Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights. Kelly Miller

peaceful intentions toward our troops, attacked them in the most treacherous manner. With my authority the general commanding these troops has reduced the town to ashes and has had 110 persons shot. I bring this fact to the knowledge of the people of Liege in order that they may know what fate to expect should they adopt a similar attitude.

      GENERAL von BULOW.

       Liege, Aug. 22, 1914."

      CRUEL EXTREME OF PUNISHMENT.

      And yet this order showed only a cruel extreme of punishment where some punishment was to be expected. It was left for the retreating Germans of 1917 to destroy, without provocation and without purpose, motived by revenge and obsessed by the Nietschean doctrine of "spare not."

      Before Bapaume was evacuated it was deliberately converted into a mass of muck. There is no Bapaume now. It is perfectly understandable that the retreating soldiers should destroy their trenches and put up the question, "Tommy, how do you like your new trenches?" But why smear filth over the photograph of three little girls, a family treasure? All around Bapaume the villages were looted and the night the deliverers entered the destroyers made the sky lurid with the fires of towns and hamlets. Some 300 in the evacuated region were burned.

      At Nesle, Roye and Ham there was not time enough to destroy everything. The house of a doctor at Nesle, a specially attractive home, was not blown down for strategic purposes, but some soldiers did find time to drive axes through the mahogany panels of the beds and smash the clocks and mirrors. They were angry at being compelled to leave the house.

      Villages like Cressy, near Nesle, where a shell never fell in the course of the war, have been completely destroyed.

      PERONNE A HOPELESS RUIN.

      There is not a habitable house left in Peronne. The sixteenth century church of St. Jean is but a relic. W. Beach Thomas wrote after the retreat that nothing was left that was valuable enough to be worth collection by a penny tinker or a rag-and-bone merchant. Foul what you cannot have, was the motto.

      The famous ruins of the Feudal Castle of Coucy, one of the finest relics of architecture of its period, was wantonly blown up by the Germans on retreat. It was built in the thirteenth century by Enguerrand III and passed to the French crown in 1498, and was one of the great historic landmarks of Northern France.

      Coucy was one of the noblest relics of the Middle Ages, respected by the most barbarous wars of the past, whose donjon (greatest in all Europe) dates almost from Charlemagne, harmless, time-wrecked, illustrious Coucy!

      To give an idea of Coucy's importance, the French, in their first astonishment and sorrow, proposed to make reprisals on Hindenburg, should it take ten years. Of course, they will not; it is not their way.

      Coucy is a mountain of blasted stones. Shoun Kelly, American, owned one of the outer towers of the great castle and the story of its ownership is the American antithesis of German ravage. Americans were always faithful tourists to Coucy; but among them, one loved more than all the glorious old ruin and its story which began with Enguerrand, the Sire of Coucy, in the year 1210. This was the late Edmund Kelly, of New York and Paris, international lawyer and for many years counsel of the American Embassy in Paris. He meditated on the motto of old Enguerrand: "I am not king, nor prince, nor duke, nor even count: I am the Sire of Coucy!" In fact, the Sire made a record for standing off local kings.

      "He was a good American ahead of his time," said Lawyer Kelly; and he took to reading up the ancient chronicles, how Enguerrand's descendants stood off royalty for some 200 years, until finally bought out by the wealthy Louis of Orleans, and all the later glories of the place. Mazarin dismantled Coucy, but left it standing in its beauty; and Lawyer Kelly discovered it to be a State museum, impossible to be purchased, in these latter days, even by a millionaire. Not being one, he preferred it so, loving Coucy more than ever, the cultured American did the next best thing.

      A LITTLE TOWN REDUCED.

      The little town, once so rich, had dwindled since Mazarin. On the castle side stood two massive towers of the inner defense, belonging to the town. Mr. Kelly asked Mayor and department legislature to make a price on the nearest. As soon as he had bought his tower, he used loving care restoring it. He pierced windows through walls 16 feet thick. He built rooms in three stories, furnishing them in massive antique style. The tower roof was his shady terrace, covered with a little grove of century-old trees! From it he dominated Coucy. All its soul of beauty lay beneath his view.

      All was systematically blown up, the town, the towers, the castle, by retreating Germans in their rage. Just masses of crumbled stones. The German papers boast that it took 28 tons of high explosives, and any one can see, this hour, the plain of Coucy covered with a white layer of powdered limestone, for miles around.

      What for? To clear a battlefield, they say. It is not true. Nothing is cleared. The masses of crumbled stone remained, when they fled their "battlefield."

      The donjon was very high. It stood on a kind of bluff or elevation, overlooking the country, and before the days of aeroplanes it might have been used for observation. The donjon walls were 16 yards thick, not feet, but yards! No other tower in Europe had those dimensions. They tell a story about Mazarin. He deemed so strong a place, so near to Paris, might be dangerous to the Crown; so he dismantled Coucy militarily, without destroying its architectural beauty. The donjon worried him in those days when artillery could make no impression on its massive thickness. So Mazarin put 16 barrels of powder inside the tower, and set them off. The tower just converted itself into gun barrel! The powder blew out all the stories and the roof—shot them up like a gun pointed at the sky! But the tower stood, exactly as before.

      OF MASSIVE ARCHITECTURE.

      The masonry was admittedly the heaviest achieved by the Middle Ages. From the donjon extended three great vaulted halls. Massive buildings continued. There was a Gothic chapel, a Tribunal Hall, the Hall of the Nine Peers (whose statues remained), the Hall of the Nine Countesses (whose medallion-portraits were carved on the monumental chimney). There was a Romanesque chapel (relic from Charlemagne, like the original donjon), the separate Fortified Chateau of the Chatelain (the Sire's First Officer), and so on, and so on.

      The retreating Germans have not only blown up Coucy, but that other priceless relic, the Tower of the Grand Constable and the entire historic Chateau of Ham, and equally the Castle of Peronne, a jewel of beauty—all in one corner of the Vallois! On the smoking wreck of Peronne, they left a humorous placard:

      "Nicht aergen! Tur wundern! Don't be angry, just wonder!" Noyon and Peronne are sacked and ruined. At Chauny 1800 houses out of 2500 were deliberately burned, and at a distance they bombarded the remainder, full of old folks and children whom they had parked there. All the public buildings, churches, hospitals and poorhouse were blown up. Three hundred towns and villages were burning at one time in this small section of the Cradle of France. Hindenburg was at Roisel when they rounded up the populations, went through their pockets for their money (giving "receipts"), took their clothes off their backs (so that all the American relief agencies in Paris were overwhelmed with telegrams of appeal) and burgled all the safes in banks and business houses before setting fire to the town and blowing up the main street!

      ACCORDING TO THE PRINCIPLE OF WAR.

      The German official communique said that it was "all done uniquely according to the technical principles of modern war." At Berlin they caused an American correspondent to cable these words to his papers: "The enemy will find great difficulty to take shelter on a battlefield where everything has been completely razed. We regret the destruction of a beautiful region of France, but it was necessary to transform it into a clear field of battle before we quit it."

      They blew up the precious Romanesque Church of Tracy-le-Val (which dates before the Gothic). The church was situated in the midst of the great forest of Laigue; they blew up the church—and left the forest standing! No battlefield was cleared, but they hacked the bark to kill great noble trees by thousands. They made no effort to clear