NEWS PUBLISHED BY THE GERMAN GENERAL GOVERNMENT.
BERNE, _7th February_.--The representative of the Bund has been received in Berlin by Herr von Jagow, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who spoke of Switzerland in the most friendly manner. Herr von Jagow says: The strictly neutral attitude of Switzerland has produced the most favourable impression in Germany. We take a very keen interest in a neutral, independent, and powerful Switzerland.
While in Belgium they burn houses and torture civilians, on the pretext that the latter have fired on them, they congratulate the Hungarian peasants who took up arms to defend their country against the Russian invader. The contrast here is so obvious that it even struck one German--Herr Maximilian Harden. In an article in _Jingoism, a Disease of the Mind_, he reproaches his compatriots with having two weights and two measures (published in _Vorwärts_, August 1914).
They push their effrontery to the point of photographing their own francs-tireurs, so that no doubt may be left in our minds. The _Berl. Ill. Zeit._ of the 16th March, 1915 (p. 261), gives a photograph "from the theatre of the war in the Carpathians"--"Ruthenian Peasant employed in the Austro-Hungarian Army to guard roads and telegraph-lines." The peasant, without uniform, carries a rifle.
Lastly, let us cite a case in which cynicism is allied to pedantry. On the calcined walls of the Hôtel de Ville of Dinant (burned on the 23rd and 24th August, 1914) is a chronogram. The letters are cut in a slab of marble let into the wall facing the Meuse. The fire had rendered the inscription illegible, but the commandant of the town, in March 1915, had the slab re-painted black and the letters re-gilt. This is the inscription:--
PAX ET SALVS NEVTRA LITATEM SERVANT IBVS DETVR.
("May peace and security be granted to those who preserve neutrality.")
Herr Otto Eduard Schmidt, returning from the French front by way of Dinant, was struck by this inscription. "I could not learn for certain," he says, "by questioning passing soldiers of the Landsturm, whether the inscription had lately been placed there or had merely been re-gilt. But in any case, I should regard it an insult to German authority, and I am astonished that this insult should be tolerated" (O. E. Schmidt, _Eine Fahrt zu den Sachsen an die Front_, p. 131). What would Herr Schmidt say if he knew that it was his own countrymen who, in a fit of shameless cynicism, caused this inscription to be renovated?