Note 65 — Chapter II · THE MEANS OF CONDUCTING WAR

Considering the many unintelligible things written on the French side about this, the opinion of an objective critic is doubly valuable. Monod, p. 55, op. cit., says: “I have seen Bazeilles burning; I have informed myself with the greatest care as to how things happened. I have questioned French soldiers, Bavarian soldiers, and Bavarian inhabitants present at this terrible drama; I am able to see in it only one of the frightful, but inevitable, consequences of the war.” As to the treatment of Chateaudun, stigmatized generally on the French side as barbarous, the author writes (p. 56): “The inhabitants of Chateaudun, regularly organized as part of the National Guard, aided by the franctireurs of Paris, do not defend themselves by preparing ambushes but by fighting as soldiers. Chateaudun is bombarded; nothing could be more legitimate, since the inhabitants made a fortress of it; but once they got the upper hand the Bavarians set fire to more than one hundred houses.” The picture of outrages by Germans which follows may be countered by what the author writes in another place about the French soldiers: “The frightful scenes at the taking of Paris by our troops at the end of May, 1871, may enable us to understand what violences soldiers allow themselves to be drawn into, when both excited and exhausted by the conflict.”