How far the “grande nation” has already degenerated, and how far the Belgian population, akin to the French both in blood and in sentiments, imitate the French in their Balkan brutality, is illustrated by two examples.  One of these, in the form of a German official warning, says:  “The reports at hand about the fighting around Liege show that the population of the country took part in the battle.  Our troops were fired upon from ambush.  Physicians were shot at while following their profession.  Cruelties were practiced by the population on wounded soldiers.  There is also news at hand showing that German patrols in the vicinity of Metz were fired at from ambush from the French side.  It may be that these occurrences are due to the composition of the population in those industrial regions, but it may also be that France and Belgium are preparing for a guerrilla warfare upon our troops.  If the latter alternative should prove true, and this proof be strengthened through repetitions of these occurrences, then our opponents will have themselves to thank if this war be carried on with unrelenting severity even against the guilty population.  The German troops, who are accustomed to preserve discipline and to wage war only against the armed forces of the hostile State, cannot be blamed if, in just self-defense, they give no quarter.  The hope of influencing the result of the war by turning loose the passions of the populace will be frustrated by the unshaken energy of our leaders and our troops.  Before neutral foreign countries, however, it must be demonstrated, even at the beginning of this war, that it was not the German troops who caused the war to take on such forms.”

The details of the cruelties, here only hinted at, on the Belgian and French side, are supplied and proved by an eye-witness, a German physician, who reports: 

We have experienced from the Belgian population, from men, women, and half-grown boys, such things as we had hitherto seen only in wars with negroes.  The Belgian civilian population shoots in blind hatred from every house, from every thick bush, at everything that is German.  We had on the very first day many dead and wounded, caused by the civilian population.  Women take part as well as men.  One German had his throat cut at night while in bed.  Five wounded Germans were put into a house bearing the flag of the Red Cross; by the next morning they had all been stabbed to death.  In a village near Verviers we found the body of one of our soldiers with his hands bound behind his back and his eyes punched out.  An automobile column which set out from Liege halted in a village; a young woman came up, suddenly drew a revolver, and shot a chauffeur dead.  At Emmenich, an hour by foot from Aachen, a sanitary automobile column was attacked by the populace on a large scale and fired at from the houses.  The red cross on our sleeves and on our automobiles gives us physicians no protection at all.

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