Speaking of Prussians by Irvin S. Cobb

The point I am trying to make is this: That, seeing such sights, and a thousand more like them, I could picture the same things -- and a thousand worse things -- happening in my own country. With better reason, I to-day can picture them as happening in my own country; and in all fairness I go further than that and say that I can conceive them as being all the more likely to happen should the invading forces come at us under that design of a black vulture which is known as the Imperial Prussian Eagle. Given similar conditions and similar opportunities, and I can see Holyoke, Massachusetts, or Charleston, South Carolina, razed in smoking ruins, as Louvain or as Dinant was. I can see the mayor of Baltimore being put to death by drum-head court-martial because some inflamed civilian of his town fired from a cottage window at a Pomeranian grenadier. I can see in Pennsylvania congressmen and judges and clergymen and G. A. R. veterans held as hostages and as potential victims of the firing squad, in case some son or some grandson of old John Burns, of Gettysburg, not regularly enrolled, takes up his shotgun in defence of his homestead. I can see a price put on the head of some modern Molly Pitcher, and a military prison waiting for some latter-day Barbara Frietchie. For we must remember that what we Americans call patriots the anointed War Lord calls _franc-tireurs_, meaning bushwhackers.

I do not believe I personally can be charged with an evinced bias against the German Army, as based on what I saw of its operations in the opening months of the war. Because I had an admiration for the courage and the fortitude of the German common soldier, and because I expressed that admiration, I was charged with being pro-German by persons who seemingly did not understand or want to understand that a spectator may admire the individual without in the least sympathising with the causes which sent him into the field. And at a time when this country was filled with stories of barbarities committed upon Belgian civilians by German soldiers -- stories of the mutilating of babies, of the raping of women, of the torturing of old men -- I was one of five experienced newspapermen who, all of our own free will and not under duress or coercion, signed a statement in which we severally and jointly stated that, in our experiences when travelling with or immediately behind the German columns through upward of a hundred miles of Belgian territory, we had been unable to discover good evidence of a single one of these alleged atrocities. Nor did we.