Perhaps in the blind fury of the moment he did not much care.
Take the German soldier: He had proved he was ready to meet his enemy in the open and to fight him there.

When his comrade fell at his side, struck down by an unseen, skulking foe, who lurked behind a hedge or a chimney, he saw red and he did red deeds.

That in his reprisals he went farther than some might have gone under similar conditions is rather to have been expected.

In point of organization, in discipline, and in the enactment of a terribly stern, terribly deadly course of conduct for just such emergencies, his masters had gone farther than the heads of any modern army ever went before.

You see, all the laboriously built-up ethics of civilized peace came into direct conflict with the bloody ethics of war, which are never civilized, and which frequently are born in the instant and molded on the instant to suit the purposes of those who create them.