Part 2

=_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.

FOOTNOTE

[1] Brenneisen is now a prisoner in England. The diary was a most carefully kept one.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

-Obvious print and punctuation errors fixed.

End of Project Gutenberg's Germany's Dishonoured Army, by Prof. J.H. Morgan