At this point we shall give our conclusions. We think it necessary to establish the degrees of responsibility for the above attested facts: and the reader will think it right for us to add some precise mention of the authors of the facts. The omission of such a chapter would have the effect of helping to keep our indignation in the air, and thus leaving for objects of the blame contained in it only some multitudes of persons, amongst whom our indictment would be diluted and dispersed. Not that we desire to take away from the German people as such the responsibility which attaches to them, but we desire to add some names thereto. The first responsible party whom we must mention is the German nation, and explicitly the German army judged by its private soldiers. It is upon the German private soldier, indisputably, that the shame of what we have just read recoils. It was the private soldiers who committed the greater part of the crimes which we have noticed: they were the principal authors of these crimes. But it must be added that the leaders consistently encouraged them. In several instances they acted on explicit instructions from officers, and even from generals. THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE LEADERS At the beginning of this book we noted the fatal teachings of the most famous military writers of Germany, writers who formed the war-school in which was developed the military spirit of the officers of 1914. These teachings were theories of war carried on in defiance of international law. The putting to death of captured soldiers and defenceless civilians is latent in such doctrines. If, then, we wish to sum up in a word the system practised by German officers, during the course of a war which is still in progress, we may describe it as the system _of terrorising the enemy on the plea of military necessity_. German officers showed themselves liberal in their estimate of the urgency, extent, and oftener still of the bare existence of such necessity. Therein we find the source of so many cowardly cruelties and crimes. “War! it is war,” they say. As the French Commission of Inquiry observes, for all their exactions, even for all their crimes, there was no redress; and if any unfortunate dared to beg an officer to deign to intervene and spare his life, or protect his property, he received no other reply, if he was not met with threats, than this invariable formula, accompanied by a smile and ascribing to the inevitable disasters of war the most cruel atrocities.