"What would you say if we were to put such a principle into practice?"
The German often became very pale. He would content himself with a shrug of the shoulders--the shrug of the brute who knows that he is safe among civilized men.
The men I questioned were often doctors who ranked as majors or held some commission in the German medical corps. They were less stiff and automaton-like than the officers and sergeants of the line service. Their attitude varied in accordance with the number of stars they had on their epaulette. If their rank were inferior to mine, they were exaggeratedly obsequious, holding their hands along the crease in the seam of their trousers with their fingers close together--at strict attention. If their rank were superior to mine, they were defiant and insolent. Nevertheless, they showed themselves more communicative than their comrades of the line service. Most of them spoke French--well enough, though not perfectly. All of them had been in Paris, and one and all repeated this phrase:
"We know your beautiful country well. We have been in your beautiful capital often...."
For my part, I invariably spoke to them of the atrocities their men had perpetrated in that beautiful country, or of those they had perpetrated in the country of our beautiful neighbor.... Rheims, Ypres, Louvain, Andenne, were the names that always returned to my lips. I hoped each time that I would get from those men who, in spite of everything, were men of science, members of humanity's most generous profession, if not a word of contrition at least a banal word of regret. Since they had not ordered the sacrileges or the massacres, they need not keep silent. But it was all in vain. They also excused, justified and explained....
The explanation was simple and stereotyped. For the battered Cathedral of Rheims, for the total destruction of Clermont, for the systematic laying-waste of Louvain, for the frightful company of old men, women and children who were dragged off into captivity, three words were the justification--the three words of the German major at Vincy:
For the blackened ruins of Senlis, for that charming city of Louvain, razed to the ground in one night as completely as if the scourge of God had passed through it; for Andenne, assassinated in cold blood with not one of its houses being granted mercy by the assassins; for Termonde, where General Sommerfeld, seated in a chair in the midst of the Grande Place, gave the order that it be burned and replied to the entreaties of the mayor: