ybody went to hear it. It
was a complete and decisive German victory, without a single man being
killed.

A Policy of Murder

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This article is taken from Conan Doyle's book "The German
War," and is reproduced by permission of the author.

When one writes with a hot heart upon events which are still recent one
is apt to lose one's sense of proportion. At every step one should check
one's self by the reflection as to how this may appear ten years hence,
and how far events which seem shocking and abnormal may prove themselves
to be a necessary accompaniment of every condition of war. But a time
has now come when in cold blood, with every possible restraint, one is
justified in saying that since the most barbarous campaigns of Alva in
the Lowlands, or the excesses of the Thirty Years' War, there has been
no such deliberate policy of murder as has been adopted in this struggle
by the German forces. This is the more terrible since these forces are
not, like those of Alva, Parma, or Tilly, bands of turbulent and
mercenary soldiers, but they are the nation itself, and their deeds are
condoned or even applauded by the entire national press. It is not on
the chiefs of the army that the whole guilt of this terrible crime must
rest, but it is upon the whole German Nation, which for generations to
come must stand condemned before the civilized world for this reversion
to those barbarous practices from which Christianity, civilization, and
chivalry had gradually rescued the human race. They may, and do, plead
the excuse that they are "earnest" in war, but all nations are earnest
in war, which is the most desperately earnest thing of which we have any
knowledge. How earnest we are will be shown when the question of
endurance begins to tell. But no earnestness can condone the crime of
the nation which deliberately breaks those laws which have been indorsed
by the common consent of humanity.

War may have a beautiful as well as a terrible side, and be full of
touches of human sympathy and restraint which mitigate its unavoidable
horror. Such have been the characteristics always of the secular wars
between the British and the French. From the old glittering days of
knighthood, with their high and gallant courtesy, through the eighteenth
century campaigns where the debonair guards of France and England
exchanged salutations before their volleys, down to the last great
Napoleonic struggle,