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. Outrages upon Combatants in the Field. Lord Bryce’s Committee, with that scrupulous fairness which so honourably distinguishes their Report, have stated that: “We have no evidence to show whether and in what cases orders proceeded from the officer in command to give no quarter, but there are some instances in which persons obviously desiring to surrender were nevertheless killed.”