Note H — Chapter IX · THE POLITICS OF RAPINE
Reading edition
Several German medical men of eminence, among them Dr. Moll, were alleged to have offered this suggestion. On the other hand, Dr. Kaufman, of Aix-la-Chapelle, in a letter to the Kölnische Volkszeitung, says that tales of German soldiers mutilated by Belgians—tales the circulation of which was officially countenanced—spread like wildfire among the soldiers, and a single case of a man being mutilated by a shell was magnified into an outrage, and this was only one of a hundred similar instances. The soldiers, by auto-suggestion, got to believe their own wild fancies, and by propagating their stories caused a most dangerous state of anger and exasperation in the German Army. At Huy, a German non-commissioned officer and a private had been wounded by shots. On the assertion that the shots had been fired by inhabitants the German commander, Major von Baschuitch, ordered a number of houses to be burned. The burgomaster, however, persuaded him to hold an inquiry. This proved that the shots had been fired by German soldiers in a drunken panic.