Chapter XII: Part I (2)

Chief of the British General Staff, Who Made a Remarkable Record as Quartermaster General in France

_(Photo from Bain News Service.)_]

The Brilliant Strategist Who Commands the French Armies of the North

_(Photo from P.S. Rogers.)_]

One witness describes the scene graphically:

"The whole of the prisoners--men, women and children--were
placed in the church. Nobody was allowed to go outside the
church to obey the calls of nature; the church had to be used
for that purpose. We were afterward allowed to go outside the
church for this purpose, and then I saw the clergyman of
Gelrode standing by the wall of the church with his hands
above his head, being guarded by soldiers."

The actual details of the murder of the priest are as follows: The priest was struck several times by the soldiers on the head. He was pushed up against the wall of the church. He asked in Flemish to be allowed to stand with his face to the wall, and tried to turn around. The Germans stopped him and then turned him with his face to the wall, with his hands above his head. An hour later the same witness saw the priest still standing there. He was then led away by the Germans a distance of about fifty yards. There, with his face against the wall of a house, he was shot by five soldiers.

Other murders of which we have evidence appear in the appendix.

Some of the prisoners in the church at Aerschot were actually kept there until the arrival of the Belgian Army on Sept. 11, when they were released. Others were marched to Louvain and eventually merged with other prisoners, both from Louvain itself and the surrounding districts, and taken to Germany and elsewhere.

It is said by one witness that about 1,500 were marched to Louvain and that the journey took six hours.

The journey to Louvain is thus described by a witness: We were all marched off to Louvain, walking. There were some very old people, among others a man 90 years of age. The very old people were drawn in carts and barrows by the younger men. There was an officer with a bicycle, who shouted, as people fell out by the side of the road, "Shoot them!"

AERSCHOT AND DISTRICT.

Period III., (September.)

It is unnecessary to describe with much particularity the events of the period beginning about Sept. 10. The Belgian soldiers, who had recaptured the place, found corpses of civilians who must have been murdered in Aerschot itself just as they found them in Sempst and the other villages on Aug. 25. Some of these bodies were found in wells and some had been burned alive in their houses.

The prisoners released by the Belgian Army from the church were almost starved.

HAECHT.--At Haecht several children had been murdered, one of 2 or 3 years of age was found nailed to the door of a farmhouse by its hands and feet--a crime which seems almost incredible, but the evidence for which we feel bound to accept. In the garden of this house was the body of a girl who had been shot in the forehead.

CAPELLE-AU-BOIS.--At Capelle-au-Bois two children were murdered in a cart and their corpses were seen by many witnesses at different stages of the cart's journey.

EPPEGHEM.--At Eppeghem the dead body of a child of 2 was seen pinned to the ground with a German lance. Same witness saw a mutilated woman alive near Weerde on the same day.

TREMELOO.--Belgian soldiers on patrol duty found a young girl naked on the ground, covered with scratches. She complained of having been violated. On the same day an old woman was seen kneeling by the body of her husband, and she told them that the Germans had shot him as he was trying to escape from the house.

LOUVAIN AND DISTRICT.

The events spoken to as having occurred in and around Louvain between the 19th and the 25th of August deserve close attention.

For six days the Germans were in peaceful occupation of the city. No houses were set on fire--no citizens killed. There was a certain amount of looting of empty houses, but otherwise discipline was effectively maintained. The condition of Louvain during these days was one of relative peace and quietude, presenting a striking contrast to the previous and contemporaneous conduct of the German Army elsewhere.

On the evening of Aug. 25 a sudden change takes place. The Germans, on that day repulsed by the Belgians, had retreated to and reoccupied Louvain. Immediately the devastation of that city and the holocaust of its population commences. The inference is irresistible that the army as a whole wreaked its vengeance on the civil population and the buildings of the city in revenge for the setback which the Belgian arms had inflicted on them. A subsidiary cause alleged was the assertion, often made before that civilians had fired upon the German Army.

The depositions which relate to Louvain are numerous, and are believed by the committee to present a true and fairly complete picture of the events of the 25th and 26th of August and subsequent days. We find no grounds for thinking that the inhabitants fired upon the German Army on the evening of the 25th of August. Eyewitnesses worthy of credence detail exactly when, where, and how the firing commenced. Such firing was by Germans on Germans. No impartial tribunal could, in our opinion, come to any other conclusion.

On the evening of the 25th firing could be heard in the direction of Herent, some three kilometers from Louvain. An alarm was sounded in the city. There was disorder and confusion, and at 8 o'clock horses attached to baggage wagons stampeded in the street and rifle fire commenced. This was in the Rue de la Station and came from the German police guard, (21 in number,) who, seeing the troops arrive in disorder, thought it was the enemy. Then the corps of incendiaries got to work. They had broad belts with the words "Gott mit uns," and their equipment consisted of a hatchet, a syringe, a small shovel, and a revolver. Fires blazed up in the direction of the Law Courts, St. Martin's Barracks, and later in the Place de la Station. Meanwhile an incessant fusillade was kept up on the windows of the houses. In their efforts to escape the flames the inhabitants climbed the walls.

"My mother and servants," says a witness, "had to do the same
and took refuge at Monsieur A.'s, whose cellars are vaulted
and afforded a better protection than mine. A little later we
withdrew to Monsieur A.'s stables, where about thirty people
who had got there by climbing the walls were to be found. Some
of these poor wretches had to climb twenty walls. A ring came
at the bell. We opened the door. Several civilians flung
themselves under the porch. The Germans were firing upon them
from the street. Every moment new fires were lighting up,
accompanied by explosions. In the middle of the night I heard
a knock at the outer door of the stable which led into a
little street, and heard a woman's voice crying for help. I
opened the door, and just as I was going to let her in a rifle
shot fired from the street by a German soldier rang out and
the woman fell dead at my feet. About 9 in the morning things
got quieter, and we took the opportunity of venturing into the
street. A German who was carrying a silver pyx and a number of
boxes of cigars told us we were to go to the station, where
trains would be waiting for us. When we got to the Place de la
Station we saw in the square seven or eight dead bodies of
murdered civilians. Not a single house in the place was
standing. A whole row of houses behind the station at Blauwput
was burned. After being driven hither and thither interminably
by officers, who treated us roughly and insulted us
throughout, we were divided."

The prisoners were then distributed between different bodies of troops and marched in the direction of Herent. Seventy-seven inhabitants of Louvain, including a number of people of good position, (the names of several are given,) were thus taken to Herent.

"We found the village of Herent in flames, so much so that we
had to quicken up to prevent ourselves from being suffocated
and burned up by the flames in the middle of the road.
Half-burned corpses of civilians were lying in front of the
houses. During a halt soldiers stole cattle and slaughtered
them where they stood. Firing started on our left. We were
told it was the civilians firing, and that we were going to be
shot. The truth is that it was the Germans themselves who were
firing to frighten us. There was not a single civilian in the
neighborhood. Shortly afterward we proceeded on our march to
Malines. We were insulted and threatened.... The officers were
worse than the men. We got to Campenhout about 7 P.M., and
were locked into the church with all the male population of
the village. Some priests had joined our numbers. We had had
nothing to eat or drink since the evening of the day before. A
few compassionate soldiers gave us water to drink, but no
official took the trouble to see that we were fed."

Next day, Thursday, the 27th, a safe conduct to return to Louvain was given, but the prisoners had hardly started, when they were stopped and taken before a Brigade General and handed to another escort. Some were grossly ill-treated. They were accused of being soldiers out of uniform, and were told they could not go to Louvain, "as the town was going to be razed to the ground." Other prisoners were added, even women and children, until there were more than 200. They were then taken toward Malines, released, and told to go to that town together, and that those who separated would be fired on. Other witnesses corroborate the events described by the witness.

A woman employed by an old gentleman living in the Rue de la Station tells the story of her master's death:

"We had supper as usual about 8, but two German officers, (who
were staying in the house,) did not come in to supper that
evening. My master went to bed at 8:15, and so did his son.
The servants went to bed at 9:30. Soon after I got to my
bedroom I saw out of my room flames from some burning house
near by. I roused my master and his son. As they came down the
stairs they were seized by German soldiers and both were tied
up and led out, my master being tied with a rope and his son
with a chain. They were dragged outside. I did not actually
see what happened outside, but heard subsequently that my
master was bayoneted and shot, and that his son was shot. I
heard shots from the kitchen, where I was, and was present at
the burial of my master and his son thirteen days later.
German soldiers came back into the house and poured some
inflammable liquid over the floors and set fire to it. I
escaped by another staircase to that which my master and his
son had descended."

On the 26th, (Wednesday,) in the City of Louvain, massacre, fire, and destruction went on. The university, with its library, the Church of St. Peter, and many houses were set on fire and burned to the ground. Citizens were shot and others taken prisoners and compelled to go with the troops. Soldiers went through the streets saying "Man hat geschossen."[A] One soldier was seen going along shooting in the air.

[Footnote A: "They have been shooting."]

Many of the people hid in cellars, but the soldiers shot down through the gratings. Some citizens were shot on opening the doors, others in endeavoring to escape. Among other persons whose houses were burned was an old man of 90 lying dangerously ill, who was taken out on his mattress and left lying in his garden all night. He died shortly after in the hospital to which a friend took him the following morning.

On Thursday, the 27th, orders were given that every one should leave the city, which was to be razed to the ground. Some citizens, including a canon of the cathedral, with his aged mother, were ordered to go to the station and afterward to take the road to Tirlemont. Among the number were about twenty priests from Louvain. They were insulted and threatened, but ultimately allowed to go free and make their way as best they could, women and sick persons among them, to Tirlemont. Other groups of prisoners from Louvain were on the same day taken by other routes, some early in the morning, through various villages in the direction of Malines, with hands tightly bound by a long cord. More prisoners were afterward added, and all made to stay the night in the church at Campenhout. Next day, the 28th, this group, then consisting of about 1,000 men, women and children, was taken back to Louvain. The houses along the road were burning and many dead bodies of civilians, men and women, were seen on the way. Some of the principal streets in Louvain had by that time been burned out. The prisoners were placed in a large building on the cavalry exercise ground--"One woman went mad, some children died, others were born." On the 29th the prisoners were marched along the Malines road, and at Herent the women and children and men over 40 were allowed to go; the others were taken to Boort Meerbeek, 15 kilometers from Malines, and told to march straight to Malines or be shot. At 11 P.M. they reached the fort of Waelhem and were at first fired on by the sentries, but on calling out they were Belgians were allowed to pass. These prisoners were practically without food from early morning on the 26th until midnight on the 29th. Of the corpses seen on the road, some had their hands tied behind their backs, others were burned, some had been killed by blows, and some corpses were those of children who had been shot.

Another witness, a man of independent means, was arrested at noon by the soldiers of the One Hundred and Sixty-fifth Regiment and taken to the Place de la Station. He was grossly ill-treated on the way and robbed by an officer of his purse and keys. His hands were tied behind his back. His wife was kept a prisoner at the other side of the station. He was then made to march with about 500 other prisoners until midnight, slept in the rain that night, and next day, having had no food since leaving Louvain, was taken to the church in Rotselaer, where there were then about 1,500 prisoners confined, including some infants. No food was given, only some water. Next day they were taken through Wespelaer and back to Louvain. On the way from Rotselaer to Wespelaer fifty bodies were seen, some naked and carbonized and unrecognizable. When they arrived at Louvain the Fish Market, the Place Marguerite, the cathedral, and many other buildings were on fire. In the evening about 100 men, women, and children were put in horse trucks from which the dung had not been removed, and at 6 the next morning left for Cologne.

The wife of this witness was also taken prisoner with her husband and her maid, but was separated from him, and she saw other ladies made to walk before the soldiers with their hands above their heads. One, an old lady of 85, (name given,) was dragged from her cellar and taken with them to the station. They were kept there all night, but set free in the morning, Thursday, but shortly afterward sent to Tirlemont on foot. A number of corpses were seen on the way. The prisoners, of whom there are said to have been thousands, were not allowed even to have water to drink, although there were streams on the way from which the soldiers drank. Witness was given some milk at a farm, but as she raised it to her lips it was taken away from her.

A priest was taken on Friday morning Aug. 28, and placed at the head of a number of refugees from Wygmael. He was led through Louvain, abused and ill-treated, and placed with some thousands of other people in the riding school in the Rue du Manege. The glass roof broke in the night from the heat of burning buildings around. Next day the prisoners were marched through the country with an armed guard. Burned farms and burned corpses were seen on the way. The prisoners were finally separated into three groups, and the younger men marched through Herent and Bueken to Campenhout, and ultimately reached the Belgian lines about midnight on Saturday, Aug. 29. All the houses in Herent, a village of about 5,000 inhabitants, had been burned.

The massacre of civilians at Louvain was not confined to its citizens. Large crowds of people were brought into Louvain from the surrounding districts, not only from Aerschot and Gelrode as above mentioned, but also from other places. For example, a witness describes how many women and children were taken in carts to Louvain, and there placed in a stable. Of the hundreds of people thus taken from the various villages and brought to Louvain as prisoners, some were massacred there, others were forced to march along with citizens of Louvain through various places, some being ultimately sent on the 29th to the Belgian lines at Malines, others were taken in trucks to Cologne as described below, others were released. An account of the massacre of some of these unfortunate civilian prisoners given by two witnesses may be quoted:

"We were all placed in Station Street, Louvain, and the German
soldiers fired upon us. I saw the corpses of some women in the
street. I fell down, and a woman who had been shot fell on top
of me. I did not dare to look at the dead bodies in the
street, there were so many of them. All of them had been shot
by the German soldiers. One woman whom I saw lying dead in the
street was a Miss J., about 35. I also saw the body of A.M.,
(a woman.) She had been shot. I saw an officer pull her corpse
underneath a wagon."

Another witness, who was taken from Aerschot, also describes the occurrence:

"I was afterward taken with a large number of other civilians
and placed in the church at Louvain. Then we were taken to
Station Street, Louvain. There were about 1,500 civilians of
both sexes, and we had been marched from Aerschot to Louvain.
When we were in Station Street I felt that something was about
to happen, and I tried to shelter in a doorway. The German
soldiers then fired a mitrailleuse and their rifles upon the
people, and the people fell on all sides. Two men next to me
were killed. I afterward saw some one give a signal, and the
firing ceased. I then ran away with a married woman named B.,
(whose maiden name was A.M.,) aged 29, who belonged to
Aerschot, but we were again captured. She was shot by the side
of me, and I saw her fall. Several other people were shot at
the same time. I again ran away, and in my flight saw children
falling out of their mothers' arms. I cannot say whether they
were shot, or whether they fell from their mothers' arms in
the great panic which ensued. I, however, saw children
bleeding."

JOURNEY TO COLOGNE.

The greatest number of prisoners from Louvain, however, were assembled at the station and taken by trains to Cologne. Several witnesses describe their sufferings and the ill-treatment they received on the journey. One of the first trains started in the afternoon. It consisted of cattle trucks, about 100 being in each truck. It took three days to get to Cologne. The prisoners had nothing to eat but a few biscuits each, and they were not allowed to get out for water and none was given. On a wagon the words "Civilians who shot at the soldiers at Louvain" were written. Some were marched through Cologne afterward for the people to see. Ropes were put about the necks of some and they were told they would be hanged. An order then came that they were to be shot instead of hanged. A firing squad was prepared and five or six prisoners were put up, but were not shot. After being kept a week at Cologne some of these prisoners were taken back--this time only thirty or forty in a truck--and allowed to go free on arriving at Limburg. Several witnesses who were taken in other trains to Cologne describe their experiences in detail. Some of the trucks were abominably filthy. Prisoners were not allowed to leave to obey the calls of nature; one man who quitted the truck for the purpose was killed by a bayonet. Describing what happened to another body of prisoners, a witness says that they were made to cross Station Street, where the houses were burning, and taken to the station, placed in horse trucks, crowded together, men, women, and children, in each wagon. They were kept at the station during the night, and the following day left for Cologne. For two days and a half they were without food, and then they received a loaf of bread among ten persons, and some water. The prisoners were afterward taken back to Belgium. They were, in all, eight days in the train, crowded and almost without food. Two of the men went mad. The women and children were separated from the men at Brussels. The men were taken to a suburb and then to the villages of Herent, Vilvorde, and Sempst, and afterward set at liberty.

This taking of the inhabitants, including some of the influential citizens, in groups and marching them to various places, and in particular the sending of them to Malines and the dispatch of great numbers to Cologne, must evidently have been done under the direction of the higher military authorities. The ill-treatment of the prisoners was under the eyes and often by the direction or with the sanction of officers, and officers themselves took part in it.

The object of taking many hundreds of prisoners to Cologne and back into Belgium is at first sight difficult to understand. Possibly it is to be regarded as part of the policy of punishment for Belgian resistance and general terrorization of the inhabitants--possibly as a desire to show these people to the population of a German city and thus to confirm the belief that the Belgians had shot at their troops.

Whatever may have been the case when the burning began on the evening of the 25th, it appears clear that the subsequent destruction and outrages were done with a set purpose. It was not until the 26th that the library, and other university buildings, the Church of St. Peter and many houses were set on fire. It is to be noticed that cases occur in the depositions in which humane acts by individual officers and soldiers are mentioned, or in which officers are said to have expressed regret at being obliged to carry out orders for cruel action against the civilians. Similarly, we find entries in diaries which reveal a genuine pity for the population and disgust at the conduct of the army. It appears that a German non-commissioned officer stated definitely that he "was acting under orders and executing them with great unwillingness." A commissioned officer on being asked at Louvain by a witness--a highly educated man--about the horrible acts committed by the soldiers, said he "was merely executing orders," and that he himself would be shot if he did not execute them. Others gave less credible excuses, one stating that the inhabitants of Louvain had burned the city themselves because they did not wish to supply food and quarters for the German Army. It was to the discipline rather than the want of discipline in the army that these outrages, which we are obliged to describe as systematic, were due, and the special official notices posted on certain houses that they were not to be destroyed show the fate which had been decreed for the others which were not so marked.

We are driven to the conclusion that the harrying of the villages in the district, the burning of a large part of Louvain, the massacres there, the marching out of the prisoners, and the transport to Cologne, (all done without inquiry as to whether the particular persons seized or killed had committed any wrongful act,) were due to a calculated policy carried out scientifically and deliberately, not merely with the sanction but under the direction of higher military authorities, and were not due to any provocation or resistance by the civilian population.

TERMONDE.

To understand the depositions describing what happened at Termonde it is necessary to remember that the German Army occupied the town on two occasions, the first, from Friday, Sept. 4, to Sunday, Sept. 6, and again later in the month, about the 16th. The civilians had delivered up their arms a fortnight before the arrival of the Germans.

Early in the month, probably about the 4th, a witness saw two civilians murdered by Uhlans. Another witness saw their dead bodies, which remained in the street for ten days. Two hundred civilians were utilized as a screen by the German troops about this date.

On the 5th the town was partially burned. One witness was taken prisoner in the street by some German soldiers, together with several other civilians. At about 12 o'clock some of the tallest and strongest men among the prisoners were picked out to go around the streets with paraffin. Three or four carts containing paraffin tanks were brought up, and a syringe was used to put paraffin on to the houses, which were then fired. The process of destruction began with the houses of rich people, and afterward the houses of the poorer classes were treated in the same manner. German soldiers had previously told this witness that if the Burgomaster of Termonde, who was out of town, did not return by 12 o'clock that day the town would be set on fire. The firing of the town was in consequence of his failure to return. The prisoners were afterward taken to a factory and searched for weapons. They were subsequently provided with passports enabling them to go anywhere in the town, but not outside. The witness in question managed to effect his escape by swimming across the river.

Another witness describes how the tower of the Church of Termonde St. Gilles was utilized by the Belgian troops for offensive purposes. They had in fact mounted a machine gun there. This witness was subsequently taken prisoner in a cellar in Termonde in which he had taken refuge with other people. All the men were taken from the cellar and the women were left behind. About seventy prisoners in all were taken; one, a brewer who could not walk fast enough, was wounded with a bayonet. He fell down and was compelled to get up and follow the soldiers. The prisoners had to hold up their hands, and if they dropped their hands they were struck on the back with the butt end of rifles. They were taken to Lebbeke, where there were in all 300 prisoners, and there they were locked up in the church for three days and with scarcely any food.

A witness living at Baesrode was taken prisoner with 250 others and kept all night in a field. The prisoners were released on the following morning. This witness saw three corpses of civilians, and says that the Germans on Sunday, the 6th, plundered and destroyed the houses of those who had fled. The Germans left on the following day, taking about thirty men with them, one a man of 72 years of age.

Later in the month civilians were again used as a screen, and there is evidence of other acts of outrage.

ALOST.

Alost was the scene of fighting between the Belgian and German Armies during the whole of the latter part of the month of September. In connection with the fighting numerous cruelties appear to have been perpetrated by the German troops.

On Saturday, Sept. 11, a weaver was bayoneted in the street. Another civilian was shot dead at his door on the same night. On the following day the witness was taken prisoner together with thirty others. The money of the prisoners was confiscated, and they were subsequently used as a screen for the German troops who were at that moment engaged in a conflict with the Belgian Army in the town itself. The Germans burned a number of houses at this time. Corpses of 14 civilians were seen in the streets on this occasion.

A well-educated witness, who visited the Wetteren Hospital shortly after this date, saw the dead bodies of a number of civilians belonging to Alost, and other civilians wounded. One of these stated that he took refuge in the house of his sister-in-law; that the Germans dragged the people out of the house, which was on fire, seized him, threw him on the ground, and hit him on the head with the butt end of a rifle, and ran him through the thigh with a bayonet. They then placed him with seventeen or eighteen others in front of the German troops, threatening them with revolvers. They said that they were going to make the people of Alost pay for the losses sustained by the Germans. At this hospital was an old woman of 80 completely transfixed by a bayonet.

Other crimes on noncombatants at Alost belong to the end of the month of September. Many witnesses speak to the murder of harmless civilians.

In Binnenstraat the Germans broke open the windows of the houses and threw fluid inside, and the houses burst into flames. Some of the inhabitants were burned to death.

The civilians were utilized on Saturday, Sept. 26, as a screen. During their retreat the Germans fired twelve houses in Rue des Trois Clefs, and three civilians, whose names are given, were shot dead in that street after the firing of the houses. On the following day a heap of nine dead civilians were lying in the Rue de l'Argent.

Similar outrages occurred at Erpe, a village a few miles from Alost, about the same date. The village was deliberately burned. The houses were plundered and some civilians were murdered.

Civilians were apparently used as a screen at Erpe, but they were prisoners taken from Alost and not dwellers in that village.

DIARIES OF GERMAN SOLDIERS.

This disregard for the lives of civilians is strikingly shown in extracts from German soldiers' diaries, of which the following are representative examples.

Barthel, who was a Sergeant and standard bearer of the Second Company of the First Guards Regiment of Foot, and who during the campaign received the Iron Cross, says, under date Aug. 10, 1914:

"A transport of 300 Belgians came through Duisburg in the
morning. Of these, eighty, including the Oberburgomaster, were
shot according to martial law."

Matbern of the Fourth Company of Jaegers, No. 11, from Marburg, states that at a village between Birnal and Dinant on Sunday, Aug. 23, the Pioneers and Infantry Regiment One Hundred and Seventy-eight were fired upon by the inhabitants. He gives no particulars beyond this. He continues:

"About 220 inhabitants were shot, and the village was burned.
Artillery is continuously shooting--the village lies in a
large ravine. Just now, 6 o'clock in the afternoon, the
crossing of the Meuse begins near Dinant. All villages,
chateaux and houses are burned down during the night. It is a
beautiful sight to see the fires all around us in the
distance."

Bombardier Wetzel of the Second Mounted Battery, First Kurhessian Field Artillery Regiment, No. 11, records an incident which happened in French territory near Lille on Oct. 11: "We had no fight, but we caught about twenty men and shot them." By this time killing not in a fight would seem to have passed into a habit.

Diary No. 32 gives an accurate picture of what took place in Louvain:

"What a sad scene--all the houses surrounding the railway
station completely destroyed--only some foundation walls still
standing. On the station square captured guns. At the end of a
main street there is the Council Hall which has been
completely preserved with all its beautiful turrets; a sharp
contrast: 180 inhabitants are stated to have been shot after
they had dug their own graves."

The last and most important entry is that contained in Diary No. 19. This is a blue book interleaved with blotting paper, and contains no name and address; there is, however, one circumstance which makes it possible to speak with certainty as to the regiment of the writer. He gives the names of First Lieutenant von Oppen, Count Eulenburg, Captain von Roeder, First Lieutenant von Bock und Polach, Second Lieutenant Count Hardenberg, and Lieutenant Engelbrecht. A perusal of the Prussian Army list of June, 1914, shows that all these officers, with the exception of Lieutenant Engelbrecht, belonged to the First Regiment of Foot Guards. On Aug. 24, 1914, the writer was in Ermeton. The exact translation of the extract, grim in its brevity, is as follows:

"24.8.14. We took about 1,000 prisoners: at least 500 were
shot. The village was burned because inhabitants had also
shot. Two civilians were shot at once."

We may now sum up and endeavor to explain the character and significance of the wrongful acts done by the German Army in Belgium.

If a line is drawn on a map from the Belgian frontier to Liege and continued to Charleroi, and a second line drawn from Liege to Malines, a sort of figure resembling an irregular Y will be formed. It is along this Y that most of the systematic (as opposed to isolated) outrages were committed. If the period from Aug. 4 to Aug. 30 is taken it will be found to cover most of these organized outrages. Termonde and Alost extend, it is true, beyond the Y lines, and they belong to the month of September. Murder, rape, arson, and pillage began from the moment when the German Army crossed the frontier. For the first fortnight of the war the towns and villages near Liege were the chief sufferers. From Aug. 19 to the end of the month, outrages spread in the directions of Charleroi and Malines and reach their period of greatest intensity. There is a certain significance in the fact that the outrages around Liege coincide with the unexpected resistance of the Belgian Army in that district, and that the slaughter which reigned from Aug. 19 to the end of the month is contemporaneous with the period when the German Army's need for a quick passage through Belgium at all costs was deemed imperative.

Here let a distinction be drawn between two classes of outrages.

Individual acts of brutality--ill-treatment of civilians, rape, plunder, and the like--were very widely committed. These are more numerous and more shocking than would be expected in warfare between civilized powers, but they differ rather in extent than in kind from what has happened in previous though not recent wars.

In all wars many shocking and outrageous acts must be expected, for in every large army there must be a proportion of men of criminal instincts whose worst passions are unloosed by the immunity which the conditions of warfare afford. Drunkenness, moreover, may turn even a soldier who has no criminal habits into a brute, who may commit outrages at which he would himself be shocked in his sober moments, and there is evidence that intoxication was extremely prevalent among the German Army, both in Belgium and in France, for plenty of wine was to be found in the villages and country houses which were pillaged. Many of the worst outrages appear to have been perpetrated by men under the influence of drink. Unfortunately, little seems to have been done to repress this source of danger.

In the present war, however--and this is the gravest charge against the German Army--the evidence shows that the killing of noncombatants was carried out to an extent for which no previous war between nations claiming to be civilized, (for such cases as the atrocities perpetrated by the Turks on the Bulgarian Christians in 1876, and on the Armenian Christians in 1895 and 1896, do not belong to that category,) furnishes any precedent. That this killing was done as part of a deliberate plan is clear from the facts hereinbefore set forth regarding Louvain, Aerschot, Dinant, and other towns. The killing was done under orders in each place. It began at a certain fixed date, and stopped, (with some few exceptions,) at another fixed date. Some of the officers who carried out the work did it reluctantly, and said they were obeying directions from their chiefs. The same remarks apply to the destruction of property. House burning was part of the program; and villages, even large parts of a city, were given to the flames as part of the terrorizing policy.

Citizens of neutral States who visited Belgium in December and January report that the German authorities do not deny that noncombatants were systematically killed in large numbers during the first weeks of the invasion, and this, so far as we know, has never been officially denied. If it were denied, the flight and continued voluntary exile of thousands of Belgian refugees would go far to contradict a denial, for there is no historical parallel in modern times for the flight of a large part of a nation before an invader.

The German Government have, however, sought to justify their severities on the grounds of military necessity, and have excused them as retaliation for cases in which civilians fired on German troops. There may have been cases in which such firing occurred, but no proof has ever been given, or, to our knowledge, attempted to be given, of such cases, nor of the stories of shocking outrages perpetrated by Belgian men and women on German soldiers.

The inherent improbability of the German contention is shown by the fact that after the first few days of the invasion every possible precaution had been taken by the Belgian authorities, by way of placards and handbills, to warn the civilian population not to intervene in hostilities. Throughout Belgium steps had been taken to secure the handing over of all firearms in the possession of civilians before the German Army arrived. These steps were sometimes taken by the police and sometimes by the military authorities.

The invaders appear to have proceeded upon the theory that any chance shot coming from an unexpected place was fired by civilians. One favorite form of this allegation was that priests had fired from the church tower. In many instances the soldiers of the allied armies used church towers and private houses as cover for their operations. At Aerschot, where the Belgian soldiers were stationed in the church tower and fired upon the Germans as they advanced, it was at once alleged by the Germans when they entered the town, and with difficulty disproved, that the firing had come from civilians. Thus one elementary error creeps at once into the German argument, for they were likely to confound, and did in some instances certainly confound, legitimate military operations with the hostile intervention of civilians.

Troops belonging to the same army often fire by mistake upon each other. That the German Army was no exception to this rule is proved not only by many Belgian witnesses, but by the most irrefragable kind of evidence--the admission of German soldiers themselves, recorded in their war diaries. Thus Otto Clepp, Second Company of the Reserve, says, under date of Aug. 22: "Three A.M. Two infantry regiments shot at each other--9 dead and 50 wounded--fault not yet ascertained." In this connection the diaries of Kurt Hoffman and a soldier of the 112th Regiment, (Diary No. 14,) will repay study. In such cases the obvious interest of the soldier is to conceal his mistake, and a convenient method of doing so is to raise the cry of "francs-tireurs!"

Doubtless the German soldiers often believed that the civilian population, naturally hostile, had, in fact, attacked them. This attitude of mind may have been fostered by the German authorities themselves before the troops passed the frontier, and thereafter stories of alleged atrocities committed by Belgians upon Germans, such as the myth referred to in one of the diaries relating to Liege, were circulated among the troops and roused their anger.

The diary of Barthel, when still in Germany on Aug. 10, shows that he believed that the Oberburgomaster of Liege had murdered a Surgeon General. The fact is that no violence was inflicted on the inhabitants at Liege until the 19th, and no one who studies these pages can have any doubt that Liege would immediately have been given over to murder and destruction if any such incident had occurred.

Letters written to their homes which have been found on the bodies of dead Germans bear witness, in a way that now sounds pathetic, to the kindness with which they were received by the civil population. Their evident surprise at this reception was due to the stories which had been dinned into their ears of soldiers with their eyes gouged out, treacherous murders, and poisoned food--stories which may have been encouraged by the higher military authorities in order to impress the mind of the troops, as well as for the sake of justifying the measures which they took to terrify the civil population. If there is any truth in such stories, no attempt has been made to establish it. For instance, the Chancellor of the German Empire, in a communication made to the press on Sept. 2 and printed in the Nord Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of Sept. 21, said as follows:

"Belgian girls gouged out the eyes of the German wounded.
Officials of Belgian cities have invited our officers to
dinner and shot and killed them across the table. Contrary to
all international law, the whole civilian population of
Belgium was called out and, after having at first shown
friendliness, carried on in the rear of our troops terrible
warfare with concealed weapons. Belgian women cut the throats
of soldiers whom they had quartered in their homes while they
were sleeping."

No evidence whatever seems to have been adduced to prove these tales, and though there may be cases in which individual Belgians fired on the Germans, the statement that "the whole civilian population of Belgium was called out" is utterly opposed to the fact.

An invading army may be entitled to shoot at sight a civilian caught redhanded, or any one who, though not caught redhanded, is proved guilty on inquiry. But this was not the practice followed by the German troops. They do not seem to have made any inquiry. They seized the civilians of the villages indiscriminately and killed them, or such as they selected from among them, without the least regard to guilt or innocence. The mere cry, "Civilisten haben geschossen!" was enough to hand over a whole village or district, and even outlying places, to ruthless slaughter.

We gladly record the instances where the evidence shows that humanity had not wholly disappeared from some members of the German Army, and that they realized that the responsible heads of that organization were employing them not in war, but in butchery: "I am merely executing orders, and I should be shot if I did not execute them," said an officer to a witness at Louvain. At Brussels another officer says: "I have not done one-hundredth part of what we have been ordered to do by the high German military authorities."

As we have already observed, it would be unjust to charge upon the German Army generally acts of cruelty which, whether due to drunkenness or not, were done by men of brutal instincts and unbridled passions. Such crimes were sometimes punished by the officers. They were in some cases offset by acts of humanity and kindliness. But when an army is directed or permitted to kill noncombatants on a large scale the ferocity of the worst natures springs into fuller life, and both lust and the thirst of blood become more widespread and more formidable. Had less license been allowed to the soldiers and had they not been set to work to slaughter civilians there would have been fewer of those painful cases in which a depraved and morbid cruelty appears.

Two classes of murders in particular require special mention because one of them is almost new and the other altogether unprecedented. The former is the seizure of peaceful citizens as so-called hostages, to be kept as a pledge for the conduct of the civil population or as a means to secure some military advantage or to compel the payment of a contribution, the hostages being shot if the condition imposed by the arbitrary will of the invader is not fulfilled. Such hostage-taking, with the penalty of death attached, has now and then happened, the most notable case being the shooting of the Archbishop of Paris and some of his clergy by the Communards of Paris in 1871, but it is opposed both to the rules of war and to every principle of justice and humanity. The latter kind of murder is the killing of the innocent inhabitants of a village because shots have been fired, or are alleged to have been fired, on the troops by some one in the village. For this practice no previous example and no justification have been or can be pleaded. Soldiers suppressing an insurrection may have sometimes slain civilians mingled with insurgents, and Napoleon's forces in Spain are said to have now and then killed promiscuously when trying to clear guerrillas out of a village. But in Belgium large bodies of men, sometimes including the Burgomaster and the priest, were seized, marched by officers to a spot chosen for the purpose, and there shot in cold blood, without any attempt at trial or even inquiry, under the pretense of inflicting punishment upon the village, though these unhappy victims were not even charged with having themselves committed any wrongful act, and though, in some cases at least, the village authorities had done all in their power to prevent any molestation of the invading force. Such acts are no part of war, for innocence is entitled to respect even in war. They are mere murders, just as the drowning of the innocent passengers and crews on a merchant ship is murder and not an act of war.

That these acts should have been perpetrated on the peaceful population of an unoffending country which was not at war with its invaders, but merely defending its own neutrality, guaranteed by the invading power, may excite amazement and even incredulity. It was with amazement and almost with incredulity that the committee first read the depositions relating to such acts. But when the evidence regarding Liege was followed by that regarding Aerschot, Louvain, Andenne, Dinant, and the other towns and villages, the cumulative effect of such a mass of concurrent testimony became irresistible, and we were driven to the conclusion that the things described had really happened. The question then arose, how they could have happened. Not from mere military license, for the discipline of the German Army is proverbially stringent, and its obedience implicit. Not from any special ferocity of the troops, for whoever has traveled among the German peasantry knows that they are as kindly and good-natured as any people in Europe, and those who can recall the war of 1870 will remember that no charges resembling those proved by these depositions were then established. The excesses recently committed in Belgium were, moreover too widespread and too uniform in their character to be mere sporadic outbursts of passion or rapacity.

The explanation seems to be that these excesses were committed--in some cases ordered, in others allowed--on a system and in pursuance of a set purpose. That purpose was to strike terror into the civil population and dishearten the Belgian troops, so as to crush down resistance and extinguish the very spirit of self-defense. The pretext that civilians had fired upon the invading troops was used to justify not merely the shooting of individual francs-tireurs, but the murder of large numbers of innocent civilians, an act absolutely forbidden by the rules of civilized warfare.[A]

[Footnote A: As to this, see, in appendix, the Rules of The Hague Convention of 1907, to which Germany was a signatory.]

In the minds of Prussian officers war seems to have become a sort of sacred mission, one of the highest functions of the omnipotent State, which is itself as much an army as a State. Ordinary morality and the ordinary sentiment of pity vanish in its presence, superseded by a new standard, which justifies to the soldier every means that can conduce to success, however shocking to a natural sense of justice and humanity, however revolting to his own feelings. The spirit of war is deified. Obedience to the State and its war lord leaves no room for any other duty or feeling. Cruelty becomes legitimate when it promises victory. Proclaimed by the heads of the army, this doctrine would seem to have permeated the officers and affected even the private soldiers, leading them to justify the killing of noncombatants as an act of war, and so accustoming them to slaughter that even women and children become at last the victims. It cannot be supposed to be a national doctrine, for it neither springs from nor reflects the mind and feelings of the German people as they have heretofore been known to other nations. It is a specifically military doctrine, the outcome of a theory held by a ruling caste who have brooded and thought, written and talked, and dreamed about war until they have fallen under its obsession and been hypnotized by its spirit.

The doctrine is plainly set forth in the German Official Monograph on the usages of war on land, issued under the direction of the German Staff. This book is pervaded throughout by the view that whatever military needs suggest becomes thereby lawful, and upon this principle, as the diaries show, the German officers acted.[A]

[Footnote A: "Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege," Berlin, 1902, in Vol. VI., in the series entitled "Kriegsgeschichtliche Einzelschriften," published in 1905. A translation of this monograph, by Professor J.H. Morgan, has recently been published.]

If this explanation be the true one, the mystery is solved, and that which seemed scarcely credible becomes more intelligible, though not less pernicious. This is not the only case that history records in which a false theory, disguising itself as loyalty to a State or to a Church, has perverted the conception of duty and become a source of danger to the world.