The general impression left in my mind by these subsequent inquiries at head-quarters as to the value of the statements made to me earlier by soldiers in hospital is that those statements were true. There is a tendency in some quarters to depreciate the value of the testimony of the British soldier, but the degree of its value depends a good deal on the capacity in which, and the person to whom, the soldier is addressing himself. In writing letters home or in talking to solicitous visitors the soldier is one person; in giving evidence in an official inquiry he is quite another. I have had opportunities when attending field courts-martial of seeing something of the way in which soldiers give evidence, and I see no reason to suppose that the soldier is any less reliable than the average civilian witness in a court of common law. Indeed, the moment I made it clear to the soldiers that my inquiry was an official one they became very cautious and deliberate in their statements, often correcting themselves or referring to their diaries (of which they usually take great care), or qualifying the narration with the statement “I did not see it myself.” It need hardly be said that these observations as to the credibility of the soldiers apply no less to that of the officers. And it is worthy of remark that, apart from individual cases of corroboration of a soldier’s evidence by that of an officer, the burden of the evidence in the case of each class is the same. Where officers do not testify to the same thing as the soldiers, they testify to similar things. The cumulative effect produced on my mind is that of uniform experience.
I have often found the statements so made subsequently corroborated; I have rarely, if ever, found them contradicted. I ascribe this result to my having applied rigid rules as to the reception of evidence in the first instance. I have always taken into account the peculiar receptivity of minds fatigued and overwrought by the strain of battle to the influences of “suggestion,” whether in the form of newspapers or of oral gossip. It sometimes, but not often, happened that one could recognise the same story in a different investiture, although appearing at first sight to be a different occurrence. Or, again, it may happen that a story undergoes elaboration in the process of transmission until it looks worse than it originally was. So, too, a case of apparent outrage may admit of several explanations; it may happen, for example, in the case of a suspicious use of the white flag that the act of one party of Germans in raising it and of another party in taking advantage of it were conceivably independent of one another. Cases of the shelling of “undefended” places, of churches, and of hospitals, I have always disregarded if our men or guns were or lately had been in the vicinity; and it may easily happen that a case of firing on stretcher-bearers or ambulance waggons is due to the impossibility of discrimination in the midst of a general engagement. Wherever any of these features appeared to be present I rejected the evidence--not always nor necessarily because I doubted its veracity, but because I had misgivings as to its value.