WHO ARE THE HUNS?

230 French and Belgian "Atrocity Books."
without saying that every red-handed franc-tireur is innocent
as a lamb and pure as snow.
The Uhlans, of course, play a great rôle—carboniser, filler,
fusiller, violer, tuer, and so on. Very often the atrocity fable
degenerates into the grotesque, still more frequently into the
burlesque. The big and the little are mingled in inextricable
confusion: "La chambre du baron de Baye était dans le plus
grand désordre ... un bureau avait été fracturé; un commode
Louis XVI et un bureau à cylindre du même style avaient été
fouillés."
In this childish fashion the report proceeds. Let us compare
such puerilities and petty slanders with, for instance, the
open letter to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by James O'Donnell
Bennet, the captured correspondent of the "Chicago Tribune"
(published by Georg Reimer, Berlin 1915), which furnishes a
splendid testimonial for the German army and its behavior in
hostile country. It is indeed exceedingly difficult to understand
how a nation whose chief representative has uttered the
phrase: "c'est la guerre," could have permitted a report of this
nature to be compiled by four men who make pretences to
serious consideration. One is really forced to ask oneself
whether M. le président, to whom the report was presented,
felt no sense of shame in permitting such a piece of bungled
work to be issued by the printing-office of the Journaux officiels.
I would request every jurist and every layman to read
this wretched and claptrap "fake"—concocted from the gossip
of hysterical old women and girls, of children and old men.
They will be forced to agree with me that the moral and intellectual
degradation of the French nation has never been proved
so conclusively by any other contemporary document—as by
this famous official report of the four members of the French
"Atrocity Commission." But worse than that, one's faith in
the sense of justice of a nation to which one ventures to submit
such "proofs" of the "Hunnish" character of the German
soldier, receives in turn a staggering blow. Inasmuch as only
"Madame X" and "Monsieur X" are cited as witnesses, and
not the violated, the outraged, the injured, etc., all confirmation
is absolutely impossible. The whole plan and purpose