St. Louis Post-Dispatch
July 28, 1918

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" al a MIC PAGE Y 2%, 1978, Lo ee eS = te (Copyrt by Rove Rolaneee SS A TURE = TO f : SSS Ee oe t. 1918, by H.C. Fisher, k Reg. U. S. Pat. Office.) aE WALK ° (AT'S THe RT TER Witte SUNNING? Jean Knott TODD —— | said the mother, st of smiles, ‘pass wind, and be very ill any on the table- Sango | and indifferent air is. She acts es if anybody was look- erits that. Her fa- sriddle cakes ta the estaurant"—Bostes — uneventful way ¢hat —Chicago | News. ee oe Po 0, ae”, Sy a oe 1 ee PLP PHO “ eg ae — ef ate Be A, Sap l ‘ , as Os Ss xt . * SRA SL + . \ So . es" 5 Vata Ga ‘ . wee AAS se aye ~ . . ones ——, - Ae i “ CPOE CODE. “So ae al . A Mn CLE TD oS Pe 2! OO a a S| anaes a cn all et aa OO a i ME A aR On Ge I 5 6, LA ACE nO eer oN ’ a “ Oe < “ fay v= + Se x” = is $i. ena Ae oe ee ed Se oe PE oe LS SRO: eo *» <« SL EE BIE ES FA game SOS De? ee BES lem fifa’ De a hadi Se ra gs SRL PRS ie te Sid eS a RN of Dae Sp. : Re PB acta home \/ © ST. LOUIS, SUNDAY MORNING, JULY 28, 1918. PAGES 1— System Brand Germany as Foe of Civilization, Says Lauzanne ne. 7 a Famous French Editor Tells How He Has Seen Both in Operation and How Remorseless and Conscienceless They Are—All German Pris- | oners Alike, for Their Identity Is Sunk in the State. ‘ By STEPHANE LAUZANNE, Editor of the Paris Matin and Member of the French High Commission to the United States. WASHINGTON, July 27. MONG the many things that will be al- A ways engraved on the tablets of my mem- ory, the deepest is that of the time when I ‘was on guard at the field of battle on the Ourcgq, morth of Meaux, on the when you have seen 10 German prisoners you have seen 1000; when you have questioned one Ger- man officer, you have questioned 50. The char- acteristic of the race is that they have abolished all individuality. You find yourself in an amor- phous mass, cast in a extremity of the battle A ny wrong, how line of the ’*Marne. Field of battle I have just written. No, it | -ROM GERMAN was not a field of | MANUAL. be, that the war demands is allowed.— uniform mold, not in the presence of human beings who think their own thoughts. I often saw trains ever great it may MILITARY battle, but a field of = carnage. I have forgotten the corpses I met in the roads or in the fields, with their grinning faces ‘and their distorted attitudes. But I shall never forget the ruin that was everywhere, the abominable manner in which the fields had been laid waste, the sactilegious pillage of homes. That bore the trade mark of German “kultur.” That trade mark will be enough to dishonor a nation for centuries. Some hundreds of meters from the village I noticed a woman lost in the immense beet fields. Apparently she was unharmed. I walked in her direction, thrusting aside with my legs corpses of men and horses, scaling the trenches, making a circuit around the craters made by shells. Sud- denly, what was my surprise at seeing two Ger- man soldiers, accompanied by a farmer, coming along a footpath. They stopped at six paces, gave me a military salute and pointed to the white brassard of the Red Cross they wore on ee arms. “Where do you come from?’ I asked. are you doing here?” “We come from that farm, where we have been for two days, caring for two of our wounded. We didn't see any French officer or soldier. We don’t know what to do. We want to go to the village down there” (they pointed out a hamlet two or three kilometers off), “where we left a doctor and 153 wounded.” “What “Véry good,” I said, “follow me.” | A Lesson in Humanity ; ] Obediently the two orderlies marched behind me to the village they had pointed out. It was situated on the national highway to Soissons. In this place where a hundred and fifty or two hundred Germans, quartered in four or five houses, under the guard of a company of Zouaves, who had just arrived a half-hour previously. The German Major, informed of: my arrival, stood in front of the main building. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. His face was the type the Alsatian Hansi loves to show in his books. He spoke very good French and even pretended that he did not want to answer the questions I asked him in his own language. “Show me your wounded,” I ordered. He immediately conducted me everywhere, ex- plaining the nature of each wound. Some were suffering and groaning; others, seeing the uni- form of a French officer, tried to raise themselves up and salute. The German Major asked: “When they come to evacuate the wounded to Meaux dr some other place, do you suppose I shall be allowed to accompany them and continue my treatment?” “I don’t know,” I replied, “but there, is one thing you can be sure of. My superiors will “! in accordance with the demands of humanity. Now you follow me.” I led him outside to the doorstep. I pointed out the poor homes of the village, ruined, re- duced to dust. Everywhere were the dwellings. of the entire region, with their furniture lying in the mud and ashes. “Look at that,” I said to him. your men have done.” The German officer turned very pale, then very red. He answered: “It's sad, but it’s war.” “No,” I replied, “it isn’t war. It’s pure barbar- “That is what ism and it’s abominable.” J Some few paces away from us French Zouaves In War as the French See It Were sitting beside some wounded Germans. their own glasses they poured out a little cordial for their prisoners; they gave them their last cigarettes. One of them had even taken, as if he were his brother, the head of a wounded Ger- man in his left hand to support it. With his right hand, very carefully, he was giving him a drink. I pointed that out to the German Major, saying: “There! That is war—at least it’s war as we But all the German prisoners repeated what - be had said to me as a set phrase. On the whole,| ~~ ' and his staff officer's card. And here is what he | + 3top in what is called a “Gare regulatrice,” where the prisoners are ques- tioned and distributed. These trains bring in prisoners and their officers. The commandant of the station, in accordance with his duty, has the officers appear before him, so that he may ques- tion them: | “Your name? Your rank?” The German states his name and rank, offer- ing of necessity his identification card. * “Your regiment?” “Such and such a regiment.” “Your army corps?” “Such and such an army corps.” “Who is the General in command?” Like an automaton the officer replies: “Das sage ich nicht.”’ (“I cannot answer that.’’) And you know that it would be an easier matter to make the stone beneath your feet talk than one of these prisoners. ’ mi et [ Stereotyped German Answer. | However, the commandant frowned § slightly, glanced over his notes and said, coldly: “I know who your General is. If you belong to such and such an army corps, the General in command must be Gen. von Bissing “Ich have nichts zu sagen.” (“I have nothing to say.’’) As a general thing, one of the staff had some- thing to say. The interpreter, the convoy officer or the station master would get a lot of fun out of reciting to the German passages from Von Bissing’s famous and ferocious proclamation or- dering that no quarter be given and that the troops should not encumber themselves with pris- oners. Then he would ask: “What would you say if we were to put such a principle into practice?” The explanation was simple and stereotyped. For the battered Cathedral of Rheims, for the total destruction of Clermont, for the systematic laying waste of Louvain, for the frightful com- pany of old men, women and children who were dragged into captivity, three words were the jus- tification—the three words of the German Major at Vincy: “Das ist Krieg.” (‘It is war.’’) For the blackened ruins of Senlis,’for that charming city of Louvain, razed to the ground in one night as completely as if the scourge of God had passed through. it; for Andenne, as- sassinated in cold blood with not one of its houses sg granted mercy by the assassins; for Tre- monde, where Gen. Sommerfeld, seated in a chair in the midst of the Grande Placc, gave the order that it be burned and replied to the entreaties of the Mayor: “No. Burn it to the ground!” Five other words sufficed to explain evéry- thing: “Civilians fired on our troops.” Not one village in flames, not one desecrated monument, not one organized killing, not one tor- tured city that does not fall under the one or the other of those justifications. “War is war,” or “Civilians fired on our troops.” The German War »Y/anual Doctors, savants, officers, Bavarians, Saxons and Prussians have adopted the double excuse with marvelous unity; they advance it in a cer- tain tone of voice. It is firmly imbedded in what is left of their conscience as firmly as the iron cross is riveted on their necks. : Besides, it was all planned, wished for, ar- ranged in advance. German frightfulness formed a part of the plan of campaign. It is enough to read the manual called “Kreigesgebrauch in Land- kriege” (“Military Usage in Landwarfare”) to be very much edified. Every German officer has had this manual in his hands since the days of peace. It comprised his rules of warfare. It was a 668 of his war equipment the same as his field glasses | reads on the very first page: War carried on energetically cannot be di- rected against the inhabitants and fortified places of the hostile state alone; it will en- _deavor, it ought to endeavor, to destroy equal- ly all the enemy’s intellectual and material re- Continued on Page Nine. What President’s Son-In-Law A TRIBUTE TO THE SOLDIERS OF ITALY ‘‘Why Does the World Not Learn of Your Army’s Part in the War?’’ Sayre Asked an Officer—‘‘We Are in to Fight, Not 'Talk,’’ He Replied, but Sayre Tells of Some Wonders He Saw—Men Have Brave Hearts and Trué Comradeship. aE and gallant fighting of the Italian soldiers; we turned to one of the Italian officers accom- panying us, and asked: front watching at close range the stirring By FRANCIS B. SAYRE. PART I. F: several days we had been at the Carso of Germany and Austria; her statesmen had con- ceived of her Mediterranean policy as clashing with that of England and France; her people had been taught to look upon the general in- terests of the Triple. “Why don’t America and England and France know more about the _ splendid things that Italy is doing? Why don’t you tell the world more about the Italian fight- lately returned. De B. SAYRE, President Wilson and the enly mem- ber of the President’s family who has yet visited the European battlefront, went there recently on a special mission for the Y. M. C. A., and has but Entente as hostile to | her own. Germany posed as her friend: and although the Ital- ians did not, as indi- viduals, love the Ger- mans, yet they could not escape the fact son-in-law of immediate ing?” “Italy is in the war to fight, and not to talk!” came back the quick reply. Often I have thought of that answer, especially during the days of the disastrous November re- treat when hardly a word broke Italy’s silence, and almost nothing was told of the indomitable pluck and splendid will by which a broken and weary army, facing a winter short of food, short of coal, short of many of the necessities of war, re-established its line of defense, reorganized itself and became once again a powerful and effi- cient fighting force. Perhaps America did not quite appreciate in those trying days the things that were being done officer’s reply comes home today, when Italian deeds, perhaps no more heroic than those of last December, have resulted in a smashing Italian victory. Italy is in the war to fight, and not to talk! 7 Visit to Front | It was in the early days of September, 1917, that for the Army Y. M. C. A., were privileged, upon the official invitation of the Italian Government, | to visit the Carso and Trentino fronts. | Our journey took us, fresh from the rain and( °® her knees, the victorious German march into mud and dreary plains of bloody Flanders, south- ward across France to the Mount Cenis Pass over into Italy. Once across the Alps, we found our- selves suddenly translated into a different world— a land of soft delight, a country of blue sunny 'skies and red-tiled roofs and gray campaniles of | grape vines, of picturesque valleys and mountains glorified with ever-changing lights and shadows. We stopped for a few hours at Milan; while we were feasting our eyes once again on the delicate tracerywork of the famous cathedral roof, fairy- like in its beauty under the rising moon, we heard with a distinct shock the familiar droning whir of an approaching airplane. A few moments aft- erwards we were watching a large fighting mono- plane hovering directly over the cathedral. Next day, when we entered Venice, the touch of modern warfare within that ancient city seemed still more strange. Today no one is al- lowed to enter the city except under special mili- tary permit. Venice, the romantic, has given place to Venice, prepared for war. The great bronze horses of St. Mark’s captured and removed by Napoleon at the opening of the last century and brought back to Venice at the time of his downfall, have again left their ancient post | guarding the portals of St. Mark’s, and have been carried away to safer pastures. - St. Mark’s itself is half-hidden behind protect- ing bulwarks of sandbags and timbers; the saints within are swathed in padding and wrappings to prevent injury in case of an Austrian bomb smashing through the roof. The noble Colleoni is invisible behind the protecting wall of sandbags; it is covered with a pointed roof, so as to deflect falling Austrian bombs. Hardly a picture is to be seen in Venice; almost all have been removed and stored in safer places. Our visit to Venice was indeed not to see again the pictures and works of art which all the world has learned to love, but to observe the aerial defenses with which Venice has provided herself—her batteries of anti-air- craft guns, and her extensive system of signals and alarms covering the entire city. Partly perhaps because we are prone to think Beauties Are Hidden of Italy only in terms of art and of the past, partly because of the great distance which sepa- rates America from Italy, many of us in the Western world, particularly at the outbreak of the great war, failed to appreciate the difficulty of Italy’s situation and the signifiance of her con- tribution to the allied cause. In those first historic days of August, 1914, when all Germany seemed suddenly to have gone mad, as though bent on the destruction of civ- ilization, when the hopes and fears of everyone were centered upon Belgium and France and En- gland, Italy was facing a crisis of her own, of large importance to the fortunes of the allied Powers. For a generation she had been the nominal ally on the Italian front. The significance of that ,; : a number of us, engaged upon a special mission ( openly flout the German war god, French divi- { | \ } that many powerful Italian institutions were supported by German capital, and that each year the trade with Ger- many, both as to exports and imports, was | greater than the trade with any other country. It was only natural, therefore, that when those first August days revealed so startlingly the soul of Germany, many people were in doubt as to what the course of Italy would be. For France it was a grave and perilous ques- tion. .Wave after wave of gray-green German troops were sweeping down across her northern fields, over every resistance. Every day was bringing them closer to Paris; for a time it seemed as though Paris were doomed. Only some superhuman effort could stop that terrible advance; if ever there were need of stout-heart- | ed soldiers to save a country’s life, France needed | them then. Would it be necessary, in a crisis like. that, to send precious regiments and divisions to, the South to guard her Italian frontier? Stag-| gered by the German onrush, she sent in hot haste to ask of Italy, the nominal ally of Germany and Austria, what her course would be. If Italy should even waver in her answer, if she dared not sions, s0 imperatively needed in the North, must be thrown along the Italian frontier; that might the contest easily mean the capture of Paris, and, with France Russia. But the heart of Italy rang true. i i ' / ] | | } | “No!”’ came the quick reply; “on no account | will we attack; on the faith of Italy you may rest | secure; no regiments will be necessary in the South!” But it was when the fighting commenced, after her entrance into the war, that the real soul of Italy was bared. It was the attempt to master what seemed like the impossible, in the teeth of almost every natural difficulty, that brought out the skill and the daring, the large faith and the sacrificial bravery of Italy. It is not so much in the length of Italy’s bat- tle line—for many months over three times as long as the English line in Flanders—but rather in the baffling and heartbreaking difficulties of her warfare in the mountainous parts of her line, | that Italy’s problems are unique. Her zigzag line) of trenches runs from the Adriatic across miles of | sun-baked, dusty plains until it reaches the moun-| tains, then up crazily into the Alps, surmounting | the tops of seemingly inaccessible peaks, plung- ing to the bottoms of deep green valleys, rising | dizzily again along sheer cliffs and over airy heights of rock and snow, until the clouds hide it | from view! Then it goes on through the snows of the Dolomites nine and ten thousand feet above sea level till it ends at the frontiers of Switzer- | [ Real Soul Bared land. To carry on modern trench warfare in a flat) country in a temperate climate is enough to tax | the genius of a nation to the utmost; to carry on this same mode of warfare along a line such | as this, amid the rigors of an Arctic climate, | where sheer cliffs and rocky walls afford scarce- | ly room for existence at all, seems little short. of miraculous. - j g Perched Like Eagles’ Nests In cramped huts, perched like eagles’ nests on the edges of beetling cliffs and precipices, in dugouts sandbagged and bombproofed against the enemy’s shell fire, in chambers hewn out of the solid rock, the Italian soldiers in the mountain fastnesses of the Trentino are living. They are enduring winter temperatures which frequently reach 30 and 40 degrees below zero; they are fac- ing avalanches and landslides which in the high mountains kill more men than enemy shell fire; and yet they are playing this heroic part with an almost childlike gayety and simplicity. They are fighting, almost as a matter of course, over moun-. tain heights and on the tops of snowy peaks which | limber would not care to. many a venturesome ascend, battling for their lives behind barbed wire entanglements, in trenches hewn out of rock or cut in snow and ice! Warfare such as this seems so incredible that one must see it with his own eyes to be convinced Continued on Page Four. ~ Fighting of American Troops Dispels Allied Gloom After SE ee Most Disastrous Year of War Simonds, Reviewing Campaigns of the Fourth Year of World Struggle, Reveals How Nearly the Cause of Civilization Against Kultur Was Lost by Successive Defeats of British, French and Italian Armies, Following Russian Collapse. By FRANK H. SIMONDS, Author of “The Great War” and “They Shall Not Pass.” (Copvricht. 1918. by Tribune Western nations, the gloomiest of the whole struggle, is ending under condi- tions which are more favorable and giv» more real cause for op- : fourth year of the world war for the ) ditions of the opening days of the war. By the end of last year, Germany was free to strike for Paris again; before the campaign of 1918 was well opened the peace of Brest-Litovsk and of Bucha- rest had eliminated timism than any that have existed in the past 12 months. We are en- tering the fifth year of not with any prospects of peace now or even within the ALLEYRAND Terror, ‘‘I lived.”’ asked to give an account of his adventures during the time of the Foch might make simi- lar answer, looking back over the diffi- cult and critical days from March 21 to Russia and Rumania, abolished the eastern front, given to the Germans the mastery of the Baltic and Black seas, placed the Kaiser's Generals in control of once said, when period of another year, July 19. But by this latter date he was the colossal Russian but under circum- able to face his foe with comparatively carcass and removed stances’ strikingly re- equal numbers and with the assurance from the eastern flank calling the _ situation that at no distant date and thenceforth of a completed Mittle after the first battle of the Marne. The second, and we may believe the final, blow of Germany, has been parried, if not broken. If we have not brought the new Napo- leonic edifice to the ruin of a Waterloo there are signs that the sive advantage. through the war he would have the deci- The collapse of the fifth German offensive, the success of Franco- American counter thrust launched upon the German right, as Joffre threw Mau- noury against Kluck in the Marne time; aa Lee threw Jackson.against Hooker at Chancelloraville, instantly supplied allied capitals with the basis for optimism long denied.—FRANK H. SIMONDS. Europa the immediate and apparently even an eventful menace of Slavdom. The Teuton seemed to have won his age long battle with the Slavs, his way to the Pacific lay open, while he still commanded the recent defeat may prove in some degree suggestive of Leipsic. The story of the fourth year of the struggle is measured by two major events: The collapse of Russia and the coming of the United States. When the year opened we were, all of us, still hoping against hope that the Russian operations in Galicia might prove the first sign of a renais- sance of Russian republic that might repeat the achievement of the first French republic and, in defending the liberty of the Slav world con- tribute mightily to the salvation of Western civ- J But before the campaign had come to an end Russia had ceased to be a military factor; trea- son and madness had done their work, and hence- forth the disintegration within was to be rapid; while German troops, released from the East, were to carry peril to the very edge of Paris and threaten Sir Douglas Haig’s mighty force with the fate which had been prescribed for the “con- temptible little army” of Field Marshal Sir John French in the opening days of the war. The world, particularly the allied world, was slow in perceiving what were to be the conse- quences of the Russian collapse. When the full German storm broke in March of the present year it took the allies by surprise and brought an unready coalition within measur- able distance of one of the great disasters of human history. But when the March blow had fallen and the extent of the danger was perceived, then the war became a race between America a@d Germany, a race Between our young troops, hur- ried across a submarine-infested ocean, and the last flower of German veterans thrown upon the allied lines in offensive after offensive, seeking a decision before America came. a As early as June of 1917, when Nivelle’s Aisne offensive failed, it became clear that unless America came to the rescue the war would be lost to our allies and Germany would win on the con- tinent something recalling Napoleon's success against Austria in 1805, Prussia in 1806 and against Russia in 1807. But what was not per- ceived at that time was that it was going to be 'ilization. The Russian Collapse America Was *»eeded a narrow question whether France, Britain and | Italy could hold against our coming, and, blind ‘to the real facts, our allies continued to ask of us material and money rather than men, until ‘the bitter awakening of March transformed the _whole situation. | The Russian revolution and the resulting an- ‘archy, which led to the demoralization of the ‘Russian army, in fact, produced a situation in which France and Britain could not win the war; it produced the condition tn which the possibility of a German success was patent, at least to Ger- 'mans and neutrals. It brought back the old prob- | lem of 1914, and in the next 12 months there was to be repeated the German effort of the Marne ‘campaign. ' The German Plan From Angust, 1917, onward, the German prob- lem and the German hope was to organize a new blow which should crush France and Britain before Russian operations in the East should demand attention. ' In a word, we went back suddenly to the con- Pee ie ay nll ee cn ee a % i Constantinople bridge to the nearer East. When the campaign of 1917 was over the Ger- man could calculate and did calculate that he should, with hands free and resources concen- trated upon the western front, dispose of France and Britain before America was ready, and then to negotiate a favorable peace with the American foe. The story of the campaign of 1917, after Aug. 1, is briefly told. For our allies, it is a history re- plete with misfortune. In August and Septem- ber the brilliant but foredoomed Brusiloff offen- sive in Galicia faded into the shameful and inde- scribable flight of Russian troops from the field of victory into the darkness of demoralization and disintegration. There was a moment when it seemed as if Lemberg was again in danger, we read again names of towns and rivers, the scenes of victories by the Russians in 1914, but in a few brief hours the Russian offensive in Galicia suc- cumbed to internal disease of the Russian nation. After August Russia was gone. .. Meantime, in the West, the British offensive in Flanders pursued its unlucky road to com- plete failure. It had been the conception of Haig and Robertson, striking north from Ypres and out of the famous old salient, to break the German line, cut off the troops on the Belgian seacoast or compel their retreat, free Ostend and Zeebruegge, abolish the submarine bases on this coast and, pressing eastward, throw the Germans behind the Scheldt and compel their later retire- ment out of France from the Lys to the Meuse: -— The British Defeat In this effort Plumer had made a brilliant be- ginning in June at Messines, but in July and August, Gough, later to disappear as a result of the Picardy defeat of the present year, had so handled affairs that a second operation had ended in costly failure and when Plumer resumed the direction of operations the weather was already changing and the golden moment had passed. In point of fact, the campaign of the British was al- ready sure to fail, for German troops were hasten- ing westward from Russia. Yet, doggedly and grimly. the British Gen- erals held their men to their task and the toll of casualties for the British in Flanders rivaled, if it did not pass, that of the Somme the previous year, while great hopes, excited by a brief but brilliant success before Cambrai, gave way to new On the map there was proof of a German re- Ridge and critics talked of the advance vantage ground in the next year to Ghen Lille, little dreaming that a few days would then suffice to compel the surrender these hills, won by so much sacrifice an and that Ypres itself was in peril as deadly as that of In this autumn the French army was through a periof of reorganization and sance. Its defeat in May had shaken it to very foundation. For a few brief weeks ig il bites morale was lower than at any time since the :