Chapter 32: The Forcing-House of Bestiality

The German Government made savagery, brutality, and bestiality a deliberate policy, and now it is their unconscious impulse. Germany is paying a terrible penalty in the degradation and demoralisation of her whole people for having given the direction of the country into the hands of the Devil in exchange for power, and the German army is to-day a forcing-house for bestiality, and there is no atmosphere in the whole world that so conduces to evil. 

In the beginning of the war letters and statements of prisoners showed that there were then many decent Germans who were horrified at the abominations they had seen and committed at the command of their government. But latterly, you cannot find any trace of this feeling. Now they gloat over it.

There is no one in the world to-day except those who are of like mind who do not know that the story of the German atrocities is true, for Germany has admitted enough crimes to convince any sane man that she would stick at nothing. No action could be too cruel, no deed too beastly, no torture too diabolical, no insult too keen, no impulse too filthy, no disfigurement too hideous, no vandalism too shocking, no destruction too complete, no stooping too low that Germany would hesitate to do where she has opportunity. 

When Germany boasted of the murder by drowning of women and babes on the high seas she proclaimed to the world that she was a criminal, and we do not need to have any other crimes proven to convince us that, while there is such a thing as justice, she must not go unpunished.

Criminals have been forgiven, but not before they are repentant ; Safety, as well as Justice demands that the murderer, the assassin, the rapist shall not go free. Germany has not only committed all these crimes, but her theologians and professors have condoned them. The man who counsels forgiveness to Germany adds hypocrisy to the will to commit the same crimes.

To forgive, we are told, is divine, but the Divine does not forgive without repentance. Has Germany shown signs of repentance yet ? Well, then, the man who talks of forgiveness to Germany before she is on her knees begging for forgiveness is an enemy of peace and a condoner of crime It is so easy for those who have not suffered to tell the victims ' to forgive.' We do not go in nightly dread lest in the morning we should have to rake among the ruins of our homes for the mangled body of our baby ! We do not have to work in daily fear lest we should have to return to an empty house whence wife or daughter have been dragged by brutal hands ! 

For three years the people of London and Paris and thousands of other cities have never known but that at any moment their house might be brought down in ruins about their ears, entombing all that they hold dear ! For three years the men of northern France and Belgium have never known but that while they were working under compulsion, against the life of their own blood and country in a German munition factory, some soldiers might not be calling at their homes to take the woman that they love God alone knows where ! 

These very things have happened to tens of thousands. Week after week the human hawks come over London, and ever the toll of civilians and women and babies done to death grows larger! One hundred thousand young girls were taken from Lille and other cities away from knowledge or protection of their kin, and until recently we had no news of any of them, but some have been thrown into Switzerland, of no further use to Germany ; used up like sucked lemons, they are cast aside for the Swiss to feed. Germany has in her maw to-day more than ten millions of slaves.

In America or Australia there are no hospitals where lie thousands of girls too young to become mothers who have been raped. We have not hundreds of boys who will never become men. A young girl said to me : 'There is a baby coming ; it is a Boche; when it is born I will cut its throat!' A woman, showed me on an estaminet floor the bloodstains of her own baby, butchered before her eyes. These were French women, not ours. 

But what if they had been ? Your sister! Your mother! Your wife ! And they might have been but for the accident of geography. Would you then have felt as bitter as these people ? Or would you still have kindly feelings to Germany and not want to 'humiliate her'? There maybe beings who could see daughter violated or brother mutilated without taking personal vengeance, but such should not be permitted to breathe the air with MEN.

The only people who have a right to say what punishment shall be meted out to Germany for her misdeeds, are the women of France, of Belgium, of Poland, of Serbia, of Rumania, of Italy, who have suffered these things ; and if any one, King or President, Parliament or Pope, dares stand between these people and their just wrath they deserve to be pilloried in the minds of men as condoners of crime, as accessories after the fact.

The only chance for permanent peace, and guarantee that these abominable crimes shall not be committed again, is that we should so punish Germany that she shall realise ' that war does not pay,' and that the whole earth may know that no nation can commit these atrocities and go unpunished.