Referring to the systematic pillage effected by the German army, we have already mentioned (p. 132) the fact that "war booty" was despatched openly. In this respect, effrontery and impudence have surely nowhere been carried to greater lengths than in the valley of the Meuse. All the villas were as a matter of course emptied by the officers; when they were situated close to the banks of the river the furniture, etc., was transported on a little steamer, one of those tourist boats which in summer run between Namur and Dinant. The boat would stop before each villa, and--without the least attempt to conceal the nature of the proceedings--the pianos, beautiful pieces of furniture, clocks, pictures, etc., were piled on the deck. To cite one case among hundreds, it was thus that the villa of Mme. Wodon, at Davos, was emptied. Cynicism and impudence often lend one another mutual support. Let us recall, for example, the question of asphyxiating gases. Article 23 of the Hague Convention forbids the employment of poisons. Even in the siege of Liége our enemies were making use of shells which discharged poisonous gases at the moment of explosion; it was one of them that all but poisoned General Leman. It might, however, be supposed that these toxic vapours were the inevitable result of the detonation of the explosives with which the shells were loaded. But in April 1915 the Germans suddenly began to accuse their adversaries of the use of asphyxiating shells (see the German official communiqués of the 9th, 12th, 14th, and 21st April). At the same time they made it known that their chemists, far abler than those of France or England, were about to combine substances whose detonation would liberate products far more toxic than those of the enemy's shells. And on the 22nd April they preceded their attack on the trenches to the north of Ypres by a cloud of smoke of a yellowish-green colour, which asphyxiated the French and Canadians (see _N.R.C._, 29th April, 1914, morning). Now the falsity of their bragging allegations is obvious. They will not persuade any one to believe that between the 8th of April and the 22nd May they had had time to invent the combination of substances capable of giving off toxic vapours, to manufacture them in sufficient quantities, and finally to forward the cylinders to the field of battle. Let us add, moreover, that we knew before the end of March--that is, before the accusations made against the French--that the Germans were making experiments on a large scale in the aviation camp at Kiewit, near Hasselt. They were asphyxiating dogs. It may be supposed that they presently realized that they had gone a little too far in their cynicism, for in its issue of the 3rd May, 1915, _Die Wochenschau_, commenting on the affair of the 22nd April, stated that the attack had been "ably seconded by technical means."