As Lord Kitchener said, Germany "has stooped to acts which will surely stain indelibly her military history and which would vie with the barbarous savagery of the Dervishes of the Sudan."[77] On the same day, in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister declared: "When we come to the end of this war, which, please God, we may, we shall not forget--and ought not to forget--this horrible record of calculated cruelty and crime, and we shall hold it to be our duty to exact such reparation against those who are proved to have been guilty agents or actors in the matter, as it may be possible for us to exact. I do not think we should be doing our duty to these brave and unfortunate men or to the honour of our own country and the plain dictates of humanity if we were content with anything less than that."[78] (_c_) At the very outset of war a German mine-layer was discovered laying a mine-field on the high seas. Further mine-fields have been laid from time to time without warning, and are still being laid on the high seas, and many neutral, as well as British vessels, have been sunk by them. (_d_) At various times during the war German submarines have stopped and sunk British merchant vessels, thus making the sinking of merchant vessels a general practice, though it was admitted previously, if at all, only as an exception; the general rule, to which the British Government have adhered, being that merchant vessels, if captured, must be taken before a Prize Court. The Germans have also sunk British merchant vessels by torpedo without notice, and without any provision for the safety of the crew. They have done this in the case of neutral as well as of British vessels, and a number of non-combatant and innocent lives, unarmed and defenceless, have been destroyed in this way. The Germans have sunk without warning emigrant vessels, have tried to sink an hospital ship, and have themselves used an hospital ship for patrol work and wireless. The torpedoeing of the "Lusitania" on May 7, 1915, involving the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians--British and neutral--was acclaimed with great relish in Berlin. (_e_) Unfortified, open, and defenceless towns, such as Scarborough, Yarmouth and Whitby, have been deliberately and wantonly bombarded by German ships of war, causing, in some cases, considerable loss of civilian life, including women and children. (_f_) German aircraft have dropped bombs on the East Coast of England, in places where there were no military or strategic points to be attacked. (_g_) The Germans have used poisonous gases in killing Allied troops at the Front, although Germany was a signatory to the following article in the Hague Convention:-- "The Contracting Powers agree to abstain from the use of projectiles, the object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases."[79] And finally the German troops in South Africa have poisoned drinking wells and infected them with disease.[80] FOOTNOTES: