Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 217, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 September 1918 — Chaplain Would Exterminate Foe [ARTICLE]

Chaplain Would Exterminate Foe

Baltimore, Md.—Rev. George A. Griffin, a Baltimore Protestant Episcopal clergyman serving as chaplain with the Fifth field artillery, the regiment that fired America’s first shot in the war.has written a letter to Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs, a prominent Baltimorean, which was printed in full in the current issue of the Manufacturers’ Record, in which he discusses at length cruelties inflicted by the Germans upon civilians and soldiers. “I feel,” he says, “that, I express the sentiment of those who have seen and heard over here, when I say that were I in America today,* priest as I am, I should do my best to have put to death any Boche in America or any so-called American who would apologize in any way for what the Boche has done. “All that you have heard in America about them does not approximate the truth. There are little children right here in France with their little stumps of bands; there were some not far from my last camp, and young men with all the fingers of their right hand cut off. The other day a British officer and three Tommies told me that a short time ago they went as an advance party into a little, village from which the Boche had been driven back, and in a large room there were four young Canadians crucified, one on each wall of the room. Torture Young- Girls. “Also, when I was with the British they told me the Boches had taken young Belgian and French girls into their first line trenches and tortured them until their screams made the Scotch and the Canadians so crazed they would go over into the machine gun nests which the Boche had set up, using the women’s screams as a decoy. “And I have it on the word of ,a British officer, that they have stood (the officers) with guns leveled at their men to keep them from going over when the women scream, and being needlessly slaughtered. I cannot tell you what the Tommies told me they found when they drove these hell-fiends out of these positions; it is too awful even to think about. I also have it on the word of one of the greatest French abbes that the Boche were especially instructed to destroy convents —and kill or outrage the nuns —and he says that all through France and Belgium are ruined convents, and that the nuns were given to the soldiers to be outraged 4n camps. “These are not isolated cases nor abnormal conditions which prevail here and there where troops were'Urunk or without restraint. Go along the French or British front, and the only conclusion you arrive at is that they are just the ground principle of Boche efficiency in action. “It is American blood that is flowing now, and God grant it may give America some strength to realize what we are up against. To talk of terms until the Boche is exterminated is to league with Satan for a corner in hell. Privations, sacrifices! What can jrou do at home to compare with what these men of ours are doing over here? Meatless days, wheatless days, sugarless days, good women knitting, benefits for the Red Cross —or all your social diversions with a charitable object sandwiched in! “When you are out on a shell-swept hill and the shells are going by like bats out of hell, as the soldiers say,

and it’s dark as the grave, and every man, God bless him! stands strong and true, camouflaging all his own feelings for your sake and for the sake of what he has back home, meatless days and wheatless days, and Liberty bond campaigns seem cheap as your support of him in such an hour. “Loathe the Boche—preach against him—work against him, wherever he is, ostracize him socially and commercially. Take no chance—even though his reputation for loyalty has been a long-standing one. The leopard cannot change his spots—neither can the Boche demon lose his horns. I’m begging you now—as the Boche are trying to murder us—to help wake every one up to the fact that America must realize what the world is facing over here. Can’t you see it —can’t America see it —how everything is hanging in the balance? And I know that the weight which shall cast It down Is when your loathing for the Boche will so burn in you as to make you count nothing—consider nothing—but his extermination.”