to work on a village, our engineers! Then it goes into the air as if a mighty earthquake had caught it, it crumbles and breaks up and falls, and the last pitiful houses are knocked out by the coup de grace.

grace. And what a rubbish-heap there lies spread-bricks and clay and stones and timbers licked by the flames. Poor devil of a war-zone, seek you habitation elsewhere. Old-time farms with massive walls, vaulting, and any amount of resisting power—their walls were drilled scientifically, and the charges fired. Then the whole farm crumpled up, just as it was intended to do-half over the road which it was its business to bury, and the other half into the cracking cellars.

“Rubble, nothing but rubble, all this ancient village history, all these future prospects of modern peasant life. The fine broad yard sinks away with the cottage; the cottage burns quietly to ashes, and the remains of its clay walls yield to the first serious stroke of the battering-ram. The great farm buildings put up a defenseonly to fly into the air, rain down again, and mingle themselves with their neighbors' misery in a field of ruins which once bore a name and paid a rent.

“Let them see it over there! Let them see it over there! This fearful naked war should be reflected in all the shop windows of the Boulevards. We have put distance between us and our enemies. It is a desert full of wretch

edness. .::

“Farewell, comrades of the Somme! The earth which drank your blood is upheaved and torn asunder. It is made unfruitful, it is turned into a desert, and your graves are made free from the dwellings of men.

Those who tread it, your desert, will be greeted by our shells."

The second is from the Lokal Anzeiger, of March 18, 1917: :

“In the course of these last few months great stretches of French territory have been turned by us into a dead country. It varies in width from 10 to 12 or 15 kilometers (644 to 792 or 8 miles) and extends along the whole of our new position, presenting a terrible barrier of desolation to any enemy hardy enough to advance against our new lines. No village or farm was left standing on this glacis, no road was left passable, no railway track or embankment was left in being. Where once were woods there are gaunt rows of stumps; the wells have been blown up, wires, cables, and pipe-lines de

, stroyed. In front of our new position runs, like a gigantic ribbon, an empire of death."

It would be useless to continue the recital of unwarranted practices by Germans in Poland, or those permitted by the Germans to their allies, the Turks, in Armenia. The spirit in which the whole was done is sufficiently evident in the order issued by General Stenger, of the

58th German Brigade, on August 26, 1914, and which was testified to by numerous German prisoners taken from that brigade:

“After today no more prisoners will be taken. All prisoners are to be killed. Wounded, with or without arms, are to be killed. Even prisoners already grouped in convoys are to be killed. Let not a single living enemy remain behind us.

* وو

If any of these practices were later modified it was done not out of any consideration for humanity or respect for signed conventions; any abatements noticeable were effected by the fear of neutral opinion or of reprisals on German prisoners. The spirit that dictated such orders was the Prussian war spirit.

All this had not been done against us except in the sense that it had been done against humanity and against those laws of war which through two centuries civilized nations had been trying to formulate and establish. As the truth began to come to us, it made neutrality of thought impossible, though our government continued to maintain a scrupulous neutrality