Let us call to mind the innumerable instances when the Boches put up their hands, or waved a white flag, and cried, "Kamerad," pretending to surrender: thus drawing our unsuspecting men towards them and then suddenly moving aside, to leave the field open to a party of riflemen or a machine-gun hidden away behind them. These are the tricks of cowards, which were constantly employed at the beginning of the war, and our men (at the cost of many victims) learned at last to guard against them. But they have done even more cowardly things than this. There was the German officer who, to protect himself from danger while taking observations, put three children round him. At NÉry, twenty-five persons, women and children, were compelled to walk at the side of a Boche column to protect it from being enfiladed. Near Malines, six German soldiers who were taking with them five young girls, on meeting a Belgian patrol, placed the girls all round them to prevent the enemy from firing. At Jodoigne they put a CurÉ in front of them and made him walk with his arms folded, and they did the same at Hougaerde to another CurÉ who was killed. A similar fate befell several civilians at Mons. At Senlis, our men were firing to cover our retreat, and the Germans took some inhabitants out of the houses and made them walk in the middle of the streets while they themselves kept along by the walls. Many of these unfortunate people were killed. "In numerous places," says the Belgian Commission of Enquiry, "the Germans made civilians—men and women—walk in front of them." In this way a German column passed through Marchienne, pushing ahead of them a body of several hundred civilians. They took the road for Montigny-le-Tilleul, where the first important battle with the French forces took place. At Sempst, during the fighting on the 25th August, men and women were placed in the front rank of the firing line. At Erpe, on the 12th September, a German column, attacked by a Belgian motor-machine-gun, took out of the houses twenty to twenty-five men and young people (including a child of thirteen), and made them walk in front in the middle of the road. The machine-gunners, seeing civilians in front of them, ceased firing. At Alost, a German company attacked the bridge. In front marched some thirty civilians with a machine-gun hidden behind them. At Nimy, with the butt-ends of their rifles, they drove in front of them 500 men, women and children towards the English, who in consequence dared not fire; and in this way the 84th and 85th Schleswig Regiments were able to continue their heroic march as far as Maubeuge.

When their adversary cannot actually see the human shield that they are using, they send a warning. On the 7th September, 1914, the Death's Head Hussars shut up all the inhabitants of the village with them in the ChÂteau of Saint Ouen-sur-Morin, and then, to avoid being shelled, informed the English of their "dispositions." They fired on anyone who tried to escape. At Mouzon, we saw a number of civilians being pushed in front of the enemy with the butt-ends of rifles, and we stopped firing. The wretched people moved suddenly to one side of the road, uncovering the Germans, and then we fired. The Boches, furious, fired their first volley not at us, but point blank at these non-combatants, who were decimated.

The cowards chiefly used civilians as shields, but sometimes they also made use of prisoners. At Keyem, they pushed one hundred Belgian soldiers in front of them, some with their hands tied, and others with their arms in the air. At Dixmude, they advanced under the shelter of forty disarmed marines who had been taken prisoners. When they got in front of our lines our marines shouted, "For God's sake fire, these are Germans," and these heroes fell gloriously under the French bullets. Such deeds are countless.

The Boches will deny them later on, but in 1914 they did not deny them, but rather gloried in them as a "good idea." We can see this from the letter of the Bavarian Lieutenant Eberlein, published on the 7th October, 1914, by a leading Munich paper, "We had arrested three other civilians when a 'good idea' struck me. We made them sit on chairs in the middle of the street;—supplications from them, and blows with butt-ends of rifles from us. At last they were seated outside in the street with their hands convulsively clasped together. I felt sorry for them, but the plan worked at once. As I learnt later, the regiment which entered Saint-DiÉ, further to the north of us, had precisely similar experiences to our own. The civilians, whom they had put in the same way in the middle of the street, were killed by French bullets. I saw their dead bodies."[17]

FOOTNOTES:

[17] We have not, so far, come across any attempted justification, by German authors, of these cowardly acts; but such we shall have without fail. It is probable that the 93 "intellectuals" whose manifesto we recall to memory a few pages further on are preparing a fresh "appeal to the civilized world" with a view to explaining that the German troops—the representatives and trustees of Kultur—are authorised by God Himself to use every means for the protection of their precious lives.