German press, generally located, not at Visé, but at some unnamed village, and with the addition that the populace were surrounded by a hollow square of German soldiers. Does it not strike Mr Bennett as remarkable that the White Book should make no allusion to an incident like this, for which, had it ever occurred, a crowd of witnesses could have been cited? The smallest investigation of these extracts from the Belgian press would have shown him that they were merely specimens of the lies which (in the absence of authentic news) filled all the papers of the world during those four days of consternation and bewilderment. If he thought them worth citing, he ought in common fairness to have cited as well the instant and energetic steps taken by the Belgian Government to forbid civilian participation in the fighting, and to secure the surrender of firearms.

Mr Bennett's careful abstention from any critical examination of the German evidence is proved by the fact that he has not even followed it on the map. He says: The White Book does not cover more than the incidents which occurred at Dinant, Aerschot, Andenne, Louvain, and the neighbourhood of Visé. This remark he somewhat amends by heading the first section of the book (Appendices 2-66), 'Down the Eastern Frontier.' As a matter of plain fact, these Appendices refer neither to the neighbourhood of Visé in particular nor to the eastern frontier, but to villages and small towns all over the country-for instance, to villages around Namur, to Lessines (thirty miles west of Brussels), and to Deynze, Staden, and Roulers, within a few miles of the North Sea.

In his attempt to discredit the evidence presented to the Bryce Committee, Mr Bennett emphasizes the fact that it was not given upon oath. He seems to imagine that the White Book contains nothing but sworn testimony; but this is far from being the case. In the section relating to the villages, for example, 103 witnesses in all are produced, and of these only 43 are sworn. Something like the same proportion probably obtains throughout the book. A great part of the unsworn evidence consists of mere extracts from regimental reports, in which the writers may occasionally speak as

eye-witnesses, but are as a rule merely retailing the alleged experiences of others. Not one witness seems to have been subjected to any cross-examination; whereas the witnesses who appeared before the Bryce Committee were cross-examined by experienced lawyers. Even a superficial reader, in fact, must be struck by the constant failure in the White Book to distinguish between firsthand and hearsay evidence, as well as by the way in which the Zusammenfassender Bericht' prefixed to each section misquotes and misrepresents the statements it professes to summarise. But Mr Bennett is blind to all shortcomings. In his eyes everything that the (German) soldier says is evidence.

It is manifestly impossible within the limits of a single article to examine minutely even a tithe of the statements put forth in some 300 closely printed pages; but it is possible to make some general observations which seem to have escaped Mr Bennett. The typical picture presented by the German story is that of great bodies of men advancing in column of route, and fiercely assailed, in every second village they passed through, by sharpshooters concealed in the houses that lined the roadway. If these accounts were true, the expression 'Belgian Folk-War' employed on the cover of the White Book would not be at all exaggerated. But the first thing that strikes the attentive reader is that this is an almost bloodless war on the German side; it is the savage Belgians, not the 'defenceless' and 'unsuspecting' Germans, who are massacred. The first section of the White Book deals with events in 51 villages. We are constantly told that the advancing columns are received with 'lively fire,' 'violent fire,' 'particularly violent fire,' 'fire from all sides,' 'a general fusillade,' 'murderous fire,' 'a raging rifle-fire,' and so forth; but it is by the rarest exception that any one is injured. The total casualty-list for these 51 villages is 14 killed, 29 wounded, and three missing. To these must be added three cases of indeterminate loss: we had killed and wounded,' 'we lost several men, including officers,' 'a considerable number were wounded.' The disparity between cause and effect sometimes strikes the Germans themselves, who explain that the Belgians were fortunately poor

marksmen, or that they were so cowardly that, instead of exposing themselves at the windows, they fired from the middle of their rooms and, consequently, could not take aim. We are constantly assured, indeed, that these misguided patriots who, in the face of the most ghastly warnings, insisted on uselessly sacrificing not only their own lives, but the lives of their families and neighbours, habitually took up positions from which it was almost impossible to make good shooting and equally difficult for them to escape. The post usually assigned them is a 'Dachluke,' which Mr Bennett translates 'roof-window,' but which seems in some cases to mean a hole in the roof made by the removal of tiles. Could a more disadvantageous position be selected for firing into a village street? And why should men who knew they were throwing away their lives do their best to make their heroism vain?

Before attempting any solution of this mystery, let us look at a still more surprising feature of the German story. When the cry of 'Man hat geschossen!' was raised, the almost invariable procedure was to set about the 'Säuberung' (clearing out) of the houses whence shots were supposed to have proceeded. Soldiers rushed in, breaking open the doors, and, with the butt-ends of their rifles, drove all the hapless inmates into the street. Now this would appear to be a service of the extremest danger. The houses were, by hypothesis, held by armed and desperate men, who, knowing that massacre awaited them, would be sure to sell their lives dearly. However poor shots they might be, they could not fail to account for one or two of a gang of soldiers breaking into a cottage room. Will it be believed that in all the 300 pages of German evidence scarcely a case is recorded of effective resistance to the 'Säuberung' process-in the whole village section, not a single case? What can we possibly conclude from this except that the desperados were not armed? In some cases it is stated that arms were found upon them; but this is often the mere assumption of some one reporting from hearsay. In a good many cases it is said that ammunition was found, but not firearms-as though a rifle could easily be spirited away, but tell-tale cartridges were stubborn things. Can any one conjecture why the lion-hearted

patriots of Belgium should lose all their courage the moment their houses were entered, and should let themselves be led like lambs to the slaughter?

Another curious point must be noted in this connexion. Not infrequently, it is alleged that the francstireurs used machine-guns, placed either in their houses or in church towers; but these machine-guns do no execution, and in no single case is it even alleged that they are discovered and seized in the course of the 'Säuberung.' Here is an instance: Lieutenant von Lindeiner relates that at a time when the street of the village of Tintigny was 'blocked' by German troops, fire was opened upon them from all the windows' of a side street, and adds, 'I am also convinced that I noticed a machine-gun served by civilians at the first-floor of a house some twenty paces from myself.' We shudder to think of the carnage which must have been caused by a machine-gun pumping lead at twenty paces into a dense and stationary mass of soldiers; but the lieutenant's next sentence relieves us: 'I observed with my own eyes that a considerable number of our soldiers were wounded by this fire.' Was there ever such an anticlimax? Yet this is the sort of evidence which impresses Mr Bennett.

'But, after all,' it may be said, 'whatever the exaggerations and inaccuracies of the German stories, they cannot all be without foundation. We cannot but believe that, in most of the cases recorded, there was at any rate a certain amount of shooting.' Yes, there was; but the question is, Who fired the shots ? It is sometimes maintained from the Belgian side that not a single franc-tireur existed; but this is to go too far. It is very probable that here and there an isolated sportsman or gamekeeper may have yielded to the temptation to have a shot from behind a hedge, or from the margin of a wood, at a passing swarm of invaders. But very few of the incidents alleged in the White Book are of this type. The great majority imply concerted action by a considerable number of men in situations whence escape was obviously difficult, and where, even if the actual aggressors escaped, their action would call down summary vengeance on their families and neighbours. The antecedent improbability of such madness is

enormous.* There is, however, a certain amount of independent evidence to show that some stragglers or deserters from the Belgian army put on civilian clothes, but retained their arms, and fired, or might be reasonably suspected of firing, upon the Germans. This was, of course, an indefensible stupidity; and the action of such fools may account for the origin of some of the incidents recorded. But in no case is guilt clearly brought home to such a malefactor; and in most cases any theory based upon the action of isolated individuals is ruled out by the nature of the circumstances described.

If, then, we deny that Belgian action is responsible for more than a small percentage of the incidents related, to what do we ascribe the origin of the great majority of these terrible occurrences?† Partly to deliberate German villainy (even Mr Bennett admits 'the existence in all conscript armies of brutal and criminal types, not confined to the rank and file'), but mainly to the uncontrollable nervousness of swarms of wholly unseasoned soldiers, brought up on the franctireur legends of 1870, and fed by the German press,

The effective franc-tireur wars of history-the Peninsular War, the Tyrolese War, and the German Befreiungskrieg of 1813-have all consisted of operations against comparatively small invading forces in practically unlimited, thinly peopled, and generally mountainous territory. In Belgium the conditions were exactly reversed-the invading armies enormous, the country very small, densely peopled, and comparatively poor in natural cover and places of refuge. To attempt a franc-tireur war in such a country would have been madness. It is not suggested, of course, that the Belgian populace were alive to these historic and strategic considerations; but they were not devoid of plain common sense. And the strategic considerations must at any rate have been present to the Belgian Government, whom the Germans, in spite of conclusive evidence, persistently accused of arming and inciting the 'francs-tireurs.'

†The following pages, and this argument as a whole, are founded on a minute study of those sections of the White Book which relate to the villages, to Aerschot, to Andenne, and to Louvain. The section relating to Dinant has not been studied with similar intensity, and remarks relating to other places may not be equally applicable to events in that town. The German evidence regarding it is very confused and full of incredible details; but it seems, on the whole, not entirely incredible that some of the inhabitants took a hand in the fighting. Whether their doing so went any way towards justifying the hideous barbarities of the German action is a totally different matter. German apologists have been allowed to assume too easily that any Belgian civilians who took up arms were rightly treated as outlaws and bandits. Even if the facts of the German case could be established, the majority of the German reprisals might easily be shown to be entirely disallowed by the Hague Conventions.