Police persecution of every sort was carried to the border-line of endurance. The roads were constantly patrolled say the repatriated. A deadly subjection to regulations was enforced : no travelling from village to village; no assembling in groups of more than three; no going out after six o'clock at night, and lights out at nine. The annoyances were endless: repeated summonses to assemble, sometimes at midnight in midwinter; house-to-house requisitioning visits; frequent searches, carried out with an arbitrariness and brutality which were denounced by the Archbishop of Cambrai in his protest of October 20, 1916.

Suppose a search-warrant to be issued against an old lady suspected of having more than ten kilogrammes of potatoes on hand. The Boches rush to the house in force, drive the lady and her children out of doors, regardless of the weather, upset the house from attic to cellar, and pillage it in their search for the corpus delicti. And there have been even more barbarous refinements of police inquisition. Some Kommandants have not blushed to seek and confiscate in every house the churn and even the coffee-grinder, to make it more certain that the people would not grind secretly the little grain that they were able to glean, or to pick up by chance here and there.

If a barn was burned, as at Crèvecoeur, the Kommandants ordered all the male inhabitants of the village to be driven into the church and shut up like cattle. Although the culprit, who in this case happened to be a German soldier, was discovered, the prisoners were not immediately released.

The instruments of this tyranny, the police, in bottle-green uniform and decorated with a metal badge under the chin, which points them out from afar to public suspicion, have been dubbed by the people" green devils," because of their zeal as persecutors.

And signs of approbation from the authorities fall in showers: fines on every pretext, imprisonment, deportation, sentence of death. These penalties are often imposed on persons simply under suspicion, especially on many priests, imprisoned for no cause. "No one can be sure of to-morrow," says one of the repatriated. A word too outspokenly French in sympathy may send you to a prison cell. At Bohain the prisons are overflowing with civilians condemned for trifles; a convict-gang has been formed of inhabitants alleged to be refractory. In certain communes regular prisons have been built, as the cellars were too small. For, in most cases, the cellars, long ago emptied of their contents, are used as gaols in the villages, and gaols where the inmates are kept on a bread-and-water diet. And all this aside from blows and insults.

Space forbids me to write of all the disproportionate and inhuman acts of repression. A shopkeeper at Hirson, the mother

of three children, was shot because she went into Belgium to buy goods. Young déportés, who are employed in digging and who drop their shovels from weariness, are shot at point-blank range by the sentries. At Vauresis, on September 18, 1914, ten people were shot for going out at night with lanterns, as their custom

was.

The readiness of the Germans to shoot inoffensive persons has manifested itself a thousand times. How many-how many women have been victims of drunken or brutal soldiers! How many others have fallen under the fire of sentries because they had ventured into the street after six o'clock at night to fetch a doctor for a sick person or to look for a child who had not come home!

And there is no real protection against the excesses either of the private soldier or of the Kommandant. The former, if any one dares to complain of him, avenges himself by pillage or by some foul blow. The Kommandant, from whose decree an appeal is taken to the commanding general, wreaks his vengeance at once by requisitions, expulsions, or burnings.

VI

Their police administration is not merely inhuman and vexatious it is, in addition, like everything that issues from the pagan wilderness beyond the Rhine, a revolting medley of falsehood, double-dealing, and sophistry.

The bare definition of the proscribed offences shows us upon what a vicious and disgraceful plan the arbitrary power of the Kommandanturs is exercised. Their agents themselves, with sober faces, call the householder who tries to conceal his property from them a "notorious thief." In their eyes the father of a family is a criminal who hides his silverware in his cellar—a crime, it would seem, which confers upon the invaders the absolute right to seize the property. A criminal, too, is the faithful wife who gives shelter to her husband who has eluded their pursuit; so, too, the girl who refuses to be dishonoured. And it is a crime to give a bit of bread to an unfortunate prisoner.

The same lack of moral rectitude is responsible for all the penalties imposed in the invaded districts. The Boches have set up there on a great scale the system of penal confiscations. The hateful practice of taking hostages, ancient though it is, had never before taken on such gigantic dimensions, or attained such a degree of cynicism. This unjust notion of confiscation is so congenial to the Prussian character that they have extended its application in all directions. Since the outbreak of the war, whenever they have come in contact with Anglo-French troops, they have persistently taken revenge for their losses on the

innocent inhabitants. Notably at Laon, whenever a French aeroplane bombarded their military trains, the city, though already devastated and blood-stained by air-raiders, was compelled to pay an enormous fine. If an urchin scrawls some taunting words on a wall, the town is mulcted. If a spy is caught passing through Saint-Quentin, the repatriation of Saint-Quentinites is instantly suspended.

In every regard the German administration of the invaded districts maintains a treacherous attitude. Questions and conversations of apparently trivial importance are often traps laid to evoke criticism, which is punished on the instant. Often during the first year the officers solemnly promised to restore the piano, the furniture, the tools of which they took possession; but almost never have they kept their word; and the generals were the first of all to break their written promises. The Kommandantur at Chauny gave a manufacturer of the town permission to go away, on his pledging a valuable collection of stamps, which it bound itself to return; but it kept the collection, with a cynical gibe at the owner. The Kommandantur at Saint-Quentin in 1916 readily authorized the inhabitants to clothe four hundred ragged Russian prisoners, and congratulated them on their humanity; but the garments were no sooner supplied than the Kommandantur laid hands on them, and the Russians were left in their rags.

Here is another common example: The repatriates are authorized to take home with them three hundred francs in cash as well as their registered securities, and on the road they are robbed of them. Sometimes, adding a cowardly insult to their rascality, the Germans substitute for the cash a subscription to their war loan.

The climax of achievement in the way of falsehood is perhaps the having publicly organized it as the Germans have done in the French provinces-by printing and selling false French newspapers. For instance, they compelled the publication of the Gazette des Ardennes (at least twenty copies for each three hundred people) a base and insane effort to reach and pervert the hearts and minds of a whole nation that is brutally gagged; an effort in which we detect anew the unfailing materialism of the German, who thinks that he need only mutilate texts and distort facts in order to manufacture convictions as by machinery. Logical in their madness, they hunt down all the genuine newspapers of France. Let a balloon with a package of such papers be spied in the air, and on the instant, cavalry, motor-cyclists, and automobiles rush in pursuit. Whoever is detected in possession of a Temps or a Figaro is imprisoned or fined.

VOL. LXXI

39

VII

Pillage, although an essential part of the German method of waging war, demands a chapter to itself, as the culminatingpoint of the system. From the days of Tacitus, pillage has always been the supreme German achievement. We do not propose to recount their innumerable and violent depredations during the irruption of August 1914-especially how the wine in all the cellars was stolen or drunk in a few days. Even under the status of territorial occupation they employed themselves, in many places, in burglaries with violence, as carefully prepared as notarial documents.

Under the administrative regime properly so called their fury has been little less unbridled. They have levied exorbitant war taxes in all the communes, large or small. Factories of all sorts very soon began to be dismantled. Machines, ovens, vats, taps and cocks, weaving frames, raw materials emigrated to Germany in procession. Of all the textile, metal-working, and other establishments, there soon remained in the north of France only a few munition factories, a few saw-mills producing posts and timbers for the trenches, a few electric power-houses, and some sauerkraut factories set up in remodelled sugar-refineries.

Agriculture suffered no less. Not only crops and cattle, but all the good horses and the best farming implements were taken to Germany; to such an extent that the Germans, becoming conscious of the mistake they had made, eventually brought them back in a hurry. In 1916 there were villages of 1600 people which had no more than twenty cows and a few superannuated horses. Other villages had none at all.

In 1915 the special requisitions of leather, rubber, metals, wool, and cotton began. Even the worn-out leather on carriageshafts was carefully detached. In 1916 the German Cyclops shook the church bells everywhere to bring down the bronze. Tablelinen and body-linen were swept away in the same torrent of spoliation. Mattresses were opened and emptied of their wool. In one village of a thousand people, five hundred mattresses were thus disinflated in a few days. No mercy was shown even to the mattresses on which sick persons lay. The sole manifestation of German delicacy consisted in replacing the wool by chips. In 1917 the kitchen utensils and the silver plate fell into the abyss in ever-increasing quantities. Everything was requisitioned by the Boches says one of the repatriates, even the night vessels.

The general spoliation is accompanied by destruction pure and simple. Houses in the peaceful occupation of their owners, a long way from the trenches, are demolished to obtain wood for burning or construction. Doors, windows, floors, even school furniture, are used for fires.

To sum up-pillage, requisition, destruction go side by side,

look alike, and run in harness together, like a fraternal team of apocalyptic monsters.

But, concurrently with these direct methods, the occupying forces seek also to increase their prizes by oblique devices. They assume the mask of commerce, the mask of industry, to say nothing of the judicial mask, which enables them to glut themselves with fines without number. In the dairy country, in 1915, they requisitioned all the butter, paid for it at the rate of fifteen cents a pound, and sold it at double the price to the inhabitants. This exploitation of the farm was transformed into a comedy of unending spoliation. The Kommandantur issued its orders to the labourers, but did not pay them; it laid that burden on the commune. It exacted from the farmer himself a huge indemnity, said to be for the expenses of cultivation. And, as a climax, it rushed the harvest into Germany by motor, without in all cases taking the trouble to hand the farmer the notes of requisition, which were in any event a mere mockery of payment.

Thus, it was not enough to confiscate the crop, but the invaders devised this buffoonery of compelling payment to themselves by those whom they despoiled, including the workmen, whose daily wage did not exceed thirty cents.

The rule is the same for the wood-cutting and for the few industries which remain, such as saw-mills. The mayor is the inexhaustible paymaster, and the Kommandantur takes unto itself the product. The French municipality, with a rope about its neck, pays even the very workers in the munition factories.

The Germans' quarrelsome and extravagant attention to trivialities is equally open to criticism, alongside their brutality, their falsity, and their greed. Their organization of conquest and rapine is carried on in accordance with a meticulous, oppressive, and enfeebling system of rules. Let us cite this one fact: they have extended their census-taking to include hens, rabbits, pigeons, and even the most microscopic beasts, and have given to each one of them a certificate of civil status, recording their birth and their demise. They keep an exact account of vegetables and eggs; and certain villages-for instance, the gallant little village of Bony in the Department of the Aisne-have been the theatre of preposterous scenes in this connexion, the Kommandant going so far as to enclose the farmers' hens under his own windows, that he might follow and verify their laying qualities at close quarters.

VIII

All these details show clearly enough what an intolerable state of serfdom our compatriots have fallen into; and how they are being rushed en masse down the incline of destitution and starvation. Kept closely confined within the bounds of their towns or villages, they go thence only to perform enforced labour