h they
originated after their violation of Belgium's neutrality? Of course they
did it--as a murderer who slanders his victim--in the hope to justify
their crime."

It is evil to murder non-combatants. It is more evil to "rationalize"
the act--to invent a moral reason for doing an infamous thing. First,
Belgium suffered a vivisection, a veritable martyrdom. Now, she is
officially informed by her executioners that she was the guilty party.
She is not allowed to protest. She must sit quietly under the charge
that her sacrifice was not a sacrifice at all, but the penalty paid for
her own misbehavior. This is a more cruel thing than the spying that
sapped her and the atrocities practised upon her, because it is more
cruel to take a man's honor than his property and his life.

"If the peasants had stayed in their houses, they would have been safe."

When they stayed in their houses they were burned along with the houses.
I saw this done on September 7, 1914, at Melle.

"The peasants shot from their houses at the advancing German army."

I saw German atrocities. The peasants did not shoot. It is the old
familiar formula of the _franc-tireur_. That means that the peasant, not
a soldier, dressed in the clothing of a civilian, takes advantage of his
immunity as a noncombatant, to secrete a rifle, and from some shelter
shoot at the enemy army. The Bishop of Namur writes:

"It is evident that the German army trod the Belgian soil and carried
out the invasion with the preconceived idea that it would meet with
bands of this sort, a reminiscence of the war of 1870. But German
imagination will not suffice to create that which does not exist.

"There never existed a single body of _francs-tireurs_ in Belgium.

"No 'isolated instance' even is known of civilians having fired upon the
troops, although there would have been no occasion for surprise if any
individual person had committed an excess. In several of our villages
the population was exterminated because, as the military authorities
alleged, a major had been killed or a young girl had attempted to kill
an officer, and so forth.... In no case has an alleged culprit been
discovered and designated by name."

This lie--that the peasants brought their own death on themselves--was
rehearsed before the war, as a carefully learned lesson. The army came
prepared to find the excuse for the methodical outrages which they
practised. In the fight in the Dixmude district, a German offi