Violation
The number of women outraged by Germans where they lived is considerable. Violation was practised everywhere on invaded territory as a right of war, and without distinction of age. We feel in touch with an odious perversity as we read the story of these outrages, in which a depraved imagination is as prominent as their brutality.
On the 4th September, at Rebais, a young woman of twenty-nine years, a wine-seller, was accused of having concealed English soldiers at her house. The Germans undressed her, and compelled her to stay in that condition in their midst for an hour and a half. Then they fastened her to her counter, and threatened her with death. The wretched woman would infallibly have died had not orders, which suddenly arrived, compelled her torturers to be off and leave her in the hands of an Alsatian soldier, who released her.
The French Commission of Inquiry reports two cases of violation committed in each of the places it was able to visit, especially at Villers, Trumilly, Sermaize, etc. Special indignation is aroused by those of which quite young girls were the victims.
At Château-Thierry it was a girl of only fourteen years of age, who was dragged into a shop by three Germans, where, under threat of a bayonet, she was violated by two of them, while the third gave way to the young victim’s entreaties. At Begu-Saint-Germain it was a girl of thirteen years. At Loupy-le-Château it was on children of thirteen and eight years that such outrages were committed. At Magnières a little child of twelve years was violated twice by a soldier. At Suippy, on the 3rd September, a child of eleven years was for three hours the butt of the brutality of a man, who found her with her sick grandmother, brought her into a deserted house, and stuffed a handkerchief into her mouth to prevent her crying.
Unbridled bestiality of this kind had no more respect for age than childhood. The nature of some of these acts seems to prove the existence in the German race not merely of moral, but of physical defects. With amazement and disgust we put on record the evidence for acts which in ordinary life are found only in the diseased or maniacs.
At Vitry-en-Perthois a German violated an old woman of eighty-nine years, who died as a result. At Loupy-le-Château an unfortunate woman of seventy-five years was violated; at Suippes another old woman, aged seventy-two years, was seized by a German soldier, who was putting the muzzle of his revolver under her chin, when the woman’s brother-in-law came along and released her. In Serbia the corpses of mutilated old women, the discovery of which we noted above, were examined, and it was proved that these old women had been violated before being mutilated. In certain places soldiers were seen outraging dead bodies. This fact was established at Gerbeviller, the culprit being a Bavarian of the army corps commanded by General Clauss.