German army is, by the judgment of the civilised world
outside Germany, unprecedented in modern history. But the instances of
long-drawn-out, cold-blooded, unrelenting cruelty, of which the German
conduct of the war is full, fill one after a while with a shuddering
sense of something wholly vile, and wholly unsuspected, which Europe has
been sheltering, unawares, in its midst. The horror has now thrown off
the trappings and disguise of modern civilisation, and we see it and
recoil. We feel that we are terribly right in speaking of the Germans as
barbarians; that, for all their science and their organisation, they
have nothing really in common with the Graeco-Latin and Christian
civilisation on which this old Europe is based. We have thought of them,
in former days,--how strange to look back upon it!--as brothers and
co-workers in the human cause. But the men who have made and are
sustaining this war, together with the men, civil and military, who have
breathed its present spirit into the German Army, are really moral
outlaws, acknowledging no authority but their own arrogant and cruel
wills, impervious to the moral ideals and restraints that govern other
nations, and betraying again and again, under the test of circumstance,
the traits of the savage and the brute.

And as one says these things, one could almost laugh at them!--so strong
is still the memory of what one used to feel towards the poetic, the
thinking, the artistic Germany of the past. But that Germany was a mere
blind, hiding the real Germany.

Listen, at least, to what this old village of the Ile-de-France knows of
Germany.

With the early days of September 1914, there was a lamentable exodus
from all this district. Long lines of fugitives making for safety and
the south, carts filled with household stuff and carrying the women and
children, herds of cattle and sheep, crowded the roads. The Germans were
coming, and the terror of Belgium and the Ardennes had spread to these
French peasants of the centre. On September 1st, the post-mistress of
Vareddes received orders to leave the village, after destroying the
telephone and telegraphic connections. The news came late, but panic
spread like wildfire. All the night, Vareddes was packing and going. Of
800 inhabitants only a hundred remained, thirty of them old men.

One of the emigrants did not get far from home. He was a man of seventy,
Louis Denet by name. He left Vareddes with his wife, in a farm-cart,