German Atrocities: A Record of Shameless DeedsLe Queux, William
History
German Atrocities: A Record of Shameless Deeds
Le Queux, William
World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities
Again the Germans, having despoiled dead Belgian soldiers of their
uniforms, clothed some of their men in them and placed them at the head
of their troops when an attack was made upon the Belgian troops.
The Khaki Uniform Trick.
The treacherous use by the Germans of British uniforms is instanced by
one of the wounded men at present in England. “What made matters worse
for us was the treachery of the enemy,” he stated, in the course of an
account of the fight in which he had sustained his hurt. “We were
compelled to fall back at one point, and left behind us our haversacks
and greatcoats, which we had taken off to allow us to fight the better.
Some time afterwards a body of men came towards us wearing the familiar
khaki-coloured coats, and naturally we took them for friends. But they
were Germans who had seized our coats and put them on in order to
disguise themselves, and no sooner were they near us than they sent a
murderous fire into our ranks. Later, when there was a lull in the
fighting, we found a large number of Germans killed wearing the clothes
of British soldiers, showing that they must either have stripped our
dead or the British prisoners they had captured and used their clothes.”
A number of Belgian soldiers arriving in Folkestone have also described
the behaviour of the enemy as too brutal for any civilised nation, and
most of them had seen Belgian villagers drawn in front of the Germans to
act as a screen for them. A favourite trick of the Germans was to
terrify Belgian villagers by driving them along immediately in front of
their heavy guns, where, owing to the elevation of the guns, they were
really quite safe. Their experience had been that the Germans had no
respect for the Red Cross, and that in fact they waited until the
wounded had been picked up and would then fire. They confirmed the
stories which had been told about the manner in which the Germans had
killed wounded men.
In another case a French soldier, after the engagement at Spincourt,
related that while he was on the ground with a bullet in his foot the
Germans, seeing he was not dead, fired at him with a rifle, twice,
point-blank, hitting him in the hip and shoulder, whereupon he became
unconscious. The Germans, thinking he was dead, left him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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