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."
And here it is worth quoting a happy example of German chivalry. It is
taken from one of Sir John French's messages. A small party of French
under a non-commissioned officer was cut off and surrounded. After a
desperate resistance it was decided to go on fighting to the end.
Finally, the N.C.O.
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