een at Liege a dozen priests condemned to death
because they put a price on the heads of German soldiers; he had also
seen there civilians who had cut off the breasts of a Red Cross nurse.
Again, a Hessian schoolmaster tells in a letter how his detachment had
been treacherously attacked at Ch----by the inhabitants, with the cure
at their head.

Submitted to the test of the German military inquiry these stories are
shown to be without foundation. Received from the front and narrated by
a soldier who professes to have been an eyewitness, they are
nevertheless clothed in the public view with special authority.

Welcomed without control by the press, the stories recounted in letters
from the front appear, however, in the eyes of the readers of a paper
clothed with a new authority--that which attaches to printed matter.
They lose in the columns of a paper their individual and particular
character. Those who send them have, as the _Koelnische Volkszeitung_
notes, usually effaced all personal allusions. The statements thus
obtain a substance and an objectivity of which they would otherwise be
devoid. Mixed with authentic news, they are accepted by the public
without mistrust. Is not their appearance in the paper a guaranty of
accuracy?

Besides imposing itself on public credulity, the printed story fixes
itself in the mind. It takes a lasting form. It has entered permanently
into consciousness, and more, it has become a source of reference.

All these pseudo-historical publications are, however, only one aspect
of the abundant literary production of the Great War. All the varieties
of popular literature, the romances of cloak and sword, the stories of
adventure, the collections of news and anecdotes, the theater itself,
are in turn devoted to military events. The great public loves lively
activity, extraordinary situations, and sensational circumstances
calculated to strike the imagination and cause a shiver of horror.

So one finds in this literature of the lower classes the principal
legendary episodes of which we have studied the origin and followed the
development; accommodated to a fiction, woven into a web of intrigue,
they have undergone new transformations; they have lost every indication
of their source; they are transposed in the new circumstances imagined
for them; they have usually been dissociated from the circumstances
which individualize them and fix their time and place. The thematic
motives from which the