I saw German atrocities. The peasants did not shoot. It is the old familiar formula of the _franc-tireur_. That means that the peasant, not a soldier, dressed in the clothing of a civilian, takes advantage of his immunity as a noncombatant, to secrete a rifle, and from some shelter shoot at the enemy army. The Bishop of Namur writes: "It is evident that the German army trod the Belgian soil and carried out the invasion with the preconceived idea that it would meet with bands of this sort, a reminiscence of the war of 1870. But German imagination will not suffice to create that which does not exist. "There never existed a single body of _francs-tireurs_ in Belgium. "No 'isolated instance' even is known of civilians having fired upon the troops, although there would have been no occasion for surprise if any individual person had committed an excess. In several of our villages the population was exterminated because, as the military authorities alleged, a major had been killed or a young girl had attempted to kill an officer, and so forth.... In no case has an alleged culprit been discovered and designated by name." This lie--that the peasants brought their own death on themselves--was rehearsed before the war, as a carefully learned lesson. The army came prepared to find the excuse for the methodical outrages which they practised. In the fight in the Dixmude district, a German officer of the 202e Infantry had a letter with this sentence on his body: "There are a lot of _francs-tireurs_ with the enemy." There were none. He had found what he had been drilled to find, in the years of preparedness. The front lines of the Yser were raked clear by shell, rifle, and machine-gun fire. The district was in ruins. I know, because I worked there with our Red Cross Corps through those three weeks. The humorous explanation of this is given by one of the Fusilier Marin Lieutenants--that the blue cap and the red pompon of the famous fighting sailors of France looked strangely to the Germans, who took the wearers for _francs-tireurs_, terror suggesting the idea. But this is the kindly humor of Brittany. The saucy sailor caps could not have looked strangely to German eyes, because a few weeks earlier those "Girls with the red pompon" had held the German army corps at Melle, and not even terror could have made them look other than terribly familiar. No. The officers had been faithfully trained to find militant peasants under arms, and to send back letters and reports of their discovery, which could later be used in official excuses for frightfulness. This letter is one that did not get back to Berlin, later to appear in a White Paper, as justification for official murder of non-combatants.