My investigations extended over a period of four or five months. The first six weeks were spent in visiting the base hospitals and convalescent camps at Boulogne and Rouen, and the hospitals at Paris; during the remaining three months I was attached to the General Headquarters Staff of the British Expeditionary Force. In the course of my inquiries in the hospitals and camps I orally interrogated some two or three thousand officers and soldiers,[78] representing almost every regiment in the British armies and all of whom had recently been engaged on active service in the field. The whole of these inquiries were conducted by me personally, but my inquiries at headquarters were of a much more systematic character. There, owing to the courtesy of Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Murray, the late Chief of the General Staff, I had the assistance of the various services—in particular the Adjutant-General, the Provost-Marshal, the Director of Military Intelligence, the Director of Medical Services and their respective staffs—and also of the civil authorities, within the area at present occupied by the British armies, such as the sous-prefets, the procureurs de la République, the commissaries de police, and the maires of the communes. In this way I was enabled not only to obtain corroboration of the statements taken down in the base hospitals in the earlier stages of my inquiry, but also to make a close local study of the behaviour of the German troops towards the civil population during their occupation of the districts recently evacuated by them.[79] In pursuance of this latter inquiry I visited every town and commune of any importance now in our occupation and lately occupied by the Germans, including places within a few hundred yards of the German lines. As regards the conduct of the German troops in the earlier stages of the campaign and in other parts of France, I confined my inquiries to incidents which actually came under the observation of our own troops during or after the battles of Mons, the Marne, and the Aisne, and did not extend them to include the testimony of the French civil authorities, as I did not consider it part of my duty to attempt to do what was already being done by the Commission of Inquiry instituted by the President of the Council. But I freely availed myself of opportunities of corroboration of English evidence from French sources where such sources were readily accessible, and, by the courtesy of the French Ministry of War, who placed a Staff officer and a military car at my disposal, I was enabled to go over the ground to the north-east of Paris covered by our troops in their advance to the Aisne and to obtain confirmation of many incidents already related to me by British officers and soldiers. It was also my privilege frequently to meet M. Mollard, of the French Commission, and to examine for myself the depositions on oath and pièces justificatives on which the first Reports of the Commission are based, and which are as yet unpublished. In these different ways I have been enabled to obtain an extensive view of the whole field of inquiry and to arrive at certain general conclusions which may be of some value.
Methods of Enquiry.
My method of inquiry was twofold—I availed myself of both oral evidence and written evidence. As regards the former, the evidence taken at the base hospitals was wholly of this character. The method which I adopted in taking it was as follows:
I made it a rule to explain to the soldier or officer at the outset that the inquiry was an official one, and that he must be prepared to put his name to any testimony he might elect to give.
I allowed the soldier to tell his story in his own way and in his own words, but after, or in the course of, the recital, I always cross-examined him as to details, inquiring in particular (1) whether he directly witnessed the event himself; (2) what was the date and place of the occurrence—to establish these I have frequently gone over the operations with the witness with the aid of a military map and a diary of the campaign; (3) whether, in the case of hearsay evidence, he heard the story direct from the subject of it, and, in particular, whether he was versed in the language employed; (4) whether he could give me the name of any person or persons with him, particularly officers, who also witnessed the event or heard the story.
After such cross-examination I then took down the narrative, if satisfied that it possessed any value, read it over to the soldier, and then obtained his signature. This, however, was often only the first stage, as I have not infrequently been able to obtain confirmation of the evidence so obtained by subsequent inquiries at General or Divisional Headquarters, either among members of the staff or from company officers or from the civil authorities. For example, hearsay evidence of rape (and I always regarded such evidence as inconclusive of itself) tendered to me by soldiers at the base hospitals received very striking confirmation in the depositions of the victims on oath which had been taken by the civil authorities at Bailleul, Metteren, and elsewhere, and which were subsequently placed at my disposal. Personal inquiries made by me among the maires and curés of the communes where particular incidents were alleged to have occurred resulted in similar confirmation. So, too, the Indian witnesses whom I examined at the base hospital were at my request subsequently re-examined, when they had rejoined their units, by the Intelligence Officers attached to the Indian Corps, and with much the same results. Corroborative evidence as to a policy of discrimination practised by the German officers in favour of Indians was also obtained from the record of statements volunteered by a German prisoner of the 112th Regiment and placed at my disposal by our Intelligence Officers.
The general impression left in my mind by these subsequent inquiries at head-quarters as to the value of the statements made to me earlier by soldiers in hospital is that those statements were true. There is a tendency in some quarters to depreciate the value of the testimony of the British soldier, but the degree of its value depends a good deal on the capacity in which, and the person to whom, the soldier is addressing himself. In writing letters home or in talking to solicitous visitors the soldier is one person; in giving evidence in an official inquiry he is quite another. I have had opportunities when attending field courts-martial of seeing something of the way in which soldiers give evidence, and I see no reason to suppose that the soldier is any less reliable than the average civilian witness in a court of common law. Indeed, the moment I made it clear to the soldiers that my inquiry was an official one they became very cautious and deliberate in their statements, often correcting themselves or referring to their diaries (of which they usually take great care), or qualifying the narration with the statement “I did not see it myself.” It need hardly be said that these observations as to the credibility of the soldiers apply no less to that of the officers. And it is worthy of remark that, apart from individual cases of corroboration of a soldier’s evidence by that of an officer, the burden of the evidence in the case of each class is the same. Where officers do not testify to the same thing as the soldiers, they testify to similar things. The cumulative effect produced on my mind is that of uniform experience.
I have often found the statements so made subsequently corroborated; I have rarely, if ever, found them contradicted. I ascribe this result to my having applied rigid rules as to the reception of evidence in the first instance. I have always taken into account the peculiar receptivity of minds fatigued and overwrought by the strain of battle to the influences of “suggestion,” whether in the form of newspapers or of oral gossip. It sometimes, but not often, happened that one could recognise the same story in a different investiture, although appearing at first sight to be a different occurrence. Or, again, it may happen that a story undergoes elaboration in the process of transmission until it looks worse than it originally was. So, too, a case of apparent outrage may admit of several explanations; it may happen, for example, in the case of a suspicious use of the white flag that the act of one party of Germans in raising it and of another party in taking advantage of it were conceivably independent of one another. Cases of the shelling of “undefended” places, of churches, and of hospitals, I have always disregarded if our men or guns were or lately had been in the vicinity; and it may easily happen that a case of firing on stretcher-bearers or ambulance waggons is due to the impossibility of discrimination in the midst of a general engagement. Wherever any of these features appeared to be present I rejected the evidence—not always nor necessarily because I doubted its veracity, but because I had misgivings as to its value.
Outrages upon Combatants in the Field.
Lord Bryce’s Committee, with that scrupulous fairness which so honourably distinguishes their Report, have stated that: