"
As a matter of fact, instead of winning our admiration they have drawn
our detestation. Not content with brushing aside all international laws
of warfare, they have trampled upon every law, human and divine,
standing in their way of conquest. Indeed, Germany's method of fighting
would disgrace the savages of Central Africa.
Prussianized Germany has the monopoly of "frightfulness." When not
"frightful," Prussian troopers are not living down to the instructions
of their War-lords to leave the conquered with nothing but eyes to weep
with. Not content to crucify Canadians, murder priests, violate nuns,
mishandle women, and bayonet children, the enemy torpedoes
civilian-carrying liners, and bombs Red Cross hospitals. More, sinning
against posterity as well as antiquity, Germans stand charged before man
and God with reducing to ashes some of the finest artistic output of
Christian civilization. When accused of crimes such as these, Germany
answers through her generals: "The commonest, ugliest stone put to mark
the burial-place of a German grenadier is a more glorious and venerable
monument than all the cathedrals of Europe put together" (General von
Disfurth in _Hamburger Nachrichten_). "Thus is fulfilled the well-known
prophecy of Heine: 'When once that restraining talisman, the Cross, is
broken ... Thor, with his colossal hammer, will leap up, and with it
shatter into fragments the Gothic cathedrals'" (_Religion and Philosophy
in Germany in the Nineteenth Century_).
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