by a Belgian motor-machine-gun, took out of the houses twenty to twenty-five men and young people (including a child of thirteen), and made them walk in front in the middle of the road. The machine-gunners, seeing civilians in front of them, ceased firing. At Alost, a German company attacked the bridge. In front marched some thirty civilians with a machine-gun hidden behind them. At Nimy, with the butt-ends of their rifles, they drove in front of them 500 men, women and children towards the English, who in consequence dared not fire; and in this way the 84th and 85th Schleswig Regiments were able to continue their heroic march as far as Maubeuge. When their adversary cannot actually see the human shield that they are using, they send a warning. On the 7th September, 1914, the Death's Head Hussars shut up all the inhabitants of the village with them in the Château of Saint Ouen-sur-Morin, and then, to avoid being shelled, informed the English of their "dispositions." They fired on anyone who tried to escape. At Mouzon, we saw a number of civilians being pushed in front of the enemy with the butt-ends of rifles, and we stopped firing. The wretched people moved suddenly to one side of the road, uncovering the Germans, and then we fired. The Boches, furious, fired their first volley not at us, but point blank at these non-combatants, who were decimated. The cowards chiefly used civilians as shields, but sometimes they also made use of prisoners. At Keyem, they pushed one hundred Belgian soldiers in front of them, some with their hands tied, and others with their arms in the air. At Dixmude, they advanced under the shelter of forty disarmed marines who had been taken prisoners. When they got in front of our lines our marines shouted, "For God's sake fire, these are Germans," and these heroes fell gloriously under the French bullets. Such deeds are countless. The Boches will deny them later on, but in 1914 they did not deny them, but rather gloried in them as a "good idea." We can see this from the letter of the Bavarian Lieutenant Eberlein, published on the 7th October, 1914, by a leading Munich paper, "We had arrested three other civilians when a 'good idea' struck me. We made them sit on chairs in the middle of the street;--supplications from them, and blows with butt-ends of rifles from us. At last they were seated outside in the street with their hands convulsively clasped together. I felt sorry for them, but the plan worked at once. As I learnt later, the regiment which entered Saint-Dié, further to the north of us, had precisely similar experiences to our own. The civilians, whom they had put in the same way in the middle of the street, were killed by French bullets. I saw their dead bodies."[17] FOOTNOTES: