They said ’Ne tirez-pas, nous sommes Francais,’ and asked for the C.O.  He came up, and then they calmly blew his brains out!” A similar act of treachery is recorded by Lieutenant Oswald Anne, R.A., in a letter published in the Leeds Mercury:  “At one place where the Berkshire Regiment was on guard a German force arrived attired in French uniforms.  To keep up the illusion, a German called out in French from the wire entanglements that they wanted to interview the commanding officer.  A major of the Berkshires who spoke French, went forward, and was immediately shot down.  This sort of thing is of daily occurrence.”  Lieutenant Edgcumbe, son of Sir Robert Edgcumbe, Newquay, tells of another instance of treachery in which British uniforms were used, and declares, in common with many other officers, that he “will never again respect the Germans; they have no code of honor!”

They strip the uniforms from the dead, come on in night attacks shouting “Vive, l’Angleterre!” and sound the British bugle-call “Cease fire” in the thickest of the fight.  Twice in one engagement the Germans stopped the British fire by the mean device of the bugle, and twice they charged desperately upon the silent ranks.  But in nearly every case their punishment for these violations of the laws of civilized warfare has been swift and terrible, and no mercy has been shown them.

Charges of barbarity are also common in letters from the battlefields.  One officer, who says he “never before realized what an awful thing war is,” writes:  “We have with us in the trenches three girls who came to us for protection.  One had no clothes on, having been outraged by the Germans.  I have given her my shirt and divided my rations among them.  In consequence I feel rather hungry, having had nothing for thirty-two hours, except some milk chocolate.  Another poor girl has just come in, having had both her breasts cut off.  Luckily I caught the Uhlan officer in the act, and with a rifle at 300 yards killed him.  And now she is with us, but, poor girl, I am afraid she will die.  She is very pretty and only about nineteen."[H]

Captain Roffey, Lancashire Fusiliers, tells how he was found wounded, and handed over his revolver to the Germans, whereupon his captor used it to shoot him again, and left him for dead.  There is no end to the stories of this kind, and one of the wounded vehemently declared that the “devilry of the Germans cannot be exaggerated.”

There are others amongst the wounded however, who have received nothing but kindness from the enemy.  Lieutenant H.G.W.  Irwin, South Lancashire Regiment, pays a tribute to the treatment he met with in the German lines; Captain J.B.  George, Royal Irish, “could not have been better treated had he been the Crown Prince;” and one of the Officer’s Special Reserve says the stories of “brutality are only exceptions, and there are exceptions in every army.”