“On the following day, the 26th, M. Hammann and his son, aged twenty-one years, were arrested at their house and dragged outside by a gang who had broken in the door and entered. The father was unmercifully beaten, and as for the young man, when he tried to struggle a non-commissioned officer cracked his skull with a revolver shot.
“At 1 p.m. M. Riklin, a druggist, who had been told that a man had fallen about thirty metres from his shop, went to the spot and recognised in the victim his own brother-in-law, M. Colin, aged sixty-eight years, who had been struck in the stomach by a bullet. The Germans alleged that this old man had fired on them, but M. Riklin formally denies this statement.
“Colin, he told us, was an inoffensive man absolutely incapable of any act of aggression, and quite ignorant of the use of firearms.
“The mind refuses to believe that all these massacres took place without excuse,” continues the French Commission of Inquiry. “That, however, is the case. The Germans, it is true, have always given the same excuse, alleging that civilians were the first to fire on them. This allegation is false, and those who have made it have been unable to make it appear probable, even by firing rifle shots close to dwelling-houses, as they were in the habit of doing so that they might be able to declare that they had been attacked by unoffending civilians upon whose ruin or massacre they had decided. On many occasions we obtained proof of this; the following, for example, is one of many others. One evening, when a report rang out while the Abbé Colin, curé of Croismare, happened to be with an officer, the latter exclaimed, ‘That is sufficient reason, M. le Curé, why you and the burgomaster should be shot and a farm burnt. Look! there is one burning.’ ‘M. l’Officier,’ replied the priest, ‘you are too intelligent not to recognise the crack of your rifle. For my part, I do recognise it.’ The German did not insist.”
Outrages and Attacks on Hostages
Before ending this chapter and putting on record the admissions which German officers and soldiers have involuntarily made on the subject with which we are engaged, we may draw up two other categories of criminal acts which they have committed: (1) the practice of taking hostages, everywhere and on all kinds of pretexts, some of whom were ill-treated and killed, and (2) the callous deportation of civilians to Germany.
To take hostages from among civilians whom the fortune of war condemns to invasion is a thing so cruel in itself that all civilised nations try to limit the practice. The Germans, on the contrary, are noted for the fact that they extend it as much as they can. The name of hostages repeated everywhere gave a melancholy significance to the Prussian barbarism of 1870. “This practice,” writes Bluntschli, “is all the more open to criticism, as it endangers the lives of peaceful citizens without any fault of theirs, and, moreover, without bringing any appreciable increase of security.” On the other hand, Geffcken writes: “We cannot approve of the practice by which in 1870 Germany forcibly seized the chief people in enemy communes to secure the railroads against attacks by francs-tireurs.”
This opinion of German jurists, which is, moreover, shared by all writers, has not prevented the Germans from resorting in 1914 to the same practices as in 1870, and even adding thereto fresh cruelties.
In Belgium it was the clergy who principally served as hostages. The majority of the Belgian priests who had been ill-treated came under this category.