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Show Who Are We Fighting? : We are fighting the' people of Germany as well as their Hohenzollerns and Hindenburgsl The people of Germany ire fighting us. When we first entered the war, some of us tried to believe we were not fighting the German people, that our whole battle was with the kaiser and Hindenburg, and our whole duty was to trounce the Hun government '"!"' Even now thereare sowe who" will" prate in this vein. We . must not listen to tnem. They are deceived, or they are trying . to. deceive us. '- - - T TheatrocftieT-commHted-on-thfr-battlefields have been too fiorribly numerous to have been thought out by one man or dictated dic-tated by a multitude of generals. The German soldier has proved himself as Hunnish in his warfare as has his government In Its International In-ternational dealings. Joseph H. Odell in The Outlook draws a true picture of the Hun soldier. He writes: f. "Why do Americans persist in differentiating between the Germany military caste and 4he German people? ' They were ordinary boche regiments which held Cha-i Cha-i tean Thierry, and when their evacuation of the place be-3f be-3f came obviously necessary they set about to destroy and 'i pollute everything within reach. Remember, this 1s not hearsay; I went into Chateau Thierry on the, heels of the American advance and saw things with my own eyes. Every available, Hunnish, fiendish, filthy thing that men H could do these Huns did In Chateau Thierry just before they left. The streets were littered with the private possessions pos-sessions of -the citizens thrown through the windows; every bureau and chiffonier drawer was rifled and its con-" con-" tents destroyed, In the better class houses the paintings were ripped and the china and porcelain smashed; furniture fur-niture was broken or hacked; mirrors were shivered Into ' a thousand fragments; mattresses' and upholstery were slashed ; richly bound books were ripped ;' in act, there was ' hardly ft thing In the city left intact. The houses of the poor, In which the German, privates had been billeted, were just as badly pillaged and devastated as the homes of the well to do. The church, grand enough for a cathedral, had not been spared. Its paintings and altars and crucifixes and stations of the cross had been ruthlessly ruth-lessly battered and defiled. Yet even this does not tell the story a story which cannot be told to people who respect decency for the Germans left tokens of physical and mental obscenity In every house I visited, and I entered en-tered scores. If all hell had been let loose in a choice suburban town for half a day, it could not have put Its obscene and diabolical mark on a place more unmistakably unmistak-ably than the Germans put theirs on Chateau Thierry. I stood amazed that there could be so much unrelieved vile-ness, vile-ness, such organized beastliness, In the world." |
