[Illustration: Figure 8.]


IV.

Frequently when a German troop want to carry a position, they place
before them civilians--men, women, and children--and find shelter behind
these ramparts of living flesh. As such a stratagem is essentially
playing upon the nobility of heart of the adversary, and saying to him
"you won't fire upon these unfortunates, I know it, and I hold you at my
mercy, unarmed, because you are not as craven as I am," as it implies a
homage to the enemy and the self-degradation of the one employing it, it
is almost inconceivable that soldiers should resort to it; it represents
a new invention in the long story of human vileness, which even the
dreadful Penitentiels of the Middle Ages had not discovered. In reading
the stories from French, Belgian, and English sources, attributing such
practices to the Germans, it has made me doubt, if not the truthfulness,
at least the detailed exactness of the stories. It seemed to me that the
tales must be of crimes by men who would be disavowed, individual
lapses, which do not dishonor the nation, because the nation on
ascertaining them would repudiate them. But how can we doubt that the
German Nation has, on the contrary, accepted these acts as exploits
worthy of herself, that in them she recognizes her own aptitudes, and
finds pleasure in the contemplation; how, I ask, can we doubt this in
reading the following narrative signed by a Bavarian officer, Lieut. A.
Eberlein, spread out in the columns of one of the best known periodicals
of Germany, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, in its issue of Wednesday,
Oct. 7, 1914, Page 22, Lieut. Eberlein relates there the occupation of
Saint-Dié at the end of August. He entered the town at the head of a
column, and while waiting for reinforcements was compelled to barricade