e officers and sergeants of the line service.
Their attitude varied in accordance with the number of stars they had
on their epaulette. If their rank were inferior to mine, they were
exaggeratedly obsequious, holding their hands along the crease in the
seam of their trousers with their fingers close together--at strict
attention. If their rank were superior to mine, they were defiant and
insolent. Nevertheless, they showed themselves more communicative than
their comrades of the line service. Most of them spoke French--well
enough, though not perfectly. All of them had been in Paris, and one
and all repeated this phrase:

"We know your beautiful country well. We have been in your beautiful
capital often...."

For my part, I invariably spoke to them of the atrocities their men
had perpetrated in that beautiful country, or of those they had
perpetrated in the country of our beautiful neighbor.... Rheims,
Ypres, Louvain, Andenne, were the names that always returned to my
lips. I hoped each time that I would get from those men who, in spite
of everything, were men of science, members of humanity's most
generous profession, if not a word of contrition at least a banal word
of regret. Since they had not ordered the sacrileges or the massacres,
they need not keep silent. But it was all in vain. They also excused,
justified and explained....

The explanation was simple and stereotyped. For the battered Cathedral
of Rheims, for the total destruction of Clermont, for the systematic
laying-waste of Louvain, for the frightful company of old men, women
and children who were dragged off into captivity, three words were the
justification--the three words of the German major at Vincy:

"_Das ist Krieg._" ("It is war.")

For the blackened ruins of Senlis, for that charming city of Louvain,
razed to the ground in one night as completely as if the scourge of
God had passed through it; for Andenne, assassinated in cold blood
with not one of its houses being granted mercy by the assassins; for
Termonde, where General Sommerfeld, seated in a chair in the midst of
the Grande Place, gave the order that it be burned and replied to the
entreaties of the mayor:

"No. Burn it to the ground!"

Five other words sufficed to explain everything:

"Civilians fired on our troops."

Not one village in flames, not one desecrated monument, not one
organized killing, not one tortured city that does not fall under the
scope of one or the other of