November 11, 1918, will go down in history as the memorable day in which the last surviving medieval tyranny in Europe disappeared in blood and smoke; for its final act was filled with characteristic hate and brutality.

In the very last hours before armistice took effect, German batteries poured a deluge of high explosives and poison gas on Mezieres, where there were no allied soldiers at all, but only civilians, men, women and children, twenty thousand of them, penned like rats in a trap, without possibility of escape.  Says one correspondent, describing that horror:  “Words cannot depict the plight of the unhappy victims of this crowning German atrocity.  Incendiary shells fired the hospital, and by the glare of a hundred fires the wounded were carried to a shelter of cellars where the whole population was crouching.

“That was not enough to appease the bitter blood lust of the Germans in defeat.  Cellars may give protection from fire or melinite; but they are worse than death traps against the heavy fumes of poisonous gas.  So the murderous order was given, and faithfully the boche gunners carried it out.  There were no gas masks for the civilians and no chemicals that might permit them to save lives.  Many succumbed.”

FINAL ACT OF THE HUN AT SEA

The final act at sea was almost concurrent with this tragedy.  The 16,000-ton battleship Britannia was torpedoed off the entrance to the straits of Gibraltar, November 9, and sank in three and one-half hours.

FOLLOWING THE DAYS OF RECKONING

And so, spewing murder in its last writhing, the monster died.  It had begun by furiously ravaging Belgium in August, 1914; it ended with the awful, wanton murder of noncombatants at Mezieres in November, 1918.  Throughout four years, three months and ten days, it had ramped and raged over the land, under the sea and in the air, slaughtering, poisoning, ravaging, without cessation, killing wherever it could, robbing with colossal greed, defiling what it could neither kill nor carry away, leaving across the pages of history a trail of blood and filth and slime that all the tears of all the angels cannot ever wash away.

But it left a world of nations free to work out their several destinies, self-determining, not subject any more to the threat of causeless war at the hands of a government steeled to barbarity.  A world cemented by the blood the monster itself had caused to be shed; by the memory of brave sons fallen that others might live; by the tears of countless women and children made widows and orphans; by a new understanding between all the nations of men that dwell upon the face of the earth, because of mutual sacrifices in a common cause; by a knowledge that the long night of medieval tyranny had faded out and a new day had come, in which power shall arise from and be wielded by the peoples, never again by kings or emperors.  And so our planet shall be ruled as long as man inhabits it.  Out of bitter darkness, in the splendor of this new day the spirit of liberty has risen, with healing on its wings.