The story of Vareddes is indeed nearly incredible.  That English, or French, or Italian troops could have been guilty of this particular crime is beyond imagination.  Individual deeds of passion and lust are possible, indeed, in all armies, though the degree to which they have prevailed in the 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.