As regards private property, respect for it among the German troops
simply does not exist. By the universal testimony of every British
officer and soldier whom I have interrogated the progress of German
troops is like a plague of locusts over the land. What they cannot
carry off they destroy. Furniture is thrown into the street, pictures
are riddled with bullets or pierced by sword cuts, municipal registers
burnt, the contents of shops scattered over the floor, drawers rifled,
live stock slaughtered and the carcases left to rot in the fields.
This was the spectacle which frequently confronted our troops on the
advance to the Aisne and on their clearance of the German troops out of
Northern France. Cases of petty larceny by German soldiers appear to
be innumerable; they take whatever seizes their fancy, and leave the
towns they evacuate laden like pedlars. Empty ammunition waggons were
drawn up in front of private houses and filled with their contents for
despatch to Germany.
=_Robbery--pure and simple._=--I have had the reports of the local
commissaires of police placed before me, and they show that in smaller
villages like those of Caestre and Merris, with a population of about
1,500 souls or less, pillaging to the extent of 4,000_l._ and 6,000_l._
was committed by the German troops. I speak here of robbery which does
not affect to be anything else. But it is no uncommon thing to find
extortion officially practised by the commanding officers under various
more or less flimsy pretexts. One of these consists of holding a town
or village up to ransom under pretence that shots have been fired at
the German troops. Thus at the village of Merris a sum of 2,000_l._
was exacted as a fine from the Mayor at the point of a revolver under
this pretence, this village of 1,159 inhabitants having already been
pillaged to the extent of some 6,000_l._ worth of goods. At La Gorgue,
another small village, 2,000_l._ was extorted under a threat that if
it were not forthcoming the village would be burnt. At Warneton, a
small village, a fine of 400_l._ was levied. These fines were, it must
be remembered, quite independent of the requisitions of supplies. As
regards the latter, one of our Intelligence officers, whose duty it has
been to examine the forms of receipt given by German officers and men
for such requisitions, informs me that, while the receipts for small
sums of 100 francs or less bore a genuine signature, those for large
sums were invariably signed "Herr Hauptmann von Koepenick," the simple
peasants upon whom this fraud was practised being quite unaware that
the signature has a classical fictitiousness in Germany....
=_German Officers' Bestial Ways._=--Before I leave the subject of the
treatment of private property by the German troops, I should like to
draw the attention of the reader to some unpleasant facts which throw
a baneful light on the temper of German officers and men. If one thing
is more clearly established than another by my inquiries among the
officers of our Staff and divisional commands, it is that châteaux
or private houses used as the headquarters of German officers were
frequently found to have been left in a state of bestial pollution,
which can only be explained by gross drunkenness or filthy malice.
Whichever be the explanation, the fact remains that, while to use
the beds and the upholstery of private houses as a latrine is not an
atrocity, it indicates a state of mind sufficiently depraved to commit
one. Many of these incidents, related to me by our own officers from
their own observations, are so disgusting that they are unfit for
publication. They point to deliberate defilement.
=_Methods of Savages._=--The public has been shocked by the evidence,
accepted by Lord Bryce's Committee as genuine, which tells of such
mutilations of women and children as only the Kurds of Asia Minor had
been thought capable of perpetrating. But the Committee were fully
justified in accepting it--they could not do otherwise--and they
have by no means published the whole. Pathologists can best supply
the explanation of these crimes. I have been told by such that it is
not at all uncommon in cases of rape or sexual excess to find that
the criminal, when satiated by lust, attempts to murder or mutilate
his victim. This is presumably the explanation--if one can talk of
explanation--of outrages which would otherwise be incredible. The
Committee hint darkly at perverted sexual instinct. Cases of sodomy
and of the rape of little children did undoubtedly occur on a very
large scale. Some of the worst things have never been published.
This is not the time for mincing one's words but for plain speech.
Disgusting though it is, I therefore do not hesitate to place on record
an incident at Rebais related to me by the Mayor of Coulommiers in the
presence of several of his fellow-townsmen with corroborative detail. A
respectable woman in that town was seized by some Uhlans who intended
to ravish her, but her condition made rape impossible. What followed is
better described in French.
Mme. H----, cafetière à Rebais, mise nue par une patrouille allemande,
obligée de parcourir ainsi toute sa maison, chassée dans la rue et
obligée de regarder les cadavres de soldats anglais. Les allemands lui
barbouillent la figure avec le sang de ses règles.
It is almost needless to say that the woman went mad. There is very
strong reason to suspect that young girls were carried off to the
trenches by licentious German soldiery, and there abused by hordes of
savage and licentious men. People in hiding in the cellars of houses
have heard the voices of women in the hands of German soldiers crying
all night long until death or stupor ended their agonies.
One of our officers, a subaltern in the sappers, heard a woman's
shrieks in the night coming from behind the German trenches near
Richebourg l'Avoué; when we advanced in the morning and drove the
Germans out a girl was found lying naked on the ground "pegged out" in
the form of a crucifix. I need not go on with this chapter of horrors.
To the end of time it will be remembered, and from one generation to
another, in the plains of Flanders, in the valleys of the Vosges, and
on the rolling fields of the Marne, the oral tradition of men will
perpetuate this story of infamy and wrong....
=_Insolence which Knows no Pity._=--Although I have some claims to
write as a jurist I have here made no attempt to pray in aid the Hague
Regulations in order to frame the counts of an indictment. The Germans
have broken all laws, human and divine, and not even the ancient
freemasonry of arms, whose honourable traditions are almost as old as
war itself, has restrained them in their brutal and licentious fury.
It is useless to attempt to discriminate between the people and their
rulers; an abundance of diaries of soldiers in the ranks shows that all
are infected with a common spirit. That spirit is pride, not the pride
of high and pure endeavour, but that pride for which the Greeks found
a name in the word _ὕβρις_ the insolence which knows no pity and which
feels no love. Long ago Renan warned Strauss of this canker which was
eating into the German character. Pedants indoctrinated it, Generals
instilled it, the Emperor preached it. The whole people were taught
that war was a normal state of civilisation, that the lust of conquest
and the arrogance of race were the most precious of the virtues. On
this Dead Sea fruit the German people have been fed for a generation
until they are rotten to the core.