Читать книгу German Atrocities: An Official Investigation - J. H. Morgan - Страница 24

It is the fondest of delusions to imagine that all this blood-guiltiness is confined to the German Government and the General Staff. The whole people is stained with it. The innumerable diaries of common soldiers in the ranks which I have read betray a common sentiment of hate, rapine, and ferocious credulity.52 Again and again English soldiers have told me how their German captors delighted to offer them food in their famished state and then to snatch it away again. The progress of French, British, and Russian prisoners, civil as well as military, through Germany has been a veritable Calvary.53 The helplessness which in others would excite forbearance if not pity has in the German populace provoked only derision and insult.54 The “old gentleman with a grey beard and gold spectacles” who broke his umbrella over the back of a Russian lady (the wife of a diplomatist), the loafers who boarded a train and under the eyes of the indulgent sentries poked their fingers in the blind eye of a wounded Irishman who had had half his face shot away, the men and women who spat upon helpless prisoners and threatened them with death, the guards who prodded them with bayonets, worried them with dogs, and dispatched those who could not keep up—these were not a Prussian caste, but the German people. What is to be thought of a people, one of whose leading journals publishes55 with approval the letter of a German officer describing “the brilliant idea” (ein guter Gedanke) which inspired him to place civilians on chairs in the middle of the street of a town attacked by the French and use them as a screen for his men, in spite of their “prayers of anguish.”