Читать книгу German Atrocities: An Official Investigation - J. H. Morgan - Страница 12

I turn to the case of Dinant, one of the most appalling massacres that have ever been perpetrated,28 even by the hordes of Kultur. No attempt is made to deny the wholesale slaughter; it is freely admitted, and with sanguinary iteration we are told again and again “a fairly large number of persons were shot, “all the male hostages assembled against the garden wall were shot.” Such battues occur on page after page.29 What is the German excuse? It is that the civilian population offered a desperate resistance. To prove how desperate it was, and consequently to establish the “military necessity,” it has to be conceded that they were organised. But this is proving too much, for “organised” civilian combatants are entitled to the privileges of lawful belligerents. Therefore it is argued that they were “without military badges”: this phrase occurs with a curious lack of variation in the words of each witness. It is added that women and “children (including girls) of ten or twelve years” were armed with revolvers! “Elderly women,” “a white-haired old man,” fired with insensate fury. None the less—says one ingenuous German witness—“the people had all got a very high opinion of Germany.” At intervals during the engagement not only were groups of civilians, alleged to have arms in their hands, shot in groups, but unarmed civilians were shot—“all the male hostages.” In other words the whole of the German defence that the German troops were punishing illicit francs-tireurs is suddenly abandoned. Tiring apparently of these laboured inventions, the German staff, in a grim and sombre sentence, suddenly throws off the mask:

“In judging the attitude which the troops of the 12th Corps took against such a population, our starting point must be that the tactical object of the 12th Corps was to cross the Meuse with speed, and to drive the enemy from the left bank of the Meuse; speedily to overcome the opposition of the inhabitants who were working in direct opposition to this was to be striven for in every way.... Hostages were shot at various places and this procedure is amply justified.”30

It has been estimated that about eight hundred civilians perished in this massacre. The German White Book freely concedes that the number was large; indeed by a simple process of induction from the German evidence it is clear that it was very large. It appears that a whole Army Corps (the 1st Royal Saxon) was engaged and that the armed troops of the Allies were encountered in force. The German troops received a check and it seems fairly obvious that they simply wreaked their vengeance, as they have so often done, on an unoffending population, presumably in order to intimidate the enemy in the field. Not for the first time they attempted to do by terror what they could not do by force of arms.