I do not believe I personally can be charged with an evinced bias against the German Army, as based on what I saw of its operations in the opening months of the war. Because I had an admiration for the courage and the fortitude of the German common soldier, and because I expressed that admiration, I was charged with being pro-German by persons who seemingly did not understand or want to understand that a spectator may admire the individual without in the least sympathising with the causes which sent him into the field. And at a time when this country was filled with stories of barbarities committed upon Belgian civilians by German soldiers--stories of the mutilating of babies, of the raping of women, of the torturing of old men--I was one of five experienced newspapermen who, all of our own free will and not under duress or coercion, signed a statement in which we severally and jointly stated that, in our experiences when travelling with or immediately behind the German columns through upward of a hundred miles of Belgian territory, we had been unable to discover good evidence of a single one of these alleged atrocities. Nor did we. What I tried to point out at the time--in the fall of 1914--and what I would point out again in justice to those who now are our enemies, is that identically the same accounts of atrocities which were told in England and in America as having been perpetrated by Germans upon Belgians and Frenchmen, were simultaneously repeated in Germany as having been perpetrated by Belgians and Frenchmen upon German nuns and German wounded; and were just as firmly believed in Germany as in America and Britain, and had, as I veritably believe, just as little foundation of fact in one quarter as in the other quarters. Indeed, I am willing to go still further and say, because of the rigorous discipline by which the German common soldier is bound, that in the German occupation of hostile territory opportunities for the individual brute or the individual degenerate to commit excesses against the individual victim were greatly reduced. Of course there must have been sporadic instances of hideous acts--there always have been where men went to war; but I have never been able to bring myself to believe that such acts could have been a part of a systematic or organised campaign of frightfulness. There was plenty of the frightfulness without these added horrors.