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UNITED STATES FOOD ADMINISTRATION 



The 



PRUSSIAN SYSTEM 



.t/ 



BY 



V, 



Fv C. WALCOTT 




2 Groh 



WASHINGTON, D.C 
SEPTEMBER, 1917 



D. 
JAN 



Of D. 
2\ 1918 






Th 



le 

PRUSSIAN SYSTEM 

Told by F. C. Walcott at Conference of Field Men, Sept. 12. 

This I have seen. I could not believe it unless I had seen it 
through, arid through. For several weeks I lived with it; I 
went all about it and back of it; inside and out of it was 
shown to me — until finally I came to realize that the incredible 
was true. It is monstrus, it is unthinkable, but it exists. It is 
the Prussian system. _ * 

A year ago I went to Poland to learn its facts concerning the remnant 
of a people that had been decimated by war. The country had been 
twice devastated. First the Russian army swept through it and then 
the Germans. Along the roadside from Warsaw to Pinsk, the present 
firing line 230 miles, near half a million people had died of hunger and 
cold. The way was strewn with their bones picked clean by the crows. 
With their usual thrift, the Germans were collecting the larger bones to 
be milled into fertilizer, but finger and toe bones lay on the ground 
with the mud covered and rain soaked clothing. 

Wicker baskets were scattered along the way — the basket in which 
the baby swings from the rafter in every peasant home. Every mile 
there were scores of them, each one telling a death. I started to count, 
but after a little I had to give it up, there were so many. 

That is the desolation one saw along the great road from Warsaw to 
Pinsk, mile after mile, more than two hundred miles. They told me a 
million people were made homeless in six weeks of the German drive 
in August and September, 1916. They told me four hundred thousand 
died on the way. The rest, scarcely half alive, got through with the 
Russian army. Many of these have been sent to Siberia; it is these 
people whom the Paderewski committee is trying to relieve. 

In the refugee camps, 300,000 survivors of the flight were gathered 
by the Germans, members of broken families. They were lodged in 
jerr>'-built barracks, scarcely water-proof, unlighted, unwarmed in the 
dead of winter. Their clothes, where the buttons were lost, were sewed 
on. There were no conveniences, they had not even been able to wash 



for weeks. Filth and infection from vermin were spreading. The\ 
were famished, their daily ration a cup of soup and a piece of bread as 
big as my fist. 

In Warsaw, which had not been destroyed, a city of one million in- 
habitants, one of the most prosperous cities of Europe before the war, 
the streets were lined with people in the pangs of starvation. Famished 
and rain-soaked, they squatted there, with their elbows on their knees 
or leaning against the buildings, too feeble to lift a hand for a bit of 
money or a morsel of bread if one offered it, perishing of hunger and 
cold. Charity did what it could. The rich gave all that they had, the 
poor shared their last crust. Hundreds of thousands were perishing. 
Day and night the picture is before my eyes — a people starving, a nation 
dying. 



In that situation, the German commander issued a proclamation. 
Every able-bodied Pole was bidden to Germany to work. If any re- 
fused, let no other Pole give him to eat, not so much as a mouthful, 
under penalty of German military law. 

This is the choice the German government gives to the conquered 
Pole, to the husband and father of a starving family : Leave your fam- 
ily to die or survive as the case may be. Leave your country which is 
destroyed, to work in Germany for its further destruction. If you are 
obstinate, we shall see that you surely starve. 

Staying with his folk, he is doomed and they are not saved; the 
father and husband can do nothing for them, he only adds to their risk 
and suffering. Leaving them, he will be cut off from his family, they 
may never hear from him again nor he from them. Germany will set 
him to work that a German workman may be released to fight against 
his own land and people. lie shall be lodged in barracks, behind barbed 
wire entanglements, under armed guard. He shall sleep on the bare 
ground with a single thin blanket. He shall be scantily fed and his 
earnings shall be taken from him to pay for his food. 

That is the choice which the German Government offers to a proud, 
sensitive, high-strung people. Death or slavery. 

When a Pole gave me that proclamation, I was boiling. But I had to 
restrain myself. I was practically the only foreign civilian in the coun- 
try and I wanted to get food to the people. That was what I was there 
for and I must not for any cause jeopardize the undertaking. I asked 
Governor General Von Beseler, "Can this be true?" 

"Really, I cannot say," he replied, "I have signed so many proclama- 
tions ; ask General Von Kries." 



So I asked General Von Kries. "General, this is a civilized people. 
Can this be true?" 

"Yes," he said, "it is true" — with an air of adding, Why not? 

I dared not trust myself to speak; I turned to go. "Wait," he said. 
And he explained to me how Germany, official Germany, regards the 
state of subject peoples. 



Even now I find it hard to describe in comprehensible terms the mind 
of official Germany, which dominates and shapes all German thought 
and action. Yet it is as hard, as clear-cut, as real as any material thing. 
I saw it in Poland, I saw the same thing in Belgium, I hear of it in 
Serbia and Roumania. For weeks it was always before me, always the 
same. Officers talked freely, frankly, directly. All the staff officers 
have the same view. 

Let me try to tell it, as General Von Kries told me, in Poland, in the 
midst of a dying nation. Germany is destined to rule the world, or at 
least a great part of it. The German people are so much human ma- 
terial for building the German state, other people do not count. All is 
for the glory and might of the German state. The lives of human be- 
ings are to be conserved only if it makes for the state's advancement^ 
their lives are to be sacrificed if it is to the state's advantage. The 
state is all, the people are nothing. 

Conquered people signify little in the German account. Life, liberty, 
happiness, human sentiment, family ties, grace and generous impulse, 
these have no place beside the one concern, the greatness of the German 
state. 

Starvation must excite no pity; sympathy must not be allowed, if it 
hampers the main design of promoting Germany's ends. 

'Starvation is here,' said General Von Kries. 'Candidly, we would 
like to see it relieved ; we fear our soldiers may be unfavorably affected 
by the things that they see. But since it is here, starvation must serve 
our purpose. So we set it to work for Germany. By starvation we can 
accomplish in two or three years in East Poland more than we have in 
West Poland, which is East Prussia, in the last hundred years. With 
that in view, we propose to turn this force to our advantage.' 

This country is meant for Germany,' continued the keeper of starv- 
ing Poland. Tt is a rich alluvial country which Germany has needed 
for some generations. We propose to remove the able-bodied working 
Poles from this country. It leaves it open for the inflow of German 
working people as fast as we can spare them. They will occupy it and 
work it.' 



Then with a cunning smile, 'Can't you see how it works out? By and 
by we shall give back freedom to Poland. When that happens Poland 
will appear automatically as a German province.' 

In Belgium, General Von Bissing told me exactly the same thing. 'If 
the relief of Belgium breaks down we can force the industrial popula- 
tion into Germany through starvation and colonize other Belgians in 
Mesopotamia where we have planned large irrigation works; Germans 
will then overrun Belgium. Then when the war is over and freedom 
IS given back to Belgium, it will be a German Belgium that is restored. 
Belgium will be a German province and we have Antwerp — which is 
what we are after.' 

In Poland, the able-bodied men are being removed to relieve the Ger- 
man workman and make the land vacant for Germany. In Belgium, 
the men are deported that the country may be a German colony. In 
Serbia, where three-fourths of a million people out of three millions 
have perished miserably in the last three years, Germany hardens its 
heart, shuts its eyes to the suffering, thinks only of Germany's gain. 
In Armenia, six hundred thousand people were slain in cold blood by 
Kurds and Turks under the domination and leadership of German 
officers — Germany looking on, indifferent to the horror and woe, intent 
only on seizing the opportunity thus given. War, famine, pestilence — 
these bring to the German mind .10 appeal for humane effort, only the 
resolution to profit from them to the utmost that the German state may 
be powerful and great. 

That is not all. Removing the men, that the land may be vacant 
for German occupation, that German stock may replace Belgians, Poles, 
Servians, Armenians, and now Roumanians, Germany does more. 
Women left captive are enslaved. Germany makes all manner of lust 
its instrumentality. 

The other day a friend of mine told me of a man just returned from 
Northern France. "I cannot tell you the details," he said, "man to 
man, I don't want to repeat what I heard." Some of the things he did 
tell — shocking mutilation and moral murder. He told of women, by 
the score, in occupied territory of Northern France, prisoned in un- 
derground dungeons, tethered for the use of their bodies by officers 
and men. 

If this is not a piece of the Prussian system, it is the logical product 
of disregard of the rights of others. 



Such is the German mind as it was disclosed to me in several weeks' 
contact with officers of the staff. Treaties are scraps of paper, if they 
hinder German aims. Treachery is condoned and praised, if it falls in 



with German interest. Men, lands, countries are German prizes. Pop 
ulations are to be destroyed or enslaved so Germany may gain. Women 
are Germany's prey, children are spoils of war. God gave Germany 
the Hohenzollern and together they are destined to rule Europe and, 
eventually, the world — -thus reasons the Kaiser. 

Coolly, deliberately, officers of the German staff, permeated by this 
monstrous philosophy, discuss the denationalization of peoples, the de- 
struction of nations, the undoing of other civilizations, for Germany's 
account. 

In all the world such a thing has never been. The human mind has 
never conceived the like. Even among barbarians, the thing would be 
incredible. The mind can scarcely grasp the fact that these things are 
proposed and done by a modern government professedly a Christian 
government in the family of civilized nations. 

This system has got to be rooted out. If it takes everything in the 
world, if it takes every one of us, this abomination must be overthrown. 
It must be ended or the world is not worth living in. No matter how 
long it takes, no matter how much it costs, we must endure to the end 
with agonized France, with imperiled Britain, with shattered Belgium, 
with shaken Russia. 

We must hope that Germany will have a new birth as Russia is being 
reborn. We must pray, as we fighl* against the evil that is in Germany, 
that the good which is in Germany may somehow prevail. We must 
trust that in the end a Germany really great with the strength of a won- 
derful race may find its place as one of the brotherhood of nations in 
the new world that is to be. 

The responsibility of success or failure rests now upon our shoulders ; 
the eyes of the world are anxiously watching us. Are we going to be 
able to rise to the emergency, throw off our inefficiency, and prove that 
Democracy is safe for the world? 

September 13, 1917. 



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