“From my elevated position I had an excellent view also of the great oil tanks on the opposite side of the Scheldt.  They had been set on fire by four bombs from a German Taube, and a huge, thick volume of black smoke was ascending two hundred feet into the air.  The oil had been burning furiously for several hours, and the whole neighborhood was enveloped in a mist of smoke.

“After watching for some considerable time the panorama of destruction that lay unrolled all around me, I came down from my post of observation on the cathedral roof, and at the very moment I reached the street a 28- centimeter shell struck a confectioner’s shop between the Place Verte and the Place de Meir.  It was one of these high-explosive shells, and the shop, a wooden structure, immediately burst into flames.”

Recapitulation

The destruction of towns and villages, and the vengeance against inanimate objects shown in the German march through Belgium was barbaric.  It was provoked by organized resistance on the part of Belgian franc-tireurs, and by shooting from behind shutters, etc., and other attacks by citizens of the invaded country.  The Germans, though truthful in the statement of the causes, inflicted punishment out of all proportion to the crime.

The reports of unprovoked personal atrocities, it is nevertheless true, have been hideously exaggerated.  Wherever one real atrocity has occurred, it has been multigraphed into a hundred cases.  Each, with clever variation in detail, is reported as occurring to a relative or close friend of the teller.  For campaign purposes, and particularly in England for the sake of stimulating recruiting, a partisan press has helped along the concoction of lies.

In every war of invasion there is bound to occur a certain amount of plunder and rapine.  The German system of reprisal is relentless; but the German private as an individual is no more barbaric than his brother in the French, the British, or the Belgian trenches.

The End