"There on the floor was the body of the owner. In the interior our men had destroyed everything exactly like vandals.... The sight of the inhabitants of the village who had been shot beggars any descriptions. The volley had nearly decapitated certain of them. Every house to the last corner had been searched and so the inhabitants brought out from their hiding-places. The men were shot. The women and children put in the convent. From this convent shooting has come, so the convent will be burned. Only through the giving up of the guilty and the paying of 15,000 francs can it save itself." The German phrases of frightfulness have a sound that matches their meaning: "Hatten unsere Leute bereits wie die Vandalen gehaust." "Männer erschossen." I opened the diary of Private Hassemer of the VIII Corps, and in the entry at Sommepy (in the district of the Marne) for September 3, 1914, I read: "3/9 1914. Ein schreckliches Blutbad, Dorf abgebrannt, die Franzosen in die brennenden Häuser geworfen, Zivilpersonen alles mitverbrandt." ("A hideous bloodbath (massacre), the village totally burned, the French hurled into the burning houses, civilians, everybody, burned together.") An unsuspected brutality is here revealed. To these men a peasant of another race is not a father and husband and man. He is as a dog. He is "Ausländer," beyond the pale--a thing to be chased with bayonets and burned with fire, to the rollicking amusement of brave soldiers. Back of the slaughter lies the basic idea of a biological superiority in the German people, a belief that their duty calls them to a sacred war to dominate other races, and create a greater Germany. They think they are a higher order of beings, who can kill creatures of a lesser breed, as one slays the lower order of animals in the march of progress. Other races have had dreams of grandeur, but never so mad a dream, so colossal in its designs on world dominion, so cruel in its methods of achieving that supremacy. Soldat Wilhelm Schellenberg, of 106 Reserve Infantry of the XII Reserve Army Corps, gives his home as Groitzsch bei Leipzig, "am Bahnhof," first floor, number 8. "Frau Martha Schellenberg" is to be notified. His diary is innocent. I held in my hands the diary of Erich Harlak of the II Company, 38 Fusilier Regiment of the Sixth Army Corps. There is a cut through the cover and pages of the pamphlet--probably the stab of a bayonet. Harlak is a Silesian. On the first page he writes in German "Bitte dieses Buch gütigst meinen Eltern zusenden zu wollen." Then in French "Je prie aussi Les Français de rendre, s'il vous plait, cet livre à mes parents. Addresse Lehrer Harlak." "Meinen lieben Eltern gewidmet in Grune bei Lisser in Posen." He writes, "I noticed how our cavalry had plundered here." He gives an instance of how the men broke to pieces what they could not carry away. "La Guerre est la Guerre." He writes that in French. He runs his table of values.