15th May, 1915; _Third_, Notebooks found upon a large number of German
soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and officers, who have been wounded
or taken prisoners, and translated under the direction of the French
Government. These valuable records, in which the bandits and their
leaders have imprudently given themselves away, are real "_pièces à
conviction_."

These reports in their entirety form an overwhelming indictment. We
wish that everyone could study them in full. But the books are large,
running to thousands of pages, and will not find their way to the
general public.

Yet everyone ought to know how the Germans carry on war. We have
therefore made selections from these documents in order to compile this
small pamphlet. A dismal task, this wading through mud and blood! And a
hard task, to run through all these reports, pencil in hand, with the
idea of underlining _the essential facts_! You find yourself noting down
each page, marking each paragraph; and, lo and behold, at the end of the
book, you have selected _everything_--- that is to say, nothing. One
might as well start to gather the hundred finest among the leaves of a
forest, or to pick up the hundred most glittering grains among the sand
on a beach. All we can do is to take the first examples which come to
hand. This, then, is not a collection of the most stirring and striking
German crimes, but simply a book of samples. Until complete statistics
are forthcoming, two classes of outrage stand out, and must remain ever
present to the mind: murdered civilians can be counted in thousands;
houses wilfully burned, in tens of thousands.

For want of time and space we have concerned ourselves here only with
crimes committed in Belgium and France, and we have had no thought of