The importance of this great moral change should be emphasised. The German army will never again represent invulnerability; it will stand rather for pure savagery. Reference has already been made to the raids undertaken by German cavalry for the purpose of terrorising the civilian population. As the telegrams in this volume will show, intimidation did not stop at mere raids, fuss, and noise. Inoffensive civilians were shot on the slightest provocation; houses were looted; villages burned; women and even young girls outraged; boys battered to death with the butts of rifles--and all this was done, not because the men got out of hand and "saw red"; but systematically, because the invaders wished to terrorise the civil population. When this statement was first made it seemed incredible--the methods of the Huns or the Tartars in the twentieth century. Some refutation, some attempt at refutation, from the German side was awaited. It did not come. Instead there came an admission of the truth of the allegations which had been accumulating for several days. After the outbreak of war it was customary for the German "wireless" stations to send out war "news" at Nauen or Norddeich. This was picked up by the Marconi Company and given out to the English Press. The "news" was usually exaggerated and in many cases utterly mendacious. But hidden away at the end of a batch of these messages which reached London on August 27th was to be found an appalling paragraph, which, in the course of a very few lines, admitted publicly and officially the terrible charges of barbaric savagery that during the preceding days had compelled the Belgian Government to appeal to the judgment of the civilised world. Special stress must be laid on the official character of this confession, because it is notorious that nothing can be transmitted from the German wireless stations under war conditions without the express sanction and approval of the Berlin Government. The statement in question is as follows: The distribution of arms and ammunition among the civil population of Belgium had been carried out on systematic lines, and the authorities enraged the public against Germany by assiduously circulating false reports. They were under the impression that, with the aid of the French, they would be able to drive the Germans out of Belgium in two days. The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity and to create examples, which by their "frightfulness" would be a warning to the whole country. The increased war contribution levied on the Province of Liège has also had an excellent effect. Could a confession be more frank or candid? Could any statement nerve us, as we have never been nerved before, to resist the menace of Prussian militarism to the uttermost? CHAPTER I Outbreak of War--Invasion of Belgium and Luxemburg--The First Fighting at Liège