Williams news., 1918-01-10
General Won Bissing's Defense of German War Practices Is
 Significant.
INNOCENT NOT TO BE SPARED
They Must Suffer With the Guilty Irwin Cobb Tells of Respon- sibiIity of kaiser's High
 Command.

The Committee on Public lnforma- | tion, appointed by the president, and consisting of the secretary of state, secretary of war, secretary of the navy, and George Greet, official censor, has made public a 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 beastIiness which has character ized 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.
 MT. F. c. Walcott of the Belgian re- lief commission tells in the Geograph- ical Magazine for May, 1917, of meet ing Gen von Bernhardi:
 'As I walked out, Gen. von Bern hardi came into the room, an expert artilleryman, a professor in one of their war colleges. I met him the next morning, and he asked me if I had read his book, Germany in the Next War
 "I said I 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 said, No, have not, because nobody will believe it. What did you think of it?
 q said, General, I 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 %, 1914. at Munster, of the extreme measures which the Germans felt obliged to take against the civil population of Bel gium, Gen. von Bissing said:
 "The innocent must suffer with the guilty. In the repression of infamy, human lives cannot be spared, and if isolated houses, flourishing vil- lages, and even entire towns are anni- Inflated, that is assuredly regrettable, but it must not excite i1l-timed sentf- mentality All this must not in our eyes weigh as much as the life of 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. von Bissing, after his appoint ment as governor general of Belgium, repeated in substance the above opin- ion to Dutch journalist. The inter. view is published in the Dusseldorfer Anzeiger of December 8, 1914.
 Irwin S. Cobb states his conclusions on the responsibility of the higher Ger man command for the atrocities:
 ''But 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 a wholesale basis by or der of officers of rank, and must have been carried out under their personal supervision, direction, and approval. Briefly, what I saw was this: I 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 I saw other wide areas where scarcely one stone had been left to stand upon another; where the fields were rav- 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- ing 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 a 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 fn- discriminatory wasted, in exact ac- cordance with the word of their supe