ere 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 the forest; but weeping
old French peasants told how half a German regiment was occupied three
days in barking trees to prevent the sap from mounting. The crushed
pearl of architecture lies in a dying forest.

At Le Novion, torch in hand, they burned 223 houses; but all the gutted
walls are standing.

What technical principles of war command the wholesale destruction of
young fruit trees? In 20 orchards, by count, in sweet Leury (hidden at
the bottom of a valley) every peach, plum, apricot and pear tree has
been assassinated--hacked and standing, when the trunks are thick, and
sprawling, severed by one blow of a sharp hatchet, young trees from the
thickness of your wrists to your thumb. The French, with loving care,
trained peach and pear trees against sunny walls, as if they were
grapevines. The slender trunks are cut--and the garden walls left
standing.

DESECRATION OF TREES.

The soldiers spared neither the orchards nor the single trees that took
a generation to grow, and would have borne fruit for generations to
come. Reapers and binders and other farming machines were collected and
broken to pieces. One might see a measure of advantage that the
deliverers would gain from these things if not destroyed, but it is an
awful war doctrine that refuses to discriminate between the immediate
and the eventual, the direct and the indirect, the important and the
negligible advantage that would impoverish posterity to get a dime in