St. Tammany farmer. [volume] (Covington, La.) 1874-current, 1918-01-26
URGED TO STAY
and SPARE NOT
German Soldiers melted to Acts
of Cruelty by Genera! Won
Kissing.
TERMINATION OF HIGH KULTUR'
Governor General Of Belgium on Rec
ord as Declaring the innocent Must
Suffer With the Guilty-lrvin
Cobb's Tale Of Horrors.

surfer with the Griity-IrVtn
-Cobb's Tale Of Horrors.
The horrors deliberately and sys-
ten,atically inflicted upon the people
of Belgium by the German soldiers,
under the orders Of their command
ing officers, are shown IN all their
hideousness by official documents
and the testimony Of eye-wifnesses,
as weN as by letters uriHen by Ger
man soldiers IN the field. The bra
zen effort of Emperor William to
cast the odium Of the fearful deeds
on the Be7gians is also shomn. Quo
tations given are from documents
already made public or IN The pos
session of the government at Wash
ington.
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-
zeal Magazine for May, 1917, of meet
ing Gen Won Bernhard:
"As I walked out, Gen. Won Bern
hardi came into the room, an expert
,artillerynan, professor In one OF
their war colleges. met him the
next morning, and he asked me If
had read his book, Germany In the
Next War;
II said had. He said: DO you
know, my friends nearly ran me out
of the country for thatY They said,
s'You have let the cat out Of the Bag
I said, mo, have not, because nobody
will believe It, What did you think
of itr
IT said, General, I did not believe a
word of 1t when I read 1t. but 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
lgium, Gen. Won Kissing said:
"The innocent must suffer with the
guilty. In the repression Of
/, hnfamy, human lives cannot be spared,
and If isolated houses, fourishlng VII
hages, and even entire towns are ami
Inflated, that Is assuredly regrettable,
but It must not excite ill-timed senti-
Rmentality. All this must not IN our
ewes weigh as much as the life OF a
single one Of our brave soldiers--the
Rigorous accomplishment Of duty Is the
emanation Of high kultur, and in
that, the population Of the enemy
countries can learn a lesson from our
army"
Officers Encouraged Atrocities.
Gen. Won Kissing, after his appoint
ment as governor general Of Belgium,
Repeated In substance the above opin-
hon to q Dutch journalist. The inter
view Ii published in the Dusseldorfer
,Anzeiger Of December 8, 1914. ~
irwin s. Cobb states his conclusions
ION 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
lme as worse than any individual ex-
Icess, any individual outrage, could
ever have been or can ever be; be.
-lcause these crimes individually were
instigated ON wholesale basis by or.
der Of officers of rank, and must have
been carried out under their personal
supervision, direction, and approval
"Taking the physical evidence offer
ed before our own eyes, and buttress-
ing Il 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 q place.
5 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 discrlm.
inately spared, and there they had In
discriminatory wasted, in exact nc
cordance with the word of their supe'
riors."-Iryin Cobb, Speaking of Prus'
SLAMS, New York, 1917, PIP. 1924. .
Hoodwinked German People.
These ideas, then. were systemat
ically impressed upon the military and
official classes. 1t was necessary,
however, to work upon the minds OF
the German people, so that they might
lend themselves to the inhuman poll
cies advocated by the military leaders
To do this was difficult, for, as ha:
been shown often. many of the civil
ian leaders of public opinion, time ant
again, expressed their horror of the
new spirit which was animating tht
military authorities. The reichstat
debates give ample evidence of this
and the task of the military leader:
would have been still more difficult II
the relchstag had any real power
(See War Information Series No. 3
sThe Government of Germany" SEE
also Gerard's "My Four Years In Ger
many" chapter 2)
The military authorities and those
In sympathy with them have done al
in their power to stimulate hatred O
other peoples in the minds of the Ger
mans. A campaign Of education be
.1,rrt