They seized the civilians of
the villages indiscriminately and killed them, or such as they selected
from among them, without the least regard to guilt or innocence. The
mere cry, "Civilisten haben geschossen!" was enough to hand over a whole
village or district, and even outlying places, to ruthless slaughter.
We gladly record the instances where the evidence shows that humanity
had not wholly disappeared from some members of the German Army, and
that they realized that the responsible heads of that organization were
employing them not in war, but in butchery: "I am merely executing
orders, and I should be shot if I did not execute them," said an officer
to a witness at Louvain. At Brussels another officer says: "I have not
done one-hundredth part of what we have been ordered to do by the high
German military authorities."
As we have already observed, it would be unjust to charge upon the
German Army generally acts of cruelty which, whether due to drunkenness
or not, were done by men of brutal instincts and unbridled passions.
Such crimes were sometimes punished by the officers. They were in some
cases offset by acts of humanity and kindliness.
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