The Chickasha daily express. (Chickasha, Indian Territory [Okla.]) 1899-current, 1918-01-16
URGED TO SLAY
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 ss Declaring the innocent Must
Suffer With the euiIty-Irvin
- cobb's Tale Of Horrors.

~ Ooppb ialS OF F1oTroT5'
The horrors deliberately and sys-
teolatically inflicted upon the people
Of Belgium By the German s0idjerS
Under the orders Of their command
ing officers, are Sh0wn IN all their
bideoaseeSs By official documents
and the testimony Of eye-wilnesScS
as weH as By letters written By GER
man soldiers in the field. The 6ra-
seb effort Of Emperor William toI
cast the odium Of the fearful deeds
ON the BeIgianS is also shown. Q0o-
tations gjven are from documents
already made public or IN the pos
session of the government at WASH
jngton.
This interview was reproduced in
the Berliner Tagebatt of November
90, 1914.
Mr.. f. c. Walcott of the Belgian re
lief commission tells in the Geograph-
ical Magazine for May, 1917, of meet
ing Gen Won Bernhard:
GAS | walked out Gen. Won Bern
hardi came into the room, an expert
nrilleryman, a professor in one OF
their war colleges. I met him the
next morning, and he aske mo If /
had read his book, Germany IN ,he
Next War
~ said / had. He said: DO you
know, my friends nearly ran me out
Of the country for thatY 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?
"I said General, I did not believe
word of it when l read it, but 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
4 glum, Gen. Won Bissing said:
"The 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 arg ami
/ hilated. that is assuredly regrettable,
I but it must not excite ill-timed senti-
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. 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 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
,ostigat9d 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 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
naople.' And there they had said:
waste this town and shoot these peo-
nle' And here the troops had discrim-
inatelv spared ana there they had in
discriminatory wasted, in exact ac-
cordance with the word of their supe-
riors. irwin Cobb, Speaking of Prus-
ans New York, 1917, PIP. 32-34.
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
10 do this was difficult, for, as has
bcen shown often, many of the civil
ian leaders of public opinion, time and
again. expressed their horror of the
new spirit which was animating the
military authorities. The reichstag
dehates give ample evidence of this,
and the task of the military leaders
would have been still more difficult If
the reichstag had any real power.
(See War Information Series No. 3,
"The Government of Germany :" see
nlso Gerard's my -Four Years in Ger
I =