FOOTNOTES: 

[12] See the report of the French Commission (vol. i., page 35).  See also, in the “Reply to the White Book,” p. 500, the moving letter of Cardinal Mercier to von Bissing:  “My conscience forbids my divulging to any tribunal the information, alas, only too well substantiated, which I possess.  Outrages on nuns have been committed ...”

KILLING THE WOUNDED

There are great numbers of wounded who, on their solemn oath, have related how, when lying on the field of battle, they saw their wounded comrades “finished off” by rifle or revolver shots, or by blows from butt-ends, or by bayonet stabs, or kicked to death by German soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and even by officers.[13]

We cannot pause to analyse these innumerable depositions.  There is other evidence.  How often, when a counter-attack has put us in possession of ground lost the day before, have we found poor fellows “finished off”—­with their throats cuts, as in the case of the two sergeants of the 31st Chasseurs at the Pass of Sainte-Marie, or “with their own bayonets driven into their mouths,” like the poor little fellow of the 17th.  The enemy often runs amok like this:—­“On August 23rd, the Cure of Remereville tended Lieutenant Toussaint (who passed out first at the Forestry School in July).  When he fell in battle, this young officer was bayoneted by all the Germans who passed near him, and his body was a mass of wounds from head to feet.”  At Oudrigny “a German officer met a French vehicle showing the Red Cross flag, and loaded with ten wounded.  He deployed his company, and fired two volleys at it.”  At Bonviller, an officer murdered nine French wounded, stretched helpless in a barn, by shooting them through the ear.  On 23rd August at Montigny-le-Tilleul, M. Vital was caught in the act of tending a French soldier, L. Sohier by name, wounded in the head and side.  Such a crime deserved punishment, and the wretches first shot the orderly and then the patient.

At Ethe they set a shed on fire and roasted more than twenty wounded who were lying there.

We all know the celebrated order of General Stenger in the region of Thiaville (Meurthe-et-Moselle):—­“No prisoners are to be taken.  All prisoners, whether wounded or not, must be slaughtered.”

It was not only in Lorraine that such orders were given.  Listen to the depositions of a German soldier:  “The same day we saw eighteen other Frenchmen.  Lieutenant N. told us to shoot them as he did not know what else to do with them.”

Read this letter found at L’Ecouvillon in a German trench which we recaptured:  “Every day we take many prisoners, but they are shot at once as we no longer know where to put them.”

Think of the diary in which a German soldier near Peronne recorded his impressions of the day:  “They lay in heaps of ten or twelve, some dead and some still living.  Those who could still walk were marched off.  Those who were wounded in the head or lungs, and could not lift themselves up, were finished off with a bullet.  That is the order which we got.”