At Luneville, eighteen civilians were killed, including one boy of twelve, shot, and an old woman of ninety-eight, bayoneted.
At Liege, twenty-nine civilians were murdered, some shot and others bayoneted—yet others burned alive.
At Audenne, August 20 and 21, 1914, 250 civilians were killed, according to French records, while General Von Bulow, over his own signature, in a written order to the people of Liege, dated August 22, says that he commanded the town to be reduced to ashes and ordered 110 persons shot.
The process of terrorism is invariably the same:—First, the crushing blow of invasion, followed by pillage, rape and murder; then, when the victims are paralyzed, crushed in spirit, shocked to the heart’s core, obnoxious regulations are published and enforced to prevent their recuperating.
At La Fontenelle, Ban de Sept, and many other villages along the front, manure had been thrown into the wells, the fruit trees were cut down, the copper was taken from coffins of the dead, the farm houses were demolished, and all property was taken away or destroyed. One would not pay $10 for the whole outfit of a peasant farmer’s home: table, a half dozen chairs, a bedstead in the corner, a crucifix hanging on the wall, a marriage certificate and a picture of the virgin, yet all was gone. The ammunition trains that came up from Germany went back loaded with such poor people’s belongings. Nothing left, an old woman’s bonnet on a dung-heap, a baby’s shoe in a corner, a broken picture frame or two—that’s all.
Talk about forgiving the Germans! Robbing the poor, the destruction of property, possibly may be forgiven. Property can be replaced. But, the systematic, deliberate ruin of non-combatant, innocent women and children, is a crime against civilization that can never be forgiven or forgotten. For generations to come, the German will be treated as an outlaw. He will be shunned—worse than a beast. Unclean, he will have to purge himself before he may be again accepted in the society of decent women and men.
Think of those fine-grained, sensitive French girls, compelled to live with brutes—generally surly, often drunk, who have killed their husbands, their brothers, their fathers! They have broken all the rules of war. They have outraged every decency. They are so sunk in the abyss of shame that they know neither respect for the living nor reverence for the dead.