His unwillingness to do the wicked thing must be subordinated to the will of the officer.
Corporal Menge of the Eighth Company of the 74th Reserve Infantry, 10 Reserve Corps, writes in his diary for August 15:
"Wir passieren unter dreimaligen Hurra auf unsern Kaiser u. unter den Klängen d. Liedes Deutschland über alles die Belgische Grenze. Alle Bäume ungefällt als Sperre. Pfarrer u. dessen Schwester aufgehängt, Häuser abgebrannt."
("We passed over the Belgian border under a three times given Hurrah for our Kaiser, and under the Strain of the song Deutschland über alles. All the trees were felled as barricades. A curé and his sister hanged, houses burned.")
This is a neatly written diary, which he wishes to be sent to Fraulein F. Winkel of Hanover.
Penitential days are coming for the German Empire and for the German people. For these acts of horror are the acts of the people: man by man, regiment by regiment, half a million average Germans, peasants and clerks, stamped down through Belgium and Northern France, using the incendiary pellet and the bayonet. In the words of the manifesto, signed by the 93 Wise Men of Germany, referring to the German army, "Sie kennt keine zuchtlose Grausamkeit": it doesn't know such a thing as undisciplined cruelty. No, these are the acts of orderly procedure, planned in advance, carried out systematically. Never for an instant did the beautiful disciplined efficiency of the regiment relax in crushing a child and burning an inhabited house. The people of Germany have bowed their will to the implacable machine. They have lost their soul in its grinding.
Private Sebastian Weishaupt of the Third Bavarian Infantry, First Bavarian Corps:
"10.8.1914—Parie das erste Dorf verbrannt, dann gings los; Dorf nach dem andern in Flammen; über Feld und Acker mit Rad bis wir dann an Strassengraben kamen, wo wir dann Kirschen assen."
("Octobre 8, 1914. Parux is the first village burned, then things break loose: 1 village after another to the flames; over field and meadow with cycle we then come to the roadside ditches, where we ate cherries.")
It is all in the day's work: the burning of villages, the murder of peasants, the eating of cherries. Travelers among savage tribes have told of living among them for years, and then suddenly in a flash the inmost soul of the tribe has revealed itself in some sudden mystical debauch of blood. There is an immense unbridled cruelty in certain of these German soldiers expressing itself in strange, abnormal ways. This is the explanation of some of the outrages, some of the mutilations. But, for the most part, the cruelty is not perversion, nor a fierce, jealous hate. It is merely the blind, brutal expression of imperfectly developed natures, acting under orders.