Before neutral foreign
countries, however, it must be demonstrated, even at the beginning of
this war, that it was not the German troops who caused the war to take
on such forms."
The details of the cruelties, here only hinted at, on the Belgian and
French side, are supplied and proved by an eye-witness, a German
physician, who reports:
We have experienced from the Belgian population, from men, women,
and half-grown boys, such things as we had hitherto seen only in
wars with negroes. The Belgian civilian population shoots in blind
hatred from every house, from every thick bush, at everything that
is German. We had on the very first day many dead and wounded,
caused by the civilian population. Women take part as well as men.
One German had his throat cut at night while in bed. Five wounded
Germans were put into a house bearing the flag of the Red Cross; by
the next morning they had all been stabbed to death. In a village
near Verviers we found the body of one of our soldiers with his
hands bound behind his back and his eyes punched out. An automobile
column which set out from Liege halted in a village; a young woman
came up, suddenly drew a revolver, and shot a chauffeur dead.
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