The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/"We Shall Never Massacre Belgian Women"
"WE SHALL NEVER MASSACRE BELGIAN WOMEN"
One of the writers who performed the same
kind of moral somersault was Gerhart Hauptmann,
author of a Socialist drama called "The
Weavers," and, rumour says, protege (what
frightful irony!) of the Crown Prince. Hauptmann
knew well (none better) that a vast proportion
of the human family live perpetually
on the borderland of want, and that of all who
suffer by war the poor suffer most. Yet he
wrote (and a degenerate son of the great Norwegian
liberator, Björnsen, published) a letter,
in which, after telling the poor of his people
that "heaven alone knew" why their enemies
were assailing them, he called on them (in
effect) to avenge unnameable atrocities, which
he alleged, without a particle of proof, had been
committed on innocent Germans living abroad, and
then said, in allusion to Mr. Maeterlinck, "I can
assure him that, although 'barbarous Germans,'
we shall never be so cowardly as to massacre or
martyr the Belgian women and children."
This was written in August 1914, at the very
hour, as the world now knows, when the German
soldiers in Liege were shooting, bayoneting, and
burning alive old men and little children, raping
nuns in their convents and young girls in the
open streets. But the invisible powers of evil
have no mercy on their instruments after they
have worked their will, and Time has turned
them into objects of contempt.
Nor were the German people themselves, any more than their master-spirits and spokesmen, spared the shame of their duplicity in those early days of August 1914. A large group of them, including commercial and professional men, drew up a long address to the neutral countries, in which they said that down to the eleventh hour they had "never dreamt of war," never thought of depriving other nations of light and air or of thrusting anybody from his place. And yet the ink of their protest was not yet dry when they gave themselves the lie by showing that down to the last detail of preparation they had everything ready for the forthcoming struggle.
Englishmen who were in Berlin and Cologne on July 31, and August 1 (before any of the nations had declared war on Germany), could see what was happening, though no telegrams or newspapers had yet made known the news. A tingling atmosphere of joyous expectation in the streets; the cafés and beer-gardens crowded with civilians in soldiers' uniforms; orchestras striking up patriotic anthems; excited groups singing "Deutschland über Alles," or rising to their feet and jingling glasses; then the lights put out, and a general rush made for the railway stations—everybody equipped, and knowing his duty and his destination.