The Rainbow Division Leaves
for France
AS the rainbow is heaven’s token of faith, so have we faith in these modern knights journeying to beloved France to give battle to invading barbarians.
Ponder a moment over these men of the Rainbow Division, lads with minds clean as their hearts are true, and compare them with the blood-craving hordes reared in a school having no other aim than to kill their fellow beings. One is Man in the superlative, and for the other there is no name sufficiently abhorrent.
When an American soldier enters Hun territory we know how scrupulously the laws of humanity will be respected: he will at least be knightly and merciful.
And the four years’ record of German savagery is so well known that it must forever befoul the pages of history.
Lack of opportunity in the library has prevented a thorough exploration of the unspeakable atrocities of the early Huns who under Attila ravaged a great part of Europe. But sufficiently have I read to be convinced that the Huns and Vandals and Goths of early history, compared with the Hohenzollern-inspired fiends, were scarcely more than bungling altruists. We know it to be fact that German soldiers murdered priests and raped nuns in Belgium, violated practically every young woman in the Aisne and Champagne, razed defenseless towns and hamlets in these French Departments, murdered old people and children and mutilated youths everywhere, delighted in destroying hospital ships and treated Red Cross signs as targets for their guns, inoculated French prisoners as a means of furthering the Berlin plan to diminish the French race, and in cold blood murdered scores of women and children on the Lusitania.
These are awful indictments, with not one excusable on the ground of military need or expediency. Given trial at the bar of civilization their perpetrators must forever be judged as outside the pale of humanity and hereafter can have no standing in lands where the principles of Christianity and humanity have a meaning. With my own eyes I have seen scores of proofs of German “frightfulness”; with me it is not hearsay. And remember that it was none other than Goethe who wrote that “the Prussian was born a brute, and civilization will make him ferocious.”
Positive is it that the United States and her Allies will crush the conscienceless militarism of Germany, and ever of good omen is the Rainbow, telling of improving skies and perfect conditions for the morrow.
FREDERIC COURTLAND PENFIELD, American Ambassador
to Austria-Hungary, 1913-1917.