FRENCH ADVANCE IN VILLAGE STREET OF MAGNIÈRES, MEURTHE ET MOSELLE. _From “En Plein Feu.” By kind permission of M. Vermot, Rue Duguay-Trouin, Paris._ ]
But the affair at Suarce is the most really damning piece of evidence supplied by any of these pre-war violations of French territory. It is not necessary to depend on the testimony of a Colmar newspaper, which might possibly be still further mistaken in its statements, to make the complicity of the German _haut commandement_ historically certain. Early in the morning of the same fateful date (August 2, 1914), two cyclists and seven troopers of the German 22nd regiment of Dragoons rode into the village and informed the inhabitants that it was conquered territory. Later in the day an officer, a non-commissioned officer, and twelve troopers of the same regiment appeared, and after breaking up the telephone apparatus, forced a provision convoy, consisting of nine men, two waggons, and twenty-two horses, on its way to Belfort, to turn round and accompany them to Germany. The waggons and horses were taken as loot; the men were presumably the first specimens of the new kind of civil prisoner which, during the war, the Germans have been pleased to label as “hostages.” But in time of peace it is not the custom of civilized nations to take either loot or hostages from their neighbours, and, since there were no soldiers engaged in the affair on the French side, and therefore no fighting, the act could not be defended as an act of retaliation. Nor is there any question of the officer having done what he did merely on his own responsibility. You cannot take a troop of French horses and waggons and men into Germany and hide them under a bushel. The officer would not, in fact, have dared to commit the crime of international robbery and kidnapping, and then carried off his spoil with him to barracks, unless he had known that it would be condoned by his superior officers. In other words, like the Roman centurion, he was a man set under authority, and only did what he was told to do. The facts of the incident, as I have given them, are indisputable. If, at the time when the British cabinet was weighing the reasons for and against joining in the war, there were any of its members who doubted the extent of Germany’s guilt, the story of Suarce may well have played (as I have heard it did) an important part in helping them to make up their minds. For it was possibly the earliest positive evidence which proved beyond a shadow of doubt Germany’s deliberate intention of going to war. As far as I know, the story has not previously been published, at all events in any detail, and therefore it may be of a certain amount of historical interest to give the names of the nine Frenchmen who were made prisoners of war before war was declared. They were: Edouard Voelin (58 years of age), Eugène Mattin (52), François Verthe (66), Isidore Skup (57), Céléstin Fleury (55), Henri Féga (53), J. Pierre Marchal (51), Charles Martin (29), and Emile Mouhay (29). The last two had been passed as “bons pour l’armée” in the class of 1914. The rest were obviously far beyond the military age. Two of the nine have died during their indefensible imprisonment in Germany.