("A hideous bloodbath (massacre), the village totally burned, the French hurled into the burning houses, civilians, everybody, burned together.")
An unsuspected brutality is here revealed. To these men a peasant of another race is not a father and husband and man. He is as a dog. He is "Ausländer," beyond the pale—a thing to be chased with bayonets and burned with fire, to the rollicking amusement of brave soldiers. Back of the slaughter lies the basic idea of a biological superiority in the German people, a belief that their duty calls them to a sacred war to dominate other races, and create a greater Germany. They think they are a higher order of beings, who can kill creatures of a lesser breed, as one slays the lower order of animals in the march of progress. Other races have had dreams of grandeur, but never so mad a dream, so colossal in its designs on world dominion, so cruel in its methods of achieving that supremacy.
Soldat Wilhelm Schellenberg, of 106 Reserve Infantry of the XII Reserve Army Corps, gives his home as Groitzsch bei Leipzig, "am Bahnhof," first floor, number 8. "Frau Martha Schellenberg" is to be notified. His diary is innocent.
I held in my hands the diary of Erich Harlak of the II Company, 38 Fusilier Regiment of the Sixth Army Corps. There is a cut through the cover and pages of the pamphlet—probably the stab of a bayonet. Harlak is a Silesian. On the first page he writes in German "Bitte dieses Buch gütigst meinen Eltern zusenden zu wollen." Then in French "Je prie aussi Les Français de rendre, s'il vous plait, cet livre à mes parents. Addresse Lehrer Harlak." "Meinen lieben Eltern gewidmet in Grune bei Lisser in Posen."
He writes, "I noticed how our cavalry had plundered here." He gives an instance of how the men broke to pieces what they could not carry away. "La Guerre est la Guerre." He writes that in French. He runs his table of values.
| 1 | kleiner sous | = | 4 | pfennig. |
| 1 | grosser sous | = | 8 | " |
| 1/2 | sous | = | 2 | " |
He has a vocabulary of French words in his own handwriting. His record is one of honest distress at the pillage done by his comrades.
When the French soldiers say "C'est la Guerre"—"that's the way it is with war"—they refer to the monotony of it, or the long duration, or some curious ironic contrast between a peaceful farmyard scene and a Taube dropping bombs. The Germans say it again and again in their diaries, sometimes in the French phrase, sometimes "Das ist der Krieg," and almost always they use it in speaking of a village they have burned or peasants they have shot. To them that phrase is an absolution for any abomination. It is the blood-brother of "military necessity."
Carl Zimmer, Lieutenant of the 57th Infantry of the VII Corps, has a diary that runs from August 2 to October 17, 1914. On August 29 he tells of marching through a village of Belgium.
"Very many houses burned whose inhabitants had shot at our soldiers. 250 Civilians shot."