My last view of Allenburg was from across the river with the long rays of the setting sun burnishing the ruins of the once beautiful church, the church I saw months later on the screen in the London display room, the church that has been shown all over the world as evidence of Russian methods in war.

I went all through East Prussia studying first hand the effects of the great campaign.  My luck increased from day to day.  I secured a military pass to visit all hospitals in the XXth Army Corps, which aided my investigations not a little.  The prejudice which I had against the Russians died in East Prussia.  It was buried forever the following winter when I was with the Russian Army in the memorable retreat through the Bukowina.  In East Prussia I was in an entirely different position from a man investigating conditions in Belgium, for I was in the German’s own country after he had driven out the invader.  I tried to see some youth whose hand had been cut off, but could not find a single case, although, everybody had heard of such mutilations.  The fact that no doctor whom I questioned knew of any case was sufficient refutation, since a person whose hand had been cut off would need something more than a bandage tied on at home.

When the Russians entered the province they struck yellow and black posters everywhere announcing that it was annexed to Russia.  In view of this the Russian officers were instructed to restrain their men and to treat the natives well.  Isolated cases of violence, for the most part murder and robbery of the victim, had occurred where men had broken away from restraint, but they were surprisingly few.

After I returned to Berlin I met an American correspondent who was in East Prussia when I was.  His sympathies were pro-German, but he was an, open and fair-minded man, who, like me, had left Berlin with a deep feeling against the Russians, thanks to the excellent German propaganda.  “I went especially to get some good stories of Russian atrocities,” he said.  “I thought that every mile would be blood-marked with evidence, but I came back defeated.  Some petty larceny and robbery, a Red Cross flag torn to shreds by a Russian shell, two old men murdered and robbed by Cossacks, and a woman in the hospital at Soldau, who had been outraged by five Cossacks, was all that I could find, even though I was aided by the German Government.”

My own first-hand investigations convinced me that it would be difficult for any army in the world to conduct a cleaner campaign than Russia conducted in her first invasion of East Prussia.  I remind the reader that I am speaking of the first invasion, for I have no personal knowledge of the second.  Subsequently in Germany when.  I spoke of the matter I was always told that it was the second invasion which was so bad.  Perhaps!  But I had been fooled when Berlin cried wolf the first time.

By a stroke of fortune while in East Prussia I became “assistant” for two days to a Government moving picture photographer who had a pass for himself and assistant in those happy days of inexactitude.  We formed the kind of close comradeship which men form who are suffocated but unhurt by a shell which kills and maims others all about them.  That had been our experience.  He had, moreover, been over much of the ground covered by me behind the front.