait becomes a vice. In peate it makes him yet more peaceful; in war it gives to his manner of waging war an added sinister menace. . . If our oversec.s observations of . tins war abroad have taught us anything, they should have taught us that the German army—and when I say army I mean in this case, not its men but its officers, since in the German army the officers are essentially the brain and the power and the motive force directing the unthinking, blindly obedient mass beneath them —that the Ger- I man army is not an army of good sportsmen. And that I take it, is an I even more important consideration upon the field of battle than it is upon the athletic field. As tho saying goes, the Germans don’t play the game. It ] is as inconceivable to imaenno Herman officers going in f° r bn*ebnll or football or cricket as it is to imagine American volunteers marching the goose-step. UNDERSTAND FORCE ONLY. The Germans are not an outdoor race; they arc not given to playing outdoor sports and abiding hy the rules of those sports, as Englishmen and as Americans are. And in war—that biggest of all outdoor games—it stands proved against them that they do not play according to the rules, except they he rules of their own making. It may he argued that the French are not an outdoor race or a sport-loving I race, as we conceive sports. But, on | the other hand, the Frenchman is es- I oentially romantic and essentially

<1 ruin a tic, and, whether in war or in victory afterwards, he is likely to exhibit the magnanimous and tiio geueroUs virtue* rather than the cruei and the unkindly instincts, because, as w€ ail know, it is easier to dramatise one’s good impulses than one’s evil ones. Having spread the gospel ot force foe no long, Prussianised Germany can understand but one counter-argument force. We must give -her back blow for blow—a- harder blow in return for cadi blow she gives us. v ‘Thrico is ho ♦irmed that hath his quarrel just *; and oUr quarrel is just. Ail tho same, to make war successfully, wc must make it with a whole heart. A\e must hold it to bo a holy war: we must preach a jehad, remembering always, now that the Chinese Empire is a republic. now that Russia bv revolution has thrown off the chains of autocracy, that wo shall be fighting not only to punish tho enemy for wrongs inflicted and i" suits ovc’rpatiently endured.