Читать книгу German Atrocities: An Official Investigation - J. H. Morgan - Страница 20

One thing emerges quite clearly from these disorderly depositions and that is a great confusion of mind. The evidence from Belgian sources, very carefully sifted by a Committee38 (presided over by Sir Mackenzie Chalmers) of the Belgian Commission and, independently, by the Bryce Committee,39 is to the effect that two detachments of German troops fired on one another and then threw the blame on the innocent inhabitants. This explanation certainly receives some countenance from the German depositions, which, as I have said, exhibit a kind of turbulent confusion. The N.C.O.‘s of two battalions which entered the town at 9 p.m. say “the noise and confusion was very great,” and “to what extent our fire was returned I cannot say”; “we shot the street lamps to pieces”; “our opponents were not to be seen since it was already dark,” and “we only saw the flash of the discharges and supposed that they came from the houses” (D 36, 37); and here again, as in the case of the company of Landsturm previously referred to, only “five men” were known to be hit. During the greater part of the day (August 25th) there was only40 one company of Landsturm and sixty men of a railway detachment in the town (D 8). It is surely rather remarkable that “a well-prepared and elaborately designed attack on the part of the civil population” (D 41) should have halted all day and then begun either at or a short time before (the German evidence is, as we have seen, very conflicting) German reinforcements were entering the town, and then tarried again until the whole or the greater part of a German Army Corps had arrived: the only thing that the German evidence proves is the sinister fact that the arrival of each detachment of German forces coincided with renewed massacres of the civilian population. Such is the ugly story that emerges from these ill-nourished and contradictory testimonies.

Such is the German White Book. I think it is not too much to say that it bears the stamp of the forger’s hand upon it, the same hand that forged the Ems telegram and garbled the Belgian documents captured in Brussels. It was conceived in iniquity and brought forth in falsehood. It confesses, but does not avoid.