Ellsworth American. [volume] (Ellsworth, Me.) 1855-current, 1918-01-23
URGED TO STAY
And SPARE NOT
German Soldiers lncited to Acts
of Cruelty by General Won
Kissing.
'EMANATl0N 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

The horrors deliberately and sys
tematicGIly inflicted upon the people
( of Belgium By the German soldiers
under the orders of their command.
ing officers, are shoTn in all heir
hideousness By Official documents
and the testimony of eye-witaeSssS
as UeH as By letters written By Ger
man soldiers in the field. The bra-
zen effort Of Emperor William to
cast the odism Of the fearful deeds
on the Belgiaas is also shown. Quo
tations giveH are from documents
already made public or in the pos
session of the government at Wash-
iHgton.
This interview was reproduced In
the Berliner Tageblatt of November
20, 1914.
Mr.. F. c, walcott Of the Belgian re-
lief commission tells In the Geograph-
teal Magazine for May. 1917. of meet
ing Gen Won Bernhard:
as I walked ont, Gen. Won Bern
hardi came iHto the room, an expert
artilIeryman. a professor In one of
their war colleges. / met him the
next morning. and he asked me IL ]
had read his book, Germany In the
Next War
II said I he'd. He said: DO you
know. my friends nearly ran me out
of the country for thatT They said,
You have let the cat out of the bag
said, No. have not. because nobody
viii believe it What did you think
of itr
81 said. General. did not believe a
word Of 1t when / read II, bat i now
feel that you did not ten 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
GUM. Gen Won Kissing said:
Int lu4b[cDL must VILE LAc
guilty. In the repression Of
infamy, human lives cannot be spared
and II isolated houses. fourishing VII
lagos. and even entire towns are ami
hilated, that Is assuredly regrettable,
but IL must not excite ill-timed senti-
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
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.
In substance the above opin-
ion to 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:
'eBut 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
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.
Taking the physical evidence offer
ed before our own eyes. ahd buttress-
ing it with the statements made to us,
not only by natives, but German sol
iiers and German officers, we could
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-
Pile And here the troops had dlscrim-
inately spared, and there they had In
discriminatory wasted. In exact ac-
eordance with the word of their supe-
riors."-Irvin Cobb. Speaking Of Prus-
SLAMS, New York, 1917, pp. 1924.
Hoodwinked German People.
These ideas, then. we're systemat-
icalIy 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 has
been shown often. many Of the civil
Ian leaders of public opinion, time anc
again, expressed their horror of tbs
new spirit which was animating tbs
military authorities. The reichstai
debates give ample evidence of this
and the task of the military leader
would have been still more difficult l
the reichstag had any real power
tSee War Information Series No.
"The Government of Germany" Sc
also Gcrard's my Four Years in Ger
\ many" chapter %