[76] Mr. Justice Bailhache in the King v. the Superintendent of Vine Street Police Station. “The courts are entitled to take judicial notice of certain notorious facts. Spying has become the hall-mark of German Kultur.” September 7th, 1915.
[77] It is, however, impossible to include within the limits of this book the whole of the unpublished material at my disposal.
[78] The term “soldier” is used throughout this article in the sense adopted in the Army Annual Act, i.e., as meaning N.C.O.s and privates.
[79] The outrages committed in the districts now in the occupation of the British armies have not been reported upon by the French Commission, and the ground so traversed in this article is therefore new.
[80] Von der Goltz.
[81] One might go further and say that the Geneva Convention, which has hitherto been universally regarded as a law of perfect obligation and which even the German Staff in the German War Book affects to treat as sacred, is perverted to an instrument of treachery. The emblem of the Red Cross was used to protect waggons in which machine-guns were concealed. And since this article was written a German hospital ship, the Ophelia, has been condemned, on irrefutable evidence, by our Prize Court as having been used for belligerent purposes. Such things throw a very lurid light on the German conception of honour.
[82] Similar evidence has been supplied to me by a French officer attached to the Fifth Division of the British Expeditionary Force. See Chap. III., Part I., No. 56.
[83] See Chapter III., Part I., and, in particular, Nos. 39 to 43.
[84] The German officers spoke Hindustani. Doubtless they knew, as I have found they often know, the identity of the British regiments opposite their positions and were attached there for the express purpose of dealing with Indians. But in no case, so far as I know, were their attempts to seduce our Indian troops successful.
[85] This diary is now in the possession of my friend the Marquis de Dampierre, who is about to publish it and numerous others, together with fac-similes of the originals.