We shall see how the German armies interpret these articles.
Private Handschuhmacher (Eleventh Battalion of Chasseurs Reserves) writes in his notebook:
Aug. 8, 1914, Gouvy, (Belgium.)—There, the Belgians having fired on some German soldiers, we started at once pillaging the merchandise warehouse. Several cases—eggs, shirts, and everything that could be eaten was carried off. The safe was forced and the gold distributed among the men. As to the securities, they were torn up.
This happened as early as the fourth day of the war, and it helps us to understand a technical article on the operations of the military treasury (Der Zahlmeister im Felde) in the Berliner Tageblatt of the 26th of November, 1914, in which an economic phenomenon of rather unusual import is recited as a simple incident: "Experience has demonstrated that very much more money is forwarded by postal orders from the theatre of operations to the interior of the country than vice versa."
As, in accordance with the continual practice of the German armies, pillaging is only a prelude to incendiarism, the sub-officer Hermann Levith (160th Regiment of Infantry, Eighth Corps) writes:
The enemy occupied the village of Bievre and the edge of the wood behind it. The Third Company advanced in first line. We carried the village, and then pillaged and burned almost all the houses.
And Private Schiller (133d Infantry, Nineteenth Corps) writes:
Our first fight was at Haybes (Belgium) on the 24th of August. The Second Battalion entered the village, ransacked the houses, pillaged them, and burned those from which shots had been fired.
And Private Sebastian Reishaupt (Third Bavarian Infantry, First Bavarian Corps) writes:
The first village we burned was Parux, (Meurthe-et-Moselle.) After this the dance began, throughout the villages, one after the other; over the fields and pastures we went on our bicycles up to the ditches at the edge of the road, and there sat down to eat our cherries.