Excerpt from Protection of Art During War, Vol. 1: Reports Concerning the Condition of the Monuments of Art at the Different Theatres of War and the German and Austrian Measures Taken for Their Preservation, Rescue and Research; The Western Front

The war was waged and ended in hostile country; therefore the battle-fields on which both parties have fought are in the West. The scenes of destruction, in which both sides have an equal share, lie in enemy country and it is the opponent who has been heavily smitten by this loss, who especially mourns. Had destiny decided otherwise the. Battle-fields would be on German soil, the zone of war devastations would pass through German land, and Germany in the same way would be suffering and mourning, as has been the case in East Prussia. And are there not in Galicia and in the Bukowina, wide stretches of the austro-hungarian monarchy, devastated by the Russians; has not Gorz been shot into ruins and the Isonzo territory changed into a desert by the Italians; have not even in neutral territory, such as Persia and Macedonia, venerable monuments of art and culture been destroyed or plundered by the Russians and French respectively? Certainly in these cases where only Germany and its allies or neutrals were the sufferers, the universal conscience was not further disturbed!

The great historical mistake in all these charges is that the military leadership or one of the war-parties is accused, whereas really only war itself should be accused. This war has been so terrible in the means employed and their consequences, through the reckless introduction of destructive air attacks, through the thousandfold increase and heightening of the artillery fire, through the pre viously unheard-oi concentration of enormous masses of troops within a seemingly impossible narrow compass (who by their sheer attempt to expand seemed to crush everything around them), that just as the human losses have increased prodigiously in comparison with former wars, so also the devasta tion of land had to be much more terrible. The awful bloodshed in the autumn of last year must have brought home to the conscience of all nations that at the present day war means a laying waste of the whole war-territory; even as Lloyd George, gravely declared, this fact must be clear to us that such a war must never be allowed to recur. And Prince Max of Baden spoke _in tones of intense emo tion of the great purification, which this realisation brought to us.

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