The General commanding the Brigade,
STENGER.
General Stenger was in charge of the 58th Brigade, composed of the 112th and 142d Bavarian Infantry. Thirty soldiers of these regiments, now prisoners, have made affidavits to this, signed with their own names, which are in the possession of the French Government.
The attack of September 25, 1915, brought the French within two kilometers of Somme-py. Lying in the trenches under the furious bombardment, we considered the diary which was found on the German soldier, Hassemer, of the 8th Army Corps, when they captured the town in 1914: “Horrible carnage; the villages totally burned; the French thrown into the burning houses; the civilians burned with all the others.”
I have many times been at St. Maurice, Meurthe and Moselle, where I saw and pondered over, fire-blackened houses and somber-faced, solitary women. The tall chimney of a demolished manufacturing plant stands guard over desolation. From the diary of a Bavarian soldier of the German[German] army, evidence written by the perpetrators, the following is quoted: “The village of St. Maurice was encircled, the soldiers advanced at one yard apart, through which line nobody could get. Afterward the Uhlans started the fire, house by house. Neither man, nor woman, nor child could get away. They were permitted to take out the cattle because that was a drawing out method. Those that risked to run away were killed by rifle shot. All those that were found in the village were burned with it.”
In the first lot of exchanged English prisoners returned from Germany was a Gloucester man shot in his jaws, his teeth blackened and broken. Pointing to where his chin had been, he told me: “That is what they did to me—what they did after I was taken prisoner and was wounded in four places and unable to move. A Boche came along, put his rifle to my face and pulled the trigger. But that wasn’t anything to what they did to my comrade. He was lying in his blanket seriously wounded, and a Boche ran a bayonet into him sixteen times before he died.”
In the clearing house hospital at Lyons I saw two old comrades meet, one wounded, from the front, the other from a German prison camp. “Yes,” said the latter, with a peculiar, vacant expression in his eye. “Yes, I was crucified. I was hung from a beam in the middle of the camp for two hours, hands tied together over my head, in the form of a cross, body hanging down till my feet were eighteen inches above the ground.”
“Is that true?” I demanded.
“True, look at these arms. Ask those comrades over there. I swear it, I will write it down for you.”
He wrote the above statement and signed his name, Gandit, Pierre, 19th Infantry.