_Face title-page._] GERMAN ATROCITIES A RECORD OF SHAMELESS DEEDS BY WILLIAM LE QUEUX [Illustration: colophon] GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED LONDON PREFACE This fearful and disgraceful record of a Nation’s shame and of an Emperor’s complicity in atrocious crimes against God and man is no work of fiction, but a plain unvarnished statement of the grim and terrible work of the Kaiser’s Huns of Attila which I have considered it a duty to lay before the British public. Modern Germany, frothing with military Nietzschism, seems to have returned to a primitive barbarism. Belgium, a peaceful modern nation, has been swept by fire and sword, and its honest, pious inhabitants tortured and massacred, not because the German soldiery desired to wreak such vengeance upon a people with whom they could have no quarrel, but because they had been encouraged “to act with unrelenting severity, to create examples which by their frightfulness would be a warning to the whole country.” The wild orgies of blood and debauchery, the atrocious outrages, murders, and mutilations, the ruthless violation and killing of defenceless women, girls, and children of tender age, have been, it is now admitted by the Germans themselves, carried out with their full knowledge, and even as part of the actual plan of campaign of their War-Lords. Germany, though boasting of her culture, her refinement, her honest home-life, and the peaceful efforts of her Emperor, has for ever lost her place among civilized nations. It now stands revealed that when her diplomatic methods of base chicanery and lying fail then she does not hesitate to resort to acts so dastardly and inhuman as to have no parallel. Not only has she broken her most solemn treaties and moral engagements, but all the rules of civilized warfare to which she was a signatory at The Hague she has also violated, merely regarding them as “a scrap of paper.” Not content with resorting to every act of savagery and every refinement of cruelty which degenerated minds, filled with the blood-lust of war, could conceive, her troops, by order of her generals, have made a practice all along the line of placing before them innocent women and children to act as a living screen, in the hope that the Allies would not, from motives of humanity, fire upon them. One cannot read a single page of this awful record--the German Black Book--without being thrilled with horror at unspeakable acts of civilized troops, who, at the behest of their Kaiser, and the exposed yet still ruling _camarilla_ at Berlin, have become simply as the Huns of Attila.