The Boches—I say it not to justify but to explain their acts of murder—pretended, as you remind us in the course of your book, that civilians had fired upon them. It is a cynical falsehood. Since the beginning of August, 1914, I have administered the Department of Meurthe et Moselle, and I have made a searching investigation in all my communes. I affirm that no non-combatant, no man not regularly classed in the ranks of the army, has ever fired on the enemy. Never? I exaggerate. There has been one case. One day, in 1914, a German aeroplane flew over the plains of Lorraine; it dropped murderous bombs at random on the peaceable population of certain rural communes. On seeing this, the Mayor of one of these communes, close to Nancy, lost his sangfroid, armed himself with an old fowling-piece, and began to fire at the aeroplane. There was certainly some excuse for him, was there not? But I considered that he was at fault. Assassins must not be killed by passers-by; it is the business of the gendarmes to arrest them. In war it is the army’s business—it is strong enough for the job—to punish the enemy. Consequently the action of this mayor called for censure. I did not hesitate to make an order against this honest but over-strung magistrate; in virtue of the powers conferred upon me by the law, I suspended him from his functions. This order was universally approved; it interpreted the unanimous wish of all civilians not to provide any pretext for German brutality. I take another example of our standard of behaviour from the story of Badonviller. This Lorraine commune was one of the first that suffered the horrors of Kultur. It was entered by the Germans at the beginning of the month of August. Because our troops had met them with a stubborn resistance which cost them dear, they were mad with fury when they entered the little town; it was there that they first used the special implements with which their soldiers had been supplied for methodical and “scientific” house-burnings; they destroyed, with fire applied by hand, half the commune. That was not enough for them; they shot down the people in the streets like rabbits, they killed women and children on the threshold of their doors. The mayor, M. Benoit, a much-respected business man, saw his young wife assassinated before his eyes; he saw his house burnt, and was himself the object of the worst forms of violence. These scenes of outrage only lasted for a short time. On the next day the French troops retook Badonviller by a vigorous effort, and, after a hot pursuit, made a number of prisoners. These prisoners were brought to the square in front of the Mairie. They were some of the brute-beasts with human faces, who, a few hours before, had burnt the commune and bathed it in blood. The houses to which they had set fire were still smoking. The bodies of their innocent victims were not yet buried. A crowd of infuriated peasants gathered round them, shaking