In the cheerless interior of one of these freight cars (much the same kind of car as that in which we were confined during the trip from Brussels to Aix—­apparently used as a horse-stall on the previous trip, and with no bedding beyond a damp pile of straw in one corner) the American noticed a young German private.  This particular fellow was not wounded.  He wore no bandages; he was the only occupant of the horse-stall; and he paced up and down the boards, muttering, muttering, continually muttering to himself.  Now and then he snatched up a musket, went through the form of fixing a bayonet, and again and again lunged savagely at the wall of the car.

The Red Cross surgeon to whom the American went for information dismissed the matter casually by merely tapping his forehead with his index finger.

“Just one of those insane cases,” he said.

Later in the day on better acquaintance the surgeon explained the matter in this fashion:—­

“The fellow was quartered in a village near Lille, doing sentry duty on a house occupied by German officers.  There was an uprising of citizens.  From across the way native franc-tireurs fired shots into the house, killing one officer and wounding a second.  Tracing the firing across the street, the remaining officers entered a bakery-shop where they found several men and a woman, all armed.  They ordered the men to be shot.  The woman had in her hand a revolver with one of the cartridge chambers empty.  The German lieutenant saw that she was about to become a mother.  He then explained the gravity of her offense, told her that she was practically guilty of murder, and took away her weapon.  But under the circumstances he ordered her released instead of being shot.  He turned his back and walked away about five paces.  Suddenly the woman snatched another revolver from behind the counter and fired point-blank.  As he fell, the officer called out to his orderly, ‘Bayonet the woman.’

“The sentry did what he was ordered, but, you see, it has affected the poor fellow’s mind.”

This story, along with a few others, I have picked out from hundreds of atrocity tales which I heard during four months spent in England, Belgium, Germany, and Holland.  It will serve as an example, not only because it has the earmarks of truth,—­having been told in an offhand way merely as an explanation of the private’s insanity,—­but because it is typical of the kind of incident which in the telling is, nine times out of ten, twisted into atrocious and wholly unrecognizable form.

Under the law of military reprisal was there justification for the death of this woman?  Was the dying officer guilty of barbarian conduct?  And did the private, ordered against his will to perform an act whose memory drove him insane, commit an atrocity?  Without answering the question, let us consider for a moment how that particular anecdote would be told by a Belgian partisan.  In my wanderings through Termonde, Liege, and Louvain, I heard tales—­unspeakable and on their face utterly unbelievable—­of which this kind of thing must have been the foundation.