The Benson signal., 1917-12-29
General Won Bissing's Defense of
German War Practices Is
Significant.
INNOCENT NOT TO Be SPARED
Governor General of Belgium Declared
They Must Suffer With the Guilty
Irwin Cobb Tells of Respon-
sibIity Of Kaiser's High
Command.

The Committee on PUBLIC informd-
zion, appointed by the president, and
consisting of the secretary Of state,
secretary of war, secretary of the
navy, and George CreeI, official censor,
has made public mass of evidence
dealing with German war practices
which shows the kaiser's leaders in the
field. and in command of captured
points to be directly responsible for
the beastliness which has character
lied the operations of the "Huns," in
the present conflict. Quotations from
the pamphlet follow:
This interview was reproduced in
the Berliner Tageblatt of November
20, 1914
Mr.. f. G. Walcott of the Belgian re-
lief commission tells in the Geograph-
ical Magazine for May, 1917, of meet
ing Gen Won Bernhard:
GAS I walked out, Gen. Won Bern
hardi came into the room, an expert
artilleryman, professor in one OF
their war colleges. @I met him the
next morning and he asked me II L
Next War
II said 1 had. He said: DO you
know, my friends nearly ran me out
Of the country for that? They said,
You have let the cat out of the bag
I said, No, have not, because nobody
will believe it, What did you think
of it?
II said, General, 1 did not believe a
word of it when I read it, but I now
feel that you did not tell the whole
truth and the old general looked
actually pleased"
Speaking on August 20, 1914, at
Munster, of the extreme measures
which the Germans felt obliged to take
against the civil population Of Bel
gium, Gen. Won Bissing said:
'rhe innocent must Suffer with the
guilty. In the repression of
infamy, human lives cannot be spared,
and if isolated houses, flourishing viii
lagos, and even entire towns are ami
hilated, that is assuredly regrettable,
but it must not excite ill-timed senti-
mentality. All this must not in our
eyes weigh as much as the life of a
single one of our brave soldiers-the
rigorous accomplishment of duty is the
emanation of a high kultur, and in
that, the population Of the enemy
countries can learn a lesson from our
army"
Officers Encouraged Atrocities.
Gen. Won Bissing, after his appoint
ment as governor general Of Belgium,
repeated in substance the above opin-
ion to a Dutch journalist. The inter
view is published in the DusseldOrfer
Anzeiger Of December s, 1914.
Irwin S. Cobb states his conclusions
on the responsibility of the higher Ger
man command for the atrocities:
"But I was an eyewitness to crimes
which, measured by the standards of
humanity and civilization, impressed
me as worse than any individual ex-
cess, any individual outrage, could
ever have been or can ever be; be-
cause these crimes indubitably were
instigated on q wholesale basis by or
been carried out under their personal
supervision, direction, and approval.
Briefly, what I saw was this: l saw
wide areas of Belgium and France in
which not a penny's worth Of wanton
destruction had been permitted to oc-
cur in which the ripe pears hung un-
touched upon the garden walls; and
saw other wide areas where scarcely
one stone had been left to stand upon
another; where the fields were raw
aged: where the male villagers had
been shot in squads; where the miser-
able survivors had been left to den in
holes, like wild beasts.
"Taking the physical evidence offer
ed before our own eyes, and buttress-
;ng it with the statements made to US,
not only by natives, but German sol
diers and German officers, we could
reach but one conclusion, which was
that here, in such and such place,
those in command had said to the
troops: Spare this town and these
people, And there they, had said :
Waste this town and shoot these peo-
ple.' And here the troops had discrim-
inately spared, and there they had in
discriminatory wasted, in exact ac-
cordance with the word of their supe-