ity that the atrocities have emerged. It
isn't as if they were extemporized--a sudden flare, with no background.
They are the logical result of doing secretly for years that which
humanity has agreed not to do.

Some of the members of our Red Cross unit--the Hector Munro Ambulance
Corps--worked for a full year with the French Fusiliers Marins, perhaps
the most famous 6000 fighting men in the western line. They were sailor
boys. They covered the retreat of the Belgian army. They consolidated
the Yser position by holding Dixmude for three weeks against a German
force that outnumbered them. Then for a year, up to a few months ago,
they helped to hold the Nieuport section, the last northern point of the
Allied line. When they entered the fight at Melle in October, 1914, our
corps worked with one of their doctors, and came to know him. Later he
took charge of a dressing station near St. George. Here one day the
Germans made a sudden sortie, drove back the Fusiliers for a few
minutes, and killed the Red Cross roomful, bayoneting the wounded men.
The Fusiliers shortly won back their position, found their favorite
doctor dead, and in a fury wiped out the Germans who had murdered him
and his patients, saving one man alive. They sent him back to the
enemy's lines to say:

"Tell your men how we fight when you bayonet our wounded."

That sudden act of German falseness was the product of slow, careful
undermining of moral values.

One of the best known women in Belgium, whose name I dare not give, told
me of her friends, the G----'s, at L---- (she gave me name and
address). When the first German rush came down on Belgium the household
was asked to shelter German officers, one of whom the lady had known
socially in peace days. The next morning soldiers went through the
house, destroying paintings with the bayonet and wrecking furniture. The
lady appealed to the officer.

"I know you," she said. "We have met as equals and friends. How can you
let this be done?"

"This is war," he replied.

No call of chivalry, of the loyalties of guest and host, is to be
listened to. And for the perpetrating of this cold program years of
silent spy treachery were a perfect preparation. It was no sudden
unrelated horror to which Germans had to force themselves. It was an
astonishing thing to simple Belgian gentlemen and gentlewomen to see the
old friendly German faces of tourists and social guests show up, on
horseback, riding into the cities