My individual wish is to see them pictured as crimson as possible,
that men may the fiercer revolt against the shame and horror of
this red butchery called war. But this is a record of just one
observer's reactions and experiences in the war zone. After weeks
in this contested ground, the word "atrocity" now calls up to my
mind hardly anything I saw in Belgium, but always the savageries I
have witnessed at home in America.

For example, the organized frightfulness that I once witnessed in
Boston. Around the strikers picketing a factory were the police in
full force and a gang of thugs. Suddenly at the signal of a shrill
whistle, sticks were drawn from under coats and, right and left,
men were felled to the cobblestones. After a running fight a score
were stretched out unconscious, upon the square. As blood
poured out of the gashes, like tigers intoxicated by the sight and
smell thereof, the assailants became frenzied, kicking and beating
their victims, already insensible. In a trice the beasts within had
been unleashed.

If in normal times men can lay aside every semblance of restraint
and decency and turn into raging fiends, how much greater cause
is there for such a transformation to be wrought under the stress of
war when, by government decree, the sixth commandment is
suspended and killing has become glorified. At any rate my
experiences in America make credible the tales told in Belgium.

But there are no pictures of these outrages such as the Germans
secured after the Russian drive into their country early in the war.
Here are windrows of mutilated Germans with gouged eyes and
mangled limbs, attesting to that same senseless bestial ferocity