The basest and the worst that one can
dream of is it not that campaign of slander and blackmail which they
originated after their violation of Belgium's neutrality? Of course they
did it--as a murderer who slanders his victim--in the hope to justify
their crime."
It is evil to murder non-combatants. It is more evil to "rationalize"
the act--to invent a moral reason for doing an infamous thing. First,
Belgium suffered a vivisection, a veritable martyrdom. Now, she is
officially informed by her executioners that she was the guilty party.
She is not allowed to protest. She must sit quietly under the charge
that her sacrifice was not a sacrifice at all, but the penalty paid for
her own misbehavior. This is a more cruel thing than the spying that
sapped her and the atrocities practised upon her, because it is more
cruel to take a man's honor than his property and his life.
"If the peasants had stayed in their houses, they would have been safe."
When they stayed in their houses they were burned along with the houses.
I saw this done on September 7, 1914, at Melle.
"The peasants shot from their houses at the advancing German army."
I saw German atrocities. The peasants did not shoot. It is the old
familiar formula of the _franc-tireur_. That means that the peasant, not
a soldier, dressed in the clothing of a civilian, takes advantage of his
immunity as a noncombatant, to secrete a rifle, and from some shelter
shoot at the enemy army.
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