BERNHARDISM:
Reading edition
“It’s all right. If I hadn’t done it someone else might”
As regards private property, respect among German troops simply does not exist. By the universal testimony of every British officer and soldier I have interrogated the progress of the German troops is like a plague of locusts over the land. What they can not carry off they destroy. Furniture is thrown into the street, pictures are riddled with bullets and pierced by sword cuts, municipal registers burnt, the contents of shops scattered on the floor, drawers rifled, live stock slaughtered and carcasses left to rot in the fields. Cases of petty larceny by German soldiers appear to be innumerable; they take whatever seizes their fancy, and leave the towns they evacuate laden like pedlars. Empty ammunition wagons were drawn up in front of private houses and filled with their contents for despatch to Germany.
I have had the reports of local commissions of police placed before me, and they show that in smaller villages like those of Caestre and Merris, with a population of about 1,500 souls or less, pillaging to the extent of £4,000 and £6,000 was committed by the German troops.
Professor J. H. Morgan in “German Atrocities,” an Official Investigation.
