100 YEARS AGO IN THE SARATOGIAN

Sunday, June 30, 1918. The Broadway Theatre, normally closed on Sundays, hosts a fundraiser for the American Red Cross today, The Saratogian reports.

The featured speakers are Captain Thomas M. Judson, a British veteran touring the U.S., and Rev. John Fox, who is “well known to all Saratogians.”

Judson’s “accounts of scenes which have been enacted in the battlefields of Europe were thrilling,” a reporter writes. He vividly describes the valor of Belgian, French and Italian troops fighting the Germans and Austrians, and recalls with sadness how the children of Europe have learned to fear all soldiers.

The Englishman fought alongside troops who liberated a town from the Germans, only to see the local children run away from them. “They had been so cruelly treated by the German soldiers that the fact that a man wore a uniform was enough to make them run,” Judson says, “It was hard to feel that the uniform which you had thought meant something was feared and hated by these little ones.”

Judson was enraged to find three French women who had been raped and killed by German soldiers who’d used a hospital as a “carousing place.” He tells the crowd: “When the Allied soldiers march into Germany, the women and children need not fear, but God help the men.”

Fox tells the audience that “we are in this righteous war at the call of God and we must enter into it with a whole-hearted and enthusiastic support, for it is a holy and a just war.

“Thanks be to God, we entered the conflict with our hands clean. True we tried to escape, honorably, the seething vortex which engulfed the nations abroad. Night and day we exercised patience to the limit…. We were forced to listen to the vile slanders of our present enemies, who charged us with being too peace-loving to forsake the marts of commerce and trade.”

Eventually “the mailed fist of Germany was not needed to awaken the youth of America. The summons came from God. Across the sea was flashed to that despicable Potsdam crowd that America’s honor was not buried in the graves at Bunker Hill and Concord. From the ashes of those heroic men of the days of yore rose the spark which flamed the land and cried, ‘To arms, God wills it!’”

Under such circumstances, “we cannot have patience with the unholy pessimism which finds its way into the hearts of some and which if it could would weaken the superb morale of our people…. For a man to criticize unjustly those in whom rests our national destiny, such a man is a traitor.”

-- Kevin Gilbert