A Belgian officer once quoted it to me, with a comment.
"This is not an order to the army. It is an attempt at justification for the very acts which Berlin is now attempting to deny!"
That is how "frightfulness" came into the literature of the war.
Captain F—— stopped the car. Near the road was a ruin of an old church.
"In that church," he said, "our soldiers were sleeping when the Germans, evidently informed by a spy, began to shell it. The first shot smashed that house there, twenty-five yards away; the second shot came through the roof and struck one of the supporting pillars, bringing the roof down. Forty-six men were killed and one hundred and nine wounded."
He showed me the grave from a window of the car, a great grave in front of the church, with a wooden cross on it. It was too dark to read the inscription, but he told me what it said:
"Here lie forty-six chasseurs." Beneath are the names, one below the other in two columns, and underneath all: "Morts pour la Patrie."
We continued to advance. Our lamps were out, but the fusées made progress easy. And there was the moon. We had left behind us the lines of the silent men. The scene was empty, desolate. Suddenly we stopped by a low brick house, a one-story building with overhanging eaves. Sentries with carbines stood under the eaves, flattened against the wall for shelter from the biting wind.