ain. This was
a crime against international law as well as a sin against humanity.

My captain returned to The Hague the next morning, bringing his report.
He had seen the horror with his own eyes. More: with the care of a true
officer he had made a map of the course taken by the air-ship in its
flight over the city. That map showed beyond a doubt that the aim of the
marauder was to destroy the principal hospital, the hotel where the
Belgian Ministers lived, and the palace in which the King and Queen with
their children were sleeping.

I cabled the facts to Washington at once, and sent the map with a fuller
report the next day. I felt deeply (and ventured to express my feeling)
that the United States could, and ought to, protest against this clear
violation of the law of nations--this glaring manifestation of a spirit
which was going to make this war the most cruel and atrocious known to
history. The foreboding of a return to barbarism has been fulfilled,
alas, only too abominably!

In every step of that downward path Germany has led the way, by the
perfection of her scientific methods applied to a devilish purpose.

Take, for example, the use of poisonous gas in warfare. This was an
ancient weapon, employed long before the beginning of the Christian era.
It had been abandoned by civilized nations, and was prohibited by one of
the Hague conventions, for a period of five years. But that period
having expired, and the convention being only a "scrap of paper,"
Germany revived the ancient deviltry in a more scientific form. On April
22, 1915, she sent the yellow clouds of death rolling down upon the
trenches of Ypres, where the British defended the last city of outraged
Belgium. The suffocating horrors of that hellish method of attack are
beyond description. The fame of this achievement of spectacled barbarism
belongs to the learned servants of the predatory Potsdam gang. But we
cannot blame the Allies if they were forced reluctantly to take up the
same weapon in self-defense.

IV

The real character and the inhuman effect of the German invasion were
brought home to us, and made painfully clear to our eyes and our hearts,
by the amazing tragic spectacle of the flood of refugees pouring out of
Belgium.

It began slowly. When the quaint frontier town of Vise, surrounded by
its goose-farms, was attacked and set on fire on August 4, there were
many families from the neighborhood who fled to Holland. When Liege was
ca