Out of respect a protestant avoided sleeping there; he polluted the place with his excrements. How can there be such beings! Last night, a man of the Landwehr, a man of thirty-five, and a married man, tried to rape the daughter of a man in whose house he had been quartered, she was a child; and as the father tried to interpose he kept the point of his bayonet on the man’s breast.”[25]

Plate 11.

With the exception of these soldiers, who are worthy of the name, the thirty other writers are the same, and the same soul, if the word be allowed, seems to animate them all, uncontrolled and low. They are all alike, yet with some shades of difference. There are some who make distinctions, like subtle lawyers, sometimes blaming, sometimes disapproving: “Dort war ein Exempel am Platze”. And there are some who sneer: “Krieg ist Krieg”; or in French, by preference to add to their scorn “Ja, ja, c’est la guerre”; and there are some who having done their ugly work, open their Hymn Book, and sing psalms: for instance the Saxon officer Rieslang, who relates how one day he left a feast to go to “Gottesdienst”, but was obliged to leave hurriedly, having eaten and drunk too much; or again Private Moritz Grosse of the 177^th Inf. who after describing the sack of St Vieth (22^nd August) and that of Dinant (23^rd August) writes this sentence (Plate 12):

Throwing of bombs in the houses. In the evening, military chorale: Nun danket alle Gott (Now, thank ye all God).[26]

They are all alike. Now, if we consider that I could substitute for the preceding examples others similar and no less cynical, taken for instance from the diary of the reservist Lautenschlager, of the 1^st Battalion of the 66^th Inf. Reg^t, or from the diary of P^te Eduard Hohl of the VIII Corps, or from the diary of non-commissioned officer Rheinhold Koehn, of the 2^nd Battalion of Pomeranian Pioneers, or from the diary of the non-commissioned officer Otto Brandt of the 2^nd section of the ambulance corps (reserves) or from the diary of the Reservist Martin Muller, of the 100^th Saxon Reserves, or from the diary of Lt Karl Zimmer, of the 55^th Inf. or from the diary of P^te Erich Pressler of the 100^th Grenadiers, 1^st Saxon Corps, etc.; and if we notice, that among the extracts already given, there are very few isolated cases of brutality (as can be and are found, alas in the most noble minded of armies) and that I have scarcely noted here any crime that was not done by order, any crime that does not implicate and dishonour not only the individual soldier, but the whole regiment, the officer, the very nation; and if we consider that these thirty diaries, whether they be Bavarian or Saxon, Baden or Rhenish, Pomeranian or from Brandenburg, taken haphazard must represent hundreds and thousands of similar ones, all of a fearful monotony, we shall be obliged to allow, I think, that, M. René Viviani in no way overstated the case when from the French tribune he spoke of “this system of collective murder and pillage which Germany calls war”.

Plate 12.

VII

H. M. the German Emperor, in ratifying the Hague Convention of 1907 agreed (Article 23) “that it is forbidden ... (c) to kill or wound an enemy, who having laid down his arms and having no means of self-defence, gives himself up as a prisoner; (d) to declare that no quarter will be given”.

Has the German Army respected these conventions? In the French and Belgian reports, evidence is plentiful resembling the following which comes from a Frenchman captain in the 288^th Infantry: “On the evening of the 22^nd I learnt that in the wood a hundred and fifty metres from the cross-roads formed by the intersection of the great trench at Calonne and the road from Vaux-lès-Palameix to St Rémy there were some dead bodies of French soldiers who had been shot by the Germans.

I went there, and saw some thirty soldiers in a small space, for the most part lying down, some however on their knees and all having the same kind of wound, a gun-shot in the ear. Only one, very severely wounded was able to speak. He told me the Germans had, before leaving, ordered them to lie down, then had killed them by a shot through the head; that he had been spared on telling them he was the father of three small children. Their brainpans had been blown some distance away, the guns broken at the stock were scattered here and there, and the blood had so bespattered the bushes that as I came out of the wood the front of my cape was all smeared with blood; it was a real charnel-house.”

I have quoted this man’s testimony, not to rely on it as evidence but merely to make clear the nature of my indictment; as for justifying it I shall take care not to depart from the rule I have laid down to resort to German sources of information only.

Here is an order of the day given on the 26^th August by General Stenger commanding the 58^th German Brigade to his troops:

Von heute ab werden keine Gefangene mehr gemacht. Sämtliche Gefangene werden niedergemacht. Verwundete ob mit Waffen oder Wehrlos niedergemacht. Gefangene auch in grösseren 6 geschlossenen Formationen werden niedergemacht. Es bleibe kein Feind lebend hinter uns.

Oberleutnant und Kompagnie-Chef Stoy; Oberst und Regiments-Kommandeur Neubauer; General-Major und Brigade-Kommandeur Stenger.

Translation. After to-day no more prisoners will be taken. All prisoners are to be killed. Wounded, with or without arms, are to be killed. Even prisoners already grouped in convoys are to be killed. Let not a single living enemy remain behind us.

Some thirty soldiers of Stenger’s Brigade (112 and 142^nd Reg^t of the Baden Infantry), were examined in our prisoners camps. I have read their evidence, which they gave upon oath and signed. All confirm the statement that this order of the day was given them on the 26th August, in one unit by Major Mosebach, in another by Lt Curtius, etc.; the majority did not know whether the order was carried out; but three of them say they saw it done in the forest of Thiaville, where ten or twelve wounded French soldiers who had already been spared by a battalion were despatched; two others saw the order carried out on the Thiaville road, where some wounded found in a ditch by a company were finished off.

No doubt, I cannot produce the autograph of General Stenger, and it is not for me to communicate the names of the German prisoners who gave this evidence. But I have no difficulty in producing here German