The Kingdom of serbia : report upon the atrocities committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the first invasion of Serbia

MASSACRES OF PRISONERS 27

quence of the attack of the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Serbian Regiment, they shot the wounded, in order to prevent their being retaken alive by the Serbians. The men were found with their wounds dressed, but dead.

With a view to being as impartial as possible, I have also made enquiries as to whether cruelties have been perpetrated by your soldiers upon the Austrian prisoners and wounded. Generally speaking, the Austrian prisoners told me, they had no knowledge of cruelty on the part of the Serbian soldiers. Only one man told me that he had seen the corpse of an Austrian with uniform buttons forced into his eyes. He had been told that the Serbs had mutilated the corpse in this manner, but he did not see the culprits.

This deposition is not unlike the following :—

The Austrian witness, No. 44, of the 53rd Infantry Regt., deposes that before they crossed the frontier, a man in Austrian uniform, with his ears and forearms cut off, was led past the troops on horseback. The officers told them: ‘This is what is in store for you if you surrender.” They moreover declared that the mutilated man was a Croat ; but none of the soldiers present knew him.

In my opinion the cruelty involved in thus parading on horseback one of their own men mutilated in this fashion, precludes the possibility of his having been an Austrian. Is it not more likely that it was a Serbian soldier, mutilated after having been tricked out in an Austrian uniform, in order to strike terror into the hearts of the invading troops? As I shall presently show, the Austrian