World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, British
The Germans are what we call dirty fighters, and they will take
advantage of anything to try and score over you. They have no respect
for anything and made a particular point in many of the places they
overran of desecrating the churches. They never hesitated to turn a
place of worship into a scene for an orgy, and I remember going into one
church after the Germans had occupied it and being shocked at their
conduct. In this particular place they had been able to lay hands on a
good deal of champagne and they had drunk to excess, turning the church
into a drinking-place, so that when we reached it there was an
indescribable scene--filthy straw on the floor, empty champagne bottles
littered everywhere, and the whole building degraded and desecrated.
The Germans had got a French uniform and stuffed it with straw and
propped it up to resemble a man, and on the uniform they had stuck a
piece of paper with some writing on it in German. I do not know what the
writing was, but I took it to be some insult to the brave men who were
defending their country and preventing the Germans from getting anywhere
near Paris. I could tell you much more and many things of the Germans’
dirty fighting, and of things that were far worse than such an incident
as turning a church into a drinking-place; but perhaps enough has been
said on that point of late.
But that dirty fighting does not mean that the Germans do not fight
bravely--far from it; they are hard cases, especially when they are in
overwhelming numbers, which is the form of fighting that they like best
of all. They are great believers in weight and hurling masses of men at
a given point, and they are absolutely mad at times when their opponents
are the English.
I will tell you of a case which illustrates this particular hatred. One
night we were attacked by the Germans, though there was but little hope
of them doing anything serious, in view of the fact that we were in
trenches and that there were the barbed wire entanglements everywhere.
There had been no sign of an attack, but in the middle of the night a
furious assault was made upon us and a young German by some
extraordinary means managed to get through the entanglements. An officer
of the Buffs was near us, and in some way which I cannot explain the
German managed to reach him. With a fierce cry he sprang directly at the
officer, put an arm round his neck, and with the revolver which he held
in the other hand shot him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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