That their officers and soldiers might understand in advance the use of the atrocity as a military instrument, the General Staff of the German army, in 1902, published a handbook of military tactics, entitled "The Laws of War on Land." This handbook sets forth a deliberate system of atrocity, and prepares the way for every species of villainy. In clear and unmistakable language, the War Staff presents principles that embody the ideas of savages. Witness the statements on page 35: "By steeping himself in military history an officer will be able to guard himself against excessive humanitarian notions. It will teach him that certain severities are indispensable to war. What is permissible includes _every means_ without which the object of the war cannot be attained." Witness also the savagery outlined on page 52: "A war conducted with energy cannot be directed merely against the combatants of the enemy states and the positions they occupy, but it will and must in like manner seek to destroy the total intellectual and material resources of the latter. Humanitarian claims,--such as the protection of men's lives and their property, can be taken into consideration only in so far as the nature and object of the war will permit." Their Handbook of Military Tactics is, therefore, nothing other than the science of atrocity. With an army steeped in these vicious teachings, with private soldiers trained by this handbook that teaches crime as an art, and with the exhortation of their Kaiser to make themselves as terrible as the Huns under Attila, the rape of Belgium, the crucifixion of Poland, and the assassination of Northern France were logical and inevitable results. THE GERMAN MOTIVE FOR MASSACRE AN OVERWHELMING ONE To-day, Germans find it difficult to forgive Bethmann-Hollweg for his confessions when, at the beginning of the war, he acknowledged they were committing a wrong against Belgium, that their designs made necessary, by "hacking the way through." We now know that the motive of the Kaiser and his War Staff for massacring Belgium was an overwhelming motive. They had staked everything upon a short war. "Brussels in one week, Paris in two weeks, London in two months,"--that was the programme. The stubborn opposition of the Belgian army, standing on a frontier whose sanctity the Kaiser, by the most solemn treaties, had just pledged himself to safeguard, stalled the German military machine, made impossible a crushing victory over France, and threatened their dreams of a series of hurricane victories over England.