“‘Shoot them,’ commanded the leader. A volley rang out. The eight men fell. Without troubling further about them the bandits went off at once, shouting, for they were drunk… Fortunately, so drunk, in fact, that their bullets had nearly all missed. Only four of our attendants were wounded: Private Hacrien; Private Caudren, who had his leg broken; a private who was a native of Perenchies, and who had a bullet through his thigh, and a fourth private who sustained a not very serious wound on the knee. When the Boches were gone the four attendants, who were unhurt and who had been shamming death, lifted up their comrades and brought them to the ambulance.
“On the following day all the wounded under treatment in this ambulance were brought, without food, to Beaumont in Belgium, where a kindly major had them collected in a convent which had been transformed into a hospital. There I left them, as I had been authorised to go back alone to France.
“I set out on foot, without a copper, on an empty stomach. On the way, I met with a German patrol; without parley, the savages belaboured me with the butt-ends of their rifles and left me for dead, having just stripped me of all I had left—namely, my clothes.”
M. Herriot, Mayor of Lyon, on his part, in a letter to a French minister, declares that “he knows ten French doctors whose ambulances had been bombarded and their attendants killed,” and that “the Chief Rabbi of Lyon was killed as he was endeavouring to get the wounded out through the window of an ambulance which had been set on fire by shells.”
On the other hand, the French Commission of Inquiry states in its report that, on the 25th August, at Einvaux some Germans had opened fire at 300 metres on Dr. Millet, surgeon-major of the colonial regiment, just when, with the help of two bearers, he was dressing the wounds of a man who was lying on a stretcher. As his left side was turned to them they saw his brassard perfectly. Besides, they could not have been mistaken about the kind of job on which the three men were engaged.
“At Xivry-Circourt,” writes M. Bonne, senior curé of Étain, in a report which he drew up, “the Germans seized an ambulance and a convoy of wounded, only the first carriage of which succeeded in escaping, in a hail of bullets.”
In a report on the outrages and crimes committed by the Germans at Arras, M. Briens, prefect of the Department of Pas de Calais, remarks: “The most painful feelings have been roused by the taking away of all the wounded under treatment at the hospitals whom it was possible to carry… The surgeon-majors of the Medical Service and the Red Cross attendants were attached to this convoy of prisoners.”
Finally, before Lunéville, a French Red Cross nurse, Mme. Prudennec, while on the look-out for wounded on the battlefields, tended a German officer who, to show his gratitude, gave her a sabre thrust in return. The nurse was injured in the leg, and for five days remained wounded in the hands of the Prussians. But when the time came for them to retreat the Germans left behind the nurse (who was unable to walk), and so it came to pass that she was saved by French soldiers.