Unhappily there was another side of all this fighting in the Vosges which was not so splendid. It is obvious that if the French soldiers quitted themselves like heroes in all this horrible strife the men they fought against were brave too. But not gallant, but not gentlemen, which the French are to a man. They had as a body imbibed too deeply the teaching of certain of their own philosophers. They had learnt or been drilled to substitute in time of war the religion of force for every other. Their _Credo_ was the antithesis of all the recognized beliefs which civilized men must inevitably hold or pretend to hold in time of peace. “I believe in the God of Battles, Maker of the rulers of the earth, who giveth the victory to those who shrink from nothing and no means in order to attain it. I believe in terrorism and pillage and destruction and death. I believe in stifling all my softer feelings, and in making the life of the people in whose country I fight a hell.” Is that too severe a judgment? I am afraid not. No creed is consistently held or acted upon by all those who are supposedly its adherents. There are of course thousands and thousands of gallant gentlemen among the officers and the rank and file of the German armies. Innumerable letters found on their dead bodies show how the frightfulness of their fellow-soldiers shamed and angered them, and how they abominated German “Kultur” as deeply as Nietsche himself. But unhappily for Belgium and France, and more unhappily still for Germany, their opinions and example, even if they were in the majority, were powerless to control the acts of the thorough-going believers in the German war-creed. When the war is over, if not before, their voice will prevail. They will tear that creed, and perhaps the men who made it, to pieces as their Government did the treaty by which they bound themselves to respect the rights of Belgium. No nation can possibly consent to go on living under the shadow of such a disgrace as these men have brought on Germany. But for the present they must be judged by their present deeds, and it is impossible to write about the war in Alsace and Lorraine and the Vosges and the Woevre without saying something about the crimes which have been committed in the name of Germany by German soldiers. I will not weaken the case against them by repeating second-hand fairy-tales of “atrocities” which have not come under my own notice. There is enough material in the more carefully attested official reports, in what my colleague and I have been told by the victims and reputable eyewitnesses of these cruelties, and in what we have ourselves seen and heard, to prove beyond doubt that a very large number of soldiers in the German army have for some reason or other behaved during the war as brute-beasts. In this chapter I will quote only one case of “frightfulness” taken from a volume published officially by the French Foreign Office. The Foreign Office report, properly attested by the