These measures are significant. They show Germany’s view of the prisoner of war. The only favour she allows him is not to kill him, not to beat him, not to let him die outright of hunger. We speak here of orders given and measures taken by the higher command, for which no excuse that pleads the inhumanity of war could be admitted.
CHAPTER XI
THE MURDER, TORTURE AND VIOLATION OF WOMEN IN INVADED TERRITORY
The present and following chapters will contain the most abominable part of this indictment. We shall read the story of outrages of which women have been made victims by the German scoundrels. Were not these outrages, established as they are by certain reports, and confirmed by confessions which the Germans themselves have inadvertently made, the result of the unbridled instincts of an army in a state of delirium? We should like to think so, but the details to hand with regard to the circumstances under which these acts were performed compel us to recognise that something more is involved in them. They reveal the presence of cruelty and thirst for innocent blood in the perpetrators of these murders and acts of violence.
Crimes committed against octogenarian old women seem to issue from a special hatred, directed against those who gave birth to their enemies of to-day. The number of acts of violation committed by these invaders proves that there is inherent in the German mind a peculiar contempt for all human laws, a regular bestiality, a cynical audacity, which, if the reins are given to it, borders on madness.
In the performance of these abominable acts the Germans showed no trace of humanity. Their thoughts were incapable of going back to themselves and their fatherland, to the daughters, the fiancées, the wives, the mothers whom they themselves had left at home; wholesale murders, mutilations, tortures, treatment so frightful as to drive the victims crazy, refinements of cruelty by which the relatives and parents of the latter were made partners in their punishment, and in which, as we have seen, neither organisation nor method was wanting—such are the acts of which we are about to give proofs and examples.
Murders
In the story of the murders committed by the Germans, of which women have been the victims, we see almost always that these were surprised in the midst of their common daily tasks. The horror of the crime committed against them is enhanced. It is still worse when the massacred women were about to perform some act of charity. At Tamines, in Belgium, a woman was killed in the middle of the street as she was carrying a sick old man. At Mayen-Multien a woman named Laforest was seriously wounded, in the beginning of September, by a German horseman to whom she and her husband had been obliged to give hospitality. His excuse was that they were too long about serving him. At Hazebrouck, in the middle of the month of October, a German soldier, who was riding a bicycle, seeing in a corner a poor mother seated with her child sleeping on her knees, transfixed the latter with his bayonet, and at the same time wounded the mother in the thigh, without any of his comrades interfering. At Audun-le-Roman, Mlle. Tréfel was struck at the very moment when she was giving a drink to a German soldier.