File No. 763.72/838
The Ambassador in Great Britain (Page) to the Secretary of State
London, September 11, 1914, 3 a.m.
[Telegram]
644. Stories of horrors so naturally come with every war that for weeks I discredited the unspeakable tales that were brought from the Continent, and many are told which yet seem incredible. But American and other neutral witnesses of German atrocities in France and especially in, Belgium now make doubt impossible about some of the most barbarous acts in human annals. Man after man and woman after woman tell of very young girls whom they have seen that were violated by German soldiers. They tell of Belgian boys the tendons in whose arms and legs were cut with swords. I am told by two persons who have seen him, of a physician whose hand was cut off while he was dressing a Belgian soldier’s wounds. I am told by a trustworthy woman that there are wounded English soldiers now in English hospitals whose noses were cut off while they lay wounded on the field. Hundreds of such stories are told by apparently credible persons.
The violators of the Belgian treaty, the, sowers of mines in the open sea, the droppers of bombs on Antwerp and Paris to kill anybody they may hit, have taken to heart Bernhardi’s doctrine of the glorious enjoyment of war. It is impossible longer to doubt the wholly barbarous conduct of the Prussians.
This conviction is helping to increase the number of English volunteers enormously and is producing a silent, grim determination to make an end forever of the military system that has produced such men.