Another, Lieut.  Y., of the Seventy-seventh Infantry of Reserves, says: 

     No discipline, ... the Pioneers are well nigh worthless; as to
     the artillery, it is a band of robbers.

The third, Private Z., of the Twelfth Infantry of Reserves, First Corps, writes, (Fig. 11:)

[Illustration:  Figure 11.]

Unfortunately, I am forced to make note of a fact which should not have occurred, but there are to be found, even in our own army, creatures who are no longer men, but hogs, to whom nothing is sacred.  One of these broke into a sacristy; it was locked, and where the Blessed Sacrament was kept.  A Protestant, out of respect, had refused to sleep there.  This man used it as a deposit for his excrements.  How is it possible there should be such creatures?  Last night one of the men of the Landwehr, more than thirty-five years of age, married, tried to rape the daughter of the inhabitant where he had taken up his quarters—­a mere girl—­and when the father intervened he pressed his bayonet against his breast.

Beyond these three, who are still worthy of the name of soldiers, the other thirty are all alike, and the same soul (if we can talk of souls among such as these) animates them low and frantic.  I say they are all about alike, but there are shades of difference.  There are some who, like subtle jurists, make distinctions, blaming here and approving there—­“Dort war ein Exempel am Platze.”  Others laugh and say “Krieg ist Krieg,” or sometimes they add in French, to emphasize their derision, “Ja, Ja, c’est la guerre,” and some among them, when their ugly business is done, turn to their book of canticles and sing psalms, such as the Saxon Lieut.  Reislang, who relates how one day he left his drinking bout to assist at the “Gottesdienst", but having eaten too much and drunken too much, had to quit the holy place in haste; and the Private Moritz Grosse of the 177th Infantry, who, after depicting the sacking of Saint-Vieth, (Aug. 22,) the sacking of Dinant, (Aug. 23,) writes this phrase: 

     Throwing of incendiary grenades into the houses, and in the
     evening a military chorus—­“Now let all give thanks to God.” 
     (Fig. 12.)

They’re all of a like tenor.  Now, if we consider that I could exchange the preceding texts with others quite similar, quite as cynical, and taken at random, for instance—­from the notebook of the Reservist Lautenschlager of the First Battalion, Sixty-sixth Regiment of Infantry, or the notebook of the Private Eduard Holl of the Eighth Corps, or the notebook of the sub-officer Reinhold Koehn of the Second Battalion of Pomeranian Pioneers, or that of the sub-officer Otto Brandt of the Second Section of Reserve Ambulances, or of the Reservist Martin Mueller of the 100th Saxon Reserve, or of Lieut.  Karl Zimmer of the Fifty-fifth Infantry, or that of the Private Erich Pressler of the 100th Grenadiers, First Saxon Corps, &c., and if we will note that, among the