An invading army may be entitled to shoot at sight a civilian caught redhanded, or any one who, though not caught redhanded, is proved guilty on inquiry.  But this was not the practice followed by the German troops.  They do not seem to have made any inquiry.  They seized the civilians of the villages indiscriminately and killed them, or such as they selected from among them, without the least regard to guilt or innocence.  The mere cry, “Civilisten haben geschossen!” was enough to hand over a whole village or district, and even outlying places, to ruthless slaughter.

We gladly record the instances where the evidence shows that humanity had not wholly disappeared from some members of the German Army, and that they realized that the responsible heads of that organization were employing them not in war, but in butchery:  “I am merely executing orders, and I should be shot if I did not execute them,” said an officer to a witness at Louvain.  At Brussels another officer says:  “I have not done one-hundredth part of what we have been ordered to do by the high German military authorities.”

As we have already observed, it would be unjust to charge upon the German Army generally acts of cruelty which, whether due to drunkenness or not, were done by men of brutal instincts and unbridled passions.  Such crimes were sometimes punished by the officers.  They were in some cases offset by acts of humanity and kindliness.  But when an army is directed or permitted to kill noncombatants on a large scale the ferocity of the worst natures springs into fuller life, and both lust and the thirst of blood become more widespread and more formidable.  Had less license been allowed to the soldiers and had they not been set to work to slaughter civilians there would have been fewer of those painful cases in which a depraved and morbid cruelty appears.

Two classes of murders in particular require special mention because one of them is almost new and the other altogether unprecedented.  The former is the seizure of peaceful citizens as so-called hostages, to be kept as a pledge for the conduct of the civil population or as a means to secure some military advantage or to compel the payment of a contribution, the hostages being shot if the condition imposed by the arbitrary will of the invader is not fulfilled.  Such hostage-taking, with the penalty of death attached, has now and then happened, the most notable case being the shooting of the Archbishop of Paris and some of his clergy by the Communards of Paris in 1871, but it is opposed both to the rules of war and to every principle of justice and humanity.  The latter kind of murder is the killing of the innocent inhabitants of a village because shots have been fired, or are alleged to have been fired, on the troops by some one in the village.  For this practice no previous example and no justification have been or can be pleaded.  Soldiers suppressing an insurrection may have sometimes slain civilians