Germany's Dishonoured Army: Additional records of German atrocities in FranceMorgan, J. H. (John Hartman)
History
Germany's Dishonoured Army: Additional records of German atrocities in France
Morgan, J. H. (John Hartman)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities
=_Insolence which Knows no Pity._=--Although I have some claims to
write as a jurist I have here made no attempt to pray in aid the Hague
Regulations in order to frame the counts of an indictment. The Germans
have broken all laws, human and divine, and not even the ancient
freemasonry of arms, whose honourable traditions are almost as old as
war itself, has restrained them in their brutal and licentious fury.
It is useless to attempt to discriminate between the people and their
rulers; an abundance of diaries of soldiers in the ranks shows that all
are infected with a common spirit. That spirit is pride, not the pride
of high and pure endeavour, but that pride for which the Greeks found
a name in the word _ὕβρις_ the insolence which knows no pity and which
feels no love. Long ago Renan warned Strauss of this canker which was
eating into the German character. Pedants indoctrinated it, Generals
instilled it, the Emperor preached it. The whole people were taught
that war was a normal state of civilisation, that the lust of conquest
and the arrogance of race were the most precious of the virtues. On
this Dead Sea fruit the German people have been fed for a generation
until they are rotten to the core.
FOOTNOTE
[1] Brenneisen is now a prisoner in England. The diary was a most
carefully kept one.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
-Obvious print and punctuation errors fixed.
End of Project Gutenberg's Germany's Dishonoured Army, by Prof. J.H. Morgan
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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