CHAPTER XII

JAMES BRYCE’S REPORT ON SYSTEMATIC MASSACRE IN BELGIUM

REPORT OF COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE GERMAN OUTRAGES -- A HARROWING RECITAL -- TELLS OF MASSACRES--“KILLED IN MASSES”--THE TALE OF LOUVAIN -- TREATMENT OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN -- CALLS KILLING DELIBERATE--“SPIRIT OF WAR DEIFIED”--THE COMMISSION’S CONCLUSIONS.

Viscount Bryce, former British Ambassador at Washington, was appointed chairman of a special government commission to investigate and report on “outrages alleged to have been committed by German troops.” Associated with Lord Bryce on the commission were Sir Frederick Pollock, Sir Edward Clarke, Sir Alfred Hopkinson, H. A. L. Fisher, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield; Harold Cox, and Kenelm E. Digby. The commission was appointed by Premier Asquith on January 22, 1915. The document is considered as probably the most severe arraignment made of the German military sweep across Belgium, mainly because of the position of Viscount Bryce as a historian, and also because of the care with which the investigation was made, the great number of witnesses whose testimony was examined, and the mass of evidence submitted with the report of the commission.

The report makes an official document of sixty-one printed pages, or upward of 30,000 words, accompanied by maps showing the various routes of the army and the chief scenes of desolation. It states at the outset that 1,200 witnesses have been examined, the depositions being taken by examiners of legal knowledge and experience, though without authority to administer an oath. The examiners were instructed not to “lead” the witnesses, and to seek to bring out the truth by cross-examination and otherwise. The commission also submitted extracts from a number of diaries taken from the German dead, chiefly German soldiers and in some cases officers.

A HARROWING RECITAL

Taking up conditions at Liège at the outset of the war, the report gives a harrowing recital of occurrences at various points in the devastated territory. At Herve on August 4, 1914, the report says, “the murder of an innocent fugitive civilian was a prelude to the burning and pillage of the town and of other villages in the neighborhood; to the indiscriminate shooting of civilians of both sexes and to the organized military execution of batches of selected males. Thus some fifty men escaping from burning houses were seized, taken outside the town and shot. At Melen, in one household alone the father and mother (names given) were shot, the daughter died after being repeatedly attacked and the son was wounded.

“In Soumagne and Micheroux very many civilians were summarily shot. In a field belonging to a man named E----, fifty-six or fifty-seven were put to death. A German officer said, ‘You have shot at us.’ One of the villagers asked to be allowed to speak, and said, ‘If you think these people fired, kill me, but let them go.’ The answer was three volleys. The survivors were bayoneted. Their corpses were seen in the field that night by another witness. One at least had been mutilated. These were not the only victims in Soumagne. The eye-witness of the massacre saw, on his way home, twenty bodies, one that of a girl of thirteen. Another witness saw nineteen corpses in a meadow.

“At Heure le Romain all the male inhabitants, including some bed-ridden old men, were imprisoned in the church. The burgomaster’s brother and the priest were bayoneted. The village of Visé was completely destroyed. Officers directed the incendiaries. Antiques and china were removed from the houses before their destruction, by officers, who guarded the plunder, revolver in hand.

TELLS OF MASSACRES

“Entries in a German diary show that on August 10 the German soldiers gave themselves up to debauchery in the streets of Liège, and on the night of the 20th a massacre took place in the streets. . . . Though the cause of the massacre is in dispute, the results are known with certainty. The Rue des Pitteurs and houses in the Place de l’Université and the Quai des Pêcheurs were systematically fired with benzine; and many inhabitants were burned alive in their houses, their efforts to escape being prevented by rifle fire. Twenty people were shot while trying to escape, before the eyes of one of the witnesses. The Liège Fire Brigade turned out, but was not allowed to extinguish the fire. Its carts, however, were usefully employed in removing heaps of civilian corpses to the Town Hall.”

Taking up the Valleys of the Meuse and Sambre, the report gives lengthy details of terrible conditions described by witnesses at Andenne, and says:

“About four hundred people lost their lives in this massacre, some on the banks of the Meuse, where they were shot according to orders given, and some in the cellars of the houses where they had taken refuge. Eight men belonging to one family were murdered. Another man was placed close to a machine gun which was fired through him. His wife brought his body home on a wheelbarrow. The Germans broke into her house and ransacked it.

“A hair-dresser was murdered in his kitchen where he was sitting with a child on each knee. A paralytic was murdered in his garden. After this came the general sack of the town. Many of the inhabitants who escaped the massacre were kept as prisoners and compelled to clear the houses of corpses and bury them in trenches. These prisoners were subsequently used as a shelter and protection for a pontoon bridge which the Germans had built across the river and were so used to prevent the Belgian forts from firing upon it.

“A few days later the Germans celebrated a ‘fête nocturne’ in the square. Hot wine, located in the town, was drunk, and the women were compelled to give three cheers for the Kaiser and to sing ‘Deutschland über Alles.’”

“KILLED IN MASSES”

Similar details are recited at much length in reference to the districts of Namur, Charleroi and the town of Dinant. At the latter point, the report says, “Unarmed civilians were killed in masses. We have no reason to believe that the civilian population of Dinant gave any provocation or that any other defense can be put forward to justify the treatment inflicted upon its citizens.”

The commission stated that it had received a great mass of evidence on “scenes of chronic outrage” in the territory bounded by the towns Aerschot, Malines, Vilvorde and Louvain. It stated that the total number of outrages was so great that the commission could not refer to them all.

“The commission is specially impressed by the character of the outrages committed in the smaller villages. Many of these are exceptionally shocking and cannot be regarded as contemplated or prescribed by responsible commanders of the troops by whom they were commanded. Evidence goes to show that deaths in these villages were due not to accident but to deliberate purpose. The wounds were generally stabs or cuts, and for the most part appear to have been inflicted with a bayonet.

“In Sempst the corpse of a man with his legs cut off, who was partly bound, was seen by a witness, who also saw a girl of seventeen in great distress dressed only in a chemise. She alleged that she herself and other girls had been dragged into a field, stripped naked and attacked, and that some of them had been killed with a bayonet.”

Taking up conditions at Aerschot and the surrounding district during September, the report says:

“At Haecht several children had been murdered; one of two or three years old was found nailed to the door of a farmhouse by its hands and feet, a crime which seems almost incredible, but the evidence for which we feel bound to accept. At Eppeghem the body of a child of two was seen pinned to the ground with a German lance. The same witness saw a mutilated woman alive near Weerde on the same day.”

A chapter is given to the terrible conditions at Louvain, where the report states, “massacre, fire and destruction went on. . . . Citizens were shot and others taken prisoners and compelled to go with the troops. Soldiers went through the streets saying, ‘Man hat geschossen’ (some one has fired on us).

THE TALE OF LOUVAIN

“The massacre of civilians at Louvain was not confined to its citizens. Large crowds of people were brought into Louvain from the surrounding districts, not only from Aerschot and Gelrod, but also from other places. For example, a witness describes how many women and children were taken in carts to Louvain, and there placed in a stable. Of the hundreds of people thus taken from the various villages and brought to Louvain as prisoners, some were massacred there, others were forced to march along with citizens of Louvain through various places, some being ultimately sent to the Belgian lines at Malines, others were taken in trucks to Cologne, others were released.

“Ropes were put around the necks of some and they were told they would be hanged. An order then came that they were to be shot instead of hanged. A firing squad was prepared, and five or six prisoners were put up, but were not shot. . . . This taking of the inhabitants in groups and marching them to various places must evidently have been done under the direction of a higher military authority. The ill-treatment of the prisoners was under the eyes and often under the direction or sanction of officers, and officers themselves took part in it. . . .

“It is to be noticed that cases occur in the depositions in which humane acts by individual officers and soldiers are mentioned, or in which officers are said to have expressed regret at being obliged to carry out orders for cruel action against the civilians. Similarly, we find entries in diaries which reveal a genuine pity for the population and disgust at the conduct of the enemy. It appears that a German non-commissioned officer stated definitely that he ‘was acting under orders and executing them with great unwillingness.’ A commissioned officer on being asked at Louvain by a witness, a highly educated man, about the horrible acts committed by the soldiers, said he ‘was merely executing orders,’ and that he himself would be shot if he did not execute them.”

Another division of the report is on the “killing of non-combatants in France.” This is not as detailed as the case of Belgium, as the commission states that the French official report gives the most complete account as to the invaded districts in France. It adds:

“The evidence before us proves that, in the parts of France referred to, murder of unoffending civilians and other acts of cruelty, including aggravated cases of felonious attack, carried out under threat of death, and sometimes actually followed by murder of the victim, were committed by some of the German troops.”

TREATMENT OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN

A special chapter is given to the treatment of women and children. The latter, it is said, frequently received milder treatment than the men. But many instances are given of “calculated cruelty, often going the length of murder, towards the women and children.” A witness gives a story, very circumstantial in its details, of how women were publicly attacked in the market place of the city, five young German officers assisting. The report goes on: “In the evidence before us there are cases tending to show that aggravated crimes against women were sometimes severely punished. These instances are sufficient to show that the maltreatment of women was not part of the military scheme of the invaders, however much it may appear to have been the inevitable result of the system of terror deliberately adopted in certain regions.

“It is clearly shown that many offences were committed against infants and quite young children. On one occasion children were even roped together and used as a military screen against the enemy, on another three soldiers went into action carrying small children to protect themselves from flank fire. It is difficult to imagine the motives which may have prompted such acts. Whether or not Belgian civilians fired on German soldiers, young children at any rate did not fire.”

Many instances are given of the use of civilians as screens during the military operation. Cases of the Red Cross being misused for offensive military purposes, and of abuse of the white flag are also given. As to the latter the report says: “There is in our opinion sufficient evidence that these offences have been frequent, deliberate and in many cases committed by whole units under orders. All the facts mentioned are in contravention of The Hague Convention, signed by the Great Powers, including France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States, in 1907.”

A division of the report is given to diaries of German soldiers. The entry of a sergeant of the First Guards Regiment, who received the Iron Cross, says, under date of August 10: “A transport of 300 Belgians came through Duisburg in the morning. Of these, eighty, including the Oberburgomaster, were shot according to martial law.” The diary of a member of the Fourth Company of Jägers says, under date of August 23: “About 220 inhabitants and the village were burned.” Another diary, by a member of the Second Mounted Battery, First Kurhessian Field Artillery Regiment, No. 11, records an incident which happened in French territory near Lille on October 11: “We had no fight, but we caught about twenty men and shot them.” The commission says of this last diary: “By this time killing not in a fight would seem to have passed into a habit.”

The report adds that the most important entry was contained in diary No. 19. This contained no name and address, but names referred to in the diary indicate that the entries were made by an officer of the First Regiment of Foot Guards. The entry made at Bermeton on August 24 says: “We took about 1,000 prisoners; at least 500 were shot. The village was burned because inhabitants had also shot. Two civilians were shot at once.”

“If a line is drawn on a map from the Belgian frontier to Liège and continued to Charleroi, and a second line drawn from Liège to Malines, a sort of figure resembling an irregular Y will be formed. It is along this ‘Y’ that most of the systematic (as opposed to isolated) outrages were committed. If the period from August 4 to August 30 is taken it will be found to cover most of these organized outrages. Termonde and Alost extend, it is true, beyond the ‘Y’ lines, and they belong to the month of September. Murder, assault, arson and pillage began from the moment when the German army crossed the frontier. For the first fortnight of the war the towns and villages near Liège were the chief sufferers. From August 19 to the end of the month outrages spread in the direction of Charleroi and Malines and reached their period of greatest intensity.

“There is a certain significance in the fact that the outrages around Liège coincide with the unexpected resistance of the Belgian army in that district, and that the slaughter which reigned from August 19 to the end of the month is contemporaneous with the period when the German army’s need for a quick passage through Belgium at all costs was deemed imperative.

“In all wars occur many shocking and outrageous acts of men of criminal instincts whose worst passions are unloosed by the immunity which the conditions of warfare afford. Drunkenness, moreover, may turn even a soldier who has no criminal habits into a brute, and there is evidence that intoxication was extremely prevalent among the German army, both in Belgium and in France. Unfortunately little seems to have been done to repress this source of danger.

CALLS KILLING DELIBERATE

“In the present war, however--and this is the gravest charge against the German army--the evidence shows that the killing of non-combatants was carried out to an extent for which no previous war between nations claiming to be civilized (for such cases as the atrocities perpetrated by the Turks on the Bulgarian Christians in 1876, and on the Armenian Christians in 1895 and 1896, do not belong to that category) furnishes any precedent. That this killing was done as part of a deliberate plan is clear from the facts hereinbefore set forth regarding Louvain, Aerschot, Dinant and other towns. The killing was done under orders in each place. It began at a certain fixed date. Some of the officers who carried out the work did it reluctantly, and said they were obeying directions from their chiefs. The same remarks apply to the destruction of property. House burning was part of the program; and villages, even large parts of a city, were given to the flames as part of the terrorizing policy.

“Citizens of neutral states who visited Belgium in December and January report that the German authorities do not deny that non-combatants were systematically killed in large numbers during the first weeks of the invasion, and this, so far as we know, has never been officially denied.

“The German government has, however, sought to justify these severities on the grounds of military necessity and has excused them as retaliation for cases in which civilians fired on German troops. There may have been cases in which such firing occurred, but no proof has ever been given, or, to our knowledge, attempted to be given, of such cases, nor of the stories of shocking outrages perpetrated by Belgian men and women on German soldiers. . . .

“We gladly record the instances where the evidence shows that humanity has not wholly disappeared from some members of the German army and that they realized that the responsible heads of that organization were employing them not in war but in butchery: ‘I am merely executing orders, and I should be shot if I did not execute them,’ said an officer to a witness at Louvain. At Brussels another officer said, ‘I have not done one hundredth part of what we have been ordered to do by the high German military authorities.’

“That these acts should have been perpetrated on the peaceful population of an unoffending country which was not at war with its invaders, but merely defending its own neutrality, guaranteed by the invading power, may excite amazement and even incredulity. It was with amazement and almost with incredulity that the commission first read the depositions relating to such acts. But when the evidence regarding Liège was followed by that regarding Aerschot, Louvain, Andenne, Dinant, and the other towns and villages, the cumulative effect of such a mass of concurrent testimony became irresistible, and we were driven to the conclusion that the things described had really happened. The question then arose how they could have happened.

“The explanation seems to be that these excesses were committed--in some cases ordered, in others allowed--on a system and in pursuance of a set purpose. That purpose was to strike terror into the civil population and dishearten the Belgian troops, so as to crush down resistance and extinguish the very spirit of self-defense. The pretext that civilians had fired upon the invading troops was used to justify not merely the shooting of individual franc-tireurs, but the murder of large numbers of innocent civilians, an act absolutely forbidden by the rules of civilized warfare.

“SPIRIT OF WAR DEIFIED”

“In the minds of Prussian officers war seems to have become a sort of sacred mission, one of the highest functions of the omnipotent state, which is itself as much an army as a state. Ordinary morality and the ordinary sentiment of pity vanish in its presence, superseded by a new standard which justifies to the soldier every means that can conduce to success, however shocking to a natural sense of justice and humanity, however revolting to his own feelings. The spirit of war is deified. Obedience to the state and its war lord leaves no room for any other duty or feeling. Cruelty becomes legitimate when it promises victory. Proclaimed by the heads of the army, this doctrine would seem to have permeated the officers and affected even the private soldiers, leading them to justify the killing of non-combatants as an act of war, and so accustoming them to slaughter that even women and children become at last the victims.

“It cannot be supposed to be a national doctrine, for it neither springs from nor reflects the mind and feelings of the German people as they have heretofore been known to other nations. It is specifically military doctrine, the outcome of a theory held by a ruling caste who have brooded and thought, written and talked and dreamed about war until they have fallen under its obsession and been hypnotized by its spirit.

“The doctrine is plainly set forth in the German official monograph on the usages of war on land, issued under the direction of the German staff. This book is pervaded throughout by the view that whatever military needs suggest becomes thereby lawful, and upon this principle, as the diaries show, the German officers acted.

“If this explanation be the true one, the mystery is solved, and that which seemed scarcely credible becomes more intelligible though not less pernicious. This is not the only case that history records in which a false theory, disguising itself as loyalty to a state or to a church, has perverted the conception of duty and become a source of danger to the world.”

THE COMMISSION’S CONCLUSIONS

The conclusions of the commission, as to the various detailed recitals, are as follows:

“We may now sum up and endeavor to explain the character and significance of the wrongful acts done by the German army in Belgium.

“It is proved, first, that there were in many parts of Belgium deliberate and systematically organized massacres of the civil population accompanied by many isolated murders and other outrages.

“Second--That in the conduct of the war generally innocent civilians, both men and women, were murdered in large numbers, women attacked and children murdered.

“Third--That looting, house burning and the wanton destruction of property were ordered and countenanced by the officers of the German army, that elaborate provision had been made for systematic incendiarism at the very outbreak of the war, and that the burning and destruction were frequently where no military necessity could be alleged, being, indeed, part of a system of general terrorization.

“Fourth--That the rules and usages of war were frequently broken, particularly by the using of civilians, including women and children, as a shield for advancing forces exposed to fire, to a less degree by killing the wounded and prisoners, and in the frequent abuse of the Red Cross and the white flag.

“Sensible as they are of the gravity of these conclusions, the commission conceive that they would be doing less than their duty if they failed to record them as fully established by the evidence. Murder, lust and pillage prevailed over many parts of Belgium on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilized nations during the last three centuries.

“Our function is ended when we have stated what the evidence establishes, but we may be permitted to express our belief that these disclosures will not have been made in vain if they touch and rouse the conscience of mankind, and we venture to hope that as soon as the present war is over, the nations of the world in council will consider what means can be provided and sanctions devised to prevent the recurrence of such horrors as our generation is now witnessing.”