military authorities, is that at the end of August, 1914, thirty soldiers of the French 99th Regiment, having exhausted all their ammunition, were surrounded in a suburb of St. Dié by a company of Bavarian soldiers, and were shot down at close range at the moment when they were surrendering as prisoners. There is, I believe, no doubt that the butchery was deliberate, though possibly a special pleader might argue that the executioners did not know that their victims had no ammunition left and killed them either from motives of precaution or in self-defence. That line of defence cannot be adopted with regard to the numbers of instances of wilful incendiarism which cry for justice all over the invaded provinces. Many of the ruined villages which we saw in the Vosges were destroyed by shot and shell in fair fight. They are the eggs without which the omelette of war cannot be made. But that is not the case with Gerbéviller, Baccarat, Badonviller, a whole group of villages south of Raon l’Etape, and several other towns and villages in the same district, all of which have been wholly or partially destroyed by fire wantonly applied to them without a shadow of excuse on military grounds. I will reserve for another chapter the case of Gerbéviller, which, although it was perhaps the most cruel and wholesale of them all, may be fairly taken as typical of the rest. In every instance it is practically certain and generally proven that these acts of incendiarism (more common in the smaller villages where public opinion had not the same restrictive weight as in more important places) were accompanied by the murder of innocent and unoffending civilians. For the only excuse ever urged in their defence was that they were a painful necessity forced upon the Germans by the people themselves because they had fired upon them as franc-tireurs. And in practically every instance the more responsible of the inhabitants declare that that statement was a pretext and a lie. CHAPTER XI THE MARTYRED TOWN