[Footnote 96:  German official report in the Berliner Tageblatt, August 10th.]

An Austrian who was in the town afterwards described the attack in the Grazer Tagespost.  According to this witness it was already daylight when the airship appeared, and the effect of the bombs was truly awful.  In view of the circumstance that it was already light, Germany cannot put forward the defence that the bombs were intended for the twelve forts which surround Liege at a distance of some miles.

This is the earliest official record of an attack upon civilians—­and it came from the German side!  The crew of Z6 were the recipients of a tremendous ovation on their return, while the news of this dastardly murder was received with jubilation throughout the German Empire.  In Luneville fifteen civilians were killed by airship bombs two days earlier; shortly afterwards followed the attack by airship on civilians in Antwerp.

The author has before him about one hundred different newspaper reports, alleging the most awful barbarism on the part of the Belgians.  Among the numerous statements that Germans were murdered, only two names are mentioned, and both these men are alive to-day; the one is Herr Weber, proprietor of an hotel in Antwerp.

“We have now received full details of the murder of the German, Weber.  He had fled from his pursuers and hidden himself in a cellar.  As the raging mob could not find him they burnt sulphur in the house, which caused Weber to break into a violent fit of coughing.  This betrayed his hiding-place; he was dragged out and murdered."[97]

[Footnote 97:  Hamburger Fremdenblatt, August 12th, and simultaneously in many other journals.  On the following day the Vorwaerts announced that Herr Weber had returned to Germany in the company of their own correspondent.]

“The German pork-butcher, Deckel, who had a large business in Brussels, was attacked in his house by a crowd of Belgian beasts because he had refused to hang a Belgian flag before his shop; with axes and hatchets the mob cut off his head and hewed his corpse in pieces."[98]

[Footnote 98:  Koelnische Volkszeitung, August 10th.]

A few days later the Berliner Tageblatt informed its readers that Herr
Deckel was residing in Rotterdam, and had suffered no harm whatever.

Readers who are acquainted with the official record of brutal crimes committed year by year in Germany and the haughty contempt for civilian rights which the whole German army has consistently shown in the Fatherland, during the orderly times of peace, will require little imagination to conceive that this same army would show still less consideration for civilians in a country which they were wrongfully invading.

The German Press during the last thirty years, as well as many books published in the Fatherland, contains ample proof of German brutality at home, and above all, of the legal brutality of German non-commissioned and commissioned officers.  How can Germany expect the world to believe, that these same men, were transformed into decent human beings by the mere act of stepping over the Belgian frontier?