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.