The commonwealth. (Scotland Neck, N.C.) 1896-1929, 1918-01-11
URGED TO STAY
and SPARE NOT
German Soldiers lncited to Acts
OF Cruelty by General Won
Kissing.
'EMANATION OF HIGH KULTUR'
Governor General Of Belgium on Rec
ord as Declaring the Innocent Must
Suffer With the GuIty-lrvin
Cobb's Tale Of Horrors.

cobb's Tale of Horrors.
The horrors deliberately and sys-
temat1ca1ly inflicted upon the people
Of Belgium by the German soldiers,
under the orders of their command
ing officers, are shown IN all their
h1deousness by official documents
and the testimony Of eye-witnesses,
as we1l as by letters auritten by Ger
man soldiers IN the field. The bra
zen effort Of Emperor William to
cast the odiuma Of the fearful deeds
on the Bezgiams IS also showm. Quo
tatlons green are from documents
already made public or IN the pos
session Of the government at Wash
angton.
This interview was reproduced in
the Berliner Tageb,att 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, q professor in one of
their war colleges. I met him the
next morning, and he asked me if
! had read his book, Germany in the
Next War
81 said had He said: DO you
f,.;n mt
, of the country for that? They said,
You have let the cat out Of the bag
I said, mo, have not. because nobody
will believe it, What did you think
of it?'
! 81 said, General did not believe
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
against the civil population of Bel
! GUM, Gen. Won Kissing said:
''The innocent must suffer with the
! guilty. r 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,
hut 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
lot Of no
countries can learn 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-
ion to a 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:
sBut 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 Individually were
fnstigated on a 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 Ov,Q 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 place
those in command had said to the
troops: Spare this town and these
neople.' And there they had said
Waste this town and shoot these PEG
ple.' And here the troops had discrim
inately spared, and there they had in
discriminatory wasted, in exact &C
cordance with the word of their supe
riors'-Irvin Cobb, Speaking of Prus
slams, New York, 1917, PIP. 1924.
Hoodwinked German People.
These ideas, then, were syStemat
fcally impressed upon the military ant
official classes. It was necessary
however, to work upon the minds O.
the German people, SO that they nigh
lend themselves to the inhuman poll
cies advocated by the military leaders
To do this was difficult, for, as ha
l:en shown often, many of the civil
ian leaders of public opinion, time ant
again, expressed their horror of tn
new spirit which was animating tn
military authorities. The reichstal
debates give ample evidence of this
and the task of the military leaders
would have been still more difficult i
the reichstag had any real power
(See War Information Series No. 3
1.-THE Government of Germany" se'
also Gerard's "Ny Four Years in Ger
many" chapter p