According to the Italian newspaper Messagero, an Italian commercial traveller, M. Ugo Lorenzini, and ten fellow-countrymen were ill-treated by the Austrians on their return from Berlin to Italy on the outbreak of hostilities. They were imprisoned at Innsbruck, then shut up in a motor wagon, which took a day and a half to bring them to Trente. There they were robbed of everything they had, especially of 2000 crowns, which was all the money in their possession. For a whole week the Austrians actually kept them digging trenches for fifteen hours a day: hardly any food was given them and they were struck with sticks and swords. One morning, after one of them had killed the guard, they managed to escape. A Trentino peasant helped them to make good their flight to the Italian frontier, where they arrived in a state of exhaustion.
Crimes committed by Germans against Neutral Subjects in the invaded Countries
The most serious of these crimes was that committed by the soldiers of Lieutenant-colonel Blegen at Dinant against M. Himmer, Vice-Consul of the Argentine. This vice-consul, who ought to have been respected not merely as a non-combatant and a neutral, but because his consular rank should have protected him, was killed, and the Argentine flag trampled under foot, with the result that keen indignation was aroused in the Argentine.
Amongst the many inhabitants at Liège who were shot were five young people of Spanish nationality. They were massacred on the 20th August. Their names were known and were as follows: the brothers Oliver, Juan and Antonio, natives of Oller, Jaime Llabres of Majorca, Juan Nora and José Nielle.
The Consul-General of the Balearic Islands, who had received confirmation of this report, made an official request to the Spanish Government that they should protest against these outrages and exact reparation—that is to say, present a demand for an indemnity for the families of the murdered men, and in order to make the demand effective, seize all the German ships which had taken refuge in Spanish ports.
In France, at Jarny, twelve kilometres from Briey, the German soldiers, not satisfied with other acts of barbarism which they had committed, shot in addition thirteen Italian subjects. Here is the story of these murders, given by one of the comrades of the victims, the Italian Agostino Baccheta de Gattico of Novara, in the Gazetta del Popolo (see the Matin for 27th August, 1914).
At Jarny, Baccheta ran a small café which was a rendezvous for Italians, some of whom were his boarders. He returned to Italy, after a long and painful journey, accompanied by the sister of one of the men who had been shot.
“It was about eight o’clock in the morning, on the 3rd August,” said he, “when several battalions of the 63rd German infantry regiment, with some cavalry and artillery, got as far as Jarny, without meeting with much resistance from the French, who were not in great numbers.
“The Germans lost one man killed and four wounded. They immediately accused the inhabitants of having fired on their party, and, having summoned the chief magistrate and the local doctor, ordered them to assemble the whole male population on the open space of the village.
“Women and children were knocked down. When they wanted to follow their men-folk they were brutally driven back with the butt-ends of rifles and several were bayoneted. A woman, named Giuseppa Trolli, tried to prevent her husband getting out of the bed where he was lying seriously ill, and called out to the Germans, ‘Savage brutes.’ She, and the child which she was holding in her arms, were wounded.