cious and wholly unrecognizable form.

Under the law of military reprisal was there justification for the death
of this woman? Was the dying officer guilty of barbarian conduct? And
did the private, ordered against his will to perform an act whose memory
drove him insane, commit an atrocity? Without answering the question,
let us consider for a moment how that particular anecdote would be told
by a Belgian partisan. In my wanderings through Termonde, Liege, and
Louvain, I heard tales--unspeakable and on their face utterly
unbelievable--of which this kind of thing must have been the foundation.

When the body of this woman was found, let us say, by French peasants
returning to their ruined homes, think how the horrible fact would be
seized, without whatsoever there was of justification! How the British
and French papers would describe that mutilated form! Think of the
effect of a two-column word-picture of the wanton sack and ruin of the
town, the shooting of its helpless citizens, and the description of that
mangled body sacrified to the Huns! Think how the fact would be clutched
by fear-crazed inhabitants, would be bandied from mouth to mouth,
distorted and dressed up to suit a partisan press, and "twisted by
knaves to make a trap for fools"!

One of the first atrocity accounts which I heard in Belgium, as well as
one of the most persistent, had to do with scores of children whose
wrists had been cut by the Kaiser's troops. Hundreds of them were
reported to be in Belgium and Dutch hospitals or in the care of relief
committees. The gossip was so prevalent and in some instances so
specific that I had high hopes of tracking down and seeing, with my own
eyes, an instance. In each case which I heard abroad, my informant's
husband or brother or best friend had seen the children; but somehow or
other it was never arranged that I could see one of them myself. This
type of cruelty was so widely talked about that in plenty of cases the
German soldiers believed that some of their men had committed these
crimes. One of them told me that he understood that near Tirlemont the
wrists of several young children had been cut. He said that thirty or
forty children and peasants had fired on and killed German troops
marching through a neighboring village. A squad was sent to round up
the offenders, all of whom were found armed. Instead of killing the
snipers, whose age was between ten and seventeen, the surgeons were
ordered to s