Golden Lads | Page 4

orders its servants to lay aside pity and burn peasants in their homes, to
bayonet women and children, to shoot old men. Of course, there are
exceptions to this. There are Germans of the vintage of '48, and later,
many of them honest and peaceable dwellers in the country which
shelters them. But the imperial system has little use for them. They do
not serve its purpose.
The issue of the war, as Belgium and France see it, is this: Are they to
live or die? Are they to be charted out once again through years till
their hidden weakness is accurately located, and then is an army to be
let loose on them that will visit a universal outrage on their children
and wives? Peace will be intolerable till this menace is removed. The
restoration of territory in Belgium and Northern France and the return
to the status quo before the war, are not sufficient guarantees for the
future. The status quo before the war means another insidious invasion,
carried on unremittingly month by month by business agents,
commercial travelers, genial tourists, and studious gentlemen in villas.
A crippled, broken Teutonic military power is the only guarantee that a
new army of spies will not take the road to Brussels and Paris on the
day that peace is signed. No simple solution like, "Call it all off, we'll
start in fresh; bygones are bygones," meets the real situation. The
Allied nations have been infested with a cloud of witnesses for many
years. Are they to submit once again to that secret process of the

Germans?
[Illustration: PEASANTS' COTTAGES BURNED BY GERMANS.
The separate flame in each cottage is clearly visible, proving that each
house was separately set on fire. Radclyffe Dugmore took this
photograph at Melle, where he and the writer were made prisoners.]
The French, for instance, want to clear their country of a cloud which
has been thick and black for forty-three years. They always said the
Germans would come again with the looting and the torture and the
foulness. This time they will their fight to a finish. They are sick of hate,
so they are fighting to end war. But it is not an empty peace that they
want--peace, with a new drive when the Krupp howitzers are big
enough, and the spies in Paris thick enough, to make the death of
France a six weeks' picnic. They want a lasting peace, that will take
fear from the wife's heart, and make it a happiness to have a child, not a
horror. They want to blow the ashes off of Lorraine. Peace, as preached
by our Woman's Peace Party and by our pacifist clergy and by the
signers of the plea for an embargo on the ammunitions that are freeing
France from her invaders, is a German peace. If successfully
consummated, it will grant Germany just time enough to rest and breed
and lay the traps, and then release another universal massacre. How can
the Allies state their terms of peace in other than a militant way? There
is nothing here to be arbitrated. Pleasant sentiments of brotherhood
evade the point at issue. The way of just peace is by "converting"
Germany. There is only one cure for long-continued treachery, and that
is to demonstrate its failure. To pause short of a thorough victory over
the deep, inset habits and methods of Germany is to destroy the spirit of
France. It will not be well for a premier race of the world to go down in
defeat. We need her thrifty Lorraine peasants and Brittany sailors, her
unfailing gift to the light of the world, more than we need a thorough
German spy system and a soldiery obedient to commands of vileness.
Very much more slowly England, too, is learning what the fight is
about.
It is German violation of the fundamental decencies that makes it

difficult to find common ground to build on for the future. It is at this
point that the spy system of slow-seeping treachery and the atrocity
program of dramatic frightfulness overlap. It is in part out of the habit
of betraying hospitality that the atrocities have emerged. It isn't as if
they were extemporized--a sudden flare, with no background. They are
the logical result of doing secretly for years that which humanity has
agreed not to do.
Some of the members of our Red Cross unit--the Hector Munro
Ambulance Corps--worked for a full year with the French Fusiliers
Marins, perhaps the most famous 6000 fighting men in the western line.
They were sailor boys. They covered the retreat of the Belgian army.
They consolidated the Yser position by holding Dixmude for three
weeks against a German force that outnumbered them. Then for a year,
up to a few months ago, they