to guilt or innocence. The
mere cry, "Civilisten haben geschossen!" was enough to hand over a whole
village or district, and even outlying places, to ruthless slaughter.

We gladly record the instances where the evidence shows that humanity
had not wholly disappeared from some members of the German Army, and
that they realized that the responsible heads of that organization were
employing them not in war, but in butchery: "I am merely executing
orders, and I should be shot if I did not execute them," said an officer
to a witness at Louvain. At Brussels another officer says: "I have not
done one-hundredth part of what we have been ordered to do by the high
German military authorities."

As we have already observed, it would be unjust to charge upon the
German Army generally acts of cruelty which, whether due to drunkenness
or not, were done by men of brutal instincts and unbridled passions.
Such crimes were sometimes punished by the officers. They were in some
cases offset by acts of humanity and kindliness. But when an army is
directed or permitted to kill noncombatants on a large scale the
ferocity of the worst natures springs into fuller life, and both lust
and the thirst of blood become more widespread and more formidable. Had
less license been allowed to the soldiers and had they not been set to
work to slaughter civilians there would have been fewer of those painful
cases in which a depraved and morbid cruelty appears.

Two classes of murders in particular require special mention because one
of them is almost new and the other altogether unprecedented. The former
is the seizure of peaceful citizens as so-called hostages, to be kept as
a pledge for the conduct of the civil population or as a means to
secure some military advantage or to compel the payment of a
contribution, the hostages being shot if the condition imposed by the
arbitrary will of the invader is not fulfilled. Such hostage-taking,
with the penalty of death attached, has now and then happened, the most
notable case being the shooting of the Archbishop of Paris and some of
his clergy by the Communards of Paris in 1871, but it is opposed both to
the rules of war and to every principle of justice and humanity. The
latter kind of murder is the killing of the innocent inhabitants of a
village because shots have been fired, or are alleged to have been
fired, on the troops by some one in the village. For this practice no
previous example and no justificati