The German crime of killing enemy wounded assumes a still more dreadful aspect when it is committed only after the victims have suffered cruel treatment. The tortures inflicted on the wounded argue an exceptional ferocity in those who are guilty of them, and yet such cases are not rare.
On the 16th August, at Dinant, French soldiers were found with their heads smashed in by the butt-ends of rifles. On the 25th August, at Hofstade in Belgium, a soldier who had been slightly wounded was also killed by blows from the butt-end of a rifle. In a wood not far from the road to Malines, at Tervueren, eighteen Belgian riflemen were killed by bayonet thrusts in the head. One of the French wounded, who had been taken again by the French troops and then left at Besançon, had been struck on the head and sides with blows from the butt-end of a rifle and kicked. A German soldier had dragged him along the ground. Beside him another wounded Frenchman was dispatched with bayonet thrusts. The Belgian quartermaster Beaudin van de Kerchove (5th lancers), who had been wounded by two German bullets at the battle of Orsmael, on the 20th August, was also tortured. The French sergeant Lemerre, who had been wounded in the leg at Rembercourt by a bursting shell, was left on the ground for eight days by the German ambulance, who had, however, seen him. On the fourth day, on the order of an officer who, revolver in hand, was crossing the field of battle, this non-commissioned officer was wounded again by a rifle shot fired by a soldier.
The French Commission of Inquiry on their part quote three cases of torture inflicted on the wounded—
“On the evening of the 25th August,” say the Commission in their report, the Abbé Denis, Curé of Reméreville, tended Lieutenant Toussaint, who had only left the forestry school in the previous month of July. As he lay wounded on the field of battle, this young officer had been bayoneted by all the Germans who had passed by him. His body was one great wound from head to foot.
“At the Nancy hospital we saw Private Voger of the infantry regiment, who was still bearing the marks of German barbarism. Seriously wounded in the spinal column, in front of the forest of Champenoux, on the 24th August, and paralysed in both legs as a result of his wound, he had remained lying on his stomach, when a German soldier brutally turned him over with his rifle and struck him three times with the butt on the head. Others, who were passing near him, also struck him with the butt-ends of their rifles and kicked him.
“Finally, one of them with a single stroke made a wound below and three or four centimetres from each eye with the help of an instrument which the victim could not distinguish, but which in the opinion of Dr. Weiss, chief physician and professor of the faculty of Nancy, must have been a pair of scissors.”
These facts appear difficult of belief. Nevertheless a confession of similar deeds has been made by German soldiers; for example, Paul Gloede, of the 9th battalion of Pioneers (9th corps), actually writes in his notebook: “Mutilation of the wounded is the order of the day.”
Published Admission by Germans
These acts of German troops did not always make Germans ashamed. On the contrary, in certain cases they even thought it was a clever thing to boast about it. For instance, a story, which had come from the German non-commissioned officer Klemt (154th infantry regiment, 1st company), was published in a newspaper of Jauer in Silesia on the 18th October, 1914. The paper even put as a marginal note the following phrase “The 24th September, 1914, a day of honour for our troops.” In his pamphlet, German Crimes according to German Evidence, M. Bédier has put on record the non-commissioned officer’s story.