The Red Cross surgeon to whom the American went for information dismissed the matter casually by merely tapping his forehead with his index finger.
"Just one of those insane cases," he said.
Later in the day on better acquaintance the surgeon explained the matter in this fashion:—
"The fellow was quartered in a village near Lille, doing sentry duty on a house occupied by German officers. There was an uprising of citizens. From across the way native franc-tireurs fired shots into the house, killing one officer and wounding a second. Tracing the firing across the street, the remaining officers entered a bakery-shop where they found several men and a woman, all armed. They ordered the men to be shot. The woman had in her hand a revolver with one of the cartridge chambers empty. The German lieutenant saw that she was about to become a mother. He then explained the gravity of her offense, told her that she was practically guilty of murder, and took away her weapon. But under the circumstances he ordered her released instead of being shot. He turned his back and walked away about five paces. Suddenly the woman snatched another revolver from behind the counter and fired point-blank. As he fell, the officer called out to his orderly, 'Bayonet the woman.'
"The sentry did what he was ordered, but, you see, it has affected the poor fellow's mind."
This story, along with a few others, I have picked out from hundreds of atrocity tales which I heard during four months spent in England, Belgium, Germany, and Holland. It will serve as an example, not only because it has the earmarks of truth,—having been told in an offhand way merely as an explanation of the private's insanity,—but because it is typical of the kind of incident which in the telling is, nine times out of ten, twisted into atrocious and wholly unrecognizable form.
Under the law of military reprisal was there justification for the death of this woman? Was the dying officer guilty of barbarian conduct? And did the private, ordered against his will to perform an act whose memory drove him insane, commit an atrocity? Without answering the question, let us consider for a moment how that particular anecdote would be told by a Belgian partisan. In my wanderings through Termonde, Liege, and Louvain, I heard tales—unspeakable and on their face utterly unbelievable—of which this kind of thing must have been the foundation.
When the body of this woman was found, let us say, by French peasants returning to their ruined homes, think how the horrible fact would be seized, without whatsoever there was of justification! How the British and French papers would describe that mutilated form! Think of the effect of a two-column word-picture of the wanton sack and ruin of the town, the shooting of its helpless citizens, and the description of that mangled body sacrified to the Huns! Think how the fact would be clutched by fear-crazed inhabitants, would be bandied from mouth to mouth, distorted and dressed up to suit a partisan press, and "twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools"!
One of the first atrocity accounts which I heard in Belgium, as well as one of the most persistent, had to do with scores of children whose wrists had been cut by the Kaiser's troops. Hundreds of them were reported to be in Belgium and Dutch hospitals or in the care of relief committees. The gossip was so prevalent and in some instances so specific that I had high hopes of tracking down and seeing, with my own eyes, an instance. In each case which I heard abroad, my informant's husband or brother or best friend had seen the children; but somehow or other it was never arranged that I could see one of them myself. This type of cruelty was so widely talked about that in plenty of cases the German soldiers believed that some of their men had committed these crimes. One of them told me that he understood that near Tirlemont the wrists of several young children had been cut. He said that thirty or forty children and peasants had fired on and killed German troops marching through a neighboring village. A squad was sent to round up the offenders, all of whom were found armed. Instead of killing the snipers, whose age was between ten and seventeen, the surgeons were ordered to slice the tendons of the wrist so that the noncombatants should be prevented from holding a gun or using a knife.
Soon after my ship, the Lapland, docked in America, I heard a case of whose verity, owing to the source from which it came, I had no doubt. The refugee in question, according to my informant, was an English nurse, and lay with both wrists cut off at a well-known New York hospital on Madison Avenue. She had been in Brussels at the time of the German entry, and, being willing to work for the sake of humanity wheresoever there were sick to care for, she had nursed wounded German officers. Eventually, with a handful of English nurses still remaining in Brussels, she had been deported to Holland, because it was feared that German secrets were leaking out in letters sent by these English nurses. This latter part coincided so precisely with the facts which during my stay in Brussels I had found to be true, that I had no doubt of the whole business. On recovery the nurse was to exhibit herself and lecture for Red Cross funds. I was told this in strict confidence and I was to see and talk to the handless lady on condition that the "story" should not reach the press. I agreed. But to my bitter disappointment the ——- Hospital had never heard of the woman. My informant then confessed that his informant had made a mistake in the name of the hospital. I offered four persons ten dollars each to trace the matter to its source, the final result being a telephone call from my informant saying that an English lawyer now in New York stated that to the best of his belief there was "some such person in a hospital somewhere in New Jersey."