dren in
Belgium and northern France were saved from starving to death by the
work of the C. R. B. The men who were doing it had a chance to observe
the conditions in those invaded countries. They came to the Legation at
The Hague and told simply what they knew. We got the real story of Miss
Cavell, cruelly done to death by "field-gray" officers. We got full
descriptions of the system of deporting the civil population--a system
which amounted to enslavement, with a taint of "white slavery" thrown
in. When the Belgian workmen were suddenly called from their homes,
herded before the German commandant, and sent away, they knew not
whither, to work for their oppressor, as they were entrained they sang
the "Marseillaise." They knew they would be punished for it, kept
without food, put to the hardest labor. But they sang it. They knew that
France, and England too, were fighting for them, for their rights, for
their liberty. They believed that it would come. They were not conquered
yet.

Here I must break off my story for a month. It has not been well told.
Words cannot render the impression of black horror that lay upon us, the
fierce indignation that stirred us, during all those months while we
were doing the tasks of peace in peaceful Holland.

We were bound to be neutral in conduct. That was the condition of our
service to the wounded, the prisoners, the refugees, the sufferers, of
both sides. We lived up to that condition at The Hague without a single
criticism from anybody--except the subsidized German-American press in
the United States.

But to be neutral in thought and feeling--ah, that was beyond my power.
I knew that the predatory Potsdam gang had chosen and forced the war in
order to realize their robber-dream of Pan-Germanism. I knew that they
were pushing it with unheard-of atrocity in Belgium and northern France,
in Poland and Servia and Armenia. I knew that they had challenged and
attacked the whole world of peace-loving nations. I knew that America
belonged to that imperilled world. I knew that there could be no secure
labor and no quiet sleep in any land so long as the Potsdam Werwolf was
at large.

Chapter IV
GERMANIA MENDAX

I

The truth about the choosing, beginning, and forcing of this abominable
war has never been told by official Germandom.

Now and then an independent German like Maximilian Harden is brave
enough to blurt it out: "Of what use are weak excuses? We willed this
war, ... will