THE BRITISH ENQUIRY IN FRANCE
In November of last year I was commissioned by the Secretary of State
for Home Affairs to undertake the investigation in France into the
alleged breaches of the laws of war by the German troops, the inquiries
in England being separately conducted by others. The results of my
investigation were communicated to the Home Office, in the form of
confidential reports and of depositions, diaries, proclamations, and
other _pièces justificatives_, and were in turn submitted to the
Committee appointed by the Prime Minister and presided over by Lord
Bryce. The Committee made liberal use of this material, but, owing to
the exigencies of space and the necessity of selection, some of it
remains unpublished, and I now propose to place it and the conclusions
I draw from it before the public. Some part of it, and that part the
most important--namely, that which establishes proofs of a deliberate
policy of atrocity by responsible German officers--came into my hands
too late for use by the Committee. Moreover, the Committee felt that
their first duty was to Belgium, and consequently the portion of the
inquiry which related to France, and in particular to outrages upon
British soldiers in France, occupies a comparatively small place in
their publications. In this article I therefore confine myself to the
latter branch of the inquiry, and the reader will understand that,
except where otherwise stated, the documents here set out are now
published for the first time.[77]
My investigations extended over a period of four or five months.
The first six weeks were spent in visiting the base hospitals and
convalescent camps at Boulogne and Rouen, and the hospitals at Paris;
during the remaining three months I was attached to the General
Headquarters Staff of the British Expeditionary Force. In the course
of my inquiries in the hospitals and camps I orally interrogated some
two or three thousand officers and soldiers,[78] representing almost
every regiment in the British armies and all of whom had recently been
engaged on active service in the field. The whole of these inquiries
were conducted by me personally, but my inquiries at headquarters were
of a much more systematic character. There, owing to the courtesy
of Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Murray, the late Chief of the
General Staff, I had the assistance of the various services--in
particular the Adjutant-General, the Provost-Marshal, the Director of
Military Intelligence, the Director of Medical Services and their
respective staffs--and also of the civil authorities, within the area
at present occupied by the British armies, such as the sous-prefets,
the procureurs de la République, the commissaries de police, and the
maires of the communes. In this way I was enabled not only to obtain
corroboration of the statements taken down in the base hospitals in the
earlier stages of my inquiry, but also to make a close local study of
the behaviour of the German troops towards the civil population during
their occupation of the districts recently evacuated by them.[79] In
pursuance of this latter inquiry I visited every town and commune
of any importance now in our occupation and lately occupied by the
Germans, including places within a few hundred yards of the German
lines. As regards the conduct of the German troops in the earlier
stages of the campaign and in other parts of France, I confined my
inquiries to incidents which actually came under the observation of
our own troops during or after the battles of Mons, the Marne, and
the Aisne, and did not extend them to include the testimony of the
French civil authorities, as I did not consider it part of my duty to
attempt to do what was already being done by the Commission of Inquiry
instituted by the President of the Council. But I freely availed
myself of opportunities of corroboration of English evidence from
French sources where such sources were readily accessible, and, by the
courtesy of the French Ministry of War, who placed a Staff officer and
a military car at my disposal, I was enabled to go over the ground to
the north-east of Paris covered by our troops in their advance to the
Aisne and to obtain confirmation of many incidents already related
to me by British officers and soldiers. It was also my privilege
frequently to meet M. Mollard, of the French Commission, and to examine
for myself the depositions on oath and _pièces justificatives_ on which
the first Reports of the Commission are based, and which are as yet
unpublished. In these different ways I have been enabled to obtain an
extensive view of the whole field of inquiry and to arrive at certain
general conclusions which may be of some value.
Methods of Inquiry.
My method of inquiry was twofold--I availed myself of both oral
evidence and written evidence. As regards the former, the evidence
taken at the base hospitals was wholly of this character. The method
which I adopted in taking it was as follows:
I made it a rule to explain to the soldier or officer at the outset
that the inquiry was an official one, and that he must be prepared to
put his name to any testimony he might elect to give.
I allowed the soldier to tell his story in his own way and in his
own words, but after, or in the course of, the recital, I always
cross-examined him as to details, inquiring in particular (1) whether
he directly witnessed the event himself; (2) what was the date and
place of the occurrence--to establish these I have frequently gone over
the operations with the witness with the aid of a military map and a
diary of the campaign; (3) whether, in the case of hearsay evidence,
he heard the story direct from the subject of it, and, in particular,
whether he was versed in the language employed; (4) whether he could
give me the name of any person or persons with him, particularly
officers, who also witnessed the event or heard the story.
After such cross-examination I then took down the narrative, if
satisfied that it possessed any value, read it over to the soldier, and
then obtained his signature. This, however, was often only the first
stage, as I have not infrequently been able to obtain confirmation
of the evidence so obtained by subsequent inquiries at General or
Divisional Headquarters, either among members of the staff or from
company officers or from the civil authorities. For example, hearsay
evidence of rape (and I always regarded such evidence as inconclusive
of itself) tendered to me by soldiers at the base hospitals received
very striking confirmation in the depositions of the victims on oath
which had been taken by the civil authorities at Bailleul, Metteren,
and elsewhere, and which were subsequently placed at my disposal.
Personal inquiries made by me among the maires and curés of the
communes where particular incidents were alleged to have occurred
resulted in similar confirmation. So, too, the Indian witnesses whom
I examined at the base hospital were at my request subsequently
re-examined, when they had rejoined their units, by the Intelligence
Officers attached to the Indian Corps, and with much the same results.
Corroborative evidence as to a policy of discrimination practised by
the German officers in favour of Indians was also obtained from the
record of statements volunteered by a German prisoner of the 112th
Regiment and placed at my disposal by our Intelligence Officers.
The general impression left in my mind by these subsequent inquiries
at head-quarters as to the value of the statements made to me earlier
by soldiers in hospital is that those statements were true. There is
a tendency in some quarters to depreciate the value of the testimony
of the British soldier, but the degree of its value depends a good
deal on the capacity in which, and the person to whom, the soldier is
addressing himself. In writing letters home or in talking to solicitous
visitors the soldier is one person; in giving evidence in an official
inquiry he is quite another. I have had opportunities when attending
field courts-martial of seeing something of the way in which soldiers
give evidence, and I see no reason to suppose that the soldier is any
less reliable than the average civilian witness in a court of common
law. Indeed, the moment I made it clear to the soldiers that my inquiry
was an official one they became very cautious and deliberate in their
statements, often correcting themselves or referring to their diaries
(of which they usually take great care), or qualifying the narration
with the statement “I did not see it myself.” It need hardly be said
that these observations as to the credibility of the soldiers apply
no less to that of the officers. And it is worthy of remark that,
apart from individual cases of corroboration of a soldier’s evidence
by that of an officer, the burden of the evidence in the case of each
class is the same. Where officers do not testify to the same thing as
the soldiers, they testify to similar things. The cumulative effect
produced on my mind is that of uniform experience.
I have often found the statements so made subsequently corroborated; I
have rarely, if ever, found them contradicted. I ascribe this result
to my having applied rigid rules as to the reception of evidence in
the first instance. I have always taken into account the peculiar
receptivity of minds fatigued and overwrought by the strain of battle
to the influences of “suggestion,” whether in the form of newspapers or
of oral gossip. It sometimes, but not often, happened that one could
recognise the same story in a different investiture, although appearing
at first sight to be a different occurrence. Or, again, it may happen
that a story undergoes elaboration in the process of transmission until
it looks worse than it originally was. So, too, a case of apparent
outrage may admit of several explanations; it may happen, for example,
in the case of a suspicious use of the white flag that the act of
one party of Germans in raising it and of another party in taking
advantage of it were conceivably independent of one another. Cases of
the shelling of “undefended” places, of churches, and of hospitals, I
have always disregarded if our men or guns were or lately had been
in the vicinity; and it may easily happen that a case of firing on
stretcher-bearers or ambulance waggons is due to the impossibility of
discrimination in the midst of a general engagement. Wherever any of
these features appeared to be present I rejected the evidence--not
always nor necessarily because I doubted its veracity, but because I
had misgivings as to its value.
Outrages upon Combatants in the Field.
Lord Bryce’s Committee, with that scrupulous fairness which so
honourably distinguishes their Report, have stated that:
“We have no evidence to show whether and in what cases orders proceeded
from the officer in command to give no quarter, but there are some
instances in which persons obviously desiring to surrender were
nevertheless killed.”
This is putting the case with extreme moderation, as the evidence
at the disposal of the Committee, showing, as it did, that such
barbarities were frequently committed when the German troops were
present in force, raised a considerable presumption that they were
authorised by company and platoon commanders at least, if not in
pursuance of brigade orders. But after the Committee had concluded
its labours, and, unfortunately, too late for its consideration, I
succeeded, as the result of a long and patient investigation, in
obtaining evidence which establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the
outrages upon combatants in the field were committed by the express
orders of responsible officers such as brigade and company commanders.
The nature of that evidence (which is here published for the first
time) I will disclose in a moment. But before doing so I will present
the conclusions I had previously arrived at by a process of induction
from individual cases. It will then be seen how the deductive method
of proof from the evidence of general orders confirms the presumption
raised by the evidence of particular instances.
A German military writer of great authority[80] predicted some years
ago that the next war would be one of inconceivable violence. The
prophecy appears only too true as regards the conduct of German troops
in the field; it has rarely been distinguished by that chivalry which
is supposed to characterise the freemasonry of arms. One of our most
distinguished Staff officers remarked to me that the Germans have no
sense of honour in the field, and the almost uniform testimony of our
officers and men induces me to believe that the remark is only too
true. Abuse of the white flag has been very frequent, especially in
the earlier stages of the campaign on the Aisne, when our officers,
not having been disillusioned by bitter experience, acted on the
assumption that they had to deal with an honourable opponent. Again and
again the white flag was put up, and when a company of ours advanced
unsuspectingly and without supports to take prisoners, the Germans
who had exhibited the token of surrender parted their ranks to make
room for a murderous fire from machine-guns concealed behind them.
Or, again, the flag was exhibited in order to give time for supports
to come up. It not infrequently happened that our company officers,
advancing unarmed to confer with the German company commander in such
cases, were shot down as they approached. The Camerons, the West Yorks,
the Coldstreams, the East Lancs, the Wiltshires, the South Wales
Borderers, in particular, suffered heavily in these ways. In all these
cases they were the victims of organised German units, _i.e._ companies
or battalions, acting under the orders of responsible officers.
There can, moreover, be no doubt that the respect of the German
troops for the Geneva Convention is but intermittent.[81] Cases of
deliberate firing on stretcher-bearers are, according to the universal
testimony of our officers and men, of frequent occurrence. It is almost
certain death to attempt to convey wounded men from the trenches
over open ground except under cover of night. A much more serious
offence, however, is the deliberate killing of the wounded as they
lie helpless and defenceless on the field of battle. This is so grave
a charge that were it not substantiated by the considered statements
of officers, non-commissioned officers, and men, one would hesitate
to believe it. But even after rejecting, as one is bound to do, cases
which may be explained by accident, mistake, or the excitement of
action, there remains a large residuum of cases which can only be
explained by deliberate malice. No other explanation is possible when,
as has not infrequently happened, men who have been wounded by rifle
fire in an advance, and have had to be left during a retirement for
reinforcements, are discovered, in our subsequent advance, with nine
or ten bayonet wounds or with their heads beaten in by the butt-ends
of rifles. Such cases could not have occurred, the enemy being
present in force, without the knowledge of superior officers. Indeed,
I have before me evidence which goes to show that German officers
have themselves acted in similar fashion. Some of the cases reveal a
leisurely barbarity which proves great deliberation; cases such as the
discovery of bodies of despatch-riders burnt with petrol or “pegged
out” with lances, or of soldiers with their faces stamped upon by the
heel of a boot, or of a guardsman found with numerous bayonet wounds
evidently inflicted as he was in the act of applying a field dressing
to a bullet wound. There also seems no reason to doubt the independent
statements of men of the Loyal North Lancs, whom I interrogated on
different occasions, that the men of one of their companies were
killed on December 20th after they had surrendered and laid down their
arms.[82] To what extent prisoners have been treated in this manner it
is impossible to say; dead men tell no tales, but an exceptionally able
Intelligence Officer at the head-quarters of the Cavalry Corps informed
me that it is believed that when British prisoners are taken in small
parties they are put to death in cold blood. Certain it is that our
men when captured are kicked, robbed of all they possess, threatened
with death if they will not give information, and in some cases forced
to dig trenches. The evidence I have taken from soldiers at the base
hospitals on these points is borne out by evidence taken at the Front
immediately after such occurrences by the Deputy Judge-Advocate
General, an Assistant Provost-Marshal, and a captain in the Sherwood
Foresters, and in the opinion of these officers the evidence which
they took, and which they subsequently placed at my disposal, is
reliable.[83]
The Proofs of Policy.
The question as to how far these outrages are attributable to policy
and superior orders becomes imperative. It was at first difficult to
answer. For a long time I did not find, nor did I expect to find, any
documentary orders to that effect. Such orders, if given at all, were
much more likely to be verbal, for it is extremely improbable that the
German authorities would be so unwise as to commit them to writing.
But the outrages upon combatants were so numerous and so collective in
character that I began to suspect policy at a very early stage in my
investigations. My suspicions were heightened by the significant fact
that exhaustive inquiries which I made among Indian native officers
and men in the hospital ships in port at Boulogne, and at the base
hospitals, seemed to indicate that experiences of outrage were as
rare among the Indian troops as they were common among the British.
The explanation was fairly obvious, inasmuch as many of these Indian
witnesses who had fallen into German hands testified to me that the
German officers[84] seized the occasion to assure them that Germany was
animated by the most friendly feelings towards them, and more than once
dismissed them with an injunction not to fight against German troops
and to bring over their comrades to the German side. For example, a
sepoy in the 9th Bhopals testified to me as follows:
“I and three others were found wounded by the Germans. They
bound up our wounds and invited us to join them, offering us
money and land. I answered, ‘I, who have eaten the King’s salt,
cannot do this thing and thus bring sorrow and shame upon my
people.’ The Germans took our chupattis, and offered us of
their bread in return. I said, ‘I am a Brahmin and cannot touch
it.’ They then left us, saying that if we were captured again
they would kill us.”
There was other evidence to the same effect. Eventually I obtained
proofs confirming my suspicions, and I will now proceed to set them out.
On May 3rd I visited the Ministry of War in Paris at the invitation of
the French military authorities, and was received by M. le Capitaine
René Petit, Chef de Service du Contentieux, who conducted me to the
department where the diaries of German prisoners were kept. I made a
brief preliminary examination of them, and discovered the following
passage (which I had photographed) in the diary of a German N.C.O.,
Göttsche, of the 85th Infantry Regiment (the IXth Corps), fourth
company detached for service, under date “Okt. 6, 1914, bei Antwerpen”:
“Der Herr Hauptmann rief uns um sich und sagte: ‘In dem
Fort, das zu nehmen ist, sind aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach
Engländer. Ich wünsche aber keinen gefangenen Engländer bei der
Komp. zu sehen.’ Ein allgemeiner Bravo der Zustimmung war die
Antwort.”
(“The Captain called us to him and said: ‘In the fortress
[_i.e._, Antwerp] which we have to take there are in all
probability Englishmen. But I do not want to see any Englishmen
prisoners in the hands of this company.’ A general ‘Bravo’ of
assent was the answer.”)
This malignant frenzy against British troops, so carefully instilled,
is borne out by a passage in another diary, now in the possession of
the French Ministry of War, which was found on April 22nd on the body
of Richard Gerhold, of the 71st Regiment of Infantry of the Reserve,
Fourth Army Corps, who was killed in September at Nouvron:
“Auch hier kommen ja Sachen vor, was auch nicht sein darf,
kommt aber doch vor. Grosse Greultaten kommen natürlich an
Engländern und Belgiern vor. Nun da wird eben jeder ohne Gnaden
niedergeknallt, aber wehe dem armen Deutschen der in ihre Hände
kommt....”
(“Here also things occur which should not be. Great atrocities
are of course committed upon Englishmen and Belgians; every one
of them is now knocked on the head without mercy. But woe to
the poor German who falls into their hands.”)
As regards the last sentence in this diary, which is one long chapter
of horrors and betrays a ferocious credulity, it is worthy of remark
that I have seen at the French Ministry of War the diary[85] of a
German N.C.O., named Schulze, who, judging by internal evidence, was a
man of exceptional intelligence, in which the writer refers to tales of
French and Belgian atrocities circulated among the men by his superior
officers. He shrewdly adds that he believes the officers invented these
stories in order to prevent him and his comrades from surrendering.
A less conclusive passage, but a none the less suspicious one, is
to be found in a diary now in my possession. It is the diary of an
Unter-offizier, named Ragge, of the 158th Regiment, and contains (under
date October 21st) the following:
“Wir verfolgten den Gegner soweit wir ihn sahen. Da haben wir
machen Engländer abgeknallt. Die Engländer lagen wie gesäht am
Boden. Die noch lebenden Engländer im Schützengraben wurden
erstochen oder erschossen. Unsere Komp. machte 61 Gefangene.”
Which may be translated:
“We pursued the enemy as far as we saw him. We ‘knocked out’
many English. The English lay on the ground as if sown there.
Those of the Englishmen who were still alive in the trenches
were stuck or shot. Our company made 61 prisoners.”[86]
So far I have only dealt with the acts of small German units--_i.e._
companies of infantry. I now come to the most damning proofs of a
policy of coldblooded murder of wounded and prisoners, initiated and
carried out by a whole brigade under the orders of a Brigadier-General.
This particular investigation took me a long time, but the results
are, I think conclusive. It may be remembered that some months ago
the French military authorities published in the French newspapers
what purported to be the text of an order issued by a German
Brigadier-General, named Stenger, commanding the 58th Brigade, in
which he ordered his troops to take no prisoners and to put to death
without mercy every one who fell into their hands, whether wounded
and defenceless or not. The German Government immediately denounced
the alleged order as a forgery. I determined to see whether I could
establish its authenticity, and in February last I obtained a copy of
the original from M. Mollard, of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who
is a member of the Commission appointed by the French Government to
inquire into the alleged German atrocities. The text of that order was
as follows:
“Befehl (Armee-befehl) vom 26. Aug. 1914, gegen 4 Uhr
nachm. wie er von Führer der 7 Komp. Reg. 112 (Infant.) bei
Thionville, am Eingang des Waldes von Saint-Barbe, seinen
Truppen als Brigade-oder Armee-befehl gegeben wurde:
“Von heute ab werden keine Gefangene mehr gemacht Sämtliche
Gefangene werden niedergemacht. Verwundete ob mit Waffen
oder wehrlos niedergemacht. Gefangene auch in grösseren
geschlossenen Formationen werden niedergemacht. Es bleibt kein
Mann lebend hinter uns.”
(“Army Order of 26 Aug., 1914, about 4 p.m., such as was given
to his troops as a Brigade or Army Order by the leader of the
7th Company of the 112th Regiment of Infantry at Thionville, at
the entrance of the wood of Saint Barbe.
“To date from this day no prisoners will be made any longer.
All the prisoners will be executed. The wounded, whether armed
or defenceless, will be executed. Prisoners, even in large and
compact formations, will be executed. Not a man will be left
alive behind us.”)
Taking this alleged order as my starting-point, I began to make
inquiries at British Head-quarters as to the existence of any
information about the doings of the 112th Regiment. I soon found that
there was good reason to suspect it. Our Intelligence Department placed
in my hands the records of the examination of two men of this regiment
who had been captured by us. One of them volunteered a statement to
one of our Intelligence Officers on November 23rd to the effect that
his regiment had orders to treat Indians well, but were allowed to
treat British prisoners as they pleased. This man’s testimony appeared
to be reliable, as statements he made on other points, _i.e._, as to
the German formations, were subsequently found to be true, and his
information as to discrimination in the treatment of Indians entirely
bore out the conclusions I had already arrived at on that particular
point. The German witness in question further stated that 65 out of 150
British prisoners were killed in cold blood by their escort on or about
October 23rd on the road to Lille, and that the escort were praised
for their conduct. Other German prisoners have, I may add, also made
statements that they had orders to kill all the English who fell into
their hands.
The evidence of this man of the 112th Regiment was as explicit and
assured as it could be. But the matter did not stop there. At a
later date an officer of the same regiment fell into our hands, in
whose field note-book we found the memorandum “Keine Gefangene” (“No
prisoners”). He was immediately cross-examined as to the meaning of
this passage, but he had a plausible explanation ready. It was to the
effect that his men were not to make the capture of prisoners a pretext
for retiring with them to the rear; but, having disarmed them, were to
leave them to be taken back by the supports.
But at the end of April--too late, unfortunately, for use by Lord
Bryce’s Committee--one of our Intelligence Officers placed before
me the following entry in the field note-book of a German prisoner,
Reinhart Brenneisen,[87] reservist, belonging to the 4th Company, 112th
Regiment, and dated in August (the same month as appears on the face of
the order in question):
“Auch kam Brigadebefehl sämtliche Franzosen ob verwundet oder
nicht, die uns in die Hände fielen, sollten erschossen werden.
Es dürfte keine Gefangenen gemacht werden.”
(“Then came a brigade order that all French, whether wounded
or not, who fell into our hands, were to be shot. No prisoners
were to be made.”)
This, I think, may be said to put the reality of the brigade order in
question beyond doubt.
The cumulative effect of this evidence, coupled with the statements of
so many of our men who claim to have been eye-witnesses of wholesale
bayoneting of the wounded, certainly confirms suspicions of the
gravest kind as to such acts having been done by authority. Neither
the temperament of the German soldier nor the character of German
discipline (_furchtbar streng_--“frightfully strict”--as a German
prisoner put it to me) makes it probable that the German soldiers acted
on their own initiative. It would, in any case, be incredible that so
many cases of outrage could be sufficiently explained by any law of
averages, or by the idiosyncrasies of the “bad characters” present in
every large congregation of men.
Treatment of Civil Population.
The subject-matter of the inquiry may be classified according as
it relates to: (1) ill-treatment of the civil population, and (2)
breaches of the laws of war in the field. As regards the first it
is not too much to say that the Germans pay little respect to life
and none to property. I say nothing of the monstrous policy of
vicarious responsibility laid down by them in the Proclamations as
to the treatment of hostages which I forwarded to the Committee and
which I left to the Committee to examine; I confine myself to the
practices which have come under my observation.[88] Here it is clear
that the treatment of civilians is regulated by no more rational or
humane policy than that of intimidation or, even worse, of sullen
vindictiveness. As the German troops passed through the communes and
towns of the arrondissements of Ypres, Hazebrouck, Bethune, and Lille,
they shot indiscriminately at the innocent spectators of their march;
the peasant tilling his fields, the refugee tramping the roads, and
the workman returning to his home. To be seen was often dangerous, to
attempt to escape being seen was invariably fatal. Old men and boys
and even women and young girls were shot like rabbits. The slightest
failure to comply with the peremptory demands of the invader has been
punished with instant death. The curé of Pradelle, having failed to
find the key of the church tower, was put against the wall and shot; a
shepherd at a lonely farmhouse near Rebais who failed to produce bread
for the German troops had his head blown off by a rifle; a baker at
Moorslede who attempted to escape was suffocated by German soldiers
with his own scarf; a young mother at Bailleul who was unable to
produce sufficient coffee to satisfy the demands of twenty-three German
soldiers had her baby seized by one of the latter and its head dipped
in scalding water; an old man of seventy-seven years of age at La Ferté
Gaucher who attempted to protect two women in his house from outrage
was killed with a rifle shot.
I select these instances from my notes at random--they could be
multiplied many times--as indications of the temper of the German
troops. They might, perhaps, be dismissed as the unauthorised acts of
small patrols were it not that there is only too much evidence to show
that the soldiers are taught by their superiors to set no value upon
human life, and things have been done which could not have been done
without superior orders. For example, at Bailleul,[89] La Gorgue, and
Doulieu, where no resistance of any kind was offered to the German
troops, and where the latter were present in force under the command
of commissioned officers, civilians were taken in groups, and after
being forced to dig their own graves were shot by firing parties in
the presence of an officer. At Doulieu,[90] which is a small village,
eleven civilians were shot in this way; they were strangers to the
place, and it was only by subsequent examination of the papers found
on their bodies that some of them were identified as inhabitants of
neighbouring villages. If these men had been guilty of any act of
hostility it is not clear why they were not shot at once in their
own villages, and inquiries at some of the villages from which they
were taken have revealed no knowledge of any act of the kind. It is,
however, a common practice for the German troops to seize the male
inhabitants (especially those of military age) of the places they
occupy and take them away on their retreat. Twenty-five were so taken
from Bailleul and nothing has been heard of them since. There is only
too much reason to suppose that the same fate has overtaken them as
that which befell the unhappy men executed at Doulieu. I believe the
explanation of these sinister proceedings to be that the men were
compelled to dig trenches for the enemy, to give information as to
the movement of their own troops, and to act as guides (all clearly
practices which are a breach of the laws of war and of the Hague
Regulations), and then, their presence being inconvenient and their
knowledge of the enemy’s positions and movements compromising, they
were put to death. This is not a mere surmise. The male inhabitants of
Warneton were forced to dig trenches for the enemy, and an inhabitant
of Merris was compelled to go with the German troops and act as
a guide; it is notorious that the official manual of the German
General Staff, _Kriegsbrauch in Landskriege_, condones, and indeed
indoctrinates, such breaches of the laws of war. British soldiers who
were taken prisoners by the Germans and subsequently escaped were
compelled by their captors to dig trenches, and in a field note-book
found on a soldier of the 100th Saxon Body Grenadiers (XIIth Corps)
occurs the following significant passage:
“My two prisoners worked hard at digging trenches. At midday
I got the order to rejoin at village with my prisoners. I was
very glad, as I had been ordered to shoot them both as the
French attacked. Thank God it was not necessary.”
In this connexion it is important to observe that the German policy of
holding a whole town or village responsible for the acts of isolated
individuals, whether by the killing of hostages or by decimation or by
a wholesale _battue_ of the inhabitants, has undoubtedly resulted in
the grossest and most irrelevant cruelties. A single shot fired in or
near a place occupied by the Germans--it may be a shot from a French
patrol or a German rifle let off by accident or mistake or in a drunken
affray--at once places the whole community in peril, and it seems to be
at once assumed that the civil inhabitants are guilty unless they can
prove themselves innocent. This was clearly the case at Armentières.
Frequently, as the field note-book of a Saxon officer testifies, they
are not allowed the opportunity. Indeed there seems some reason to
suppose that the German troops hold the civil inhabitants responsible
even for the acts of lawful belligerents, and, as my inquiries at
Merris and Messines go to show, a French patrol cannot operate in
the vicinity of a French or Belgian village without exposing the
inhabitants to sanguinary punishment or predatory fines. There is not
the slightest evidence to show that French civilians have fired upon
German troops, and in spite of the difficulty of proving a negative
there is a good deal of reason to reject such a supposition. Throughout
the communes of the region of Northern France which I have investigated
notices were posted up at the mairie requiring all the inhabitants
to deposit any arms in their possession with the civil authorities,
and the orders appear to have been complied with, as they were very
strictly enforced.
In this matter of holding the civil population responsible with their
lives for anything that may prove “inconvenient” (_gênant_), to quote
a German Proclamation, to the German troops, the German commanders
seem to have no sense of cause and effect. At Coulommiers, so the
Mayor informed me, they threatened to shoot him because the gas supply
gave out. In a town which I visited close to the German lines (and the
name of which I suppress by request of the civil authorities for fear
of a vindictive bombardment), the Mayor, who was under arrest in the
guardroom, was threatened with death because a signal-bell rang at the
railway station, and was in imminent peril until it was proved that
the act was due to the clumsiness of a German soldier; and an exchange
of shots between two drunken soldiers, resulting in the death of one
of them, was made the ground of an accusation that the inhabitants
had fired on the troops, the Mayor’s life being again in peril. Where
the life of the civilian is held so cheap, it is not surprising that
the German soldier, himself the subject of a fearful discipline, is
under a strong temptation to escape punishment for the consequences of
his own careless or riotous or drunken behaviour by attributing those
consequences to the civil population, for the latter is invariably
suspected.
Outrages upon Women--The German Occupation of Bailleul.
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.[91] 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 saloons; shops
and private houses were looted (there are nine hundred authenticated
cases of pillage). Some civilians were shot and many others carried off
into captivity. Of the fate of the latter nothing is known, but the
worst may be suspected.
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
farm-houses and turned the women and children out into the wintry
and sodden fields with capricious cruelty and in pursuance of no
intelligible military purpose.
Private Property.
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.
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 and £6,000 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 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 worth of goods. At La Gorgue, another small village, £2,000 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 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.
Observations on a Tour of the Marne and the Aisne.
My investigations, in the company of a French Staff Officer, in the
towns and villages of our line of march in that part of France which
lies north-east of Paris revealed a similar spirit of pillage and
wantonness. Coulommiers, a small town, was so thoroughly pillaged
that the damage, so I was informed by the Maire, has been assessed at
400,000 francs, a statement which bore out the evidence previously
given me by our own men as to the spectacle of wholesale looting
which they encountered when they entered that town. At Barcy, an
insignificant village of no military importance, I was informed by
the Maire that a German officer, accompanied by a soldier, entered
the communal archives and deliberately burnt the municipal registers
of births and deaths--obviously an exercise of pure spite. At
Choisy-au-Bac, a little village pleasantly situated on the banks of the
Aisne, which I visited in company with a French Staff Officer, I found
that almost every house had been burnt out. This was one of the worst
examples of deliberate incendiarism that I have come across. There
had been no engagement, and there was not a trace of shell-fire or of
bullet-marks upon the walls. Inquiries among the local gendarmerie,
and such few of the homeless inhabitants as were left, pointed to the
place having been set on fire by German soldiers in a spirit of pure
wantonness. The German troops arrived one day in the late afternoon,
and an officer, after inquiring of an inhabitant, who told me the
story, the name of the village, noted it down, with the remark “Bien,
nous le rôtirons ce soir.” At nine o’clock of the same evening they
proceeded to “roast” it by breaking the windows of the houses and
throwing into the interiors burning “pastilles,” apparently carried
for the purpose, which immediately set everything alight. The local
gendarme informed us that they also sprayed (_arrosé_) some of the
houses with petrol to make them burn better. The humbler houses shared
the fate of the more opulent, and cottage and mansion were involved in
a common ruin. It seems quite clear that there was not the slightest
pretext for this wanton behaviour, nor did the Germans allege one. They
did not accuse the inhabitants of any hostile behaviour; the best proof
of this is that they did not shoot any of them, except one who appears
to have been shot by accident.
A visit to Senlis in the course of the same tour fully confirmed
all that the French Commission has already reported as to the cruel
devastation wrought by the Germans in that unhappy town. The main
street was one silent quarry of ruined houses burnt by the hands of the
German soldiers, and hardly a soul was to be seen. Even cottages and
concierges’ lodges had been set on fire. I have seen few sights more
pitiful and none more desolate. Towns further east, such as Sermaizes,
Nomeny, Gerbevillers, were razed to the ground with fire and sword and
are as the Cities of the Plain.
Bestiality of German Officers and Men.
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 head-quarters 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.
The public has been shocked by the evidence, accepted by the 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 regles.”
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
savages 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.
Conclusion.
I should say that in the above summary I have confined myself to the
result of the inquiries I made at General Head-quarters and in the area
of our occupation, and have not attempted to summarise the evidence
I had previously taken from the British officers and soldiers at the
base, as the latter may be left to speak for itself in the depositions
already published by the Committee. The object of the summary is to
show how far independent inquiries on the spot go to confirm it.
The testimony of our soldiers as to the reign of terror which they
found prevailing on their arrival in all the places from which they
drove the enemy out was amply confirmed by these subsequent and local
investigations.
It will, of course, be understood that these inquiries of mine were
limited in scope and can by no means claim to be exhaustive. For one
thing, I was the only representative of the Home Office sent to France
for this purpose; for another, I did not become attached to General
Head-quarters until the beginning of February, and before that time
little or nothing had been done in the way of systematic inquiry
by the Staff, whose officers had other and more pressing duties to
perform. By that time the testimony to many grave incidents, especially
in the field, had perished with those who witnessed them and they
remained but a sombre memory. The hearsay evidence of these things
which was sometimes all that was left made an impression on my mind as
deep as it was painful, but it would have been contrary to the rules of
evidence, to which I have striven to conform, for me to take notice of
it.
Two things clearly emerge from this observation. One is that had there
been from the beginning of the campaign a regular system of inquiry
at General Head-quarters into these things, _pari passu_ with their
occurrence, the volume of evidence, great though it is, would have been
infinitely greater; the other, that, as there is only too much reason
to suppose that with the growing vindictiveness of the enemy things
will be worse before they are better, the case for the establishment of
such a system throughout the continuance of the War is one that calls
for serious consideration.
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 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.