When life is held so cheap, it is not surprising that honour and
property are not held more dear. Outrages upon the honour of women by
German soldiers have been so frequent that it is impossible to escape
the conviction that they have been condoned and indeed encouraged by
German officers. As regards this matter I have made a most minute
study of the German occupation of Bailleul. This place was occupied
by a regiment of German Hussars in October for a period of eight
days. During the whole of that period the town was delivered over
to the excesses of a licentious soldiery and was left in a state of
indescribable filth.
There were at least thirty cases of outrages on girls and young married
women, authenticated by sworn statements of witnesses and generally by
medical certificates of injury. It is extremely probable that, owing to
the natural reluctance of women to give evidence in cases of this kind,
the actual number of outrages largely exceeds this. Indeed, the leading
physician of the town, Dr. Bels, puts the number as high as sixty.
At least five officers were guilty of such offences, and where the
officers set the example the men followed. The circumstances were often
of a peculiarly revolting character; daughters were outraged in the
presence of their mothers, and mothers in the presence or the hearing
of their little children. In one case, the facts of which are proved by
evidence which would satisfy any court of law, a young girl of nineteen
was violated by one officer while the other held her mother by the
throat and pointed a revolver, after which the two officers exchanged
their respective rôles. After the outrage they dragged the girl outside
and asked if she knew of any other young girls ("jeunes filles") in the
neighbourhood, adding that they wanted to do to them what they had done
to her.
=_No use appealing to German Officers._=--The officers and soldiers
usually hunted in couples, either entering the houses under pretence of
seeking billets, or forcing the doors by open violence. Frequently the
victims were beaten and kicked, and invariably threatened with a loaded
revolver, if they resisted. The husband or father of the women and
girls was usually absent on military service; if one was present he was
first ordered away under some pretext; and disobedience of civilians to
German orders, however improper, is always punished with instant death.
In several cases little children heard the cries and struggles of
their mother in the adjoining room to which she had been carried by a
brutal exercise of force. No attempt was made to keep discipline, and
the officers, when appealed to for protection, simply shrugged their
shoulders. Horses were stabled in salons; shops and private houses were
looted (there are nine hundred authenticated cases of pillage)....
The German troops were often drunk and always insolent. But
significantly enough, the bonds of discipline thus relaxed were
tightened at will and hardly a single straggler was left behind.
Inquiries in other places, in the villages of Meteren, Oultersteen,
and Nieppe, for example, establish the occurrence of similar outrages
upon defenceless women, accompanied by every circumstance of disgusting
barbarity. No civilian dare attempt to protect his wife or daughter
from outrage. To be in possession of weapons of defence is to be
condemned to instant execution, and even a village constable found in
possession of a revolver (which he was required to carry in virtue
of his office) was instantly shot at Westoutre. Roving patrols burnt
farmhouses and turned the women and children out into the wintry
and sodden fields with capricious cruelty and in pursuance of no
intelligible military purpose.