(Photo from Underwood & Underwood.)
GENERAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG
Commanding the First British Army, One of the Six Armies Recently Incorporated.
(Photo © American Press Association.)
In this commune twenty-seven houses have been burned. No one saw the fire lighted, but after the disaster a certain number of little fuse-sticks which the Germans frequently use for the purpose of fire-raising, and which the peasants call "macaronis," were collected.
At Lamath, on the 24th of August, the Bavarians shot an old man of 70, M. Louis, who had come out of his house to relieve the needs of nature. The unhappy man received at least ten bullets in the chest. His son-in-law, who was in an advanced stage of tuberculosis, was taken and led away. No news has been received of him. Two other inhabitants of the commune who were made prisoners at the same time as this man are still in captivity in Bavaria.
The Abbé Mathieu, curé of Fraimbois, was arrested on the 29th of August on the false allegation that shots had been fired at the Germans in his parish. In the course of his captivity, which lasted sixteen days, he was present at the murder of two of our fellow-countrymen, M. Poissonnier of Gerbéviller and M. Victor-Meyer of Fraimbois; the former, an invalid who could scarcely stand, was accused of having followed the armies as a spy. The latter had been arrested because his little girl had picked up a bit of telephone wire broken by shrapnel. One morning toward 6 o'clock the Bavarian officers went through a travesty of justice, reading documents drawn up in German, collecting the votes of eight or nine young Lieutenants to whom voting papers had been given. The two men were condemned unanimously and warned that they were about to die, and the priest was requested to give them the consolations of religion. They protested their innocence with prayers and tears, but they were compelled to kneel down against the embankment of the road, and a platoon of twenty-four soldiers drawn up in double file fired twice at them.
The village of Fraimbois was pillaged, and the objects stolen were loaded on to vehicles. The Abbé Mathieu complained to Gens. Tanner and Clauss of the burning of his bee-house, and received from the former the simple reply, "What do you expect? It is war!" The latter did not even reply.
At Mont three houses were burned with petrol. At Hériménil, on the 29th of August, the enemy, who had arrived on the 24th, were guilty of monstrous acts. The inhabitants were asked to come to church and were kept there for four days, while their houses were sacked and the French bombarded the village. Twenty-four people were killed inside the church by a shell. As a woman, who had succeeded with great trouble in leaving the church for a moment, was returning with a little milk for the children, a Captain, furious at seeing that this prisoner had been allowed to pass, cried out, "I meant that the door should not be opened! I meant the French to fire on their own people." This same Captain, a short time before, had been guilty of a revolting cruelty. He was present, eyeglass in eye, when Mme. Winger, a young woman of 23, was going to church in obedience to the general order, together with her servants, a girl and two young men, each of them 18 years old, and, considering their progress too slow, with a word he directed the soldiers to fire, and the four victims fell mortally wounded. The Germans left the corpses in the street for two days.