“I was fortunate in getting my revolver out first, and shot down the man in advance.  There was a struggle, in which the General made his escape and all of the eight were either killed or taken prisoners.  They were uhlans, two officers and six privates.”

“It was very brave,” I said.  “A remarkable exploit.”

“Very brave indeed,” he agreed with me.  “They are all very brave, the Germans.”

Captain F——­ had been again consulting his map.  Now he put it away.

“Brave but brutal,” he said briefly.  “I am of the Third Division.  I have watched the German advance protected by women and children.  In the fighting the civilians fell first.  They had no weapons.  It was terrible.  It is the German system,” he went on, “which makes everything of the end, and nothing at all of the means.  It is seen in the way they have sacrificed their own troops.”

“They think you are equally brutal,” I said.  “The German soldiers believe that they will have their eyes torn out if they are captured.”

I cited a case I knew of, where a wounded German had hidden in the inundation for five days rather than surrender to the horrors he thought were waiting for him.  When he was found and taken to a hospital his long days in the water had brought on gangrene and he could not be saved.

“They have been told that to make them fight more savagely,” was the comment.  “What about the official German order for a campaign of ‘frightfulness’ in Belgium?”

And here, even while the car is crawling along toward the trenches, perhaps it is allowable to explain the word “frightfulness,” which now so permeates the literature of the war.  Following the scenes of the German invasion into Belgium, where here and there some maddened civilian fired on the German troops and precipitated the deaths of his townsmen,[C] Berlin issued, on August twenty-seventh, a declaration, of which this paragraph is a part: 

[Footnote C:  The Belgians contend that, in almost every case, such firing by civilians was the result of attack on their women.]

“The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity and to create examples which, by their frightfulness, would be a warning to the whole country.”

A Belgian officer once quoted it to me, with a comment.

“This is not an order to the army.  It is an attempt at justification for the very acts which Berlin is now attempting to deny!”

That is how “frightfulness” came into the literature of the war.

Captain F——­ stopped the car.  Near the road was a ruin of an old church.

“In that church,” he said, “our soldiers were sleeping when the Germans, evidently informed by a spy, began to shell it.  The first shot smashed that house there, twenty-five yards away; the second shot came through the roof and struck one of the supporting pillars, bringing the roof down.  Forty-six men were killed and one hundred and nine wounded.”