Part 2 (1/2)
”Considering that the King (of the Belgians) has given orders to defend the country by all possible means, we have been ordered to shoot every male inhabitant. At Dinant more than 100 were collected in a crowd and shot. A dreadful Sunday.” Another, an aesthete, writes as follows: ”During the night many more civilians were shot, so many that we were able to count over 200. Women and children, with lamps in their hands, were compelled to witness the horrible sight. We afterwards ate our rice among the dead bodies. Sadly beautiful.” He adds (in shorthand) ”Captain Hermann was drunk.”
Again another: ”_Dinant._ We have been firing on everyone who showed himself, or on those thrown out of the houses, men or women. The bodies lie in the streets, in heaps a yard deep.”
A Saxon officer writes: ”My company is at Bouvignes. Our men behave like vandals: everything is upset; the sight of the slaughtered inhabitants defies all description; not a house is left standing. We have dragged out of every corner all survivors, one after another, men, women, and children, found in a burning cloister, and have shot them 'en ma.s.se.'”
The following depositions on the ma.s.sacres at Nomeny are made by prisoners, one a Bavarian officer in the Reserve, the other a private in the same regiment. The lieutenant says: ”I gathered the impression that it was impossible for the officers at Nomeny to prevent such acts. As far as I can judge, the crimes committed there, which horrified all the soldiers who were at Nomeny later on, must be put down to the acts of unnatural brutes.” The soldier says, ”At five o'clock regimental orders were received to kill every male inhabitant of Nomeny, and to raze everything to the ground; we forced our way into the houses.” Here is a more detailed account of a ma.s.sacre near Blamont. ”All the villagers fled: it was terrible; their beards thick with blood, and what faces!
They were dreadful to look at. The dead were all buried, numbering sixty. Among them were many old men and women, and one unfortunate woman half confined--the whole being frightful to look at. Three children were clasped in each other's arms, and had died thus. The Altar and the vaulting of the church were destroyed because there was a telephone[11]
communicating with the enemy. This morning, 2nd September, all the survivors were expelled. I saw four small boys carrying away on two sticks a cradle containing a baby of five or six months. All this is dreadful to see. Blow for blow: thunder against thunder! Every thing is given up to pillage. I also saw a mother with her two children; one had a big wound on the head, and one eye knocked out.”
FOOTNOTES:
[8] They have decorated the pirates who sank the _Lusitania_. They glory in the crime, and have even struck a commemorative medal in its honour.
[9] In this case, and many of the following ones, the reader is requested to note, and remember, the _motive_ for the murders.
[10] This cruel treatment of the Abbe Dergent, priest of Gelrode, near Louvain, is reported by a neutral witness, Father G., a student at Louvain. The German soldiers accused the Belgian priests of every conceivable crime; the a.s.sistant-Priest of Sainte-Gertrude (Louvain), who was remonstrating with a soldier, received this reply: ”We are Catholics too, but you are pigs and black devils.” In Belgium about one hundred of the clergy were ma.s.sacred. Note further that in this unfortunate country _doctors_ were particularly ill-treated; thirty-seven being shot in the small parishes, while more than one hundred and fifty disappeared altogether from large towns.
[11] To whom did it belong, and where was it? Telephones exist in every district of Meurthe-et-Moselle. Besides, our army installed field telephones which were not all destroyed at the time of their retreat. It is a most foolish pretext, yet where can one find a more stupid one than this? A German official communique, in order to prove that the general rising of the people had been organized for a long time, declares, ”that depots of arms were installed, where each rifle bore the name of the man for whom it was intended.” It is absolutely clear that this applies to arms taken from civilians by order of the local authorities in Belgium and France, and deposited at the Town Hall, every weapon bearing the name of its owner. Would they have taken that for an a.r.s.enal? No, stupid as they may be, they are not so foolish as that. They feign stupidity simply because they know very well that the conscience of the civilized world is beginning to be moved.
OUTRAGES ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN
We might write a long and heartbreaking chapter on this pitiful subject, but let the following suffice. The Report of the French Commission of Enquiry concludes with these words, ”Outrages upon women and young girls have been common _to an unheard-of extent_.” No doubt the bulk of these crimes will never come to light, for it needs a concatenation of special circ.u.mstances for such acts to be committed in public. Unfortunately and only too often these circ.u.mstances have existed, _e.g._, at Beton-Bazoches and Sancy-les-Provins, a young girl, and at St.
Denis-les-Rebaix, a mother-in-law and a little boy of eight years old, and at Coulommiers a husband and two children, were witnesses to outrages committed on the mother of the family. Sometimes the attacks were individual and sometimes committed by bodies of men, _e.g._, at Melen-Labouxhe, Margaret W. was violated by twenty German soldiers, and then shot by the side of her father and mother. They did not even respect nuns.[12]
They did not even spare grandmothers (Louppy-le-Chateau, Vitry-en-Perthois ...).
Nor did they respect children.... At Cirey, a witness (a University professor), whose statements one of us took down a few days after the tragedy, cried to a Bavarian officer, ”Have you no children in Germany?”
All the officer said in reply was, ”My mother never bore swine like you.”
Now and then they let themselves loose on a whole family; at Louppy, the mother and her two young girls aged thirteen and eight, respectively, were simultaneous victims of their savagery.
The outrages sometimes lasted till death. At Nimy, the martyrdom of little Irma G. lasted six hours till death delivered her from her sufferings. When her father tried to rescue her he was shot, and her mother was seriously wounded. Indeed, it was certain destruction to any frenzied parent who tried to defend his child. A clergyman of Dixmude says, ”The burgomaster of Handzaeme was shot for trying to protect his daughter.” And how many other cases have occurred! We have not the heart to continue the list.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] See the report of the French Commission (vol. i., page 35). See also, in the ”Reply to the White Book,” p. 500, the moving letter of Cardinal Mercier to von Bissing: ”My conscience forbids my divulging to any tribunal the information, alas, only too well substantiated, which I possess. Outrages on nuns have been committed ...”
KILLING THE WOUNDED
There are _great numbers_ of wounded who, on their solemn oath, have related how, when lying on the field of battle, they saw their wounded comrades ”finished off” by rifle or revolver shots, or by blows from b.u.t.t-ends, or by bayonet stabs, or kicked to death by German soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and even by officers.[13]
We cannot pause to a.n.a.lyse these innumerable depositions. There is other evidence. How often, when a counter-attack has put us in possession of ground lost the day before, have we found poor fellows ”finished off”--with their throats cuts, as in the case of the two sergeants of the 31st Cha.s.seurs at the Pa.s.s of Sainte-Marie, or ”with their own bayonets driven into their mouths,” like the poor little fellow of the 17th. The enemy often runs amok like this:--”On August 23rd, the Cure of Remereville tended Lieutenant Toussaint (who pa.s.sed out first at the Forestry School in July). When he fell in battle, this young officer was bayoneted by all the Germans who pa.s.sed near him, and his body was a ma.s.s of wounds from head to feet.” At Oudrigny ”a German officer met a French vehicle showing the Red Cross flag, and loaded with ten wounded.
He deployed his company, and fired two volleys at it.” At Bonviller, an officer murdered nine French wounded, stretched helpless in a barn, by shooting them through the ear. On 23rd August at Montigny-le-Tilleul, M.