like subtle jurists, make distinctions, blaming here and approving
there--"Dort war ein Exempel am Platze." Others laugh and say "Krieg ist
Krieg," or sometimes they add in French, to emphasize their derision,
"Ja, Ja, c'est la guerre," and some among them, when their ugly business
is done, turn to their book of canticles and sing psalms, such as the
Saxon Lieut. Reislang, who relates how one day he left his drinking bout
to _assist at the "Gottesdienst"_, but having eaten too much and drunken
too much, had to quit the holy place in haste; and the Private Moritz
Grosse of the 177th Infantry, who, after depicting the sacking of
Saint-Vieth, (Aug. 22,) the sacking of Dinant, (Aug. 23,) writes this
phrase:

Throwing of incendiary grenades into the houses, and in the
evening a military chorus--"Now let all give thanks to God."
(Fig. 12.)

They're all of a like tenor. Now, if we consider that I could exchange
the preceding texts with others quite similar, quite as cynical, and
taken at random, for instance--from the notebook of the Reservist
Lautenschlager of the First Battalion, Sixty-sixth Regiment of Infantry,
or the notebook of the Private Eduard Holl of the Eighth Corps, or the
notebook of the sub-officer Reinhold Koehn of the Second Battalion of
Pomeranian Pioneers, or that of the sub-officer Otto Brandt of the
Second Section of Reserve Ambulances, or of the Reservist Martin Müller
of the 100th Saxon Reserve, or of Lieut. Karl Zimmer of the Fifty-fifth
Infantry, or that of the Private Erich Pressler of the 100th Grenadiers,
First Saxon Corps, &c., and if we will note that, among the exactions
reported above, there are very few that are the work of isolated brutes,
(such as, unfortunately, may be found even in the most noble armies,)
but that, on the contrary, the crimes represented here are collective