Would it not have been believed that setting fire to a country was part of the methods of attack and of acts permitted to a conqueror? What formerly was an exceptional occurrence, which remained in the memory of men as an unheard-of crime, is in German eyes the usual way of war.
CHAPTER XV
SYSTEMATIC PILLAGE AND THEFT. ROBBING THE WOUNDED AND THE DEAD
The German Idea of War-booty
The cherished idea of the German soldier is that war permits and excuses everything. Consequently the property of the inhabitants of the territory he invades does not seem to him to be immune from his cupidity. If the lust of possession seizes him, he thinks it is a brilliantly won booty, which rewards him for his efforts.
Nevertheless, international law only recognises as booty what is taken from a state; in all other cases it is pillage, and Bluntschli, the well-known German jurist, stigmatises it as emphatically as any one.
Let us add that it is not merely the German private soldier who shows that he is capable of this violation of law. The officer and even the general share this view, and commit this crime. In the majority of these cases pillage was not an accident, but a system, and has taken place under such conditions that it could not have been carried out if the officers had not approved of it. In many cases it was they who set the example. Pillage was reduced by them to the movements of a military operation. The narratives which will follow will make that clear. For the present, we shall quote the letter of the wife of a German officer living in Berlin, which the Spanish Embassy at Berne received during the month of January, in which this woman admitted that she was in possession of a quantity of objets d’art, of which she supplied an inventory. These articles her husband had sent her after the sack of a château in France. She added that her husband had taken these articles to leave them in safety with her, that her conscience would not allow her to keep them without giving a list of them, and that she wished to see them restored to their owner after the conclusion of hostilities.
In conformity with this evidence, the French Commission of Inquiry declared that “in every place through which a company of the enemy passed they gave themselves up to a methodically organised pillage, in the presence of their leaders, and sometimes even with their active assistance.”