Let us call to mind the innumerable instances when the Boches put up
their hands, or waved a white flag, and cried, "Kamerad," pretending to
surrender: thus drawing our unsuspecting men towards them and then
suddenly moving aside, to leave the field open to a party of riflemen or
a machine-gun hidden away behind them. These are the tricks of cowards,
which were constantly employed at the beginning of the war, and our men
(at the cost of many victims) learned at last to guard against them. But
they have done even more cowardly things than this. There was the German
officer who, to protect himself from danger while taking observations,
put three children round him. At Néry, twenty-five persons, women and
children, were compelled to walk at the side of a Boche column to
protect it from being enfiladed. Near Malines, six German soldiers who
were taking with them five young girls, on meeting a Belgian patrol,
placed the girls all round them to prevent the enemy from firing. At
Jodoigne they put a Curé in front of them and made him walk with his
arms folded, and they did the same at Hougaerde to another Curé who was
killed. A similar fate befell several civilians at Mons. At Senlis, our
men were firing to cover our retreat, and the Germans took some
inhabitants out of the houses and made them walk in the middle of the
streets while they themselves kept along by the walls. Many of these
unfortunate people were killed. "In numerous places," says the Belgian
Commission of Enquiry, "the Germans made civilians--men and women--walk
in front of them." In this way a German column passed through
Marchienne, pushing ahead of them a body of several hundred civilians.
They took the road for Montigny-le-Tilleul, where the first important
battle with the French forces took place. At Sempst, during the fighting
on the 25th August, men and women were placed in the front rank of the
firing line. At Erpe, on the 12th September, a German column, attacked
by a Belgian motor-machine-gun, took out of the houses twenty to
twenty-five men and young people (including a child of thirteen), and
made them walk in front in the middle of the road. The machine-gunners,
seeing civilians in front of them, ceased firing. At Alost, a German
company attacked the bridge. In front marched some thirty civilians with
a machine-gun hidden behind them. At Nimy, with the butt-ends of their
rifles, they drove in front of them 500 men, women and children towards
the English, who in consequence dared not fire; and in this way the 84th
and 85th Schleswig Regiments were able to continue their heroic march as
far as Maubeuge.
When their adversary cannot actually see the human shield that they are
using, they send a warning. On the 7th September, 1914, the Death's Head
Hussars shut up all the inhabitants of the village with them in the
Château of Saint Ouen-sur-Morin, and then, to avoid being shelled,
informed the English of their "dispositions." They fired on anyone who
tried to escape. At Mouzon, we saw a number of civilians being pushed in
front of the enemy with the butt-ends of rifles, and we stopped firing.
The wretched people moved suddenly to one side of the road, uncovering
the Germans, and then we fired. The Boches, furious, fired their first
volley not at us, but point blank at these non-combatants, who were
decimated.
The cowards chiefly used civilians as shields, but sometimes they also
made use of prisoners. At Keyem, they pushed one hundred Belgian
soldiers in front of them, some with their hands tied, and others with
their arms in the air. At Dixmude, they advanced under the shelter of
forty disarmed marines who had been taken prisoners. When they got in
front of our lines our marines shouted, "For God's sake fire, these are
Germans," and these heroes fell gloriously under the French bullets.
Such deeds are countless.
The Boches will deny them later on, but in 1914 they did not deny them,
but rather gloried in them as a "good idea." We can see this from the
letter of the Bavarian Lieutenant Eberlein, published on the 7th
October, 1914, by a leading Munich paper, "We had arrested three other
civilians when a 'good idea' struck me. We made them sit on chairs in
the middle of the street;--supplications from them, and blows with
butt-ends of rifles from us. At last they were seated outside in the
street with their hands convulsively clasped together. I felt sorry for
them, but the plan worked at once. As I learnt later, the regiment which
entered Saint-Dié, further to the north of us, had precisely similar
experiences to our own. The civilians, whom they had put in the same
way in the middle of the street, were killed by French bullets. I saw
their dead bodies."[17]