using, they send a warning. On the 7th September, 1914, the Death's Head
Hussars shut up all the inhabitants of the village with them in the
Château of Saint Ouen-sur-Morin, and then, to avoid being shelled,
informed the English of their "dispositions." They fired on anyone who
tried to escape. At Mouzon, we saw a number of civilians being pushed in
front of the enemy with the butt-ends of rifles, and we stopped firing.
The wretched people moved suddenly to one side of the road, uncovering
the Germans, and then we fired. The Boches, furious, fired their first
volley not at us, but point blank at these non-combatants, who were
decimated.

The cowards chiefly used civilians as shields, but sometimes they also
made use of prisoners. At Keyem, they pushed one hundred Belgian
soldiers in front of them, some with their hands tied, and others with
their arms in the air. At Dixmude, they advanced under the shelter of
forty disarmed marines who had been taken prisoners. When they got in
front of our lines our marines shouted, "For God's sake fire, these are
Germans," and these heroes fell gloriously under the French bullets.
Such deeds are countless.

The Boches will deny them later on, but in 1914 they did not deny them,
but rather gloried in them as a "good idea." We can see this from the
letter of the Bavarian Lieutenant Eberlein, published on the 7th
October, 1914, by a leading Munich paper, "We had arrested three other
civilians when a 'good idea' struck me. We made them sit on chairs in
the middle of the street;--supplications from them, and blows with
butt-ends of rifles from us. At last they were seated outside in the
street with their hands convulsively clasped together. I felt sorry for
them, but the plan worked at once. As I learnt later, the regiment which
entered Saint-Dié, further to the north of us, had precisely similar