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 which lies beneath the veneer.

All the photographers were fired with desire to make a similar picture in Belgium, yet though we raced here and there, and everywhere that rumor led us, we found it but a futile chase.

Through the Great Hall in Ghent there poured 100,000 refugees.  Here we pleaded how absolutely imperative it was that we should obtain an atrocity picture.  The daughter of the burgomaster, who was in charge, understood our plight and promised to do her best.  But out of the vast concourse she was able to uncover but one case that could possibly do service as an atrocity.

It was that of a blind peasant woman with her six children.  The photographers told her to smile, but she didn’t, nor did the older children; they had suffered too horribly to make smiling easy.  When the Germans entered the village the mother was in bed with her day-old baby.  Her husband was seized and, with the other men, marched away, as the practice was at that period of the invasion, for some unaccountable reason.  With the roof blazing over her head, she was compelled to arise from her bed and drag herself for miles before she found a refuge.  I related this to a German later and he said:  “Oh, well, there are plenty of peasant women in the Fatherland who are hard at work in the fields three days after the birth of their child.”

The Hall filled with women wailing for children, furnished heartrending sights, but no victim bore such physical marks as the most vivid imagination could construe into an atrocity.

“I can’t explain why we don’t get a picture,” said the free lance.  “Enough deviltry has been done.  I can’t see why some of the stuff doesn’t come through to us.”