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Show GERMAN KULTUR NOTHING NEW Many people seem to think that, in some mysterious manner, the German soldiers were transformed from ordinary ordin-ary men to something approaching beasts, and that this took place in the twinkling of an eye, so to speak. Such is not the case, however, for the German Ger-man soldiers have been taught by their officers, including the "all-highest," that "frightfulness" should be the chief characteristic of the German soldier. The appended article appeared in the English Fortnightly Review, February, 1871, shortly before the surrender of Paris. Frederick Harrison, the writer, is still alive. It is no new thing ; and hundreds of thousands of men will have died in vain if this sinister thing is not absolutely and utterly exterminated forever by the forces of civilization now arrayed against it: "Every village they have passed through has been the victim of what is only organized pillage. Every Ev-ery city has been practically sacked sack-ed on system; its citizens plundered plund-ered or killed. The civil populations popula-tions have been, contrary to the usage us-age of modern warfare, forced to serve the invading armies, brutally brutal-ly put to death, reduced to wholesale whole-sale starvation and desolation. Vast tracts of the richest and most industrious districts of Europe have been deliberately stripped and plunged into famine, solely in order that the invaders might make war cheaply. Irregular troops, contrary con-trary to all the practice of war, have been systematically murdered and civil populations indiscriminately indiscrimin-ately massacred, solely to spread terror. A regular system or ingenious in-genious terrorism has been directed direct-ed against civilians, as horrible as anything in the history of civil or religious wars. Large and populous popu-lous cities have been, not once, but twenty, thirty, forty times bombarded bom-barded and burnt, and the women and children in them wantonly slaughtered, with the sole object of inflicting suffering. All this has been done not in license or passion, pas-sion, but by the calculating ferocity feroci-ty of scientific soldiers." Ex. |