Finally, on the volume's last page, is found this extraordinary maxim:
"Any wrong that the war demands, however great it may be, is allowed."
Therefore the horrors which the Germans performed from the war's very beginning, which provoked an expression of great indignation from all the civilized world, were not perpetrated in a moment of orgy or madness. They have been perpetrated coldly, deliberately, intentionally.
Besides, not only the officers and the common soldiers have been taught to make war in this barbarous fashion. It has been taught to the entire German people. This precept proves the case. It emanates not from a soldier but from a poet, who is not addressing the military class but the civilians, the women, the children, and all Germany. It is the "Hymn of Hate" by the poet Heinrich Vierordt, which, before the war, was recited in even the German kindergartens:
Hate, Germany! Slit the throats of your millions of enemies. Raise a monument of their smoking corpses that will rise to the heavens!
Germany, arm yourself with brazen armor and pierce with your bayonet the heart of every enemy. Take no prisoners! Strike them dumb. Transform into deserts the lands that lie near you!
Hate, Germany! Victory will come from your anger. Shatter their skulls with blows from your ax and the butt of your musket. These brigands are timid beasts.... They are not men.... May your fist perform the judgment of God!
It is useless to say what this spirit has brought about. Germany has carried on the war with vigor, has armed herself with brazen armor! She has transformed neighboring lands into deserts! She has slit throats, laid waste fields, shattered skulls, she has destroyed all that lay in her path! She has tried to impress the terror she holds salutary upon the souls of inoffensive old men and women and children!
This is the first of all the reasons why it is necessary now to fight, and to fight to the death; because these men will understand the abominable nature of "frightfulness" only when they see that "frightfulness" does not pay; only when they see the uselessness of unchaining horror and of beginning another war. Let an assassin go at liberty and he will commence his killing all over again; send him to the electric chair and he will regret his crime.