8 
LAND &> WATER 
October 31, 1918 
French were compelled to restore after their defeats in 1814 
and 1815. The British and French looted the Chinese palaces. 
It would be a stupid piece of hypocrisy to pretend that the 
armies of civilised nations have not been guilty in this respect 
in almost every war ; but the German loot has been universal 
as well as calculated. Everything that could be stolen has 
been stolen. It is a thing wholl} novel in Europe. 
Theft, however abominable, is nothing compared with 
murder, and murder in general, the murder of our women 
upon the Leinster, for instance, to quote but one of a thousand 
crimes, even that is not morally so detestable as the cold- 
blooded and calculated murder of an individual. Cold- 
blooded and calculated murders of individuals have been 
committed by the thousand. Even a short list of the worst 
cases when you see it set out in records (which, I am glad 
to say, have been carefully preserved) looks interminable. 
I will give three instances out of these thousands. 
Immediately after their invasion of Belgium, only a few 
yards from the point where they crossed the Meuse, a Prussian 
officer ordered the murder of a man and his son in a sub- 
stantial house near the river. The wife and the daughters 
of the man looked out of the window in the morning after 
the invasion, and saw the husband and the brother lying 
dead against the wall of their yard. These men had offered 
no opposition. Their murder was an act deliberately under- 
taken to strike terror, and even had they offered opposition 
they would have been wholly within their rights, as the 
territory was neutral. I have heard it not from the lips of 
the women herself, but from a witness who spoke with that 
woman at great length, and heard the whole matter in detail. 
At Senhs a Prussian officer took the aged Mayor of the 
town and killed him in cold blood in order to strike terror 
at the very gates of Paris, when the enemy thought their 
victory inevitable. He had no excuse. It was done in 
order to make the other authorities of the neighbourhood 
submissive ; it was done in order to rule by terror. At 
Guebervillers, a number of men and boys were taken as 
hostages by the local officer as he marched through (we 
have his name, as we have the names of the other criminals). 
The officer sat down at a table in a field, poured himself out 
some champagne which he had stolen, and said : " When 
I raise my glass that will be the signal for shooting these 
men." He lifted his glass, and as he drank they were mur- 
dered. One of them quite a little boy, I believe. 
There are three instances, and one could fill a large book 
with others of the same kind. 
Now, if these things go unpunished, European civilisation 
is irrecoverably lost. It will bleed to death. They will be 
repeated in future wars, and what you may call the moral 
conventions of Christendom will fall to dust. Therefore, it 
is an essential point which I make the fifth point of this list 
that the criminals should be handed over, duly tried, and 
punished according to their crimes, in such number and in 
such instances as the authorities of civilisation may determine. 
There is no way out of it. Neglect this duty, and you are 
committing suicide. No one can fail to see the inexorable 
logic of the thing. 
THE TEST CASE OP POLAND 
6. In the establishment of free nationaUties, upon which 
we are, of course, determined (and which, remember, is a 
duty incumbent upon us in domestic policy as well as in 
foreign poHcy) the test point is Poland. 
It is the test-point for the West precisely because 'it is 
the problem which the West least understands. Apart from 
its moral aspect, it is a political necessity unless we are to 
see the Slav world organised and used by Germans in the 
future. 
Nothing is easier than to argue the difficulties of any par- 
ticular- political problem. The enemies of Poland, including 
great numbers of German-speaking men living upon Polish 
territory, men who are not Poles at all, will, when the settle- 
ment comes, confuse the issue by all manner of discussion. 
They will say (with truth) that the boundaries of the Polish 
State have varied immensely with varying periods. They 
will use the statistics drawn up by Prussia in the past to 
contend that the districts undoubtedly Polish are only 
partially so ; for the Prussian statistics went by language 
and counted non-Polish anyone who could speak the German 
language at all after 150 years of colonisation and oppression 
-—and this oppression taking the form of compulsory educa- 
tion in German. They will do everything to muddy the waters. 
There is a Polish State just as much as there is an English 
and a French State. Leave the matter to a free vote of 
men of Polish] nationality alone, make your test, and you will 
easily determine what is Poland and what is not. That 
State must have access to the sea, and the only port by 
which it can have proper access to the sea is the port of 
Dantzig. You will be told that such a concession is not 
practicable, that Dantzig is a German town, that the cession 
of Dantzig would cut Prussia in two. There is no reason 
why Prussia should not be cut in two. In so far as Dantzig 
is a German town, it is German by colonisation. The 
statistics which, pretend that only a tiny' percentage of its 
population is Polish are false statistics. They merely mean 
that a very small proportion are iniable to speak German. 
If you attempt the resurrection of Poland without Dantzig 
3'ou are in for prolonged war, or, as an alternative, for the 
resurrection of Prussian power. That, then, is the sixth 
point : the complete re-establishment of Poland with its 
own, and only possible, access to the sea, the access which 
it enjoyed for centuries, and which is vital to its being. In 
this point one includes, of course, all the lesser and more 
obvious restorations of national boundaries, one includes the 
old boundaries of Lorraine, for instance (which means the 
upper Saar basin, the re-estabhshment of the Bohemian 
people, etc.). 
INTERNATIONAL CONTROL 
7. It is vitally necessary to this country in particular, 
and also to Europe as a whole, that the two entries of the 
inland seas, the Kiel Canal and the Dardanelles and Bos- 
phorus, should be under some form of international control, 
whether by being handed over to some small Power or not. 
You cannot leave either of these entries in the hands of 
anyone who can forbid their use to Europe from policy or 
caprice. 
The supply of oil and of grain to the West largely depends 
upon the one ; the supply of wood, of certain metals, and, 
more important, the immediate access to Northern Russia 
and to Finland, depends upon the other. Further, to leave 
the Kiel Canal in the hands of those who have abused their 
power (and who could not have built it but for the war of 
aggression in 1864), is to leave a perpetual menace of naval 
force against Western civilisation. 
These seven points which I have here tabulated form not 
a complete but an essential scheme for the definition of 
victory. There are many other problems with which such 
victory confronts us. Most of them cannot even be ap- 
proached by men who have not special local knowledge, 
and I certainly do not pretend to that. Some of them 
involve discussion between the Allies too delicate to be 
mentioned yet. But these seven points are sufficient to 
define our attitude towards the enemy at least when he 
has been warred down. 
There remains a doubtful and debatable point which I 
will not put in such a list— the treatment of specific enemy 
material of such a sort as is serviceable for hostage. Some 
hold, and proclaim it, that for every monument destroyed 
and for every town destroyed or damaged, a corresponding 
monument or town should be destroyed upon the enemy's 
side. I am not of that opinion, and this for reasons which 
I will now give. 
The destruction of any part of wealth, added to the 
enormous destruction already accomplished, seems to me 
to be an injury done to ourselves. For instance, there is 
a grave shortage of housing room — of defence against the 
weather. It is practicable and reasonable to exact from 
the enemy such housing room for those whom he has dis- 
possessed. It would be an excellent thing, for instance, 
to say: "You destroyed Rheims ; Aix shall be used, tem- 
porarily, at .any rate — and, better still, permanently — as 
habitation for those of Rheims who may desire to take it 
over. The former occupants and proprietors may go where 
they will, further east." The destruction of monuments 
seems to me, I confess, wanton and silly. Western Germany, 
when it lay under the influence of civilisation for so many 
centuries, produced many admirable and noble momunents, 
copies of western and southern work. Who would be so 
foolish as to desire the destruction of the cathedral where 
Charlemagne -is buried in Aix, one of the great monuments 
of the Gauls ? The destruction of the western face of Cologne, 
with its hideous modern spires, would no doubt be an excel- 
lent thing, the pulling down methodically undertaken and 
other work erected not by Germans, but by men who know 
how to build. But we have other things to do before we 
can indulge in these luxuries. In general, it might seem 
that the true policy on this debated point is to obtain repara- 
tion without destruction. 
1 
AN Exhibition of War Cartoons and Sketches at the Front, by 
Louis Raemaekers, opens at the Galleries of the Fine Art 
Society, 148 New Bond Street, on November 2nd. All readers of 
Land & water are familiar with Mr. Raemaekers' work, and should 
take this opportunity of seeing a fine collection of original drawings. 
