France. Armée. Légion étrangère; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
The attack of September 25, 1915, brought the French within two
kilometers of Somme-py. Lying in the trenches under the furious
bombardment, we considered the diary which was found on the German
soldier, Hassemer, of the 8th Army Corps, when they captured the town in
1914: “Horrible carnage; the villages totally burned; the French thrown
into the burning houses; the civilians burned with all the others.”
I have many times been at St. Maurice, Meurthe and Moselle, where I saw
and pondered over, fire-blackened houses and somber-faced, solitary
women. The tall chimney of a demolished manufacturing plant stands guard
over desolation. From the diary of a Bavarian soldier of the German
army, evidence written by the perpetrators, the following is quoted:
“The village of St. Maurice was encircled, the soldiers advanced at one
yard apart, through which line nobody could get. Afterward the Uhlans
started the fire, house by house. Neither man, nor woman, nor child
could get away. They were permitted to take out the cattle because that
was a drawing out method. Those that risked to run away were killed by
rifle shot. All those that were found in the village were burned with
it.”
In the first lot of exchanged English prisoners returned from Germany
was a Gloucester man shot in his jaws, his teeth blackened and broken.
Pointing to where his chin had been, he told me: “That is what they did
to me—what they did after I was taken prisoner and was wounded in four
places and unable to move. A Boche came along, put his rifle to my face
and pulled the trigger. But that wasn’t anything to what they did to my
comrade. He was lying in his blanket seriously wounded, and a Boche ran
a bayonet into him sixteen times before he died.”
In the clearing house hospital at Lyons I saw two old comrades meet, one
wounded, from the front, the other from a German prison camp. “Yes,”
said the latter, with a peculiar, vacant expression in his eye. “Yes, I
was crucified. I was hung from a beam in the middle of the camp for two
hours, hands tied together over my head, in the form of a cross, body
hanging down till my feet were eighteen inches above the ground.”
“Is that true?” I demanded.
“True, look at these arms. Ask those comrades over there. I swear it, I
will write it down for you.”
He wrote the above statement and signed his name, Gandit, Pierre, 19th
Infantry.
August 28, 1914. “The French soldiers who were captured were led away.
Those seriously wounded, in the head or lungs, etc., who could not get
up, were put out of their misery, according to orders, by another shot.”
An extract from the diary of a German soldier, Fahlenstein, 34th
Fusiliers II Army. The original is in the hands of the French
Government.
At Ethe, finding twenty wounded men stretched out in a shed, unable to
move, they burned the shed and roasted them alive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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