Life, 1917-09-27 · page 18 of 40
Life — September 27, 1917 — page 18: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains editorial commentary on German war crimes and the problem of justice after World War I. The article discusses Dr. Harry Stuermer, a German correspondent who witnessed Armenian massacres committed by German forces in Turkey, became disillusioned with the German General Staff, and escaped to Switzerland to publish his account. The central satirical point: The author argues that while Germany's military leadership bears responsibility for horrific atrocities against Belgian, French, and Armenian civilians, the practical problem of punishment is intractable. Killing German soldiers in continued warfare kills ordinary conscripts rather than the guilty officers and officials who orchestrated these crimes. The Germans themselves, the author suggests ironically, are "slackers" for not executing their own war criminals. The small cartoon in the left margin appears to mock the concept of virtue or justification in war. The piece advocates that the Allies must continue fighting to victory, accepting the cost, since justice cannot be achieved any other way.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
SEPTEMBER 27, 1917. “* While there ts Liye there's Hope"* VOL. 70 No, 1822 Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY J. A. Mitcnent, Pres’t. A. Miturr, Sec’y and Treas. 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York English Offices, Rolls House, Breams Bldgs., London, E. C. ERMANY’S best remaining FOR Ff ER Se VIRTUE card is that, bar- haan) ring accidents, the Germans may still kill a couple of millions of the Allied troops before they are squashed to a pulp. That they will eventually be so squashed if the war goes on long enough, our military mentors have no doubt. Mentor Simonds of the Trib- une figures on it to fill a whole page (with help of a map), telling what the losses of each of the belligerents have been, and what they have left, and you can't make anything come out of his figures except final defeat for the Ger- mans. But the price will be high if the war must end by drubbing, and, of course, it would be a relief to a great many people not to have to pay it. The Creator is a mysterious being and moved in a more than ordinarily mysterious way when he made the Prussians, and permitted so large a proportion of the hard cases among them to develop into war-lords. They have made and are still making the most notorious bad men in history seem like pikers. Dr. Hillis, the Brook- lyn pulpit orator, has been abroad this summer and is firing up Brooklyn by description of what the Germans did in Belgium and France. We have had all that in convincing reports, but when one goes over there he gets more vivid impressions than the reports give, and gets many details also that they do not contain. There isn't any doubt about the facts or the appalling extent of German sav- agery. It is coming out now through German sources, some cynical, some outraged. One of the latter is Dr. Harry Stuer- mer, formerly a correspondent of the Cologne Gazette, who served with the German army in the Masurian Lakes, was invalided, and then sent to Turkey by his paper. The Armenian slaugh- ters, in which he found Germans doing what even Turks would not do, upset his constancy to the General Staff, and the reports he sent to his paper were suppressed by the censor, and he was recalled to the colors. He managed to cut stick and get to Switzerland, and has published a book—*Two War Years in Constantinople in which he frees his. mind about German war- making. ae course there is no news in all this, but the peculiarities of Ger- man war-making need to be rubbed into us from time to time. The Ger- man General Staff is a prodigious em- barrassment. A large proportion of its numbers ought to be hanged, but with the best intentions in the world, how will it be possible to do it? It is a very dirty job which the Ger- mans ought to discharge themselves, but when it comes to hanging their General Staff and the abominable scoundrels who have carried out its orders, the Germans are slackers. Here is the most horrible record of whole- sale crimes against defenseless people that has been made for a thousand years, and the only way to proceed against it is to kill, at great expense, hundreds of thousands more of Ger- . man boys who never got to Belgium nor to Turkey. It is true that the four million Germans who have been put permanently out of the war include a great many bad ones who are dead, but no one prints the proportion of the General Staff that has succumbed to the war, and the supposition must be that it is small. Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord. I will repay! But that may merely mean hell, and when one gets to counting on hell he drifts off into a Sargasso of hypothesis. DO we want to spend our young men in efforts to punish Germans and hang their General Staff? Probably not. We have got to do our share to bring the Germans to proper terms, because there will be no peace on earth until it is done, but as to punishing them, only Germans can ever do it. If they lose the war, their punishment will take care of itself. The decent ones will have to clean up the country. Some kind of a strait- jacket must be contrived for Prussia, but the rest of the Germans will have to contrive it. If they are content after the war to continue to be ruled by Prussians, that will be their punish- ment. But Prussia cannot rule Ger- many on the militarist basis if real representative government intro- duced, and the natural strait-jacket for her is democracy. Of course thousands of men who did unspeakable things in Belgium, France, Poland, Armenia and wherever else Germans have gone, should be hanged. Also the man who drowned the crew of the Belgian Prince, the man who recommended that Argentine ships should be sunk “without trace,” the men who ordered and executed the comicbook