Near the town of Meaux and some hundreds of metres from the village of Congis is the château of Gné. At the beginning of the battle of the Marne the German general staff was installed there. Of this château there remained, after the vandals had passed by, only the ruins. The chests-of-drawers were broken, the beautiful tapestries defiled, the armchairs smashed to pieces, the costly pictures slashed, even the linen of the château stolen. When the allied troops forced the Germans back and reoccupied it, only wounded were found in it, who, before the arrival of the conquerors, had taken care to ransack the whole house and to finish the work of destruction which had been begun. We repeat that these outrages were the work of officers no less than of soldiers. And it was a captain who led the Germans at Creil when they burst into the houses of rich owners, broke the doors and windows, and gave themselves up to pillage. The same kinds of acts were also committed by the Germans in Alsace. The case of Cernay, where the Germans drove out the inhabitants in the month of January, is an example. All these people had to leave the town at three o’clock in the morning. A manufacturer of the country who returned to his villa at 7.15, found a detachment of German soldiers engaged in taking down the pictures from the walls and packing up articles which they could not carry. When he expressed his surprise at seeing them appropriating his property, the soldiers replied that they were acting under the orders of their superiors. ROBBING THE DEAD AND WOUNDED The universally admitted obligation not to plunder an enemy who has fallen on the field of battle has been, like so many others, repudiated by the Germans. The personal belongings, silver, jewels, etc., of the dead and wounded have been not merely coveted, but actually plundered by them. Examples of this infamous conduct were numerous, chiefly on the battlefields of France. On the 8th August, on the spot where a small cavalry engagement had taken place, at Beuveille (in Champagne), a French lieutenant of dragoons, who was wounded and lying unconscious on the ground, was robbed (for his own account of the incident see the _Matin_ of the 22nd August, 1914) of a sum of 250 francs in gold by the leader of a German platoon, M. de Schaffenberg, of the Trèves light infantry. His orderly, a dragoon, also wounded, lying a few paces away from the French lieutenant, was robbed of some money that he had by the same German officer. A French hussar who was attended by Dr. Weiss at the Nancy hospital told this doctor that he had broken his leg by falling from his horse, and that, as he was lying under his mount, he was attacked by Uhlans, who robbed him of his watch and chain.