New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1915-08-06
Liege 1914-1915.

lne ADVANCE RudTu Vi IiS NelIaH aihS'
In the confused rumors of those early days
what was but a minor military operation,
little more than the first stray drops Of
the coming cloudburst of war, took on an
Importance which seems hardly credible
now. when a year of war has accustomed
us to the battles of millions and the fronts
which are as long as ancient frontiers.
Yet one thing out of all the weller OF
August 6. 1914, endures. The spirit and
the emotion with which the civilized world
greeted the first definite evidence that
Germany had reduced treaties to scraps
of paper" and abolished all considerations
save those of strength remain. Indeed,
is not the horror, the disgust, the detesta-
ton a thousandfold intensified since we
have descended by sure gradations to the
smoking shambes of Louvain and the en-
during horror of the Lusitania?
In America the German case was lost as
we read the first reports, those jumbled,
exaggerated, hopelessly inaccurate reports
of the first Belgian resistance. We, who
inherit the tradition of Concord and Lex
ngton, of Bunker Hill, read in the resist
ance of the Belgian people to their invad-
ers the repetition of the story which is the
enduring glory Of our nation. What our
ancestors had done the Belgians were do
ing. That they should have been driven
to do it was, for Americans, a final indict-
ment of German methods and morals
When their feeble resistance was met by
murder, rape, arson, when women were
mutilated and dishonored, and children
were massacred or used as living screens
for Prussian infantry advancing against
fortified lines, there was left only a COM
plete bankruptcy of American sympathy
for Germany.
But there is something even more vital
to consider now. To deal quick and de-
structive blow to her French foe Germany
tore up the written treaties to which she
had engaged her honor. To terrorize
people CALAMITY resisting a treacherous
attack she repealed all the principles
WHICH man III NtllIuflGS lldS
as the final evidence of march from bar
barism to civilization. This insured to
Germany for the ages that are to come
the condemnation which the Duke of Alva
won for Spain, which the foreign invaders
of the Reformation time enjoy in the Ger
many of to-day. Hereafter for centuries
men will read of Louvain as we have read
of st. Bartholomew, and William ii will
be held up to execration as history has
held Charles TX. But what men asked
themselves one year ago was: Can these
things succeed?
For if Germany could succeed in accom-
plshing her ends by the use of the means
she had selected if victory, final and COM
plete victory, were attainable by the de-
fiance alike of law and humanity, if the
assertion of the gospel of violence and the
doctrine of "terribleness" was to be fol-
lowed by world supremacy, then indeed the
time had come to turn our backs upon all
we had believed and hoped and striven for.
German victory in its naked aspect meant
alike the bankruptcy of civilization and
the destruction of faith in God as well as
man. For even more than mans laws
were those of God trampled in the bloody
slime of Louvain.
And now, one year afterward, we are
able to see the fact. Our doubts of other
times are not fully but still sufficiently
laid at rest. One year after the vast Ger
man horde began to send its first Uhlan
pckets against the Belgian fortress we
are able to estimate how much of success
has followed German method. And after
all, is it not a pitiful showing in the face
of the cost? The other day German Off
cial figures fixed at $500 square miles the
portion Of France which was in German
hands. This, after a year, is all that Ger
many has of the France that she sought to
destroy, and seeking defed civilization.
All the advantage of that Belgian viola
ton melted into nothing at the Marine All
the treachery, inhumanity, crime went for
nil when the French armies returned to
the charge. France was to be destroyed
in six weeks, and now after nine times six
weeks France is neither destroyed nor de-
Structible. Her armies outnumber the
German in the west, and her British allies
are slowly but surely bringing new levies
to the field. For the $500 square miles of
French territory now occupied Germany
has expended in casualties above 100000.
Her killed, wounded and captured on the
western front, the flower of her manhood
almost equal in numbers the population Of
the conquered district, and her total cas-
ualties number above half the population
of the Belgium that was before August
4, 1914.
And so, after all, it has not worked, this
German principle this German idea. 1t is
that a nation may gamble