Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/87

 ers is there any real disclosure of what passed between Berlin and Vienna during that fateful period. Allegations of atrocities, too, no longer rest merely on the evidence of private persons. Formal Commissions, composed of lawyers and statesmen of international reputation, have sifted the whole mass of charges, eliminated hearsay, and committed themselves to a verdict that nothing can shake. That great prince of the Church, Cardinal Mercier, and his Bishops, have issued documents with every solemnity of form and occasion which in the early days of the struggle were not available. A whole library of comment, in which the ablest minds not only of the United Kingdom and France but also of the United States and Germany itself have collaborated in a reasoned examination of the issues at stake, is at our disposal.

The evidence in the whole case is indeed at once so clear and so voluminous that one might well have supposed any further survey of it to be superfluous. That is not so. It is a far from frequent experience to find a man in Ireland, even among those who assume to themselves a new leadership of opinion, who has made an honest study of documents within reach of all the world. You will still hear "intellectuals" explaining at length that they "don't believe the Germans committed any atrocities in Belgium." You will hear facile sneers at the notion that attacks of Great Powers on small nationalities had anything to do with the war. The