“At Montmirail a scene of real savagery was enacted. On the 5th of September a non-commissioned officer flung himself almost naked on the widow Naudé, on whom he was billeted, and carried her into his room. This woman’s father, François Fontaine, rushed up on hearing his daughter’s cry. At once fifteen or twenty Germans broke through the door of the house, pushed the old man into the street, and shot him without mercy. Little Juliette Naudé opened the window at this moment and was struck in the stomach by a bullet, which went through her body. The poor child died after twenty-four hours of most dreadful suffering.
CONSTANT EVIDENCE OF THEFT
“We have constantly found definite evidence of theft,” states the report further, “and we do not hesitate to state that where a body of the enemy has passed it has given itself up to a systematically organized pillage, in the presence of its leaders, who have even themselves often taken part in it. Cellars have been emptied to the last bottle, safes have been gutted, considerable sums of money have been stolen or extorted; a great quantity of plate and jewelry, as well as pictures, furniture, ‘objets d’art,’ linen, bicycles, women’s dresses, sewing machines, even down to children’s toys, after having been taken away, have been loaded on vehicles to be taken toward the frontier.”
Space forbids further quotation from the harrowing document, in which one frightful tale succeeds another, until with a wave of sickening horror the reader cries out, “Can such things really be?”
GERMANY DENIES ATROCITIES
“A chain of baseless fabrications” is the phrase used by Germany to characterize the charges brought against the German armies by the French government, claiming that “German army officers have, by every means and with full success, effected the maintenance of discipline and the strict observance of all the rules of war in each and all the spheres of operation.”
The demolished villages and pitiful victims must tell their own tale of terror. Doubtless many of the crimes committed have been without the sanction of the German government or even without the authority of a superior officer, but, even allowing for the partisanship that is natural on the part of afflicted inhabitants, the testimony of the French commission together with that of former Ambassador Bryce must deeply affect the attitude of all thinking people toward warfare.